Greece and Babylon: A Comparative Sketch of Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Hellenic Religions
9781465681478
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
he newly-elected holder of a University professorship or lectureship, before embarking on the course of special discussion that he has selected, may be allowed or expected to present some outlined account of the whole subject that he represents, and to state beforehand, if possible, the line that he proposes to pursue in regard to it. This is all the more incumbent on me, as I have the honour to be the first Wilde Lecturer in Natural and Comparative Religion—the first, that is, who has been officially charged by the University to give public teaching in the most modern and one of the most difficult fields of study, one that has already borne copious fruit, and will bear more in the future. I appreciate highly the honour of such a charge, and I take this opportunity of expressing my deep sense of the indebtedness of our University and of all students of this subject to Dr. Wilde for his generous endowment of this branch of research, which as yet has only found encouragement in a few Universities of Europe, America, and Japan. I feel also the responsibility of my charge. Years of study have shown me the magnitude of the subject, the pitfalls that here—more, perhaps, than in other fields—beset the unwary, and the multiplicity of aspects from which it may be studied. Having no predecessor, I cannot follow, but may be called upon rather to set, a precedent. One guidance, at least, I have—namely, the expressed wishes of the founder of this post. He has formulated them in regard to Comparative Religion in such a way that I feel precluded, in handling this part of the whole field, from what may be called the primitive anthropology of religion. I shall not, therefore, deal directly with the embryology of the subject, with merely savage religious psychology, ritual, or institutions. It is not that I do not feel myself the fascination of these subjects of inquiry, and their inevitableness for one who wishes wholly to understand the whole of any one of the higher world-religions. But we have in the University one accomplished exponent of these themes in Mr. Marett, and until recently we have been privileged to possess Professor Tylor; and Dr. Wilde has made his wishes clear that the exposition of Comparative Religion should be mainly an elucidation and comparison of the higher forms and ideas in the more advanced religions. And I can cheerfully accept this limitation, as for years I have been occupied with the minute study of the religion of Greece, in which one finds much, indeed, that is primitive, even savage, but much also of religious thought and religious ethic, unsuspected by former generations of scholars, that has become a rich inheritance of our higher culture. He who wishes to succeed in this new field of arduous inquiry should have studied at least one of the higher religions of the old civilisation au fond, and he must have studied it by the comparative method. He may then make this religion the point of departure for wide excursions into outlying tracts of the more or less adjacent religious systems, and he will be the less likely to lose himself in the maze and tangle of facts if he can focus the varying light or doubtful glimmer they afford upon the complex set of phenomena with which he is already familiar.
