Three hundred years ago Edward Herbert,[5] an Oxford scholar who played many parts and played them well, in deep revolt against the ecclesiastical doctrine that all the world outside the pale of the Church was doomed to eternal damnation, devoted himself to the study of comparative religion. With the materials which the classics afforded him, he examined the recorded facts among the Greeks and Romans, the Carthaginians and Arabs, the Phrygians, the Persians, the Assyrians. The whole fabric of human experience was built up, he argued, on certain common knowledges or notions, which could be distinguished by { 32} specific marks, such as priority, independence, universality, certainty, necessity for man's well-being, and immediacy. Here were the bases of law in relation to social order, and of religion in relation to the Powers above man. These principles in religion were five: (1) that there is one supreme God; (2) that he ought to be worshipped; (3) that virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship; (4) that we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them; (5) that divine goodness doth dispense rewards and punishments both in this life and after it. These truths had been implanted by the Creator in the mind of man, and their subsequent corruption produced the idolatries of antiquity.
[5] 1583-1648., elder brother of "Holy George Herbert."
The theory held its ground in various forms till its last echoes appeared in highly theologic guise in the writings of Mr. Gladstone. He pleaded that there must have been a true religion in the world before an untrue one began to gather and incrust upon it, and this religion included three great doctrines--the existence of the Triune Deity, the advent of a Redeemer, and the power of the Evil One and the defeat of the rebel angels. These had formed part of a primeval revelation. In the Homeric theology he traced the first in the three sons of Kronos--Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon. The second he found in Apollo, whose mother Leto represented the Woman from whom the Redeemer should descend. The rebel angels were equated with the Titans; { 33} the power of temptation was personified in Ate; the rainbow of the covenant was identified with Iris. The student of to-day can hardly believe that this volume could have been published in the same year in which Darwin and Wallace formulated the new scientific principle of "natural selection" as the great agent in the formation of species, and thus laid the foundation of the modern conception of evolution (1858).