All The Great Wave Of Teaching
And Text And Tracts And Missions And The Produce Of The Printing-Press
Has Made No Impression Upon His Race Any More Than Upon The Red Deer That
Roam In The Forest Behind His Camp.
The negroes have their fetich, every
nation its idols; the gipsy alone has none - not even a superstitious
observance;
They have no idolatry of the Past, neither have they the
exalted thought of the Present, It is very strange that it should be so
at this the height of our civilisation, and you might go many thousand
miles and search from Africa to Australia before you would find another
people without a Deity. That can only be seen under an English sky, under
English oaks and beeches.
Are they the oldest race on earth? and have they worn out all the gods?
Have they worn out all the hopes and fears of the human heart in tens of
thousands of years, and do they merely live, acquiescent to fate? For
some have thought to trace in the older races an apathy as with the
Chinese, a religion of moral maxims and some few joss-house
superstitions, which they themselves full well know to be nought,
worshipping their ancestors, but with no vital living force, like that
which drove Mohammed's bands to zealous fury, like that which sent our
own Puritans over the sea in the - Mayflower - . No living faith. So old, so
very, very old, older than the Chinese, older than the Copts of Egypt,
older than the Aztecs; back to those dim Sanskrit times that seem like
the clouds on the far horizon of human experience, where space and chaos
begin to take shape, though but of vapour.
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