Ancient Religions

Just outside Rome there was an underground temple of the Persian God Mithra. Well, at midnight, the first minute of December twenty-fifth, you would have seen that temple all lit up with candles, and priests in white garments at the altar, and boys burning incense; exactly as you will see in a Roman Catholic church at midnight on December twenty-fourth in our own time. And the worshippers of Mithra would have told you that Mithra was a good God who had come from heaven to be born as a man and redeem men from their sins; and he was born in a dark cave or stable on December twenty-fifth.

The resident official, travelling from place to place, spends a great deal of time seated in railway stations or on the banks of the Nile, waiting for his train or his boat to arrive; and he has, therefore, a great deal of time for thinking. I often try to fill in these dreary periods by jotting down a few notes on some matter which has recently been discussed, or registering and elaborating arguments which have chanced lately to come into the thoughts. These notes are shaped and "written up" when next there is a spare hour, and a few books to refer to; and ultimately they take the form of articles or papers, some of which find their way into print.

What I have called the "war dead," the multitudes passing over from battle, are the bereavements that hit with the strongest impact. Yet actually they differ in no manner from any other loss by death. We are inclined to think more of their mass, their sheer weight of numbers, than of the fact that each carries its full of poignancy. Indeed, it may even be some small comfort to reflect that others are grieving too! And there is the sustaining glow and pride in sacrifice for a common cause. But each death on the battlefield is to some one the full measure of bereavement.

Ophiolatreia, the worship of the serpent, next to the adoration of the phallus, is one of the most remarkable, and, at first sight, unaccountable forms of religion the world has ever known. Until the true source from whence it sprang can be reached and understood, its nature will remain as mysterious as its universality, for what man could see in an object so repulsive and forbidding in its habits as this reptile, to render worship to, is one of the most difficult of problems to find a solution to.

From the beginning of its history--that is, from about 4500 B.C.--we can trace the development of a religion one of whose most prominent elements was a promise of a life after death. It was still a great religion when the Christian doctrine of immortality was enunciated. In the early centuries of the Christian era, it seemed almost possible that the worship of Osiris and Isis might become the religion of the classical world; and the last stand made by civilized paganism against Christianity was in the temple of Isis at Philae in the sixth century after Christ.

For any Christian or Jew questioning the validity or authenticity of thier own religion. This book tackles problems between Judaism and Christianity, and between the Old Testament and the New Testament, in a straight forward, common sense approach. Cresson challenges many of the doctrines of Christianity that are in direct contradiction to the religion of the man they call their God and Savior, and proves his points from Old Testament Scripture.