Identifier: worldsparliament01barr (find matches)
Title: The World's Parliament of Religions : an illustrated and popular story of the World's First Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in connection with the Columbian exposition of 1893
Year: 1893 (1890s)
Authors: Barrows, John Henry, 1847-1902
Subjects: World's Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893 Religions
Publisher: Chicago : Parliament Pub. Co.
Contributing Library: Princeton Theological Seminary Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
rld must look for the most enlightening and humanizing influ-ences, and, in their use of the word, contrasting these as human productswith divinity, which completed the circle of scholastic knowledge. Butthe world of the nineteenth century is larger than that of mediaeval Europe,and we may well thank Mr. Arnold for a new word suited to the new times,Culture—acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and saidin the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit. This willrequire us to know a great body of literature ; but when we inquire for thebest we shall find ourselves confronted by a vast mass of religious litera-ture. Homer was a great religious poet, Hesiod also. The central idea inall the great dramas of ^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, was religious,and no one need hope to penetrate beneath the surface of any of these whohas not a sympathetic acquaintance with the religious ideas, myths, andmythologies of the Greeks. Dantes Divine Comedy and Miltons 622
Text Appearing After Image:
624 PARLIAMENT PAPERS: FIFTH DAY. Paradise Lost are religious poems, to read which intelligently one musthave an acquaintance with mediaeval mythology and modern Protestant the-ology. Faust is a religious poem. Then there are the great Bibles of the world, the Christian and Jewish,the Mohammedan and Zoroastrian, the Brahman and Buddhist, and the twoChinese sacred books. It is of these books that Emerson sings : Out of the heart of nature rolledThe burden of the Bible old ;The litanies of nations came,Like the volcanos tongue of flame,Up from the burning core below,The canticles of love and woe. He who would be cultured in Matthew Arnolds sense of beingacquainted with the history of the human spirit must know these books, andthis means a patient, careful study of the growth and development of rites,symbols, myths and mvthologies, traditions, creeds and priestly orders,through long centuries of time, from far away primitive nature worship up tothe elaborate ritual and developed liturgy

Note About Images