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In sixty centuries of earnest toil, with infinite pain and tearful prayer, what knowledge have we gained of God, oh brother mine, that we should quarrel about His plans or attributes? As yet we can but touch the hem of Divinity's robe; we can but hear His voice in dreams or catch in fleeting visions glimpses of His glory.
Why quarrel about our faiths, and declare that this is right or that wrong,
when all religions are, and must of necessity ever be, fundamentally one and
the same - the worship of a Superior Power, the great
"Father of them all, in ev'ry clime adored,
By saint, by savage and by sage, Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!"
Cult wars with cult, and sect with sect, while all unite to damn the independent worshiper; yet every man who bows the knee or breathes a prayer to any God of whatsoever name; every Egyptian bending at Isis' fanes and every Phoenician sacrificing unto Baal every Gueber worshiping his god of fire, and every Catholic following the sacred cross; every Peruvian adoring the rising sun and every Methodist agonizing at the mourner's bench, is a member of the same great church. They may accredit their God with different attributes and worship Him in diverse ways; but their faiths, when stripped of non-essentials, are one and the same their Deities are identical.
Men of our day, who from the dizzy heights of modern learning, hurl their logical thunderbolts at Mahomet's incoherent mouthings and Moses' solemn confabs with the Almighty anent matters of no possible moment; who sneer at Gautama's four-fold path to a Celestial Nowhere and denounce the worship of an illiterate carpenter as foolish blasphemy, forget that all things must have a beginning-that e'en proud Science sprang from the womb of stupid Ignorance, and stumbled, awkwardly enough, through long ages of Folly before she could firmly plant her feet upon the eternal rock of Fact.
I have no word of condemnation for any religious faith, however fatuous it may appear to me, that has cast one gleam of supernatural glory into the dark vale of human life; but I regard with unspeakable contempt the man of these modern days who decries all religious progress and brands as blasphemers those who would take one step beyond the crude faiths of former days-insists that religion is too sacred to be handled by human reason, that mother of which it was born! It were folly to expect a people whose wisest men believed this world the center of the universe and the stars mere ornaments of the night, to evolve a perfect religion, or form an intelligent conception of the great First Cause.
The Sacred Books of all the centuries are essentially the same - the half articulate voice of the world crying for light, the frantic efforts of man to learn whence he came and whither he goes, to lift the veil that shrouds the two eternities - to see and know! I gather them together - the Old Testament and the New, the Koran and the sacred Vedas, the northern Sagas and the southern Mythologies; I search them through, not to scoff, but to gather, with reverent soul, every gleam of light that since the birth of Time has been vouchsafed to man. I read the Revelations and ponder the Prophecies; I listen once again to the voice in the burning bush and the mystic whisperings of the Dodona Oak; I descend into the Deiphic cave, or stand with uncovered head to hear the voice of Memnon answer to the rosy fingers of the morn. I sit with Siddartha beneath the Bodhi tree and follow the prophet of Islam in all his pilgrimages; I stand with Moses on Sinai's flaming crest and listen to the prayer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, then I go forth beneath the eternal stars - each silently pouring its stream of sidereal fire into the great realm of Darkness - and they seem like the eyes of pitying angels, watching man work out, little by little, through the long ages, the mystery of his life.
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The above was written by William Cowper Brann and published in the Iconoclast in 1895. It is an appropriate Christmas message as we enter the twenty first century to remind us that as different as we attempt to be from our fellow man, how alike we remain. "I go forth beneath the eternal stars - each silently pouring its stream of sidereal fire into the great realm of Darkness - and they seem like the eyes of pitying angels, watching man work out, little by little, through the long ages, the mystery of his life."
The Iconoclast February, 1895. William Cowper Brann , The Complete Works
of Brann The Iconoclast, The Brann Publishers, New York, Volume 2, pp 1, 1919
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