Collected Works (Vol. II)

INTRODUCTION 14! I suppose!” continued the Knight, in a superior, but rather offended voice. ‘“If you would, please, sir!” ‘Well, chat,” pronounced the Knight, with the air of having thoroughly studied the question and reached a conclusion absolutely final and irreversible, ‘‘¢iat, Goodness only knows. But I will sing it to you.” PRELIMINARY INVOCATION. NOTHUNG.* THE crowns of Gods and mortals wither ; Moons fade where constellations shone ; Numberless aeons brought us hither ; Niumberless aeons beckon us on. The world is old, and I am strong— Awake, awake, O Sword of Song! Here, in the Dusk of Gods, I linger; The world awaits a Word of Truth. Kindle, O lyre, beneath my finger ! Evoke the age’s awful youth! To arms against the inveterate wrong ! Awake, awake, O Sword of Song! Sand-founded reels the House of Faith ; Up screams the howl of ruining sect ; Out from the shrine flits the lost Wraith ; ‘God hath forsaken Ilis elect !” Confusion sweeps upon the throng— Awake, awake, O Sword of Song !' Awake to wound, awake to heal By wounding, thou resistless sword ! Raise the prone priestcrafts that appeal In agony to their prostrate Lord ! Raise the duped herd—they have suffered long ! Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! My strength this agony of the age Win through ; my music charm the old Sorrow of years: my warfare wage By iron to an age of gold :— The world is old, and I am strong— Awake, awake, O Sword of Song ! * The name of Siegfried’s sword. INTRODUCTION TO ‘! ASCENSION DAY AND PENTECOST.” Nor a word to-introduce my introduction! Let me instantly launch the Boat of Dis- course on the Sea of Religious Speculation, in danger of the Rocks of Authority and the Quicksands of Private Interpretation, Scylla and Charybdis. Here is the strait; what God shall save us from shipwreck? If we choose to understand the Christian (or any other) religion literally, we are at once over- whelmed by its inherent impossibility. Our credulity is outraged, our moral sense shocked, the holiest foundations of our in- most selves assailed by no ardent warrior in triple steel, but by a loathly and disgusting worm. That this is so, the apologists for the religion in question, whichever it may be, sufficiently indicate (as a rule) by the very method of their apology. The alter- native is to take the religion symbolically, esoterically; but to move one step in this direction is to start on a journey whose end cannot be determined. The religion, ceasing to be a tangible thing, an object uniform for all sane eyes, becomes rather that mist whereon the sun of the soul casts up, like Brocken spectre, certain vast and vague images of the beholder himself, with or without a glory encompassing them. The function of the facts is then quite passive: it matters little or nothing whether the cloud be the red mist of Christianity, or the glim- mering silver-white of Celtic Paganism; the hard grey dim-gilded of Buddhism, the fleecy opacity of Islam, or the mysterious medium of those ancient faiths which come up in as many colours as their investigator has moods.* “ «Tn order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine autho- rity of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology) that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill—the method of allegorical in- terpretation. ‘his mighty ‘ two-handed engine at the door’ of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically, or, as it is otherwise said, ‘ poeti- cally’ or ‘in a spiritual sense,’ the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter de- sires they should mean” (Huxley, ‘‘ Evolution of Theology ’’).—A. C.