Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/152

Rh higher degree of religious eminence than man had ever reached before, having come to look upon God in the relation of a son to a father, devoted to his work, with an oblivion of all beside, and an abnegation never before so loftily carried out, the victim at last of his idea, and deified by his death, Jesus founded the eternal religion of mankind,—the religion of the soul set free from all priesthood, all worship, all observances; accessible to all races, superior to the distinctions of caste—in one word—absolute. “Woman, the time is come when they will not worship any more in this mountain, nor at Jerusalem, but when the true worshippers will worship in spirit and in truth.” The genial centre to which man, for centuries to come, should trace back his joy, his hopes, his consolation, and his motives for well-doing,