Page:Popular tales from the Norse (1912).djvu/55

 Rh this great movement, this mighty lust to change their seats, seized on the Aryan race one hundred or one thousand years sooner or later. But from the East we came, and from that central plain of Asia, now commonly called Iran. Iran, the habitation of the tillers and

forged and fabricated by Hebrew scribes—"says so. We believe in it we will believe in nothing else, not even in our senses. We will believe literally in the first chapter of Genesis, in working days and nights of twenty-four hours, even before the sun and moon were made, on the fourth day, 'to divide the day from the night,' and to be 'for signs and for seasons, and for days and years.' We will not hear of ages or periods, but 'days,' because the 'letter' says so." This is what our Western Brahmins say; but if they remembered that He who set sun and moon also planted the eye and ear, that He gave sense, and speech, and mind; if they considered that faith is a lively thing, elastic and expansive; that it embraces a thousand or a million years as easily as a moment of time; that bonds cannot fetter it, nor distance darken and dismay it; that it is given to man to grow with his growth and strengthen with his strength; that it rises at doubts and difficulties, and surmounts them—they would cease to condemn all the world to wear their own strait-waistcoat, cut and sewn by rabbis and doctors some thousand years ago; a garment which the human intellect has altogether outgrown, which it is ridiculous to wear, which careless and impious men laugh at when it is seen in the streets; and might begin to see that spirit is spirit, and flesh is flesh; that while one lives for ever, the other is corruptible and passes away; that there are developments in faith as in everything else; that as man's intellect and human knowledge have grown and expanded, so his faith must grow