rtaxerxes) the son of Papak the
son of Sassan sits in the great seat of the Achaemenidae.

Now this is the key to all the history of the west in those
times; and we may include West Asia in the west:--the world was
going down, and each new phase of civilization was something
worse than the one before. I cannot but see degeneracy, and with
every age a step further from ancient truth: Rome with less
light than Greece; the Sassanians a feebble copy of the
Achaemenians:--knowledge of the Realities receding ever into the
past. A new spirit had been coming in since the beginning of the
Christian era, or since the living flame of the last-surviving
Mysteries was quenched. It is one we are but painfully
struggling away from now; it has tainted all life west of China
since. China, with her satellite nations, alone in the main
escaped it: I mean, the spirit of religious intolerance.

The odium of introducing it belongs not (as you might think) to
one particular religious body, but to the evil in humanlty; on
which, since the Mysteries were destroyed, there had been no
effective check. The corner-stone of true religion is the Divine
Spirit omnipresent in Nature; the Divine Soul in Man. As well
forbid the rest of men to breathe the air you breathe, or walk
under your private stretches of sky, as try to peg yourself out a
special claim in these! You cannot do it, and the first
instinct of man should be that you cannot do it. But lose sight
of these Divine Things; lose the sense that perceives them,
their essential universality, their inevitable universality;--and
where are you? What are you to do about the inner life?--Why,
for lack of reality, you shall take a sham: you shall hatch up
some formula of words; or better still, take the formula already
hatched that comes handiest; call it your creed or confession of
faith; fix your belief on that, as supreme and infallible, the
sure and certain key to the mysteries within and around you;--
then you may cease to think of those mysteries altogether; the
word-formula will be enough; it is that, not thought, not
action, that saves. I believe in--such and such an arrangement of
consonants and vowels;--and therefore I am saved, and highly
superior; and you, poor reptile, who possess not this arrangement,
but some other and totally false one;--you, thank God, are
damned. You are lost; you shall go to hell; I scorn and
look down on you from the heights of the special favor of