ON THE THEORY OF MEDIATION. "Between me and my beloved there is a veil; it is time I should remove it, that I may see him face to face." The Poet Hemâm of Tabreez-D'HERBELOT, BIBL. Orientale. VOL. II. B ON THE THEORY OF MEDIATION. $ 1. GENERAL THEORY OF MEDIATION. THE eternal aspiration of the religious sentiment in man is to become united with God. In his earliest development the wish and its fulfilment were simultaneous through unquestioning belief'. Reflection, however, could not fail for a while to check his levity and to humble his pride. Even a faint perception of his relative place in the scale of being was enough to make him exaggerate his feebleness, and imagine himself not only imperfect, but corrupt and fallen. When this supposition became conviction, the age of gold, or what is the same thing, the age of fable, was virtually at an end. In proportion as the conception of Deity was exalted, the notion of his terrestrial presence or proximity was abandoned; and the difficulty of comprehending the divine government together with the glaring superstitious evils arising out of its misinterpretation, endangered the belief in it altogether, and seemed to make philosophy the inevitable source of an Epicurean infidelity. All thinking men would agree with Plato that it is impossible for the impure to approach the holy and perfect"; and a sigh mingled with a smile as they looked back to those simple times when the gods were supposed to have associated 'Luther said it was the desire to be as gods which drove man from Paradise; it were more true to say that Paradise was lost when the desire was conceived. * Hence the means of reconciliation with the gods were called "xabagous.” |