Parmatma Prakash

Author(s): Yogindra Acharya
Publisher: Central Jaina Publishing House

Page 15

10
INTRODUCTION
mind, trained as it is on lines of monistic thought, is apt to smile at the crude simplicity' of all creeds which savour of what has been described as a polytheistic tendency. Monism is, however, the unattainable of philosophy, and there can be no greater error than the deuial of the possibility of perfection to the souls of men, to say nothing of those who are now inhabiting the bodies of brutes and beasts. The fact is that the modern mind has a true conception of neither God, nor Religion, nor Redemption, and its entire energy is exhausted in the use of empty and ineaningless conceptions and the purest abstractions of thought. I doubt if one out of a million preachers knows his God sufficiently well to identify Him should he ever come across Him by chance. As regards polytheism, a single quotation from the writings of Thomas H. Huxley, one of the greatest champions of Free-thought and Agnosticisin, suffices to show that all modern minds do not join in siniling at the so-called crude simplicity of the ancients who have bequeathed us that system of religious philosophy. He says : -
"I suppose the moderus will continue to smile, in a superior way, at the grievous absurdity of the polytheistic idolatry of these ancient people. It is probably a congenital absence of some faculty which I ought to possess which withholds me from adopting this summary procedure. But I am not ashamed to share David Hume's want of ability to discover that polytheism is, in itself, altogether absurd. If we are bound, or permitted, to judge the government of the world by human staudards, it appears to me that directorates are proved by familiar experience, to conduct the largest and the most complicated concerns quite as well as solitary despots. I have never been able to see why the hypothesis of a divine syndicate should be found guilty of innate absurdity. Those Assyrians, in particular, who held Assur to be the one supreme and creative deity, to whom all the other superual powers were subordinate, might fairly ask that the essential difference between their system and that which obtains among the great majority of their modern theological critics should be demonstrated. In my apprehension, it is not the quantity, but the quality, of the persons, among whom the attributes of divinity are distributed, which is the serious matter. If the divine might is associated with no higher ethical attributes than those which