Finally, to sum up the matter, we have cited our authorities, and reviewed them, and then endeavoured to sift out what is good from the heap, leaving the rubbish to its fate.  Removed as we are by so many centuries from the fierce strife of religious controversy which so deeply marked the rise of Christianity, we can view the matter with impartiality and seek to redress the errors that are patent both on the side of orthodoxy and of heterodoxy.  It is true we cannot be free of the past, but it is also true that to identify ourselves with the hates and strifes of the ancients, is merely to retrogress from the path of progress.  On the contrary, our duty should be to identify ourselves with all that is good and beautiful and true in the past, and so gleaning it together, bind it into a sheaf of corn that, when ground in the mills of common-sense and practical experience, may feed the millions of every denomination who for the most part are starving on the unsatisfying husks of crude dogmatism.  There is no need for a new revelation, in whatever sense the word is understood, but there is every need for an explanation of the old revelations and the undeniable facts of human experience.  If the Augean stables of the materialism that is so prevalent in the religion, philosophy and science of to-day, are to be cleansed, the spiritual sources of the world-religions can alone be effectual for their cleansing, but these are at present hidden by the rocks and overgrowth of dogma and ignorance.  And this overgrowth can only be removed by explanation and investigation, and each who works at the task is, consciously or unconsciously, in the train of the Hercules who is pioneering the future of humanity.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 96:  Julius Caesar, III. ii. 106-8.]

[Footnote 97:  Op. cit. i. 4.  Compare the Diagram and explanation of the Middle Distance infra.  The Moon is the “Lord” of the lower plane of the Middle Distance, the Astral Light of the medieval Kabalists.  This is a doctrine common to the Hermetic, Vedantic, and many other schools of Antiquity.]

[Footnote 98:  xi. 37.]

[Footnote 99:  Philos., ix. 10.]

[Footnote 100:  Zohar, i. 50_b_, Amsterdam and Brody Editions:  quoted in Isaac Myer’s Qabbalah, pp. 376, 377.]

[Footnote 101:  See Cory’s Ancient Fragments, 2nd ed.; not the reedited third edition, which is no longer Cory’s work.]

[Footnote 102:  [Greek:  eisi panta puros henos ekgegaota]—­Psell. 24—­Plet. 30.]

[Footnote 103:  Proc. in Theol. 333—­in Tim. 157.]

[Footnote 104:  [Greek:  paegaious krataeras]—­I have ventured the above translation for this difficult combination from the meaning of the term [Greek:  paegae], found elsewhere in the Oracles, in the metaphorical sense of “source” (compare also Plato, Phaed. 245 C., 856 D., [Greek:  paegae kai archae chinaeseos]—­“the source and beginning of motion"), and also from the meaning of [Greek:  krataer] (crater), as “a cup-shaped hollow.”