FIG. 74.-Ancient Briton "Catti" coin of 2nd cent. B.C. with Sun-Crosses, Sun-horse, etc., and legend INARA (Hitto-Phoenician Father-god Indara or "Andrew").
(After Evans. E.C.B., 149, and see above, p. 317).
WHILST it is impossible to enter here on a general discussion of the historic consequences of the discoveries set forth or referred to in the foregoing pages, one or two results may, I think, be appropriately mentioned in closing this brief monograph.
What I have to say falls conveniently under two headings, the bearing of the new facts and views, first on the History of Human Progress, and secondly, on special points in that history, the Origin and Racial Affinities of the Phoenicians, the Sources of the British People, the Relation of the Primitive Aryan Religion to the later cults and so forth.
As regards the former question, that of the History of Culture, it must, I think, be admitted that we had for long been approaching an impasse. Facts had been accumulating which were putting accepted theories somewhat out of focus. There was first the long-standing difficulty of the great outburst of literature and science all over the known world, and affecting such widely-separated centres as Greece, India and China from the eighth to the fourth centuries B.C. And there was the more recent incongruity connected with the independent and seemingly indigenous cults of the Mediterranean hind-lands, and more especially of Central and Northern Europe.
To those of us who take long and broad views it had, during recent decades, been becoming increasingly obvious that many of the peoples inhabiting these outlying lands, when they first appeared in history, displayed both scientific and literary cultural elements which could nowise be explained by the accepted doctrine of a general affiliation of all progress to Hellenism and Hebraism. For example, there are many things in Gothic and "Celtic" and British
Religions and Literature which, so far from being explicable by the current theories, are in violent opposition to both the scientific and artistic standards and traditions derived from the Hellenic and Jewish peoples of which the Roman conquerors of the world made themselves the missionaries.
If, however, we adopt the theory adumbrated by the above account of the Phoenician people and Civilization, that behind both Greek and Hebrew culture there was an earlier and more widespread Aryan influence, affecting during anterior millenniums, not merely the coast-dwellers of the Mediterranean, but more or less the whole known world, and conveyed over the three continents-and even to Peru-largely by the enterprise of the Aryan Phoenicians, we shall, I think, have a theory, founded largely on facts, which will explain much that has hitherto appeared anomalous in the history of Civilized Europe and Asia.
I should like, then, to suggest for the consideration of readers, whether we do not find in such a theory the answer to the two main problems left unsolved by the current doctrine. And further, and more particularly, whether we do not obtain from it an explanation of much that was indigenous, and opposed to Hellenism and Hebraism, in the Literature and Statesmanship and Religion of Central and North-Western Europe during the medieval and modern periods.
It had long appeared probable that Civilization is largely a matter of Race and that, in Europe and Indo-Persia, the chief agency in effecting it has been an Aryan strain, operating in a way hitherto not understood amongst widely separated peoples and races. To this theory, the supposed Jewish influence on Religion and the supernatural illumination of which it was supposed to be the vehicle, constituted a serious objection, which was very inadequately met by imagining a sifting and adapting of Jewish ideas by the practical genius of Rome and the subtle intelligence of the Greeks, all the more so as there was no historical evidence whatever of any such borrowing from the Hebrews, who are nowhere even mentioned by Greco-Roman writers.
The difficulty is now wholly removed by the new evidence
showing that nearly all the monotheistic ideas and literary motives which have hitherto been regarded as characteristically Jewish, were borrowed by the Israelites from the Hitto-Phoenicians or Goths, and were therefore essentially Aryan. Nevertheless, for the past two millenniums, it has been owing to the Jews, that we have had preserved and transmitted to us in the Western Christian World, embedded in several of the books of their Old Testament, in job (whose author was the fourth traditional Aryan king), in most of the Psalms (one of which has been instanced in the text), Proverbs, Enoch (the third traditional Aryan priest-king), much of Isaiah and others, many of the priceless treasures of the first Aryan illumination amongst our Hitto- Phoenician or Gothic ancestors.
Besides supplying the missing links in the proof as to the Aryan Origin of Civilization, the new evidence shows the fuller inheritance by the British than by others of the "Hitt-ite" or Gothic Race-character, by the unique survival, in Britain, not only of the most authentic of all literary histories of the rise of the Aryans preserved in the Eddas, and of the primitive Gothic or "Hitt-ite" emblems, but also of the things for which these emblems stand, the Language, Culture and Mental aptitudes of the Early Aryans.
The new evidence, in pointing to the British and their constituent Gothic elements as the purest representatives of the Gothic or Khath (Hitt-ite) culture and heredity, sheds light upon much that would otherwise be unintelligible in the history of Western Civilization. In the first place, the high Aryanization of Britain, and the relatively low Aryanization of Germany with its round-heads, may in part explain the desire of Caesar to incorporate Britain, and his determination to exclude Germany, from incorporation in the Roman Empire. Then later, when reaction set in and it was obvious that Caesar's larger designs could not be carried out, Britain's purer Aryanism enabled it to maintain an attitude of independence towards the debased semi-pagan power which established itself on the ruins of the Western Empire.
Indeed, British progress throughout the Middle Ages was,
owing largely to racial idiosyncracy, identified with resistance to outside influences. Deriving their Christian form of religion from Rome, the British have treated it in the main as a matter of ritualistic routine. To its dogma they have been respectfully indifferent. Its lofty ethics, when practically inconvenient they have ignored. This peculiar independence and self-assertiveness of the British was displayed not less conspicuously by poets than by statesmen and theologians. It was a true instinct which led Shakespeare to glorify the murderers of Caesar, for in the absence of the decadent medieval empire, not merely British, but European art might have had a more felicitous, because more natural, development than it really enjoyed. In truth, the artistic went deeper than either the political or the religious revolt. It was a protest not so much against this or that effete doctrine, as against imperialism in principle, against finality in the realm of the ideal.
That the British have inherited the sea-faring aptitude and adventurous spirit of the Aryan Phoenicians appears obvious. Whether they in the same degree reflect, and have profited by, the ancestral monotheistic Religion, is not quite so plain. And yet, I think, there is something to be said in favour of an affirmative on this question, too.
It cannot be pretended that Sun-worship is a truly scientific religion-and the worship of that luminary itself appears to have been the earlier form of the Aryan Sun-cult, and continued amongst many of the Aryans, after the majority had made the Sun merely the symbol of the Universal Father God. The Sun, after all, is only a part, and a comparatively small part even, of the visible Universe; and no more than any other visible object can it be specially identified with the Incomprehensible Power behind all - whose glory job declares that the heavens with all their contents "utter but a whisper"- which is the real object round which the specifically religious emotions group themselves. As, however, the public demand a nonscientific religion, a religion, that is to say, which represents mankind as the great object of the Creator's care, and which appeals rather to the senses and emotions than to the reason,
the question arises whether Sun-worship does not present us with an idea which satisfies that popular demand with less departure from scientific requirements than those other miraculous and anthropomorphic types, which so many European nations have cultivated since the days of Phoenician ascendancy, and which finally took form in the ceremonies and superstitions of the Catholic Church. If the Power at the root of things is to be conceived of as having a kindly feeling for mankind, then the Sun is surely the visible manifestation of that feeling, and embodiment of that idea, seeing that it is the source of all Life in this world, and that by which alone Life is ceaselessly maintained. And it was the anthropomorphizing of the Sun as the Father-God by the Hitto-Sumerians, which, as we have seen, is the source of the modern conception of God.
Do we not thus find in the modern British Religion in most of its sects-in its tolerance, its good sense, its adaptability, its sense of reality, its power to incorporate and live on friendly terms with the various forms in which pious sentiment seeks expression, its opposition to the attempts to domineer over the mind and spirit of others, its minimization of theory, and exaltation of ritual and show, its aversion to the Mother-goddess cult and to every kind of asceticism, whether in doctrine or practice, its insisting that Religion shall submit to the same test as other institutions which profess to serve the nation, that of Usefulness-some features that harmonize well with the exalted and humane spirit of the Sun-worshippers, and that "hark back," if the expression be allowed, to that old indigenous positivistic view which the Aryan "Hitt-ite" Phoenicians brought with them from the East, and which was otherwise manifested in the literature of the British people, and notably in the person of its two greatest poets, Shakespeare and Milton?
Yet other fruits of Britain's exceptional Aryan inheritance were her establishment of democratic institutions, centuries before they were adopted by other countries, and her world-wide colonial and commercial enterprise, reproducing the maritime adventures of the Phoenician Aryans, from
whom, we have seen, the British people, properly so-called, are in part descended.
The higher Aryanization to which these and other peculiarly British characteristics bear witness is a chief guarantee that the sacrifices of the nations in the late war, in order to secure the ultimate triumph of Right over Might, will not have been made in vain. After all, human nature, like flowers, turns to the sunlight, and the final predominance of the superior heart and brain is assured.