A History of the New Testament Times Author:Adolf Hausrath Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: We can therefore point to the belief in a holy God, an eternal life, and retribution after death, as the essential and primitive root of religious conviction in ... more »the Platonic schools. True, these abstract convictions had not strength to grow into a positive popular religion. Still, the first to become the germ of a secret church would have been the belief in immortality, already appearing as a cult in the mysteries, with its hierophants and mystagogues, had it not been too arbitrary a combination of crude nature-worship and speculative thought to satisfy advancing culture 011 the one hand and religious needs on the other. Without an actual impulse in history, the new view of life could not have crystallized into a firm and comforting religious conviction; but assuredly, should the impulse be given, the lines on which consolidation must proceed were already laid down. Here was the blank outline, only needing to be filled up with living colours by the genius of religion, in order to offer a conception of the universe that could satisfy alike the cultivated and the common man. To raise religious need to such a level that the quickening impulse necessarily awakens in unsatified aspirations, and the mind becomes creative, was the task of those last two centuries B.C., which were granted such scant measure of earthly happiness. 3. Subjective Morality And The Development Of The Sense Of Sin. Great minds often create a new epoch in the world, not so much through the problems they set themselves to solve, as by breaking down the barriers of conventional ideas and clearing the ground for the development of future generations. Socrates proposed to cope with the scepticism of the Sophists; but the outcome of his philosophy was very different from what he proposed. In fact, the principle ...« less