In this way we get a clue to the primitive use of emblems and symbols by way of protection, against evils that people believed might be averted, through the intervention of the powers or divinities to whom they specially appealed hence the reverence for, the half-worship of, the symbols representing those powers to their own minds. This love of symbol and the eagerness for its artistic use are said to be rapidly reviving 183-a fact which does but prove how history repeats itself, and that the primitive notions of mankind are constantly reasserting themselves that we are but now readopting the methods which have prevailed intermittently throughout all human time. Say, represents power, and thereby the person of the Almighty Father.Įven latter-day Puritans, "who are eager to banish the cross and the crucifix, with everything that has to them even a faint association with the terrible word idolatry, 182 accept that most symbolic of romances, The Pilgrim's Progress, as a true exemplar of their special views," and thus provide the best possible evidence that no religious feeling worthy of the name will consent to live without some imaginative expression for those urgent and intimately varied spiritual yearnings, for which there is no definite and rigidly accurate language. Peter a man in a boat typifies Noah a figure with a loaf and a basket signifies the feeding of the multitude the fish is a symbol of our Lord, said to be a Greek acrostic as well as a sign the dove represents the Holy Spirit the cross is a symbol not only of a great event, but of a great doctrinal fact while the hand, or Dextera Dei, of which we have much to A figure holding a key with sometimes a cock in the background is at once known as St.
In Christian art symbolism occupies as large a place, as in the pagan mythology of old. Perhaps of all nations we English are the most materialistic and matter of fact, yet in what endless ways do we even now make use of symbols, to denote not only objects, but events and abstract ideas! Every letter that we write or print is said to be the survival of some primitive picture, and thus to be the symbol of a separate idea. IF so many strange beliefs still exist in these days of science and enlightenment, it is easy to see how in olden times a fanciful people, full of imagination, who personified not only every aspect of nature, but every virtue and every vice, got to look upon the trees or animals they thought sacred, as symbols of the deity to whom they were sacred. The Evil Eye, by Frederick Thomas Elworthy,, at
0 kommentar(er)
