The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps

382 PH@NICIAN ORIGIN OF BRITONS & SCOTS

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 Cesar, 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 allwhose 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,