"A Persian Philosopher in Damascus Of Ancient Gods and New " 


I cannot tell the fate of this man, nor can I say what shall befall His disciples. 

A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible. Yet should that seed fall upon a
rock, it will come to 
naught. 

But this I say: The ancient God of Israel is harsh and relentless. Israel should have another
God; one who is gentle 
and forgiving, who would look down upon them with pity; one who would descend with the
rays of the sun and walk 
on the path of their limitations, rather than sit for ever in the judgment seat to weigh their
faults and measure their wrong-doings. 

Israel should bring forth a God whose heart is not a jealous heart, and whose memory of their
shortcomings is brief; 
one who would not avenge Himself upon them even to the third and the fourth generation. 

Man here in Syria is like man in all lands. He would look into the mirror of his own
understanding and therein find his deity. He would fashion the gods after his own likeness,
and worship that which reflects his own image. 

In truth man prays to his deeper longing, that it may rise and fulfil the sum of his desires. 

There is no depth beyond the soul of man, and the soul is the deep that calls unto itself; for
there is no other voice 
to speak and there are no other ears to hear. 
Even we in Persia would see our faces in the disc of the sun and our bodies dancing in the fire
that we kindle upon the altars. 

Now the God of Jesus, whom He called Father, would not be a stranger unto the people of
Jesus, and He would fulfil their desires. 

The gods of Egypt have cast off their burden of stones and fled to the Nubian desert, to be free
among those who are still free from knowing. 

The gods of Greece and Rome are vanishing into their own sunset. They were too much like
men to live in the ecstasy of men. The groves in which their magic was born have been cut
down by the axes of the Athenians and the Alexandrians. 

And in this land also the high places are made low by the lawyers of Beirut and the young
hermits of Antioch. 

Only the old women and the weary men seek the temples of their forefathers; only the
exhausted at the end of the road seek its beginning. 

But this man Jesus, this Nazarene, He has spoken of a God too vast to be unlike the soul of any
man, too knowing to punish, too loving to remember the sins of His creatures. And this God of
the Nazarene shall pass over the threshold of the children of the earth, and He shall sit at their
hearth, and He shall be a blessing within their walls and a light upon their path. 

But my God is the God of Zoroaster, the God who is the sun in the sky and fire upon the earth
and light in the bosom of man. And I am content. I need no other God.