It has little,
if ever, entered the mind of the Western public that their scholars
have, until very lately, worked in a narrow pathway obstructed with the
ruins of an ecclesiastical, dogmatic Past; that they have been cramped
on all sides by limitations of "revealed" events coming from God, "with
whom a thousand years are but as one day," and who have thus felt bound
to cram millenniums into centuries and hundreds into units, giving at
the utmost an age of 1,000 to what is 10,000 years old. All this to
save the threatened authority of their religion and their own
respectability and good name in cultured society. And even that, when
free themselves from preconceptions, they have had to protect the honour
of the Jewish divine chronology assailed by stubborn facts; and thus
have become (often unconsciously) the slaves of an artificial history
made to fit into the narrow frame of a dogmatic religion. No proper
thought has been given to this purely psychological but very significant
trifle. Yet we all know how, rather than admit any relation between
Sanskrit and the Gothic, Keltic, Greek, Latin and old Persian, facts
have been tampered with, old texts purloined from libraries, and
philological discoveries vehemently denied.
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