The Two Babylons

[The Librarian]

Two Babylons A.Hislop.pdf

[Bible Speaks]

@The Librarian Is this a recommendation to read? 

[Bible Speaks]

Is this the same one? 

@The Librarian Is this a recommendation to read? 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

I bought three copies of this book from the Congregation Book Counter for $4.00 each, in the early 1960s.

This book, "The Two Babylons"was used quite extensively to support all the various theories we have about Christendom and its customs .... and was the inspiration for the Society's book, "Babylon the Great has Fallen - God's Kingdom Rules",

... there is a whole other backstory  about this book and the influence it had ... but I have to pour concrete today ..... It is worth reading, though, to see how it influenced the religious world of that time, and for almost a hundred years, the Society's perspective on things.

 

 

[Ann O'Maly]

The Saturday Review, Sept. 17, 1859, p. 340 [paragraphs added for ease of reading]:

"We should not have thought it worth while to notice Mr. Hislop's lucubrations if his book had not reached a second edition, and thus revealed the melancholy intellectual condition of a portion at least of the British public. For the sake of this class of readers, it may perhaps not be amiss to state gravely why we dissent from his line of argument.

"In the first place, his whole superstructure is raised upon nothing. Our earliest authority for the history of Semiramis wrote about the commencement of the Christian era, and the historian from whom he drew his information lived from fifteen hundred to two thousand years after the date which Mr. Hislop assigns to the great Assyrian Queen. The most lying legend which the Vatican has ever endorsed stands on better authority than the history which is now made the ground of a charge against it.

"Secondly, the whole argument proceeds upon the assumption that all heathenism has a common origin. Accidental resemblances in mythological details are taken as evidence of this, and nothing is allowed for the natural working of the human mind.

"Thirdly, Mr. Hislop's reasoning would make anything of anything. By the aid of obscure passages in third-rate historians, groundless assumptions of identity, and etymological torturing of roots, all that we know, and all that we believe, may be converted, as if by the touch of Harlequin's wand, into something totally different.

"Fourthly, Mr. Hislop's argument proves too much. He finds not only the corruptions of Popery, but the fundamental articles of the Christian Faith, in his hypothetical Babylonian system. ...

"... But it is idle to speak seriously of a book which only claims attention by its matchless absurdity, and by the fact that it apparently finds readers. We take leave of Mr. Hislop and his work with the remark that we never before quite knew the folly of which ignorant or half-learned bigotry is capable."

Link to full review - https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ob9LAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=hislop&f=false