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Beacon Lights of History, Volume 01: The Old Pagan Civilizations

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Title: Beacon Lights of History, Volume 01: The Old Pagan Civilizations

Author: John Lord


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY, VOLUME 01: THE OLD PAGAN CIVILIZATIONS ***

LORD'S LECTURES

BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY, VOLUME I

THE OLD PAGAN CIVILIZATIONS.

BY JOHN LORD, LL.D.,

AUTHOR OF "THE OLD ROMAN WORLD," "MODERN EUROPE,"
ETC., ETC.







To the Memory of

MARY PORTER LORD,

WHOSE FRIENDSHIP AND APPRECIATION

AS A DEVOTED WIFE

ENCOURAGED ME TO A LONG LIFE

OF HISTORICAL LABORS,

This Work

IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

BY THE AUTHOR.




PUBLISHERS' NOTE.


In preparing a new edition of Dr. Lord's great work, the "Beacon Lights
of History," it has been necessary to make some rearrangement of
lectures and volumes. Dr. Lord began with his volume on classic
"Antiquity," and not until he had completed five volumes did he return
to the remoter times of "Old Pagan Civilizations" (reaching back to
Assyria and Egypt) and the "Jewish Heroes and Prophets." These issued,
he took up again the line of great men and movements, and brought it
down to modern days.

The "Old Pagan Civilizations," of course, stretch thousands of years
before the Hebrews, and the volume so entitled would naturally be the
first. Then follows the volume on "Jewish Heroes and Prophets," ending
with St. Paul and the Christian Era. After this volume, which in any
position, dealing with the unique race of the Jews, must stand by
itself, we return to the brilliant picture of the Pagan centuries, in
"Ancient Achievements" and "Imperial Antiquity," the latter coming down
to the Fall of Rome in the fourth century A.D., which ends the era of
"Antiquity" and begins the "Middle Ages."

NEW YORK, September 15, 1902.




AUTHOR'S PREFACE.


It has been my object in these Lectures to give the substance of
accepted knowledge pertaining to the leading events and characters of
history; and in treating such a variety of subjects, extending over a
period of more than six thousand years, each of which might fill a
volume, I have sought to present what is true rather than what is new.

Although most of these Lectures have been delivered, in some form,
during the last forty years, in most of the cities and in many of the
literary institutions of this country, I have carefully revised them
within the last few years, in order to avail myself of the latest light
shed on the topics and times of which they treat.

The revived and wide-spread attention given to the study of the Bible,
under the stimulus of recent Oriental travels and investigations, not
only as a volume of religious guidance, but as an authentic record of
most interesting and important events, has encouraged me to include a
series of Lectures on some of the remarkable men identified with
Jewish history.

Of course I have not aimed at an exhaustive criticism in these Biblical
studies, since the topics cannot be exhausted even by the most learned
scholars; but I have sought to interest intelligent Christians by a
continuous narrative, interweaving with it the latest accessible
knowledge bearing on the main subjects. If I have persisted in adhering
to the truths that have been generally accepted for nearly two thousand
years, I have not disregarded the light which has been recently shed on
important points by the great critics of the progressive schools.

I have not aimed to be exhaustive, or to give minute criticism on
comparatively unimportant points; but the passions and interests which
have agitated nations, the ideas which great men have declared, and the
institutions which have grown out of them, have not, I trust, been
uncandidly described, nor deductions from them illogically made.

Inasmuch as the interest in the development of those great ideas and
movements which we call Civilization centres in no slight degree in the
men who were identified with them, I have endeavored to give a faithful
picture of their lives in connection with the eras and institutions
which they represent, whether they were philosophers, ecclesiastics, or
men of action.

And that we may not lose sight of the precious boons which illustrious
benefactors have been instrumental in bestowing upon mankind, it has
been my chief object to present their services, whatever may have been
their defects; since it is for _services_ that most great men are
ultimately judged, especially kings and rulers. These services,
certainly, constitute the gist of history, and it is these which I have
aspired to show.

JOHN LORD.




VOL. I.


THE OLD PAGAN CIVILIZATIONS.




CONTENTS.


ANCIENT RELIGIONS:

EGYPTIAN, ASSYRIAN, BABYLONIAN, AND PERSIAN.

Ancient religions
Christianity not progressive
Jewish monotheism
Religion of Egypt
Its great antiquity
Its essential features
Complexity of Egyptian polytheism
Egyptian deities
The worship of the sun
The priestly caste of Egypt
Power of the priests
Future rewards and punishments
Morals of the Egyptians
Functions of the priests
Egyptian ritual of worship
Transmigration of souls
Animal worship
Effect of Egyptian polytheism on the Jews
Assyrian deities
Phoenician deities
Worship of the sun
Oblations and sacrifices
Idolatry the sequence of polytheism
Religion of the Persians
Character of the early Iranians
Comparative purity of the Persian religion
Zoroaster
Magism
Zend-Avesta
Dualism
Authorities


RELIGIONS OF INDIA.

BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM.

Religions of India
Antiquity of Brahmanism
Sanskrit literature
The Aryan races
Original religion of the Aryans
Aryan migrations
The Vedas
Ancient deities of India
Laws of Menu
Hindu pantheism
Corruption of Brahmanism
The Brahmanical caste
Character of the Brahmans
Rise of Buddhism
Gautama
Experiences of Gautama
Travels of Buddha
His religious system
Spread of his doctrine
Buddhism a reaction against Brahmanism
Nirvana
Gloominess of Buddhism
Buddhism as a reform of morals
Sayings of Siddârtha
His rules
Failure of Buddhism in India
Authorities


RELIGION OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS.

CLASSIC MYTHOLOGY.

Religion of the Greeks and Romans
Greek myths
Greek priests
Greek divinities
Greek polytheism
Greek mythology
Adoption of Oriental fables
Greek deities the creation of poets
Peculiarities of the Greek gods
The Olympian deities
The minor deities
The Greeks indifferent to a future state
Augustine view of heathen deities
Artists vie with poets in conceptions of divine
Temple of Zeus in Olympia
Greek festivals
No sacred books among the Greeks
A religion without deities
Roman divinities
Peculiarities of Roman worship
Ritualism and hypocrisy
Character of the Roman
Authorities


CONFUCIUS.

SAGE AND MORALIST.

Early condition of China
Youth of Confucius
His public life
His reforms
His fame
His wanderings
His old age
His writings
His philosophy
His definition of a superior man
His ethics
His views of government
His veneration for antiquity
His beautiful character
His encouragement of learning
His character as statesman
His exaltation of filial piety
His exaltation of friendship
The supremacy of the State
Necessity of good men in office
Peaceful policy of Confucius
Veneration for his writings
His posthumous influence
Lao-tse
Authorities


ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY.

SEEKING AFTER TRUTH.

Intellectual superiority of the Greeks
Early progress of philosophy
The Greek philosophy
The Ionian Sophoi
Thales and his principles
Anaximenes
Diogenes of Apollonia
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Anaxagoras
Anaximander
Pythagoras and his school
Xenophanes
Zeno of Elea
Empedocles and the Eleatics
Loftiness of the Greek philosopher
Progress of scepticism
The Sophists
Socrates
His exposure of error
Socrates as moralist
The method of Socrates
His services to philosophy
His disciples
Plato
Ideas of Plato
Archer Butler on Plato
Aristotle
His services
The syllogism
The Epicureans
Sir James Mackintosh on Epicurus
The Stoics
Zeno
Principles of the Stoical philosophy
Philosophy among the Romans
Cicero
Epictetus
Authorities


SOCRATES.

GREEK PHILOSOPHY.

Mission of Socrates
Era of his birth; view of his times
His personal appearance and peculiarities
His lofty moral character
His sarcasm and ridicule of opponents
The Sophists
Neglect of his family
His friendship with distinguished people
His philosophic method
His questions and definitions
His contempt of theories
Imperfection of contemporaneous physical science
The Ionian philosophers
Socrates bases truth on consciousness
Uncertainty of physical inquiries in his day
Superiority of moral truth
Happiness, Virtue, Knowledge,--the Socratic trinity
The "daemon" of Socrates
His idea of God and Immortality
Socrates a witness and agent of God
Socrates compared with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius
His resemblance to Christ in life and teachings
Unjust charges of his enemies
His unpopularity
His trial and defence
His audacity
His condemnation
The dignity of his last hours
His easy death
Tardy repentance of the Athenians; statue by Lysippus
Posthumous influence
Authorities


PHIDIAS.

GREEK ART.

General popular interest in Art
Principles on which it is based
Phidias taken merely as a text
Not much known of his personal history
His most famous statues; Minerva and Olympian Jove
His peculiar excellences as a sculptor
Definitions of the word "Art"
Its representation of ideas of beauty and grace
The glory and dignity of art
The connection of plastic with literary art
Architecture, the first expression of art
Peculiarities of Egyptian and Assyrian architecture
Ancient temples, tombs, pyramids, and palaces
General features of Grecian architecture
The Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders
Simplicity and beauty of their proportions...
The horizontal lines of Greek and the vertical lines of
  Gothic architecture
Assyrian, Egyptian, and Indian sculpture
Superiority of Greek sculpture
Ornamentation of temples with statues of gods, heroes, and
  distinguished men
The great sculptors of antiquity
Their ideal excellence
Antiquity of painting in Babylon and Egypt
Its gradual development in Greece
Famous Grecian painters
Decline of art among the Romans
Art as seen in literature
Literature not permanent without art
Artists as a class
Art a refining influence rather than a moral power
Authorities


LITERARY GENIUS.

THE GREEK AND ROMAN CLASSICS.

Richness of Greek classic poetry
Homer
Greek lyrical poetry
Pindar
Dramatic poetry
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides
Greek comedy: Aristophanes
Roman poetry
Naevius, Plautus, Terence
Roman epic poetry: Virgil
Lyrical poetry: Horace, Catullus
Didactic poetry: Lucretius
Elegiac poetry: Ovid, Tibullus
Satire: Horace, Martial, Juvenal
Perfection of Greek prose writers
History: Herodotus
Thucydides, Xenophon
Roman historians
Julius Caesar
Livy
Tacitus
Orators
Pericles
Demosthenes
Aeschines
Cicero
Learned men: Varro
Seneca
Quintilian
Lucian
Authorities




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

VOLUME I.

Agapè, or Love Feast among the Early Christians _Frontispiece_
_After the painting by J.A. Mazerolle_.

Procession of the Sacred Bull Apis-Osiris
_After the painting by E.F. Bridgman_.

Driving Sacrificial Victims into the Fiery Mouth of Baal
_After the painting by Henri Motte_.

Apollo Belvedere
_From a photograph of the statue in the Vatican, Rome._

Confucian Temple, Forbidden City, Pekin
_From a photograph_.

The School of Plato
_After the painting by O. Knille_.

Socrates Instructing Alcibiades
_After the painting by H.F. Schopin_.

Socrates
_From the bust in the National Museum, Naples_.

Pericles and Aspasia in the Studio of Phidias
_After the painting by Hector Le Roux_.

Zeuxis Choosing Models from among the Beauties of Kroton for his Picture
  of Helen
_After the painting by E. Pagliano_.

Homer
_From the bust in the National Museum, Naples_.

Demosthenes
_From the statue in the Vatican, Rome_.




ANCIENT RELIGIONS:

EGYPTIAN, ASSYRIAN, BABYLONIAN, AND PERSIAN.




BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY.


ANCIENT RELIGIONS:


EGYPTIAN, ASSYRIAN, BABYLONIAN, AND PERSIAN.

It is my object in this book on the old Pagan civilizations to present
the salient points only, since an exhaustive work is impossible within
the limits of these volumes. The practical end which I have in view is
to collate a sufficient number of acknowledged facts from which to draw
sound inferences in reference to the progress of the human race, and the
comparative welfare of nations in ancient and modern times.

The first inquiry we naturally make is in regard to the various
religious systems which were accepted by the ancient nations, since
religion, in some form or other, is the most universal of institutions,
and has had the earliest and the greatest influence on the condition and
life of peoples--that is to say, on their civilizations--in every
period of the world. And, necessarily, considering what is the object in
religion, when we undertake to examine any particular form of it which
has obtained among any people or at any period of time, we must ask, How
far did its priests and sages teach exalted ideas of Deity, of the soul,
and of immortality? How far did they arrive at lofty and immutable
principles of morality? How far did religion, such as was taught,
practically affect the lives of those who professed it, and lead them to
just and reasonable treatment of one another, or to holy contemplation,
or noble deeds, or sublime repose in anticipation of a higher and
endless life? And how did the various religions compare with what we
believe to be the true religion--Christianity--in its pure and ennobling
truths, its inspiring promises, and its quiet influence in changing and
developing character?

I assume that there is no such thing as a progressive Christianity,
except in so far as mankind grow in the realization of its lofty
principles; that there has not been and will not be any improvement on
the ethics and spiritual truths revealed by Jesus the Christ, but that
they will remain forever the standard of faith and practice. I assume
also that Christianity has elements which are not to be found in any
other religion,--such as original teachings, divine revelations, and
sublime truths. I know it is the fashion with many thinkers to maintain
that improvements on the Christian system are both possible and
probable, and that there is scarcely a truth which Christ and his
apostles declared which cannot be found in some other ancient religion,
when divested of the errors there incorporated with it. This notion I
repudiate. I believe that systems of religion are perfect or imperfect,
true or false, just so far as they agree or disagree with Christianity;
and that to the end of time all systems are to be measured by the
Christian standard, and not Christianity by any other system.

The oldest religion of which we have clear and authentic account is
probably the pure monotheism held by the Jews. Some nations have claimed
a higher antiquity for their religion--like the Egyptians and
Chinese--than that which the sacred writings of the Hebrews show to have
been communicated to Abraham, and to earlier men of God treated of in
those Scriptures; but their claims are not entitled to our full
credence. We are in doubt about them. The origin of religions is
enshrouded in mystical darkness, and is a mere speculation. Authentic
history does not go back far enough to settle this point. The primitive
religion of mankind I believe to have been revealed to inspired men,
who, like Shem, walked with God. Adam, in paradise, knew who God was,
for he heard His voice; and so did Enoch and Noah, and, more clearly
than all, Abraham. They believed in a personal God, maker of heaven and
earth, infinite in power, supreme in goodness, without beginning and
without end, who exercises a providential oversight of the world
which he made.

It is certainly not unreasonable to claim the greatest purity and
loftiness in the monotheistic faith of the Hebrew patriarchs, as handed
down to his children by Abraham, over that of all other founders of
ancient religious systems, not only since that faith was, as we believe,
supernaturally communicated, but since the fruit of that stock,
especially in its Christian development, is superior to all others. This
sublime monotheism was ever maintained by the Hebrew race, in all their
wanderings, misfortunes, and triumphs, except on occasions when they
partially adopted the gods of those nations with whom they came in
contact, and by whom they were corrupted or enslaved.

But it is not my purpose to discuss the religion of the Jews in this
connection, since it is treated in other volumes of this series, and
since everybody has access to the Bible, the earlier portions of which
give the true account not only of the Hebrews and their special
progenitor Abraham, but of the origin of the earth and of mankind; and
most intelligent persons are familiar with its details.

I begin my description of ancient religions with those systems with
which the Jews were more or less familiar, and by which they were more
or less influenced. And whether these religions were, as I think,
themselves corrupted forms of the primitive revelation to primitive man,
or, as is held by some philosophers of to-day, natural developments out
of an original worship of the powers of Nature, of ghosts of ancestral
heroes, of tutelar deities of household, family, tribe, nation, and so
forth, it will not affect their relation to my plan of considering this
background of history in its effects upon modern times, through Judaism
and Christianity.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first which naturally claims our attention is the religion of
ancient Egypt. But I can show only the main features and characteristics
of this form of paganism, avoiding the complications of their system and
their perplexing names as much as possible. I wish to present what is
ascertained and intelligible rather than what is ingenious and obscure.

The religion of Egypt is very old,--how old we cannot tell with
certainty. We know that it existed before Abraham, and with but few
changes, for at least two thousand years. Mariette places the era of the
first Egyptian dynasty under Menes at 5004 B.C. It is supposed that the
earliest form of the Egyptian religion was monotheistic, such as was
known later, however, only to a few of the higher priesthood. What the
esoteric wisdom really was we can only conjecture, since there are no
sacred books or writings that have come down to us, like the Indian
Vedas and the Persian Zend-Avesta. Herodotus affirms that he knew the
mysteries, but he did not reveal them.

But monotheism was lost sight of in Egypt at an earlier period than the
beginning of authentic history. It is the fate of all institutions to
become corrupt, and this is particularly true of religious systems. The
reason of this is not difficult to explain. The Bible and human
experience fully exhibit the course of this degradation. Hence, before
Abraham's visit to Egypt the religion of that land had degenerated into
a gross and complicated polytheism, which it was apparently for the
interest of the priesthood to perpetuate.

The Egyptian religion was the worship of the powers of Nature,--the sun,
the moon, the planets, the air, the storm, light, fire, the clouds, the
rivers, the lightning, all of which were supposed to exercise a
mysterious influence over human destiny. There was doubtless an
indefinite sense of awe in view of the wonders of the material universe,
extending to a vague fear of some almighty supremacy over all that could
be seen or known. To these powers of Nature the Egyptians gave names,
and made them divinities.

The Egyptian polytheism was complex and even contradictory. What it
lost in logical sequence it gained in variety. Wilkinson enumerates
seventy-three principal divinities, and Birch sixty-three; but there
were some hundreds of lesser gods, discharging peculiar functions and
presiding over different localities. Every town had its guardian deity,
to whom prayers or sacrifices were offered by the priests. The more
complicated the religious rites the more firmly cemented was the power
of the priestly caste, and the more indispensable were priestly services
for the offerings and propitiations.

Of these Egyptian deities there were eight of the first rank; but the
list of them differs according to different writers, since in the great
cities different deities were worshipped. These were Ammon--the
concealed god,--the sovereign over all (corresponding to the Jupiter of
the Romans), whose sacred city was Thebes. At a later date this god was
identified with Ammon Ra, the physical sun. Ra was the sun-god,
especially worshipped at Heliopolis,--the symbol of light and heat.
Kneph was the spirit of God moving over the face of the waters, whose
principal seat of worship was in Upper Egypt. Phtha was a sort of
artisan god, who made the sun, moon, and the earth, "the father of
beginnings;" his sign was the scarabaeus, or beetle, and his patron city
was Memphis. Khem was the generative principle presiding over the
vegetable world,--the giver of fertility and lord of the harvest. These
deities are supposed to have represented spirit passing into matter and
form,--a process of divine incarnation.

But the most popular deity was Osiris. His image is found standing on
the oldest monument, a form of Ra, the light of the lower world, and
king and judge of Hades. His worship was universal throughout Egypt, but
his chief temples were at Abydos and Philae. He was regarded as mild,
beneficent, and good. In opposition to him were Set, malignant and evil,
and Bes, the god of death. Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, was a
sort of sun goddess, representing the productive power of Nature. Khons
was the moon god. Maut, the consort of Ammon, represented Nature. Sati,
the wife of Kneph, bore a resemblance to Juno. Nut was the goddess of
the firmament; Ma was the goddess of truth; Horus was the mediator
between creation and destruction.

But in spite of the multiplicity of deities, the Egyptian worship
centred in some form upon heat or fire, generally the sun, the most
powerful and brilliant of the forces of Nature. Among all the ancient
pagan nations the sun, the moon, and the planets, under different names,
whether impersonated or not, were the principal objects of worship for
the people. To these temples were erected, statues raised, and
sacrifices made.

No ancient nation was more devout, or more constant to the service of
its gods, than were the Egyptians; and hence, being superstitious, they
were pre-eminently under the control of priests, as the people were in
India. We see, chiefly in India and Egypt, the power of
caste,--tyrannical, exclusive, and pretentious,--and powerful in
proportion to the belief in a future state. Take away the belief in
future existence and future rewards and punishments, and there is not
much religion left. There may be philosophy and morality, but not
religion, which is based on the fear and love of God, and the destiny of
the soul after death. Saint Augustine, in his "City of God," his
greatest work, ridicules all gods who are not able to save the soul, and
all religions where future existence is not recognized as the most
important thing which can occupy the mind of man.

We cannot then utterly despise the religion of Egypt, in spite of the
absurdities mingled with it,--the multiplicity of gods and the doctrine
of metempsychosis,--since it included a distinct recognition of a future
state of rewards and punishments "according to the deeds done in the
body." On this belief rested the power of the priests, who were supposed
to intercede with the deities, and who alone were appointed to offer to
them sacrifices, in order to gain their favor or deprecate their wrath.
The idea of death and judgment was ever present to the thoughts of the
Egyptians, from the highest to the lowest, and must have modified their
conduct, stimulating them to virtue, and restraining them from vice; for
virtue and vice are not revelations,--they are instincts implanted in
the soul. No ancient teacher enjoined the duties based on an immutable
morality with more force than Confucius, Buddha, and Epictetus. Who in
any land or age has ignored the duties of filial obedience, respect to
rulers, kindness to the miserable, protection to the weak, honesty,
benevolence, sincerity, and truthfulness? With the discharge of these
duties, written on the heart, have been associated the favor of the
gods, and happiness in the future world, whatever errors may have crept
into theological dogmas and speculations.

Believing then in a future state, where sin would be punished and virtue
rewarded, and believing in it firmly and piously, the ancient Egyptians
were a peaceful and comparatively moral people. All writers admit their
industry, their simplicity of life, their respect for law, their loyalty
to priests and rulers. Hence there was permanence to their institutions,
for rapine, violence, and revolution were rare. They were not warlike,
although often engaged in war by the command of ambitious kings.
Generally the policy of their government was conservative and pacific.
Military ambition and thirst for foreign conquest were not the peculiar
sins of Egyptian kings; they sought rather to develop national
industries and resources. The occupation of the people was in
agriculture and the useful arts, which last they carried to considerable
perfection, especially in the working of metals, textile fabrics, and
ornamental jewelry. Their grand monuments were not triumphal arches, but
temples and mausoleums. Even the pyramids may have been built to
preserve the bodies of kings until the soul should be acquitted or
condemned, and therefore more religious in their uses than as mere
emblems of pride and power; and when monuments were erected to
perpetuate the fame of princes, their supreme design was to receive the
engraven memorials of the virtuous deeds of kings as fathers of
the people.

The priests, whose business it was to perform religious rites and
ceremonies to the various gods of the Egyptians, were extremely
numerous. They held the highest social rank, and were exempt from taxes.
They were clothed in white linen, which was kept scrupulously clean.
They washed their whole bodies twice a day; they shaved the head, and
wore no beard. They practised circumcision, which rite was of extreme
antiquity, existing in Egypt two thousand four hundred years before
Christ, and at least four hundred years before Abraham, and has been
found among primitive peoples all over the world. They did not make a
show of sanctity, nor were they ascetic like the Brahmans. They were
married, and were allowed to drink wine and to eat meat, but not fish
nor beans, which disturbed digestion. The son of a priest was generally
a priest also. There were grades of rank among the priesthood; but not
more so than in the Roman Catholic Church. The high-priest was a great
dignitary, and generally belonged to the royal family. The king himself
was a priest.

The Egyptian ritual of worship was the most complicated of all rituals,
and their literature and philosophy were only branches of theology.
"Religious observances," says Freeman Clarke, "were so numerous and so
imperative that the most common labors of daily life could not be
performed without a perpetual reference to some priestly regulation."
There were more religious festivals than among any other ancient nation.
The land was covered with temples; and every temple consecrated to a
single divinity, to whom some animal was sacred, supported a large body
of priests. The authorities on Egyptian history, especially Wilkinson,
speak highly, on the whole, of the morals of the priesthood, and of
their arduous and gloomy life of superintending ceremonies, sacrifices,
processions, and funerals. Their life was so full of minute duties and
restrictions that they rarely appeared in public, and their aspect as
well as influence was austere and sacerdotal.

One of the most distinctive features of the Egyptian religion was the
idea of the transmigration of souls,--that when men die; their souls
reappear on earth in various animals, in expiation of their sins. Osiris
was the god before whose tribunal all departed spirits appeared to be
judged. If evil preponderated in their lives, their souls passed into a
long series of animals until their sins were expiated, when the purified
souls, after thousands of years perhaps, passed into their old bodies.
Hence it was the great object of the Egyptians to preserve their mortal
bodies after death, and thus arose the custom of embalming them. It is
difficult to compute the number of mummies that have been found in
Egypt. If a man was wealthy, it cost his family as much as one thousand
dollars to embalm his body suitably to his rank. The embalmed bodies of
kings were preserved in marble sarcophagi, and hidden in gigantic
monuments.

The most repulsive thing in the Egyptian religion was animal-worship. To
each deity some animal was sacred. Thus Apis, the sacred bull of
Memphis, was the representative of Osiris; the cow was sacred to Isis,
and to Athor her mother. Sheep were sacred to Kneph, as well as the
asp. Hawks were sacred to Ra; lions were emblems of Horus, wolves of
Anubis, hippopotami of Set. Each town was jealous of the honor of its
special favorites among the gods.

"The worst form of this animal worship," says Rawlinson, "was the belief
that a deity absolutely became incarnate in an individual animal, and so
remained until the animal's death. Such were the Apis bulls, of which a
succession was maintained at Memphis in the temple of Phtha, or,
according to others, of Osiris. These beasts, maintained at the cost of
the priestly communities in the great temples of their respective
cities, were perpetually adored and prayed to by thousands during their
lives, and at their deaths were entombed with the utmost care in huge
sarcophagi, while all Egypt went into mourning on their decease."

Such was the religion of Egypt as known to the Jews,--a complicated
polytheism, embracing the worship of animals as well as the powers of
Nature; the belief in the transmigration of souls, and a sacerdotalism
which carried ritualistic ceremonies to the greatest extent known to
antiquity, combined with the exaltation of the priesthood to such a
degree as to make priests the real rulers of the land, reminding us of
the spiritual despotism of the Middle Ages. The priests of Egypt ruled
by appealing to the fears of men, thus favoring a degrading
superstition. How far they taught that the various objects of worship
were symbols merely of a supreme power, which they themselves perhaps
accepted in their esoteric schools, we do not know. But the priests
believed in a future state of rewards and punishments, and thus
recognized the soul to be of more importance than the material body, and
made its welfare paramount over all other interests. This recognition
doubtless contributed to elevate the morals of the people, and to make
them religious, despite their false and degraded views of God, and their
disgusting superstitions.

The Jews could not have lived in Egypt four hundred years without being
influenced by the popular belief. Hence in the wilderness, and in the
days of kingly rule, the tendency to animal worship in the shape of the
golden calves, their love of ritualistic observances, and their easy
submission to the rule of priests. In one very important thing, however,
the Jews escaped a degrading superstition,--that of the transmigration
of souls; and it was perhaps the abhorrence by Moses of this belief that
made him so remarkably silent as to a future state. It is seemingly
ignored in the Old Testament, and hence many have been led to suppose
that the Jews did not believe in it. Certainly the most cultivated and
aristocratic sect--the Sadducees--repudiated it altogether; while the
Pharisees held to it. They, however, were products of a later age, and
had learned many things--good and bad--from surrounding nations or in
their captivities, which Moses did not attempt to teach the simple souls
that escaped from Egypt.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of the other religions with which the Jews came in contact, and which
more or less were in conflict with their own monotheistic belief, very
little is definitely known, since their sacred books, if they had any,
have not come down to us. Our knowledge is mostly confined to monuments,
on which the names of their deities are inscribed, the animals which
they worshipped, symbolic of the powers of Nature, and the kings and
priests who officiated in religious ceremonies. From these we learn or
infer that among the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Phoenicians religion
was polytheistic, but without so complicated or highly organized a
system as prevailed in Egypt. Only about twenty deities are alluded to
in the monumental records of either nation, and they are supposed to
have represented the sun, the moon, the stars, and various other powers,
to which were delegated by the unseen and occult supreme deity the
oversight of this world. They presided over cities and the elements of
Nature, like the rain, the thunder, the winds, the air, the water. Some
abode in heaven, some on the earth, and some in the waters under the
earth. Of all these graven images existed, carved by men's hands,--some
in the form of animals, like the winged bulls of Nineveh. In the very
earliest times, before history was written, it is supposed that the
religion of all these nations was monotheistic, and that polytheism was
a development as men became wicked and sensual. The knowledge of the one
God was gradually lost, although an indefinite belief remained that
there was a supreme power over all the other gods, at least a deity of
higher rank than the gods of the people, who reigned over them as
Lord of lords.

This deity in Assyria was Asshur. He is recognized by most authorities
as Asshur, a son of Shem and grandson of Noah, who was probably the hero
and leader of one of the early migrations, and, as founder of the
Assyrian Empire, gave it its name,--his own being magnified and deified
by his warlike descendants. Assyria was the oldest of the great empires,
occupying Mesopotamia,--the vast plain watered by the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers,--with adjacent countries to the north, west, and east.
Its seat was in the northern portion of this region, while that of
Babylonia or Chaldaea, its rival, was in the southern part; and although
after many wars freed from the subjection of Assyria, the institutions
of Babylonia, and especially its religion, were very much the same as
those of the elder empire. In Babylonia the chief god was called El, or
Il. In Babylon, although Bab-el, their tutelary god, was at the head of
the pantheon, his form was not represented, nor had he any special
temple for his worship. The Assyrian Asshur placed kings upon their
thrones, protected their armies, and directed their expeditions. In
speaking of him it was "Asshur, my Lord." He was also called "King of
kings," reigning supreme over the gods; and sometimes he was called the
"Father of the gods." His position in the celestial hierarchy
corresponds with the Zeus of the Greeks, and with the Jupiter of the
Romans. He was represented as a man with a horned cap, carrying a bow
and issuing from a winged circle, which circle was the emblem of
ubiquity and eternity. This emblem was also the accompaniment of
Assyrian royalty.

These Assyrian and Babylonian deities had a direct influence on the Jews
in later centuries, because traders on the Tigris pushed their
adventurous expeditions from the head of the Persian Gulf, either around
the great peninsula of Arabia, or by land across the deserts, and
settled in Canaan, calling themselves Phoenicians; and it was from the
descendants of these enterprising but morally debased people that the
children of Israel, returning from Egypt, received the most pertinacious
influences of idolatrous corruption. In Phoenicia the chief deity was
also called Bel, or Baal, meaning "Lord," the epithet of the one divine
being who rules the world, or the Lord of heaven. The deity of the
Egyptian pantheon, with whom Baal most nearly corresponds, was Ammon,
addressed as the supreme God.

Ranking after El in Babylon, Asshur in Assyria, and Baal in
Phoenicia,--all shadows of the same supreme God,--we notice among these
Mesopotamians a triad of the great gods, called Anu, Bel, and Hea. Anu,
the primordial chaos; Hea, life and intelligence animating matter; and
Bel, the organizing and creative spirit,--or, as Rawlinson thinks, "the
original gods of the earth, the heavens, and the waters, corresponding
in the main with the classical Pluto, Jupiter, and Neptune, who divided
between them the dominion over the visible creation." The god Bel, in
the pantheon of the Babylonians and Assyrians, is the God of gods, and
Father of gods, who made the earth and heaven. His title
expresses dominion.

In succession to the gods of this first trio,--Anu, Bel, and Hea,--was
another trio, named Siu, Shamas, and Vul, representing the moon, the
sun, and the atmosphere. "In Assyria and Babylon the moon-god took
precedence of the sun-god, since night was more agreeable to the
inhabitants of those hot countries than the day." Hence, Siu was the
more popular deity; but Shamas, the sun, as having most direct
reference to physical nature, "the lord of fire," "the ruler of the
day," was the god of battles, going forth with the armies of the king
triumphant over enemies. The worship of this deity was universal, and
the kings regarded him as affording them especial help in war. Vul, the
third of this trinity, was the god of the atmosphere, the god of
tempests,--the god who caused the flood which the Assyrian legends
recognize. He corresponds with the Jupiter Tonans of the Romans,--"the
prince of the power of the air," destroyer of crops, the scatterer of
the harvest, represented with a flaming sword; but as god of the
atmosphere, the giver of rain, of abundance, "the lord of fecundity," he
was beneficent as well as destructive.

All these gods had wives resembling the goddesses in the Greek
mythology,--some beneficent, some cruel; rendering aid to men, or
pursuing them with their anger. And here one cannot resist the
impression that the earliest forms of the Greek mythology were derived
from the Babylonians and Phoenicians, and that the Greek poets, availing
themselves of the legends respecting them, created the popular religion
of Greece. It is a mooted question whether the Greek civilization is
chiefly derived from Egypt, or from Assyria and Phoenicia,--probably
more from these old monarchies combined than from the original seat of
the Aryan race east of the Caspian Sea. All these ancient monarchies
had run out and were old when the Greeks began their settlements and
conquests.

There was still another and inferior class of deities among the
Assyrians and Babylonians who were objects of worship, and were supposed
to have great influence on human affairs. These deities were the planets
under different names. The early study of astronomy among the dwellers
on the plains of Babylon and in Mesopotamia gave an astral feature to
their religion which was not prominent in Egypt. These astral deities
were Nin, or Bar (the Saturn of the Romans); and Merodach (Jupiter), the
august god, "the eldest son of Heaven," the Lord of battles. This was
the favorite god of Nebuchadnezzar, and epithets of the highest honor
were conferred upon him, as "King of heaven and earth," the "Lord of all
beings," etc. Nergal (Mars) was a war god, his name signifying "the
great Hero," "the King of battles." He goes before kings in their
military expeditions, and lends them assistance in the chase. His emblem
is the human-headed winged lion seen at the entrance of royal palaces.
Ista (Venus) was the goddess of beauty, presiding over the loves of both
men and animals, and was worshipped with unchaste rites. Nebo (Mercury)
had the charge over learning and culture,--the god of wisdom, who
"teaches and instructs."

There were other deities in the Assyrian and Babylonian pantheon whom I
need not name, since they played a comparatively unimportant part in
human affairs, like the inferior deities of the Romans, presiding over
dreams, over feasts, over marriage, and the like.

The Phoenicians, like the Assyrians, had their goddesses. Astoreth, or
Astarte, represented the great female productive principle, as Baal did
the male. It was originally a name for the energy of God, on a par with
Baal. In one of her aspects she represented the moon; but more commonly
she was the representative of the female principle in Nature, and was
connected more or less with voluptuous rites,--the equivalent of
Aphrodite, or Venus. Tanith also was a noted female deity, and was
worshipped at Carthage and Cyprus by the Phoenician settlers. The name
is associated, according to Gesenius, with the Egyptian goddess Nut, and
with the Grecian Artemis the huntress.

An important thing to be observed of these various deities is that they
do not uniformly represent the same power. Thus Baal, the Phoenician
sun-god, was made by the Greeks and Romans equivalent to Zeus, or
Jupiter, the god of thunder and storms. Apollo, the sun-god of the
Greeks, was not so powerful as Zeus, the god of the atmosphere; while in
Assyria and Phoenicia the sun-god was the greater deity. In Babylonia,
Shamas was a sun-god as well as Bel; and Bel again was the god of the
heavens, like Zeus.

While Zeus was the supreme deity in the Greek mythology, rather than
Apollo the sun, it seems that on the whole the sun was the prominent and
the most commonly worshipped deity of all the Oriental nations, as being
the most powerful force in Nature. Behind the sun, however, there was
supposed to be an indefinite creative power, whose form was not
represented, worshipped in no particular temple by the esoteric few who
were his votaries, and called the "Father of all the gods," "the Ancient
of days," reigning supreme over them all. This indefinite conception of
the Jehovah of the Hebrews seems to me the last flickering light of the
primitive revelation, shining in the souls of the most enlightened of
the Pagan worshippers, including perhaps the greatest of the monarchs,
who were priests as well as kings.

The most distinguishing feature in the worship of all the gods of
antiquity, whether among Egyptians, or Assyrians, or Babylonians, or
Phoenicians, or Greeks, or Romans, is that of oblations and sacrifices.
It was even a peculiarity of the old Jewish religion, as well as that of
China and India. These oblations and sacrifices were sometimes offered
to the deity, whatever his form or name, as an expiation for sin, of
which the soul is conscious in all ages and countries; sometimes to
obtain divine favor, as in military expeditions, or to secure any object
dearest to the heart, such as health, prosperity, or peace; sometimes to
propitiate the deity in order to avert the calamities following his
supposed wrath or vengeance. The oblations were usually in the form of
wine, honey, or the fruits of the earth, which were supposed to be
necessary for the nourishment of the gods, especially in Greece. The
sacrifices were generally of oxen, sheep, and goats, the most valued and
precious of human property in primitive times, for those old heathen
never offered to their deities that which cost them nothing, but rather
that which was dearest to them. Sometimes, especially in Phoenicia,
human beings were offered in sacrifice, the most repulsive peculiarity
of polytheism. But the instincts of humanity generally kept men from
rites so revolting. Christianity, as one of its distinguishing features,
abolished all forms of outward sacrifice, as superstitious and useless.
The sacrifices pleasing to God are a broken spirit, as revealed to David
and Isaiah amid all the ceremonies and ritualism of Jewish worship, and
still more to Paul and Peter when the new dispensation was fully
declared. The only sacrifice which Christ enjoined was self-sacrifice,
supreme devotion to a spiritual and unseen and supreme God, and to his
children: as the Christ took upon himself the form of a man, suffering
evil all his days, and finally even an ignominious death, in obedience
to his Father's will, that the world might be saved by his own
self-sacrifice.

With sacrifices as an essential feature of all the ancient religions, if
we except that of Persia in the time of Zoroaster, there was need of an
officiating priesthood. The priests in all countries sought to gain
power and influence, and made themselves an exclusive caste, more or
less powerful as circumstances favored their usurpations. The priestly
caste became a terrible power in Egypt and India, where the people, it
would seem, were most susceptible to religious impressions, were most
docile and most ignorant, and had in constant view the future welfare of
their souls. In China, where there was scarcely any religion at all,
this priestly power was unknown; and it was especially weak among the
Greeks, who had no fear of the future, and who worshipped beauty and
grace rather than a spiritual god. Sacerdotalism entered into
Christianity when it became corrupted by the lust of dominion and power,
and with great force ruled the Christian world in times of ignorance and
superstition. It is sad to think that the decline of sacerdotalism is
associated with the growth of infidelity and religious indifference,
showing how few worship God in spirit and in truth even in Christian
countries. Yet even that reaction is humanly natural; and as it so
surely follows upon epochs of priestcraft, it may be a part of the
divine process of arousing men to the evils of superstition.

Among all nations where polytheism prevailed, idolatry became a natural
sequence,--that is, the worship of animals and of graven images, at
first as symbols of the deities that were worshipped, generally the sun,
moon, and stars, and the elements of Nature, like fire, water, and air.
But the symbols of divine power, as degeneracy increased and ignorance
set in, were in succession worshipped as deities, as in India and Africa
at the present day. This is the lowest form of religion, and the most
repulsive and degraded which has prevailed in the world,--showing the
enormous difference between the primitive faiths and the worship which
succeeded, growing more and more hideous with the progress of ages,
until the fulness of time arrived when God sent reformers among the
debased people, more or less supernaturally inspired, to declare new
truth, and even to revive the knowledge of the old in danger of being
utterly lost.

It is a pleasant thing to remember that the religions thus far treated,
as known to the Jews, and by which they were more or less contaminated,
have all passed away with the fall of empires and the spread of divine
truth; and they never again can be revived in the countries where they
nourished. Mohammedanism, a monotheistic religion, has taken their
place, and driven the ancient idols to the moles and the bats; and where
Mohammedanism has failed to extirpate ancient idolatries, Christianity
in some form has come in and dethroned them forever.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was one form of religion with which the Jews came in contact which
was comparatively pure; and this was the religion of Persia, the
loftiest form of all Pagan beliefs.

The Persians were an important branch of the Iranian family. "The
Iranians were the dominant race throughout the entire tract lying
between the Suliman mountains and the Pamir steppe on the one hand, and
the great Mesopotamian valley on the other." It was a region of great
extremes of temperature,--the summers being hot, and the winters
piercingly cold. A great part of this region is an arid and frightful
desert; but the more favored portions are extremely fertile. In this
country the Iranians settled at a very early period, probably 2500 B.C.,
about the time the Hindus emigrated from Central Asia to the banks of
the Indus. Both Iranians and Hindus belonged to the great Aryan or
Indo-European race, whose original settlements were on the high
table-lands northeast of Samarkand, in the modern Bokhara, watered by
the Oxus, or Amon River. From these rugged regions east of the Caspian
Sea, where the means of subsistence are difficult to be obtained, the
Aryans emigrated to India on the southeast, to Iran on the southwest, to
Europe on the west,--all speaking substantially the same language.

Of those who settled in Iran, the Persians were the most prominent,--a
brave, hardy, and adventurous people, warlike in their habits, and moral
in their conduct. They were a pastoral rather than a nomadic people, and
gloried in their horses and cattle. They had great skill as archers and
horsemen, and furnished the best cavalry among the ancients. They lived
in fixed habitations, and their houses had windows and fireplaces; but
they were doomed to a perpetual struggle with a severe and uncertain
climate, and a soil which required ceaseless diligence. "The whole
plateau of Iran," says Johnson, "was suggestive of the war of
elements,--a country of great contrasts of fertility and
desolation,--snowy ranges of mountains, salt deserts, and fields of
beauty lying in close proximity."

The early Persians are represented as having oval faces, raised
features, well-arched eyebrows, and large dark eyes, now soft as the
gazelle's, now flashing with quick insight. Such a people were extremely
receptive of modes and fashions,--the aptest learners as well as the
boldest adventurers; not patient in study nor skilful to invent, but
swift to seize and appropriate, terrible breakers-up of old religious
spells. They dissolved the old material civilization of Cushite and
Turanian origin. What passion for vast conquests! "These rugged tribes,
devoted to their chiefs, led by Cyrus from their herds and
hunting-grounds to startle the pampered Lydians with their spare diet
and clothing of skins; living on what they could get, strangers to wine
and wassail, schooled in manly exercises, cleanly even to superstition,
loyal to age and filial duties; with a manly pride of personal
independence that held a debt the next worst thing to a lie; their
fondness for social graces, their feudal dignities, their chiefs giving
counsel to the king even while submissive to his person, esteeming
prowess before praying; their strong ambition, scorning those who
scorned toil." Artaxerxes wore upon his person the worth of twelve
thousand talents, yet shared the hardships of his army in the march,
carrying quiver and shield, leading the way to the steepest places, and
stimulating the hearts of his soldiers by walking twenty-five miles
a day.

There was much that is interesting about the ancient Persians. All the
old authorities, especially Herodotus, testify to the comparative purity
of their lives, to their love of truth, to their heroism in war, to the
simplicity of their habits, to their industry and thrift in battling
sterility of soil and the elements of Nature, to their love of
agricultural pursuits, to kindness towards women and slaves, and above
all other things to a strong personality of character which implied a
powerful will. The early Persians chose the bravest and most capable of
their nobles for kings, and these kings were mild and merciful. Xenophon
makes Cyrus the ideal of a king,--the incarnation of sweetness and
light, conducting war with a magnanimity unknown to the ancient nations,
dismissing prisoners, forgiving foes, freeing slaves, and winning all
hearts by a true nobility of nature. He was a reformer of barbarous
methods of war, and as pure in morals as he was powerful in war. In
short, he had all those qualities which we admire in the chivalric
heroes of the Middle Ages.

There was developed among this primitive and virtuous people a religion
essentially different from that of Assyria and Egypt, with which is
associated the name of Zoroaster, or Zarathushtra. Who this
extraordinary personage was, and when he lived, it is not easy to
determine. Some suppose that he did not live at all. It is most probable
that he lived in Bactria from 1000 to 1500 B.C.; but all about him is
involved in hopeless obscurity.

The Zend-Avesta, or the sacred books of the Persians, are mostly hymns,
prayers, and invocations addressed to various deities, among whom Ormazd
was regarded as supreme. These poems were first made known to European
scholars by Anquetil du Perron, an enthusiastic traveller, a little more
than one hundred years ago, and before the laws of Menu were translated
by Sir William Jones. What we know about the religion of Persia is
chiefly derived from the Zend-Avesta. _Zend_ is the interpretation of
the Avesta. The oldest part of these poems is called the Gâthâs,
supposed to have been composed by Zoroaster about the time of Moses.

As all information about Zoroaster personally is unsatisfactory, I
proceed to speak of the religion which he is supposed to have given to
the Iranians, according to Dr. Martin Haug, the great authority on
this subject.

Its peculiar feature was dualism,--two original uncreated principles;
one good, the other evil. Both principles were real persons, possessed
of will, intelligence, power, consciousness, engaged from all eternity
in perpetual contest. The good power was called Ahura-Mazda, and the
evil power was called Angro-Mainyus. Ahura-Mazda means the "Much-knowing
spirit," or the All-wise, the All-bountiful, who stood at the head of
all that is beneficent in the universe,--"the creator of life," who made
the celestial bodies and the earth, and from whom came all good to man
and everlasting happiness. Angro-Mainyus means the black or dark
intelligence, the creator of all that is evil, both moral and physical.
He had power to blast the earth with barrenness, to produce earthquakes
and storms, to inflict disease and death, destroy flocks and the fruits
of the earth, excite wars and tumults; in short, to send every form of
evil on mankind. Ahura-Mazda had no control over this Power of evil; all
he could do was to baffle him.

These two deities who divided the universe between them had each
subordinate spirits or genii, who did their will, and assisted in the
government of the universe,--corresponding to our idea of angels
and demons.

Neither of these supreme deities was represented by the early Iranians
under material forms; but in process of time corruption set in, and
Magism, or the worship of the elements of Nature, became general. The
elements which were worshipped were fire, air, earth, and water.
Personal gods, temples, shrines, and images were rejected. But the most
common form of worship was that of fire, in Mithra, the genius of light,
early identified with the sun. Hence, practically, the supreme god of
the Persians was the same that was worshipped in Assyria and Egypt and
India,--the sun, under various names; with this difference, that in
Persia there were no temples erected to him, nor were there graven
images of him. With the sun was associated a supreme power that presided
over the universe, benignant and eternal. Fire itself in its pure
universality was more to the Iranians than any form. "From the sun,"
says the Avesta, "are all things sought that can be desired." To fire,
the Persian kings addressed their prayers. Fire, or the sun, was in the
early times a symbol of the supreme Power, rather than the Power itself,
since the sun was created by Ahura-Mazda (Ormazd). It was to him that
Zoroaster addressed his prayers, as recorded in the Gâthâs. "I worship,"
said he, "the Creator of all things, Ahura-Mazda, full of light....
Teach thou me, Ahura-Mazda, out of thyself, from heaven by thy mouth,
whereby the world first arose." Again, from the Khorda-Avesta we read:
"In the name of God, the giver, forgiver, rich in love, praise be to the
name of Ormazd, who always was, always is, and always will be; from whom
alone is derived rule." From these and other passages we infer that the
religion of the Iranians was monotheistic. And yet the sun also was
worshipped under the name of Mithra. Says Zoroaster: "I invoke Mithra,
the lofty, the immortal, the pure, the sun, the ruler, the eye of
Ormazd." It would seem from this that the sun was identified with the
Supreme Being. There was no other power than the sun which was
worshipped. There was no multitude of gods, nothing like polytheism,
such as existed in Egypt. The Iranians believed in one supreme, eternal
God, who created all things, beneficent and all-wise; yet this supreme
power was worshipped under the symbol of the sun, although the sun was
created by him. This confounding the sun with a supreme and intelligent
being makes the Iranian religion indefinite, and hard to be
comprehended; but compared with the polytheism of Egypt and Babylon, it
is much higher and purer. We see in it no degrading rites, no offensive
sacerdotalism, no caste, no worship of animals or images; all is
spiritual and elevated, but little inferior to the religion of the
Hebrews. In the Zend-Avesta we find no doctrines; but we do find prayers
and praises and supplication to a Supreme Being. In the Vedas--the Hindu
books--the powers of Nature are gods; in the Avesta they are spirits, or
servants of the Supreme.

"The main difference between the Vedic and Avestan religions is that in
the latter the Vedic worship of natural powers and phenomena is
superseded by a more ethical and personal interest. Ahura-Mazda
(Ormazd), the living wisdom, replaces Indra, the lightning-god. In Iran
there grew up, what India never saw, a consciousness of world-purpose,
ethical and spiritual; a reference of the ideal to the future rather
than the present; a promise of progress; and the idea that the law of
the universe means the final deliverance of good from evil, and its
eternal triumph." [1]

[Footnote 1: Samuel Johnson's Religion of Persia.]

The loftiness which modern scholars like Haug, Lenormant, and Spiegel
see in the Zend-Avesta pertains more directly to the earlier portions of
these sacred writings, attributable to Zoroaster, called the Gâthâs. But
in the course of time the Avesta was subjected to many additions and
interpretations, called the Zend, which show degeneracy. A world of myth
and legend is crowded into liturgical fragments. The old Bactrian tongue
in which the Avesta was composed became practically a dead language.
There entered into the Avesta old Chaldaean traditions. It would be
strange if the pure faith of Zoroaster should not be corrupted after
Persia had conquered Babylon, and even after its alliance with Media,
where the Magi had great reputation for knowledge. And yet even with the
corrupting influence of the superstitions of Babylon, to say nothing of
Media, the Persian conquerors did not wholly forget the God of their
fathers in their old Bactrian home. And it is probable that one reason
why Cyrus and Darius treated the Jews with so much kindness and
generosity was the sympathy they felt for the monotheism of the Jewish
religion in contrast with the polytheism and idolatry of the conquered
Babylonians. It is not unreasonable to suppose that both the Persians
and Jews worshipped substantially the one God who made the heaven and
the earth, notwithstanding the dualism which entered into the Persian
religion, and the symbolic worship of fire which is the most powerful
agent in Nature; and it is considered by many that from the Persians the
Jews received, during their Captivity, their ideas concerning a personal
Devil, or Power of Evil, of which no hint appears in the Law or the
earlier Prophets. It would certainly seem to be due to that monotheism
which modern scholars see behind the dualism of Persia, as an elemental
principle of the old religion of Iran, that the Persians were the
noblest people of Pagan antiquity, and practised the highest morality
known in the ancient world. Virtue and heroism went hand in hand; and
both virtue and heroism were the result of their religion. But when the
Persians became intoxicated with the wealth and power they acquired on
the fall of Babylon, then their degeneracy was rapid, and their faith
became obscured. Had it been the will of Providence that the Greeks
should have contended with the Persians under the leadership of
Cyrus,--the greatest Oriental conqueror known in history,--rather than
under Xerxes, then even an Alexander might have been baffled. The great
mistake of the Persian monarchs in their degeneracy was in trusting to
the magnitude of their armies rather than in their ancient discipline
and national heroism. The consequence was a panic, which would not have
taken place under Cyrus, whenever they met the Greeks in battle. It was
a panic which dispersed the Persian hosts in the fatal battle of Arbela,
and made Alexander the master of western Asia. But degenerate as the
Persians became, they rallied under succeeding dynasties, and in
Artaxerxes II. and Chosroes the Romans found, in their declining
glories, their most formidable enemies.

Though the brightness of the old religion of Zoroaster ceased to shine
after the Persian conquests, and religious rites fell into the hands of
the Magi, yet it is the only Oriental religion which entered into
Christianity after its magnificent triumph, unless we trace early
monasticism to the priests of India. Christianity had a hard battle with
Gnosticism and Manichaeism,--both of Persian origin,--and did not come
out unscathed. No Grecian system of philosophy, except Platonism,
entered into the Christian system so influentially as the disastrous
Manichaean heresy, which Augustine combated. The splendid mythology of
the Greeks, as well as the degrading polytheism of Egypt, Assyria, and
Phoenicia, passed away before the power of the cross; but Persian
speculations remained. Even Origen, the greatest scholar of Christian
antiquity, was tainted with them. And the mighty myths of the origin of
evil, which perplexed Zoroaster, still remain unsolved; but the belief
of the final triumph of good over evil is common to both Christians and
the disciples of the Bactrian sage.

       *       *       *       *       *

AUTHORITIES.


Rawlinson's Egypt and Babylon; History of Babylonia, by A.H. Sayce;
Smith's Dictionary of the Bible; Rawlinson's Herodotus; George Smith's
History of Babylonia; Lenormant's Manuel d'Histoire Ancienne; Layard's
Nineveh and Babylon; Journal of Royal Asiatic Society; Heeren's Asiatic
Nations; Dr. Pusey's Lectures on Daniel; Birch's Egypt from the Earliest
Times; Brugsch's History of Egypt; Records of the Past; Rawlinson's
History of Ancient Egypt; Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians; Sayce's Ancient
Empires of the East; Rawlinson's Religions of the Ancient World; James
Freeman Clarke's Ten Great Religions; Religion of Ancient Egypt, by P.
Le Page Renouf; Moffat's Comparative History of Religions; Bunsen's
Egypt's Place in History; Persia, from the Earliest Period, by W. S. W.
Vaux; Johnson's Oriental Religions; Haug's Essays; Spiegel's Avesta.

The above are the more prominent authorities; but the number of books on
ancient religions is very large.




RELIGIONS OF INDIA.


BRAHMANISM AND BUDDHISM.

That form of ancient religion which has of late excited the most
interest is Buddhism. An inquiry into its characteristics is especially
interesting, since so large a part of the human race--nearly five
hundred millions out of the thirteen hundred millions--still profess to
embrace the doctrines which were taught by Buddha, although his religion
has become so corrupted that his original teachings are nearly lost
sight of. The same may be said of the doctrines of Confucius. The
religions of ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece have utterly passed
away, and what we have had to say of these is chiefly a matter of
historic interest, as revealing the forms assumed by the human search
for a supernatural Ruler when moulded by human ambitions, powers, and
indulgence in the "lust of the eye and the pride of life," rather than
by aspirations toward the pure and the spiritual.

Buddha was the great reformer of the religious system of the Hindus,
although he lived nearly fifteen hundred or two thousand years after the
earliest Brahmanical ascendency. But before we can appreciate his work
and mission, we must examine the system he attempted to reform, even as
it is impossible to present the Protestant Reformation without first
considering mediaeval Catholicism before the time of Luther. It was the
object of Buddha to break the yoke of the Brahmans, and to release his
countrymen from the austerities, the sacrifices, and the rigid
sacerdotalism which these ancient priests imposed, without essentially
subverting ancient religious ideas. He was a moralist and reformer,
rather than the founder of a religion.

Brahmanism is one of the oldest religions of the world. It was
flourishing in India at a period before history was written. It was
coeval with the religion of Egypt in the time of Abraham, and perhaps at
a still earlier date. But of its earliest form and extent we know
nothing, except from the sacred poems of the Hindus called the Vedas,
written in Sanskrit probably fifteen hundred years before Christ,--for
even the date of the earliest of the Vedas is unknown. Fifty years ago
we could not have understood the ancient religions of India. But Sir
William Jones in the latter part of the last century, a man of immense
erudition and genius for the acquisition of languages, at that time an
English judge in India, prepared the way for the study of Sanskrit, the
literary language of ancient India, by the translation and publication
of the laws of Menu. He was followed in his labors by the Schlegels of
Germany, and by numerous scholars and missionaries. Within fifty years
this ancient and beautiful language has been so perseveringly studied
that we know something of the people by whom it was once spoken,--even
as Egyptologists have revealed something of ancient Egypt by
interpreting the hieroglyphics; and Chaldaean investigators have found
stores of knowledge in the Babylonian bricks.

The Sanskrit, as now interpreted, reveals to us the meaning of those
poems called Vedas, by which we are enabled to understand the early laws
and religion of the Hindus. It is poetry, not history, which makes this
revelation, for the Hindus have no history farther back than five or six
hundred years before Christ. It is from Homer and Hesiod that we get an
idea of the gods of Greece, not from Herodotus or Xenophon.

From comparative philology, a new science, of which Prof. Max Müller is
one of the greatest expounders, we learn that the roots of various
European languages, as well as of the Latin and Greek, are
substantially the same as those of the Sanskrit spoken by the Hindus
thirty-five hundred years ago, from which it is inferred that the Hindus
were a people of like remote origin with the Greeks, the Italic races
(Romans, Italians, French), the Slavic races (Russian, Polish,
Bohemian), the Teutonic races of England and the Continent, and the
Keltic races. These are hence alike called the Indo-European races; and
as the same linguistic roots are found in their languages and in the
Zend-Avesta, we infer that the ancient Persians, or inhabitants of Iran,
belonged to the same great Aryan race.

The original seat of this race, it is supposed, was in the high
table-lands of Central Asia, in or near Bactria, east of the Caspian
Sea, and north and west of the Himalaya Mountains. This country was so
cold and sterile and unpropitious that winter predominated, and it was
difficult to support life. But the people, inured to hardship and
privation, were bold, hardy, adventurous, and enterprising.

It is a most interesting process, as described by the philologists,
which has enabled them, by tracing the history of words through their
various modifications in different living languages, to see how the
lines of growth converge as they are followed back to the simple Aryan
roots. And there, getting at the meanings of the things or thoughts the
words originally expressed, we see revealed, in the reconstruction of a
language that no longer exists, the material objects and habits of
thought and life of a people who passed away before history began,--so
imperishable are the unconscious embodiments of mind, even in the airy
and unsubstantial forms of unwritten speech! By this process, then, we
learn that the Aryans were a nomadic people, and had made some advance
in civilization. They lived in houses which were roofed, which had
windows and doors. Their common cereal was barley, the grain of cold
climates. Their wealth was in cattle, and they had domesticated the cow,
the sheep, the goat, the horse, and the dog. They used yokes, axes, and
ploughs. They wrought in various metals; they spun and wove, navigated
rivers in sailboats, and fought with bows, lances, and swords. They had
clear perceptions of the rights of property, which were based on land.
Their morals were simple and pure, and they had strong natural
affections. Polygamy was unknown among them. They had no established
sacerdotal priesthood. They worshipped the powers of Nature, especially
fire, the source of light and heat, which they so much needed in their
dreary land. Authorities differ as to their primeval religion, some
supposing that it was monotheistic, and others polytheistic, and others
again pantheistic.

Most of the ancient nations were controlled more or less by priests,
who, as their power increased, instituted a caste to perpetuate their
influence. Whether or not we hold the primitive religion of mankind to
have been a pure theism, directly revealed by God,--which is my own
conviction,--it is equally clear that the form of religion recorded in
the earliest written records of poetry or legend was a worship of the
sun and moon and planets. I believe this to have been a corruption of
original theism; many think it to have been a stage of upward growth in
the religious sense of primitive man. In all the ancient nations the
sun-god was a prominent deity, as the giver of heat and light, and hence
of fertility to the earth. The emblem of the sun was fire, and hence
fire was deified, especially among the Hindus, under the name of
Agni,--the Latin _ignis_.

Fire, caloric, or heat in some form was, among the ancient nations,
supposed to be the _animus mundi_. In Egypt, as we have seen, Osiris,
the principal deity, was a form of Ra, the sun-god. In Assyria, Asshur,
the substitute for Ra, was the supreme deity. In India we find Mitra,
and in Persia Mithra, the sun-god, among the prominent deities, as
Helios was among the Greeks, and Phoebus Apollo among the Romans. The
sun was not always the supreme divinity, but invariably held one of the
highest places in the Pagan pantheon.

It is probable that the religion of the common progenitors of the
Hindus, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Teutons, and Slavs, in their
hard and sterile home in Central Asia, was a worship of the powers of
Nature verging toward pantheism, although the earliest of the Vedas
representing the ancient faith seem to recognize a supreme power and
intelligence--God--as the common father of the race, to whom prayers and
sacrifices were devoutly offered. Freeman Clarke quotes from Müller's
"Ancient Sanskrit Literature" one of the hymns in which the unity of God
is most distinctly recognized:--

"In the beginning there arose the Source of golden light. He was the
only Lord of all that is. He established the earth and sky. Who is the
God to whom we shall offer our sacrifices? It is he who giveth life, who
giveth strength, who governeth all men; through whom heaven was
established, and the earth created."

But if the Supreme God whom we adore was recognized by this ancient
people, he was soon lost sight of in the multiplied manifestations of
his power, so that Rawlinson thinks[2] that when the Aryan race
separated in their various migrations, which resulted in what we call
the Indo-European group of races, there was no conception of a single
supreme power, from whom man and nature have alike their origin, but
Nature-worship, ending in an extensive polytheism,--as among the
Assyrians and Egyptians.

[Footnote 2: Religions of the Ancient World, p. 105.]

As to these Aryan migrations, we do not know when a large body crossed
the Himalaya Mountains, and settled on the banks of the Indus, but
probably it was at least two thousand years before Christ. Northern
India had great attractions to those hardy nomadic people, who found it
so difficult to get a living during the long winters of their primeval
home. India was a country of fruits and flowers, with an inexhaustible
soil, favorable to all kinds of production, where but little manual
labor was required,--a country abounding in every kind of animals, and
every kind of birds; a land of precious stones and minerals, of hills
and valleys, of majestic rivers and mountains, with a beautiful climate
and a sunny sky. These Aryan conquerors drove before them the aboriginal
inhabitants, who were chiefly Mongolians, or reduced them to a degrading
vassalage. The conquering race was white, the conquered was dark, though
not black; and this difference of color was one of the original causes
of Indian caste.

It was some time after the settlement of the Aryans on the banks of the
Indus and the Ganges before the Vedas were composed by the poets, who as
usual gave form to religious belief, as they did in Persia and Greece.
These poems, or hymns, are pantheistic. "There is no recognition," says
Monier Williams, "of a Supreme God disconnected with the worship of
Nature." There was a vague and indefinite worship of the Infinite under
various names, such as the sun, the sky, the air, the dawn, the winds,
the storms, the waters, the rivers, which alike charmed and terrified,
and seemed to be instinct with life and power. God was in all things,
and all things in God; but there was no idea of providential agency or
of personality.

In the Vedic hymns the number of gods is not numerous, only
thirty-three. The chief of these were Varuna, the sky; Mitra, the sun;
and Indra, the storm: after these, Agni, fire; and Soma, the moon. The
worship of these divinities was originally simple, consisting of prayer,
praise, and offerings. There were no temples and no imposing
sacerdotalism, although the priests were numerous. "The prayers and
praises describe the wisdom, power, and goodness of the deity
addressed," [3] and when the customary offerings had been made, the
worshipper prayed for food, life, health, posterity, wealth, protection,
happiness, whatever the object was,--generally for outward prosperity
rather than for improvement in character, or for forgiveness of sin,
peace of mind, or power to resist temptation. The offerings to the gods
were propitiatory, in the form of victims, or libations of some juice.
Nor did these early Hindus take much thought of a future life. There is
nothing in the Rig-Veda of a belief in the transmigration of souls[4],
although the Vedic bards seem to have had some hope of immortality. "He
who gives alms," says one poet, "goes to the highest place in heaven: he
goes to the gods[5].... Where there is eternal light, in the world where
the sun is placed,--in that immortal, imperishable world, place me, O
Soma! ... Where there is happiness and delight, where joy and pleasures
reside, where the desires of our heart are attained, there make me
immortal."

[Footnote 3: Rawlinson, p. 121.]
[Footnote 4: Wilson: Rig-Veda, vol. iii. p. 170.]
[Footnote 5: Müller: Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i. p. 46.]

In the oldest Vedic poems there were great simplicity and joyousness,
without allusion to those rites, ceremonies, and sacrifices which formed
so prominent a part of the religion of India at a later period.

Four hundred years after the Rig-Veda was composed we come to the
Brahmanic age, when the laws of Menu were written, when the Aryans were
living in the valley of the Ganges, and the caste system had become
national. The supreme deity is no longer one of the powers of Nature,
like Mitra or Indra, but according to Menu he is Brahm, or Brahma,--"an
eternal, unchangeable, absolute being, the soul of all beings, who,
having willed to produce various beings from his own divine substance,
created the waters and placed in them a productive seed. The seed became
an egg, and in that egg he was born, but sat inactive for a year, when
he caused the egg to divide itself; and from its two divisions he framed
the heaven above, and the earth beneath. From the supreme soul Brahma
drew forth mind, existing substantially, though unperceived by the
senses; and before mind, the reasoning power, he produced consciousness,
the internal monitor; and before them both he produced the great
principle of the soul.... The soul is, in its substance, from Brahma
himself, and is destined finally to be resolved into him. The soul,
then, is simply an emanation from Brahma; but it will not return unto
him at death necessarily, but must migrate from body to body, until it
is purified by profound abstraction and emancipated from all desires."

This is the substance of the Hindu pantheism as taught by the laws of
Menu. It accepts God, but without personality or interference with the
world's affairs,--not a God to be loved, scarcely to be feared, but a
mere abstraction of the mind.

The theology which is thus taught in the Brahmanical Vedas, it would
seem, is the result of lofty questionings and profound meditation on the
part of the Indian sages or priests, rather than the creation of poets.

In the laws of Menu, intended to exalt the Brahmanical caste, we read,
as translated by Sir William Jones:--

"To a man contaminated by sensuality, neither the Vedas, nor liberality,
nor sacrifices, nor strict observances, nor pious austerities, ever
procure felicity.... Let not a man be proud of his rigorous devotion;
let him not, having sacrificed, utter a falsehood; having made a
donation, let him never proclaim it.... By falsehood the sacrifice
becomes vain; by pride the merit of devotion is lost.... Single is each
man born, single he dies, single he receives the reward of the good, and
single the punishment of his evil, deeds.... By forgiveness of injuries
the learned are purified; by liberality, those who have neglected their
duty; by pious meditation, those who have secret thoughts; by devout
austerity, those who best know the Vedas.... Bodies are cleansed by
water; the mind is purified by truth; the vital spirit, by theology and
devotion; the understanding, by clear knowledge.... A faithful wife who
wishes to attain in heaven the mansion of her husband, must do nothing
unkind to him, be he living or dead; let her not, when her lord is
deceased, even pronounce the name of another man; let her continue till
death, forgiving all injuries, performing harsh duties, avoiding every
sensual pleasure, and cheerfully practising the incomparable rules of
virtue.... The soul itself is its own witness, the soul itself is its
own refuge; offend not thy conscious soul, the supreme internal witness
of man, ... O friend to virtue, the Supreme Spirit, which is the same
as thyself, resides in thy bosom perpetually, and is an all-knowing
inspector of thy goodness or wickedness."

Such were the truths uttered on the banks of the Ganges one thousand
years before Christ. But with these views there is an exaltation of the
Brahmanical or sacerdotal life, hard to be distinguished from the
recognition of divine qualities. "From his high birth," says Menu, "a
Brahman is an object of veneration, even to deities." Hence, great
things are expected of him; his food must be roots and fruit, his
clothing of bark fibres; he must spend his time in reading the Vedas; he
is to practise austerities by exposing himself to heat and cold; he is
to beg food but once a day; he must be careful not to destroy the life
of the smallest insect; he must not taste intoxicating liquors. A
Brahman who has thus mortified his body by these modes is exalted into
the divine essence. This was the early creed of the Brahman before
corruption set in. And in these things we see a striking resemblance to
the doctrines of Buddha. Had there been no corruption of Brahmanism,
there would have been no Buddhism; for the principles of Buddhism, were
those of early Brahmanism.

But Brahmanism became corrupted. Like the Mosaic Law, under the sedulous
care of the sacerdotal orders it ripened into a most burdensome
ritualism. The Brahmanical caste became tyrannical, exacting, and
oppressive. With the supposed sacredness of his person, and with the
laws made in his favor, the Brahman became intolerable to the people,
who were ground down by sacrifices, expiatory offerings, and wearisome
and minute ceremonies of worship. Caste destroyed all ideas of human
brotherhood; it robbed the soul of its affections and its aspirations.
Like the Pharisees in the time of Jesus, the Brahmans became oppressors
of the people. As in Pagan Egypt and in Christian mediaeval Europe, the
priests held the keys of heaven and hell; their power was more than
Druidical.

But the Brahman, when true to the laws of Menu, led in one sense a lofty
life. Nor can we despise a religion which recognized the value and
immortality of the soul, a state of future rewards and punishments,
though its worship was encumbered by rites, ceremonies, and sacrifices.
It was spiritual in its essential peculiarities, having reference to
another world rather than to this, which is more than we can say of the
religion of the Greeks; it was not worldly in its ends, seeking to save
the soul rather than to pamper the body; it had aspirations after a
higher life; it was profoundly reverential, recognizing a supreme
intelligence and power, indefinitely indeed, but sincerely,--not an
incarnated deity like the Zeus of the Greeks, but an infinite Spirit,
pervading the universe. The pantheism of the Brahmans was better than
the godless materialism of the Chinese. It aspired to rise to a
knowledge of God as the supremest wisdom and grandest attainment of
mortal man. It made too much of sacrifices; but sacrifices were common
to all the ancient religions except the Persian.

     "He who through knowledge or religious acts
     Henceforth attains to immortality,
     Shall first present his body, Death, to thee."

Whether human sacrifices were offered in India when the Vedas were
composed we do not know, but it is believed to be probable. The oldest
form of sacrifice was the offering of food to the deity. Dr. H. C.
Trumbull, in his work on "The Blood Covenant," thinks that the origin of
animal sacrifices was like that of circumcision,--a pouring out of blood
(the universal, ancient symbol of _life_) as a sign of devotion to the
deity; and the substitution of animals was a natural and necessary mode
of making this act of consecration a frequent and continuing one. This
presents a nobler view of the whole sacrificial system than the common
one. Yet doubtless the latter soon prevailed; for following upon the
devoted life-offerings to the Divine Friend, came propitiatory rites to
appease divine anger or gain divine favor. Then came in the natural
human self-seeking of the sacerdotal class, for the multiplication of
sacrifices tended to exalt the priesthood, and thus to perpetuate caste.

Again, the Brahmans, if practising austerities to weaken sensual
desires, like the monks of Syria and Upper Egypt, were meditative and
intellectual; they evolved out of their brains whatever was lofty in
their system of religion and philosophy. Constant and profound
meditation on the soul, on God, and on immortality was not without its
natural results. They explored the world of metaphysical speculation.
There is scarcely an hypothesis advanced by philosophers in ancient or
modern times, which may not be found in the Brahmanical writings. "We
find in the writings of these Hindus materialism, atomism, pantheism,
Pyrrhonism, idealism. They anticipated Plato, Kant, and Hegel. They
could boast of their Spinozas and their Humes long before Alexander
dreamed of crossing the Indus. From them the Pythagoreans borrowed a
great part of their mystical philosophy, of their doctrine of
transmigration of souls, and the unlawfulness of eating animal food.
From them Aristotle learned the syllogism.... In India the human mind
exhausted itself in attempting to detect the laws which regulate its
operation, before the philosophers of Greece were beginning to enter the
precincts of metaphysical inquiry." This intellectual subtlety, acumen,
and logical power the Brahmans never lost. To-day the Christian
missionary finds them his superiors in the sports of logical
tournaments, whenever the Brahman condescends to put forth his powers of
reasoning.

Brahmanism carried idealism to the extent of denying any reality to
sense or matter, declaring that sense is a delusion. It sought to leave
the soul emancipated from desire, from a material body, in a state which
according to Indian metaphysics is _being_, but not _existence_. Desire,
anger, ignorance, evil thoughts are consumed by the fire of knowledge.

But I will not attempt to explain the ideal pantheism which Brahmanical
philosophers substituted for the Nature-worship taught in the earlier
Vedas. This proved too abstract for the people; and the Brahmans, in the
true spirit of modern Jesuitism, wishing to accommodate their religion
to the people,--who were in bondage to their tyranny, and who have ever
been inclined to sensuous worship,--multiplied their sacrifices and
sacerdotal rites, and even permitted a complicated polytheism. Gradually
piety was divorced from morality. Siva and Vishnu became worshipped, as
well as Brahma and a host of other gods unknown to the earlier Vedas.

In the sixth century before Christ, the corruption of society had become
so flagrant under the teachings and government of the Brahmans, that a
reform was imperatively needed. "The pride of race had put an
impassable barrier between the Aryan-Hindus and the conquered
aborigines, while the pride of both had built up an equally impassable
barrier between the different classes among the Aryan people
themselves." The old childlike joy in life, so manifest in the Vedas,
had died away. A funereal gloom hung over the land; and the gloomiest
people of all were the Brahmans themselves, devoted to a complicated
ritual of ceremonial observances, to needless and cruel sacrifices, and
a repulsive theology. The worship of Nature had degenerated into the
worship of impure divinities. The priests were inflated with a puerile
but sincere belief in their own divinity, and inculcated a sense of duty
which was nothing else than a degrading slavery to their own caste.

Under these circumstances Buddhism arose as a protest against
Brahmanism. But it was rather an ethical than a religious movement; it
was an attempt to remove misery from the world, and to elevate ordinary
life by a reform of morals. It was effected by a prince who goes by the
name of Buddha,--the "Enlightened,"--who was supposed by his later
followers to be an incarnation of Deity, miraculously conceived, and
sent into the world to save men. He was nearly contemporary with
Confucius, although the Buddhistic doctrines were not introduced into
China until about two hundred years before the Christian era. He is
supposed to have belonged to a warlike tribe called Sâkyas, of great
reputed virtue, engaged in agricultural pursuits, who had entered
northern India and made a permanent settlement several hundred years
before. The name by which the reformer is generally known is Gautama,
borrowed by the Sâkyas after their settlement in India from one of the
ancient Vedic bard-families. The foundation of our knowledge of Sâkya
Buddha is from a Life of him by Asvaghosha, in the first century of our
era; and this life is again founded on a legendary history, not framed
after any Indian model, but worked out among the nations in the north
of India.

The Life of Buddha by Asvaghosha is a poetical romance of nearly ten
thousand lines. It relates the miraculous conception of the Indian sage,
by the descent of a spirit on his mother, Maya,--a woman of great purity
of mind. The child was called Siddârtha, or "the perfection of all
things." His father ruled a considerable territory, and was careful to
conceal from the boy, as he grew up, all knowledge of the wickedness and
misery of the world. He was therefore carefully educated within the
walls of the palace, and surrounded with every luxury, but not allowed
even to walk or drive in the royal gardens for fear he might see misery
and sorrow. A beautiful girl was given to him in marriage, full of
dignity and grace, with whom he lived in supreme happiness.

At length, as his mind developed and his curiosity increased to see and
know things and people beyond the narrow circle to which he was
confined, he obtained permission to see the gardens which surrounded the
palace. His father took care to remove everything in his way which could
suggest misery and sorrow; but a _deva_, or angel, assumed the form of
an aged man, and stood beside his path, apparently struggling for life,
weak and oppressed. This was a new sight to the prince, who inquired of
his charioteer what kind of a man it was. Forced to reply, the
charioteer told him that this infirm old man had once been young,
sportive, beautiful, and full of every enjoyment.

On hearing this, the prince sank into profound meditation, and returned
to the palace sad and reflective; for he had learned that the common lot
of man is sad,--that no matter how beautiful, strong, and sportive a boy
is, the time will come, in the course of Nature, when this boy will be
wrinkled, infirm, and helpless. He became so miserable and dejected on
this discovery that his father, to divert his mind, arranged other
excursions for him; but on each occasion a _deva_ contrived to appear
before him in the form of some disease or misery. At last he saw a dead
man carried to his grave, which still more deeply agitated him, for he
had not known that this calamity was the common lot of all men. The same
painful impression was made on him by the death of animals, and by the
hard labors and privations of poor people. The more he saw of life as it
was, the more he was overcome by the sight of sorrow and hardship on
every side. He became aware that youth, vigor, and strength of life in
the end fulfilled the law of ultimate destruction. While meditating on
this sad reality beneath a flowering Jambu tree, where he was seated in
the profoundest contemplation, a _deva_, transformed into a religious
ascetic, came to him and said, "I am a Shaman. Depressed and sad at the
thought of age, disease, and death, I have left my home to seek some way
of rescue; yet everywhere I find these evils,--all things hasten to
decay. Therefore I seek that happiness which is only to be found in that
which never perishes, that never knew a beginning, that looks with equal
mind on enemy and friend, that heeds not wealth nor beauty,--the
happiness to be found in solitude, in some dell free from molestation,
all thought about the world destroyed."

This embodies the soul of Buddhism, its elemental principle,--to escape
from a world of misery and death; to hide oneself in contemplation in
some lonely spot, where indifference to passing events is gradually
acquired, where life becomes one grand negation, and where the thoughts
are fixed on what is eternal and imperishable, instead of on the mortal
and transient.

The prince, who was now about thirty years of age, after this interview
with the supposed ascetic, firmly resolved himself to become a hermit,
and thus attain to a higher life, and rise above the misery which he saw
around him on every hand. So he clandestinely and secretly escapes from
his guarded palace; lays aside his princely habits and ornaments;
dismisses all attendants, and even his horse; seeks the companionship of
Brahmans, and learns all their penances and tortures. Finding a patient
trial of this of no avail for his purpose, he leaves the Brahmans, and
repairs to a quiet spot by the banks of a river, and for six years
practises the most severe fasting and profound meditation. This was the
form which piety had assumed in India from time immemorial, under the
guidance of the Brahmans; for Siddârtha as yet is not the
"enlightened,"--he is only an inquirer after that saving knowledge which
will open the door of a divine felicity, and raise him above a world of
disease and death.

Siddârtha's rigorous austerities, however, do not open this door of
saving truth. His body is wasted, and his strength fails; he is near
unto death. The conviction fastens on his lofty and inquiring mind that
to arrive at the end he seeks he must enter by some other door than
that of painful and useless austerities, and hence that the teachings of
the Brahmans are fundamentally wrong. He discovers that no amount of
austerities will extinguish desire, or produce ecstatic contemplation.
In consequence of these reflections a great change comes over him, which
is the turning-point of his history. He resolves to quit his
self-inflicted torments as of no avail. He meets a shepherd's daughter,
who offers him food out of compassion for his emaciated and miserable
condition. The rich rice milk, sweet and perfumed, restores his
strength. He renounces asceticism, and wanders to a spot more congenial
to his changed views and condition.

Siddârtha's full enlightenment, however, has not yet come. Under the
shade of the Bôdhi tree he devotes himself again to religious
contemplation, and falls into rapt ecstasies. He remains a while in
peaceful quiet; the morning sunbeams, the dispersing mists, and lovely
flowers seem to pay tribute to him. He passes through successive stages
of ecstasy, and suddenly upon his opened mind bursts the knowledge of
his previous births in different forms; of the causes of
re-birth,--ignorance (the root of evil) and unsatisfied desires; and of
the way to extinguish desires by right thinking, speaking, and living,
not by outward observance of forms and ceremonies. He is emancipated
from the thraldom of those austerities which have formed the basis of
religious life for generations unknown, and he resolves to teach.

Buddha travels slowly to the sacred city of Benares, converting by the
way even Brahmans themselves. He claims to have reached perfect wisdom.
He is followed by disciples, for there was something attractive and
extraordinary about him; his person was beautiful and commanding. While
he shows that painful austerities will not produce wisdom, he also
teaches that wisdom is not reached by self-indulgence; that there is a
middle path between penance and pleasures, even _temperance_,---the use,
but not abuse, of the good things of earth. In his first sermon he
declares that sorrow is in self; therefore to get rid of sorrow is to
get rid of self. The means to this end is to forget self in deeds of
mercy and kindness to others; to crucify demoralizing desires; to live
in the realm of devout contemplation.

The active life of Buddha now begins, and for fifty years he travels
from place to place as a teacher, gathers around him disciples, frames
rules for his society, and brings within his community both the rich and
poor. He even allows women to enter it. He thus matures his system,
which is destined to be embraced by so large a part of the human race,
and finally dies at the age of eighty, surrounded by reverential
followers, who see in him an incarnation of the Deity.

Thus Buddha devoted his life to the welfare of men, moved by an
exceeding tenderness and pity for the objects of misery which he beheld
on every side. He attempted to point out a higher life, by which sorrow
would be forgotten. He could not prevent sorrow culminating in old age,
disease, and death; but he hoped to make men ignore their miseries, and
thus rise above them to a beatific state of devout contemplation and the
practice of virtues, for which he laid down certain rules and
regulations.

It is astonishing how the new doctrines spread,--from India to China,
from China to Japan and Ceylon, until Eastern Asia was filled with
pagodas, temples, and monasteries to attest his influence; some
eighty-five thousand existed in China alone. Buddha probably had as many
converts in China as Confucius himself. The Buddhists from time to time
were subjected to great persecution from the emperors of China, in which
their sacred books were destroyed; and in India the Brahmans at last
regained their power, and expelled Buddhism from the country. In the
year 845 A.D. two hundred and sixty thousand monks and nuns were made to
return to secular life in China, being regarded as mere drones,--lazy
and useless members of the community. But the policy of persecution was
reversed by succeeding emperors. In the thirteenth century there were in
China nearly fifty thousand Buddhist temples and two hundred and
thirteen thousand monks; and these represented but a fraction of the
professed adherents of the religion. Under the present dynasty the
Buddhists are proscribed, but still they flourish.

Now, what has given to the religion of Buddha such an extraordinary
attraction for the people of Eastern Asia?

Buddhism has a twofold aspect,--_practical_ and _speculative_. In its
most definite form it was a moral and philanthropic movement,--the
reaction against Brahmanism, which had no humanity, and which was as
repulsive and oppressive as Roman Catholicism was when loaded down with
ritualism and sacerdotal rites, when Europe was governed by priests,
when churches were damp, gloomy crypts, before the tall cathedrals arose
in their artistic beauty.

From a religious and philosophical point of view, Buddhism at first did
not materially differ from Brahmanism. The same dreamy pietism, the same
belief in the transmigration of souls, the same pantheistic ideas of God
and Nature, the same desire for rest and final absorption in the divine
essence characterized both. In both there was a certain principle of
faith, which was a feeling of reverence rather than the recognition of
the unity and personality and providence of God. The prayer of the
Buddhist was a yearning for deliverance from sorrow, a hope of final
rest; but this was not to be attained until desires and passions were
utterly suppressed in the soul, which could be effected only by prayer,
devout meditations, and a rigorous self-discipline. In order to be
purified and fitted for Nirvana the soul, it was supposed, must pass
through successive stages of existence in mortal forms, without
conscious recollection,--innumerable births and deaths, with sorrow and
disease. And the final state of supreme blessedness, the ending of the
long and weary transmigration, would be attained only with the
extinction of all desires, even the instinctive desire for existence.

Buddha had no definite ideas of the deity, and the worship of a personal
God is nowhere to be found in his teachings, which exposed him to the
charge of atheism. He even supposed that gods were subject to death, and
must return to other forms of life before they obtained final rest in
Nirvana. Nirvana means that state which admits of neither birth nor
death, where there is no sorrow or disease,--an impassive state of
existence, absorption in the Spirit of the Universe. In the Buddhist
catechism Nirvana is defined as the "total cessation of changes; a
perfect rest; the absence of desire, illusion, and sorrow; the total
obliteration of everything that goes to make up the physical man." This
theory of re-births, or transmigration of souls, is very strange and
unnatural to our less imaginative and subtile Occidental minds; but to
the speculative Orientals it is an attractive and reasonable belief.
They make the "spirit" the immortal part of man, the "soul" being its
emotional embodiment, its "spiritual body," whose unsatisfied desires
cause its birth and re-birth into the fleshly form of the physical
"body,"--a very brief and temporary incarnation. When by the progressive
enlightenment of the spirit its longings and desires have been gradually
conquered, it no longer needs or has embodiment either of soul or of
body; so that, to quote Elliott Coues in Olcott's "Buddhist Catechism,"
"a spirit in a state of conscious formlessness, subject to no further
modification by embodiment, yet in full knowledge of its experiences
[during its various incarnations], is Nirvanic."

Buddhism, however, viewed in any aspect, must be regarded as a gloomy
religion. It is hard enough to crucify all natural desires and lead a
life of self-abnegation; but for the spirit, in order to be purified, to
be obliged to enter into body after body, each subject to disease,
misery, and death, and then after a long series of migrations to be
virtually annihilated as the highest consummation of happiness, gives
one but a poor conception of the efforts of the proudest unaided
intellect to arrive at a knowledge of God and immortal bliss. It would
thus seem that the true idea of God, or even that of immortality, is not
an innate conception revealed by consciousness; for why should good and
intellectual men, trained to study and reflection all their lives, gain
no clearer or more inspiring notions of the Being of infinite love and
power, or of the happiness which He is able and willing to impart? What
a feeble conception of God is a being without the oversight of the
worlds that he created, without volition or purpose or benevolence, or
anything corresponding to our notion of personality! What a poor
conception of supernal bliss, without love or action or thought or holy
companionship,--only rest, unthinking repose, and absence from disease,
misery, and death, a state of endless impassiveness! What is Nirvana but
an escape from death and deliverance from mortal desires, where there
are neither ideas nor the absence of ideas; no changes or hopes or
fears, it is true, but also no joy, no aspiration, no growth, no
life,--a state of nonentity, where even consciousness is practically
extinguished, and individuality merged into absolute stillness and a
dreamless rest? What a poor reward for ages of struggle and the final
achievement of exalted virtue!

But if Buddhism failed to arrive at what we believe to be a true
knowledge of God and the destiny of the soul,--the forgiveness and
remission, or doing-away, of sin, and a joyful and active immortality,
all which I take to be revelations rather than intuitions,--yet there
were some great certitudes in its teachings which did appeal to
consciousness,--certitudes recognized by the noblest teachers of all
ages and nations. These were such realities as truthfulness, sincerity,
purity, justice, mercy, benevolence, unselfishness, love. The human mind
arrives at ethical truths, even when all speculation about God and
immortality has failed. The idea of God may be lost, but not that of
moral obligation,--the mutual social duties of mankind. There is a sense
of duty even among savages; in the lowest civilization there is true
admiration of virtue. No sage that I ever read of enjoined immorality.
No ignorance can prevent the sense of shame, of honor, or of duty.
Everybody detests a liar and despises a thief. Thou shalt not bear false
witness; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not kill,--these are
laws written in human consciousness as well as in the code of Moses.
Obedience and respect to parents are instincts as well as obligations.

Hence the prince Siddârtha, as soon as he had found the wisdom of inward
motive and the folly of outward rite, shook off the yoke of the priests,
and denounced caste and austerities and penances and sacrifices as of
no avail in securing the welfare and peace of the soul or the favor of
deity. In all this he showed an enlightened mind, governed by wisdom and
truth, and even a bold and original genius,--like Abraham when he
disowned the gods of his fathers. Having thus himself gained the
security of the heights, Buddha longed to help others up, and turned his
attention to the moral instruction of the people of India. He was
emphatically a missionary of ethics, an apostle of righteousness, a
reformer of abuses, as well as a tender and compassionate man, moved to
tears in view of human sorrows and sufferings. He gave up metaphysical
speculations for practical philanthropy. He wandered from city to city
and village to village to relieve misery and teach duties rather than
theological philosophies. He did not know that God is love, but he did
know that peace and rest are the result of virtuous thoughts and acts.

"Let us then," said he, "live happily, not hating those who hate us;
free from greed among the greedy.... Proclaim mercy freely to all men;
it is as large as the spaces of heaven.... Whoever loves will feel the
longing to save not himself alone, but all others." He compares himself
to a father who rescues his children from a burning house, to a
physician who cures the blind. He teaches the equality of the sexes as
well as the injustice of castes. He enjoins kindness to servants and
emancipation of slaves. "As a mother, as long as she lives, watches over
her child, so among all beings," said Gautama, "let boundless good-will
prevail.... Overcome evil with good, the avaricious with generosity, the
false with truth.... Never forget thy own duty for the sake of
another's.... If a man speaks or acts with evil thoughts pain follows,
as the wheel the foot of him who draws the carriage.... He who lives
seeking pleasure, and uncontrolled, the tempter will overcome.... The
true sage dwells on earth, as the bee gathers sweetness with his mouth
and wings.... One may conquer a thousand men in battle, but he who
conquers himself alone is the greatest victor.... Let no man think
lightly of sin, saying in his heart, 'It cannot overtake me.'... Let a
man make himself what he preaches to others.... He who holds back rising
anger as one might a rolling chariot, him, indeed, I call a driver;
others may hold the reins.... A man who foolishly does me wrong, I will
return to him the protection of my ungrudging love; the more evil comes
from him, the more good shall go from me."

These are some of the sayings of the Indian reformer, which I quote from
extracts of his writings as translated by Sanskrit scholars. Some of
these sayings rise to a height of moral beauty surpassed only by the
precepts of the great Teacher, whom many are too fond of likening to
Buddha himself. The religion of Buddha is founded on a correct and
virtuous life, as the only way to avoid sorrow and reach Nirvana. Its
essence, theologically, is "Quietism," without firm belief in anything
reached by metaphysic speculation; yet morally and practically it
inculcates ennobling, active duties.

Among the rules that Buddha laid down for his disciples were--to keep
the body pure; not to enter upon affairs of trade; to have no lands and
cattle, or houses, or money; to abhor all hypocrisy and dissimulation;
to be kind to everything that lives; never to take the life of any
living being; to control the passions; to eat food only to satisfy
hunger; not to feel resentment from injuries; to be patient and
forgiving; to avoid covetousness, and never to tire of self-reflection.
His fundamental principles are purity of mind, chastity of life,
truthfulness, temperance, abstention from the wanton destruction of
animal life, from vain pleasures, from envy, hatred, and malice. He does
not enjoin sacrifices, for he knows no god to whom they can be offered;
but "he proclaimed the brotherhood of man, if he did not reveal the
fatherhood of God." He insisted on the natural equality of all
men,--thus giving to caste a mortal wound, which offended the Brahmans,
and finally led to the expulsion of his followers from India. He
protested against all absolute authority, even that of the Vedas. Nor
did he claim, any more than Confucius, originality of doctrines, only
the revival of forgotten or neglected truths. He taught that Nirvana was
not attained by Brahmanical rites, but by individual virtues; and that
punishment is the inevitable result of evil deeds by the inexorable law
of cause and effect.

Buddhism is essentially rationalistic and ethical, while Brahmanism is a
pantheistic tendency to polytheism, and ritualistic even to the most
offensive sacerdotalism. The Brahman reminds me of a Dunstan,--the
Buddhist of a Benedict; the former of the gloomy, spiritual despotism of
the Middle Ages,--the latter of self-denying monasticism in its best
ages. The Brahman is like Thomas Aquinas with his dogmas and
metaphysics; the Buddhist is more like a mediaeval freethinker,
stigmatized as an atheist. The Brahman was so absorbed with his
theological speculation that he took no account of the sufferings of
humanity; the Buddhist was so absorbed with the miseries of man that the
greatest blessing seemed to be entire and endless rest, the cessation of
existence itself,--since existence brought desire, desire sin, and sin
misery. As a religion Buddhism is an absurdity; in fact, it is no
religion at all, only a system of moral philosophy. Its weak points,
practically, are the abuse of philanthropy, its system of organized
idleness and mendicancy, the indifference to thrift and industry, the
multiplication of lazy fraternities and useless retreats, reminding us
of monastic institutions in the days of Chaucer and Luther. The Buddhist
priest is a mendicant and a pauper, clothed in rags, begging his living
from door to door, in which he sees no disgrace and no impropriety.
Buddhism failed to ennoble the daily occupations of life, and produced
drones and idlers and religious vagabonds. In its corruption it lent
itself to idolatry, for the Buddhist temples are filled with hideous
images of all sorts of repulsive deities, although Buddha himself did
not hold to idol worship any more than to the belief in a personal God.

"Buddhism," says the author of its accepted catechism, "teaches goodness
without a God, existence without a soul, immortality without life,
happiness without a heaven, salvation without a saviour, redemption
without a redeemer, and worship without rites." The failure of Buddhism,
both as a philosophy and a religion, is a confirmation of the great
historical fact, that in the ancient Pagan world no efforts of reason
enabled man unaided to arrive at a true--that is, a helpful and
practically elevating--knowledge of deity. Even Buddha, one of the most
gifted and excellent of all the sages who have enlightened the world,
despaired of solving the great mysteries of existence, and turned his
attention to those practical duties of life which seemed to promise a
way of escaping its miseries. He appealed to human consciousness; but
lacking the inspiration and aid which come from a sense of personal
divine influence, Buddhism has failed, on the large scale, to raise its
votaries to higher planes of ethical accomplishment. And hence the
necessity of that new revelation which Jesus declared amid the moral
ruins of a crumbling world, by which alone can the debasing
superstitions of India and the godless materialism of China be replaced
with a vital spirituality,--even as the elaborate mythology of Greece
and Rome gave way before the fervent earnestness of Christian apostles
and martyrs.

It does not belong to my subject to present the condition of Buddhism as
it exists to-day in Thibet, in Siam, in China, in Japan, in Burmah, in
Ceylon, and in various other Eastern countries. It spread by reason of
its sympathy with the poor and miserable, by virtue of its being a great
system of philanthropy and morals which appealed to the consciousness of
the lower classes. Though a proselyting religion it was never a
persecuting one, and is still distinguished, in all its corruption, for
its toleration.




AUTHORITIES.


The chief authorities that I would recommend for this chapter are Max
Müller's History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature; Rev. S. Seal's Buddhism
in China; Buddhism, by T. W. Rhys-Davids; Monier Williams's Sákoontalá;
I. Muir's Sanskrit Texts; Burnouf's Essai sur la Vêda; Sir William
Jones's Works; Colebrook's Miscellaneous Essays; Joseph Muller's
Religious Aspects of Hindu Philosophy; Manual of Buddhism, by R. Spence
Hardy; Dr. H. Clay Trumbull's The Blood Covenant; Orthodox Buddhist
Catechism, by H. S. Olcott, edited by Prof. Elliott C. Coues. I have
derived some instruction from Samuel Johnson's bulky and diffuse books,
but more from James Freeman Clarke's Ten Great Religions^ and
Rawlinson's Religions of the Ancient World.




RELIGION OF THE GREEKS AND ROMANS.


CLASSIC MYTHOLOGY.

Religion among the lively and imaginative Greeks took a different form
from that of the Aryan race in India or Persia. However the ideas of
their divinities originated in their relations to the thought and life
of the people, their gods were neither abstractions nor symbols. They
were simply men and women, immortal, yet having a beginning, with
passions and appetites like ordinary mortals. They love, they hate, they
eat, they drink, they have adventures and misfortunes like men,--only
differing from men in the superiority of their gifts, in their
miraculous endowments, in their stupendous feats, in their more than
gigantic size, in their supernal beauty, in their intensified pleasures.
It was not their aim "to raise mortals to the skies," but to enjoy
themselves in feasting and love-making; not even to govern the world,
but to protect their particular worshippers,--taking part and interest
in human quarrels, without reference to justice or right, and without
communicating any great truths for the guidance of mankind.

The religion of Greece consisted of a series of myths,--creations for
the most part of the poets,--and therefore properly called a mythology.
Yet in some respects the gods of Greece resembled those of Phoenicia and
Egypt, being the powers of Nature, and named after the sun, moon, and
planets. Their priests did not form a sacerdotal caste, as in India and
Egypt; they were more like officers of the state, to perform certain
functions or duties pertaining to rites, ceremonies, and sacrifices.
They taught no moral or spiritual truths to the people, nor were they
held in extraordinary reverence. They were not ascetics or enthusiasts;
among them were no great reformers or prophets, as among the sacerdotal
class of the Jews or the Hindus. They had even no sacred books, and
claimed no esoteric knowledge. Nor was their office hereditary. They
were appointed by the rulers of the state, or elected by the people
themselves; they imposed no restraints on the conscience, and apparently
cared little for morals, leaving the people to an unbounded freedom to
act and think for themselves, so far as they did not interfere with
prescribed usages and laws. The real objects of Greek worship were
beauty, grace, and heroic strength. The people worshipped no supreme
creator, no providential governor, no ultimate judge of human actions.
They had no aspirations for heaven and no fear of hell. They did not
feel accountable for their deeds or thoughts or words to an irresistible
Power working for righteousness or truth. They had no religious sense,
apart from wonder or admiration of the glories of Nature, or the good or
evil which might result from the favor or hatred of the divinities
they accepted.

These divinities, moreover, were not manifestations of supreme power and
intelligence, but were creations of the fancy, as they came from popular
legends, or the brains of poets, or the hands of artists, or the
speculations of philosophers. And as everything in Greece was beautiful
and radiant,--the sea, the sky, the mountains, and the valleys,--so was
religion cheerful, seen in all the festivals which took the place of the
Sabbaths and holy-days of more spiritually minded peoples. The
worshippers of the gods danced and played and sported to the sounds of
musical instruments, and revelled in joyous libations, in feasts and
imposing processions,--in whatever would amuse the mind or intoxicate
the senses. The gods were rather unseen companions in pleasures, in
sports, in athletic contests and warlike enterprises, than beings to be
adored for moral excellence or supernal knowledge. "Heaven was so near
at hand that their own heroes climbed to it and became demigods." Every
grove, every fountain, every river, every beautiful spot, had its
presiding deity; while every wonder of Nature,--the sun, the moon, the
stars, the tempest, the thunder, the lightning,--was impersonated as an
awful power for good or evil. To them temples were erected, within which
were their shrines and images in human shape, glistening with gold and
gems, and wrought in every form of grace or strength or beauty, and by
artists of marvellous excellence.

This polytheism of Greece was exceedingly complicated, but was not so
degrading as that of Egypt, since the gods were not represented by the
forms of hideous animals, and the worship of them was not attended by
revolting ceremonies; and yet it was divested of all spiritual
aspirations, and had but little effect on personal struggles for truth
or holiness. It was human and worldly, not lofty nor even reverential,
except among the few who had deep religious wants. One of its
characteristic features was the acknowledged impotence of the gods to
secure future happiness. In fact, the future was generally ignored, and
even immortality was but a dream of philosophers. Men lived not in view
of future rewards and punishments, or future existence at all, but for
the enjoyment of the present; and the gods themselves set the example of
an immoral life. Even Zeus, "the Father of gods and men," to whom
absolute supremacy was ascribed, the work of creation, and all majesty
and serenity, took but little interest in human affairs, and lived on
Olympian heights like a sovereign surrounded with the instruments of his
will, freely indulging in those pleasures which all lofty moral codes
have forbidden, and taking part in the quarrels, jealousies, and
enmities of his divine associates.

Greek mythology had its source in the legends of a remote
antiquity,--probably among the Pelasgians, the early inhabitants of
Greece, which they brought with them in their migration from their
original settlement, or perhaps from Egypt and Phoenicia. Herodotus--and
he is not often wrong--ascribes a great part of the mythology which the
Greek poets elaborated to a Phoenician or Egyptian source. The legends
have also some similarity to the poetic creations of the ancient
Persians, who delighted in fairies and genii and extravagant exploits,
like the labors of Hercules The faults and foibles of deified mortals
were transmitted to posterity and incorporated with the attributes of
the supreme divinity, and hence the mixture of the mighty and the mean
which marks the characters of the Iliad and Odyssey. The Greeks adopted
Oriental fables, and accommodated them to those heroes who figured in
their own country in the earliest times. "The labors of Hercules
originated in Egypt, and relate to the annual progress of the sun in
the zodiac. The rape of Proserpine, the wanderings of Ceres, the
Eleusinian mysteries, and the orgies of Bacchus were all imported from
Egypt or Phoenicia, while the wars between the gods and the giants were
celebrated in the romantic annals of Persia. The oracle of Dodona was
copied from that of Ammon in Thebes, and the oracle of Apollo at Delphos
has a similar source."

Behind the Oriental legends which form the basis of Grecian mythology
there was, in all probability, in those ancient times before the
Pelasgians were known as Ionians and the Hellenes as Dorians, a mystical
and indefinite idea of supreme power,--as among the Persians, the
Hindus, and the esoteric priests of Egypt. In all the ancient religions
the farther back we go the purer and loftier do we find the popular
religion. Belief in supreme deity underlies all the Eastern theogonies,
which belief, however, was soon perverted or lost sight of. There is
great difference of opinion among philosophers as to the origin of
myths,--whether they began in fable and came to be regarded as history,
or began as human history and were poetized into fable. My belief is
that in the earliest ages of the world there were no mythologies. Fables
were the creations of those who sought to amuse or control the people,
who have ever delighted in the marvellous. As the magnificent, the
vast, the sublime, which was seen in Nature, impressed itself on the
imagination of the Orientals and ended in legends, so did allegory in
process of time multiply fictions and fables to an indefinite extent;
and what were symbols among Eastern nations became impersonations in the
poetry of Greece. Grecian mythology was a vast system of impersonated
forces, beginning with the legends of heroes and ending with the
personification of the faculties of the mind and the manifestations of
Nature, in deities who presided over festivals, cities, groves, and
mountains, with all the infirmities of human nature, and without calling
out exalted sentiments of love or reverence. They are all creations of
the imagination, invested with human traits and adapted to the genius of
the people, who were far from being religious in the sense that the
Hindus and Egyptians were. It was the natural and not the supernatural
that filled their souls. It was art they worshipped, and not the God who
created the heavens and the earth, and who exacts of his creatures
obedience and faith.

In regard to the gods and goddesses of the Grecian Pantheon, we observe
that most of them were immoral; at least they had the usual infirmities
of men. They are thus represented by the poets, probably to please the
people, who like all other peoples had to make their own conceptions of
God; for even a miraculous revelation of deity must be interpreted by
those who receive it, according to their own understanding of the
qualities revealed. The ancient Romans, themselves stern, earnest,
practical, had an almost Oriental reverence for their gods, so that
their Jupiter (Father of Heaven) was a majestic, powerful, all-seeing,
severely just national deity, regarded by them much as the Jehovah of
the Hebrews was by that nation. When in later times the conquest of
Eastern countries and of Macedon and Greece brought in luxury, works of
art, foreign literature, and all the delightful but enervating
influences of aestheticism, the Romans became corrupted, and gradually
began to identify their own more noble deities with the beautiful but
unprincipled, self-indulgent, and tricky set of gods and goddesses of
the Greek mythology.

The Greek Zeus, with whom were associated majesty and dominion, and who
reigned supreme in the celestial hierarchy,--who as the chief god of the
skies, the god of storms, ruler of the atmosphere, was the favorite
deity of the Aryan race, the Indra of the Hindus, the Jupiter of the
Romans,--was in his Grecian presentment a rebellious son, a faithless
husband, and sometimes an unkind father. His character was a combination
of weakness and strength,--anything but a pattern to be imitated, or
even to be reverenced. He was the impersonation of power and dignity,
represented by the poets as having such immense strength that if he had
hold of one end of a chain, and all the gods held the other, with the
earth fastened to it, he would be able to move them all.

Poseidon (Roman Neptune), the brother of Zeus, was represented as the
god of the ocean, and was worshipped chiefly in maritime States. His
morality was no higher than that of Zeus; moreover, he was rough,
boisterous, and vindictive. He was hostile to Troy, and yet
persecuted Ulysses.

Apollo, the next great personage of the Olympian divinities, was more
respectable morally than his father. He was the sun-god of the Greeks,
and was the embodiment of divine prescience, of healing skill, of
musical and poetical productiveness, and hence the favorite of the
poets. He had a form of ideal beauty, grace, and vigor, inspired by
unerring wisdom and insight into futurity. He was obedient to the will
of Zeus, to whom he was not much inferior in power. Temples were erected
to this favorite deity in every part of Greece, and he was supposed to
deliver oracular responses in several cities, especially at Delphos.

Hephaestus (Roman Vulcan), the god of fire, was a sort of jester at the
Olympian court, and provoked perpetual laughter from his awkwardness and
lameness. He forged the thunderbolts for Zeus, and was the armorer of
heaven. It accorded with the grim humor of the poets to make this clumsy
blacksmith the husband of Aphrodite, the queen of beauty and of love.

Ares (Roman Mars), the god of war, was represented as cruel, lawless,
and greedy of blood, and as occupying a subordinate position, receiving
orders from Apollo and Athene.

Hermes (Roman Mercury) was the impersonation of commercial dealings, and
of course was full of tricks and thievery,--the Olympian man of
business, industrious, inventive, untruthful, and dishonest. He was also
the god of eloquence.

Besides these six great male divinities there were six goddesses, the
most important of whom was Hera (Roman Juno), wife of Zeus, and hence
the Queen of Heaven. She exercised her husband's prerogatives, and
thundered and shook Olympus; but she was proud, vindictive, jealous,
unscrupulous, and cruel,--a poor model for women to imitate. The Greek
poets, however, had a poor opinion of the female sex, and hence
represent this deity without those elements of character which we most
admire in woman,--gentleness, softness, tenderness, and patience. She
scolded her august husband so perpetually that he gave way to complaints
before the assembled deities, and that too with a bitterness hardly to
be reconciled with our notions of dignity. The Roman Juno, before the
identification of the two goddesses, was a nobler character, being the
queen of heaven, the protectress of virgins and of matrons, and was also
the celestial housewife of the nation, watching over its revenues and
its expenses. She was the especial goddess of chastity, and loose women
were forbidden to touch her altars.

Athene (Roman Minerva) however, the goddess of wisdom, had a character
without a flaw, and ranked with Apollo in wisdom. She even expostulated
with Zeus himself when he was wrong. But on the other hand she had few
attractive feminine qualities, and no amiable weaknesses.

Artemis (Roman Diana) was "a shadowy divinity, a pale reflection of her
brother Apollo." She presided over the pleasures of the chase, in which
the Greeks delighted,--a masculine female who took but little interest
in anything intellectual.

Aphrodite (Roman Venus) was the impersonation of all that was weak and
erring in the nature of woman,--the goddess of sensual desire, of mere
physical beauty, silly, childish, and vain, utterly odious in a moral
point of view, and mentally contemptible. This goddess was represented
as exerting a great influence even when despised, fascinating yet
revolting, admired and yet corrupting. She was not of much importance
among the Romans,--who were far from being sentimental or
passionate,--until the growth of the legend of their Trojan origin.
Then, as mother of Aeneas, their progenitor, she took a high rank, and
the Greek poets furnished her character.

Hestia (Roman Vesta) presided over the private hearths and homesteads of
the Greeks, and imparted to them a sacred character. Her personality was
vague, but she represented the purity which among both Greeks and Romans
is attached to home and domestic life.

Demeter (Roman Ceres) represented Mother Earth, and thus was closely
associated with agriculture and all operations of tillage and
bread-making. As agriculture is the primitive and most important of all
human vocations, this deity presided over civilization and law-giving,
and occupied an important position in the Eleusinian mysteries.

These were the twelve Olympian divinities, or greater gods; but they
represent only a small part of the Grecian Pantheon. There was Dionysus
(Roman Bacchus), the god of drunkenness. This deity presided over
vineyards, and his worship was attended with disgraceful orgies,--with
wild dances, noisy revels, exciting music, and frenzied demonstrations.

Leto (Roman Latona), another wife of Zeus, and mother of Apollo and
Diana, was a very different personage from Hera, being the impersonation
of all those womanly qualities which are valued in woman,--silent,
unobtrusive, condescending, chaste, kindly, ready to help and tend, and
subordinating herself to her children.

Persephone (Roman Proserpina) was the queen of the dead, ruling the
infernal realm even more distinctly than her husband Pluto, severely
pure as she was awful and terrible; but there were no temples erected to
her, as the Greeks did not trouble themselves much about the
future state.

The minor deities of the Greeks were innumerable, and were identified
with every separate thing which occupied their thoughts,--with
mountains, rivers, capes, towns, fountains, rocks; with domestic
animals, with monsters of the deep, with demons and departed heroes,
with water-nymphs and wood-nymphs, with the qualities of mind and
attributes of the body; with sleep and death, old age and pain, strife
and victory; with hunger, grief, ridicule, wisdom, deceit, grace; with
night and day, the hours, the thunder the rainbow,---in short, all the
wonders of Nature, all the affections of the soul, and all the qualities
of the mind; everything they saw, everything they talked about,
everything they felt. All these wonders and sentiments they
impersonated; and these impersonations were supposed to preside over the
things they represented, and to a certain extent were worshipped. If a
man wished the winds to be propitious, he prayed to Zeus; if he wished
to be prospered in his bargains, he invoked Hermes; if he wished to be
successful in war, he prayed to Ares.

He never prayed to a supreme and eternal deity, but to some special
manifestation of deity, fancied or real; and hence his religion was
essentially pantheistic, though outwardly polytheistic. The divinities
whom he invoked he celebrated with rites corresponding with those traits
which they represented. Thus, Aphrodite was celebrated with lascivious
dances, and Dionysus with drunken revels. Each deity represented the
Grecian ideal,--of majesty or grace or beauty or strength or virtue or
wisdom or madness or folly. The character of Hera was what the poets
supposed should be the attributes of the Queen of heaven; that of Leto,
what should distinguish a disinterested housewife; that of Hestia, what
should mark the guardian of the fireside; that of Demeter, what should
show supreme benevolence and thrift; that of Athene, what would
naturally be associated with wisdom, and that of Aphrodite, what would
be expected from a sensual beauty. In the main, Zeus was serene,
majestic, and benignant, as became the king of the gods, although he was
occasionally faithless to his wife; Poseidon was boisterous, as became
the monarch of the seas; Apollo was a devoted son and a bright
companion, which one would expect in a gifted poet and wise prophet,
beautiful and graceful as a sun-god should be; Hephaestus, the god of
fire and smiths, showed naturally the awkwardness to which manual labor
leads; Ares was cruel and bloodthirsty, as the god of war should be;
Hermes, as the god of trade and business, would of course be sharp and
tricky; and Dionysus, the father of the vine, would naturally become
noisy and rollicking in his intoxication.

Thus, whatever defects are associated with the principal deities, these
are all natural and consistent with the characters they represent, or
the duties and business in which they engage. Drunkenness is not
associated with Zeus, or unchastity with Hera or Athene. The poets make
each deity consistent with himself, and in harmony with the interests he
represents. Hence the mythology of the poets is elaborate and
interesting. Who has not devoured the classical dictionary before he has
learned to scan the lines of Homer or of Virgil? As varied and romantic
as the "Arabian Nights," it shines in the beauty of nature. In the
Grecian creations of gods and goddesses there is no insult to the
understanding, because these creations are in harmony with Nature, are
consistent with humanity. There is no hatred and no love, no jealousy
and no fear, which has not a natural cause. The poets proved themselves
to be great artists in the very characters they gave to their
divinities. They did not aim to excite reverence or stimulate to duty or
point out the higher life, but to amuse a worldly, pleasure-seeking,
good-natured, joyous, art-loving, poetic people, who lived in the
present and for themselves alone.

As a future state of rewards and punishments seldom entered into the
minds of the Greeks, so the gods are never represented as conferring
future salvation. The welfare of the soul was rarely thought of where
there was no settled belief in immortality. The gods themselves were fed
on nectar and ambrosia, that they might not die like ordinary mortals.
They might prolong their own existence indefinitely, but they were
impotent to confer eternal life upon their worshippers; and as eternal
life is essential to perfect happiness, they could not confer even
happiness in its highest sense.

On this fact Saint Augustine erected the grand fabric of his theological
system. In his most celebrated work, "The City of God," he holds up to
derision the gods of antiquity, and with blended logic and irony makes
them contemptible as objects of worship, since they were impotent to
save the soul. In his view the grand and distinguishing feature of
Christianity, in contrast with Paganism, is the gift of eternal life and
happiness. It is not the morality which Christ and his Apostles taught,
which gave to Christianity its immeasurable superiority over all other
religions, but the promise of a future felicity in heaven. And it was
this promise which gave such comfort to the miserable people of the old
Pagan world, ground down by oppression, injustice, cruelty, and poverty.
It was this promise which filled the converts to Christianity with joy,
enthusiasm, and hope,--yea, more than this, even boundless love that
salvation was the gift of God through the self-sacrifice of Christ.
Immortality was brought to light by the gospel alone, and to miserable
people the idea of eternal bliss after the trials of mortal life were
passed was the source of immeasurable joy. No sooner was this sublime
expectation of happiness planted firmly in the minds of pagans, than
they threw their idols to the moles and the bats.

But even in regard to morality, Augustine showed that the gods were no
examples to follow. He ridicules their morals and their offices as
severely as he points out their impotency to bestow happiness. He shows
the absurdity and inconsistency of tolerating players in their
delineation of the vices and follies of deities for the amusement of the
people in the theatre, while the priests performed the same obscenities
as religious rites in the temples which were upheld by the State; so
that philosophers like Varro could pour contempt on players with
impunity, while he dared not ridicule priests for doing in the temples
the same things. No wonder that the popular religion at last was held in
contempt by philosophers, since it was not only impotent to save, but
did not stimulate to ordinary morality, to virtue, or to lofty
sentiments. A religion which was held sacred in one place and ridiculed
in another, before the eyes of the same people, could not in the end but
yield to what was better.

If we ascribe to the poets the creation of the elaborate mythology of
the Greeks,--that is, a system of gods made by men, rather than men made
by gods,--whether as symbols or objects of worship, whether the religion
was pantheistic or idolatrous, we find that artists even surpassed the
poets in their conceptions of divine power, goodness, and beauty, and
thus riveted the chains which the poets forged.

The temple of Zeus at Olympia in Elis, where the intellect and the
culture of Greece assembled every four years to witness the games
instituted in honor of the Father of the gods, was itself calculated to
impose on the senses of the worshippers by its grandeur and beauty. The
image of the god himself, sixty feet high, made of ivory, gold, and gems
by the greatest of all the sculptors of antiquity, must have impressed
spectators with ideas of strength and majesty even more than any
poetical descriptions could do. If it was art which the Greeks
worshipped rather than an unseen deity who controlled their destinies,
and to whom supreme homage was due, how nobly did the image before them
represent the highest conceptions of the attributes to be ascribed to
the King of Heaven! Seated on his throne, with the emblems of
sovereignty in his hands and attendant deities around him, his head,
neck, breast, and arms in massive proportions, and his face expressive
of majesty and sweetness, power in repose, benevolence blended with
strength,--the image of the Olympian deity conveyed to the minds of his
worshippers everything that could inspire awe, wonder, and goodness, as
well as power. No fear was blended with admiration, since his favor
could be won by the magnificent rites and ceremonies which were
instituted in his honor.

Clarke alludes to the sculptured Apollo Belvedere as giving a still more
elevated idea of the sun-god than the poets themselves,--a figure
expressive of the highest thoughts of the Hellenic mind,--and quotes
Milman in support of his admiration:--

     "All, all divine! no struggling muscle glows,
     Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows;
     But, animate with deity alone,
     In deathless glory lives the breathing stone."

If a Christian poet can see divinity in the chiselled stone, why should
we wonder at the worship of art by the pagan Greeks? The same could be
said of the statues of Artemis, of Pallas-Athene, of Aphrodite, and
other "divine" productions of Grecian artists, since they represented
the highest ideal the world has seen of beauty, grace, loveliness, and
majesty, which the Greeks adored. Hence, though the statues of the gods
are in human shape, it was not men that the Greeks worshipped, but those
qualities of mind and those forms of beauty to which the cultivated
intellect instinctively gave the highest praise. No one can object to
this boundless admiration which the Greeks had for art in its highest
forms, in so far as that admiration became worship. It was the divorce
of art from morals which called out the indignation and censure of the
Christian fathers, and even undermined the religion of philosophers so
far as it had been directed to the worship of the popular deities, which
were simply creations of poets and artists.

It is difficult to conceive how the worship of the gods could have been
kept up for so long a time, had it not been for the festivals. This wise
provision for providing interest and recreation for the people was also
availed of by the Mosaic ritual among the Hebrews, and has been a part
of most well-organized religious systems. The festivals were celebrated
in honor not merely of deities, but of useful inventions, of the seasons
of the year, of great national victories,--all which were religious in
the pagan sense, and constituted the highest pleasures of Grecian life.
They were observed with great pomp and splendor in the open air in front
of temples, in sacred groves, wherever the people could conveniently
assemble to join in jocund dances, in athletic sports, and whatever
could animate the soul with festivity and joy. Hence the religious
worship of the Greeks was cheerful, and adapted itself to the tastes and
pleasures of the people; it was, however, essentially worldly, and
sometimes degrading. It was similar in its effects to the rural sports
of the yeomanry of the Middle Ages, and to the theatrical
representations sometimes held in mediaeval churches,--certainly to the
processions and pomps which the Catholic clergy instituted for the
amusement of the people. Hence the sneering but acute remark of Gibbon,
that all religions were equally true to the people, equally false to
philosophers, and equally useful to rulers. The State encouraged and
paid for sacrifices, rites, processions, and scenic dances on the same
principle that they gave corn to the people to make them contented in
their miseries, and severely punished those who ridiculed the popular
religion when it was performed in temples, even though it winked at the
ridicule of the same performances in the theatres.

Among the Greeks there were no sacred books like the Hindu Vedas or
Hebrew Scriptures, in which the people could learn duties and religious
truths. The priests taught nothing; they merely officiated at rites and
ceremonies. It is difficult to find out what were the means and forms of
religious instruction, so far as pertained to the heart and conscience.
Duties were certainly not learned from the ministers of religion. From
what source did the people learn the necessity of obedience to parents,
of conjugal fidelity, of truthfulness, of chastity, of honesty? It is
difficult to tell. The poets and artists taught ideas of beauty, of
grace, of strength; and Nature in her grandeur and loveliness taught the
same things. Hence a severe taste was cultivated, which excluded
vulgarity and grossness in the intercourse of life. It was the rule to
be courteous, affable, gentlemanly, for all this was in harmony with the
severity of art. The comic poets ridiculed pretension, arrogance,
quackery, and lies. Patriotism, which was learned from the dangers of
the State, amid warlike and unscrupulous neighbors, called out many
manly virtues, like courage, fortitude, heroism, and self-sacrifice. A
hard and rocky soil necessitated industry, thrift, and severe punishment
on those who stole the fruits of labor, even as miners in the Rocky
Mountains sacredly abstain from appropriating the gold of their
fellow-laborers. Self-interest and self-preservation dictated many laws
which secured the welfare of society. The natural sacredness of home
guarded the virtue of wives and children; the natural sense of justice
raised indignation against cheating and tricks in trade. Men and women
cannot live together in peace and safety without observing certain
conditions, which may be ranked with virtues even among savages and
barbarians,--much more so in cultivated and refined communities.

The graces and amenities of life can exist without reference to future
rewards and punishments. The ultimate law of self-preservation will
protect men in ordinary times against murder and violence, and will lead
to public and social enactments which bad men fear to violate. A
traveller ordinarily feels as safe in a highly-civilized pagan community
as in a Christian city. The "heathen Chinee" fears the officers of the
law as much as does a citizen of London.

The great difference between a Pagan and a Christian people is in the
power of conscience, in the sense of a moral accountability to a
spiritual Deity, in the hopes or fears of a future state,--motives which
have a powerful influence on the elevation of individual character and
the development of higher types of social organization. But whatever
laws are necessary for the maintenance of order, the repression of
violence, of crimes against person and the State and the general
material welfare of society, are found in Pagan as well as in Christian
States; and the natural affections,--of paternal and filial love,
friendship, patriotism, generosity, etc.,--while strengthened by
Christianity, are also an inalienable part of the God-given heritage of
all mankind. We see many heroic traits, many manly virtues, many
domestic amenities, and many exalted sentiments in pagan Greece, even if
these were not taught by priests or sages. Every man instinctively
clings to life, to property, to home, to parents, to wife and children;
and hence these are guarded in every community, and the violation of
these rights is ever punished with greater or less severity for the sake
of general security and public welfare, even if there be no belief in
God. Religion, loftily considered, has but little to do with the
temporal interests of men. Governments and laws take these under their
protection, and it is men who make governments and laws. They are made
from the instinct of self-preservation, from patriotic aspirations, from
the necessities of civilization. Religion, from the Christian
standpoint, is unworldly, having reference to the life which is to come,
to the enlightenment of the conscience, to restraint from sins not
punishable by the laws, and to the inspiration of virtues which have no
worldly reward.

This kind of religion was not taught by Grecian priests or poets or
artists, and did not exist in Greece, with all its refinements and
glories, until partially communicated by those philosophers who
meditated on the secrets of Nature, the mighty mysteries of life, and
the duties which reason and reflection reveal. And it may be noticed
that the philosophers themselves, who began with speculations on the
origin of the universe, the nature of the gods, the operations of the
mind, and the laws of matter, ended at last with ethical inquiries and
injunctions. We see this illustrated in Socrates and Zeno. They seemed
to despair of finding out God, of explaining the wonders of his
universe, and came down to practical life in its sad realities,--like
Solomon himself when he said, "Fear God and keep his commandments, for
this is the whole duty of man." In ethical teachings and inquiries some
of these philosophers reached a height almost equal to that which
Christian sages aspired to climb; and had the world practised the
virtues which they taught, there would scarcely have been need of a new
revelation, so far as the observance of rules to promote happiness on
earth is concerned. But these Pagan sages did not hold out hopes beyond
the grave. They even doubted whether the soul was mortal or immortal.
They did teach many ennobling and lofty truths for the enlightenment of
thinkers; but they held out no divine help, nor any hope of completing
in a future life the failures of this one; and hence they failed in
saving society from a persistent degradation, and in elevating ordinary
men to those glorious heights reached by the Christian converts.

That was the point to which Augustine directed his vast genius and his
unrivalled logic. He admitted that arts might civilize, and that the
elaborate mythology which he ridiculed was interesting to the people,
and was, as a creation of the poets, ingenious and beautiful; but he
showed that it did not reveal a future state, that it did not promise
eternal happiness, that it did not restrain men from those sins which
human laws could not punish, and that it did not exalt the soul to lofty
communion with the Deity, or kindle a truly spiritual life, and
therefore was worthless as a religion, imbecile to save, and only to be
classed with those myths which delight an ignorant or sensuous people,
and with those rites which are shrouded in mystery and gloom. Nor did
he, in his matchless argument against the gods of Greece and Rome, take
for his attack those deities whose rites were most degrading and
senseless, and which the thinking world despised, but the most lofty
forms of pagan religion, such as were accepted by moralists and
philosophers like Seneca and Plato. And thus he reached the intelligence
of the age, and gave a final blow to all the gods of antiquity.

It would be instructive to show that the religion of Greece, as embraced
by the people, did not prevent or even condemn those social evils that
are the greatest blot on enlightened civilization. It did not
discourage slavery, the direst evil which ever afflicted humanity; it
did not elevate woman to her true position at home or in public; it
ridiculed those passive virtues that are declared and commended in the
Sermon on the Mount; it did not pronounce against the wickedness of war,
or the vanity of military glory; it did not dignify home, or the virtues
of the family circle; it did not declare the folly of riches, or show
that the love of money is a root of all evil. It made sensual pleasure
and outward prosperity the great aims of successful ambition, and hid
with an impenetrable screen from the eyes of men the fatal results of a
worldly life, so that suicide itself came to be viewed as a justifiable
way to avoid evils that are hard to be borne; in short, it was a
religion which, though joyous, was without hope, and with innumerable
deities was without God in the world,--which was no religion at all, but
a fable, a delusion, and a superstition, as Paul argued before the
assembled intellect of the most fastidious and cultivated city of
the world.

And yet we see among those who worshipped the gods of Greece a sense of
dependence on supernatural power; and this dependence stands out, both
in the Iliad and the Odyssey, among the boldest heroes. They seem to be
reverential to the powers above them, however indefinite their views. In
the best ages of Greece the worship of the various deities was sincere
and universal, and was attended with sacrifices to propitiate favor or
avert their displeasure.

It does not appear that these sacrifices were always offered by priests.
Warriors, kings, and heroes themselves sacrificed oxen, sheep, and
goats, and poured out libations to the gods. Homer's heroes were very
strenuous in the exercise of these duties; and they generally traced
their calamities and misfortunes to the neglect of sacrifices, which was
a great offence to the deities, from Zeus down to inferior gods. We
read, too, that the gods were supplicated in fervent prayer. There was
universally felt, in earlier times, a need of divine protection. If the
gods did not confer eternal life, they conferred, it was supposed,
temporal and worldly good. People prayed for the same blessings that the
ancient Jews sought from Jehovah. In this sense the early Greeks were
religious. Irreverence toward the gods was extremely rare. The people,
however, did not pray for divine guidance in the discharge of duty, but
for the blessings which would give them health and prosperity. We seldom
see a proud self-reliance even among the heroes of the Iliad, but great
solicitude to secure aid from the deities they worshipped.

       *       *       *       *       *

The religion of the Romans differed in some respects from that of the
Greeks, inasmuch as it was emphatically a state religion. It was more of
a ritual and a ceremony. It included most of the deities of the Greek
Pantheon, but was more comprehensive. It accepted the gods of all the
nations that composed the empire, and placed them in the Pantheon,--even
Mithra, the Persian sun-god, and the Isis and Osiris of the Egyptians,
to whom sacrifices were made by those who worshipped them at home. It
was also a purer mythology, and rejected many of the blasphemous myths
concerning the loves and quarrels of the Grecian deities. It was more
practical and less poetical. Every Roman god had something to do, some
useful office to perform. Several divinities presided over the birth and
nursing of an infant, and they were worshipped for some fancied good,
for the benefits which they were supposed to bestow. There was an
elaborate "division of labor" among them. A divinity presided over
bakers, another over ovens,--every vocation and every household
transaction had its presiding deities.

There were more superstitious rites practised by the Romans than by the
Greeks,--such as examining the entrails of beasts and birds for good or
bad omens. Great attention was given to dreams and rites of divination.
The Roman household gods were of great account, since there was a more
defined and general worship of ancestors than among the Greeks. These
were the _Penates_, or familiar household gods, the guardians of the
home, whose fire on the sacred hearth was perpetually burning, and to
whom every meal was esteemed a sacrifice. These included a _Lar_, or
ancestral family divinity, in each house. There were Vestal virgins to
guard the most sacred places. There was a college of pontiffs to
regulate worship and perform the higher ceremonies, which were
complicated and minute. The pontiffs were presided over by one called
Pontifex Maximus,--a title shrewdly assumed by Caesar to gain control of
the popular worship, and still surviving in the title of the Pope of
Rome with his college of cardinals. There were augurs and haruspices to
discover the will of the gods, according to entrails and the flight
of birds.

The festivals were more numerous in Rome than in Greece, and perhaps
were more piously observed. About one day in four was set apart for the
worship of particular gods, celebrated by feasts and games and
sacrifices. The principal feast days were in honor of Janus, the great
god of the Sabines, the god of beginnings, celebrated on the first of
January, to which month he gave his name; also the feasts in honor of
the Penates, of Mars, of Vesta, of Minerva, of Venus, of Ceres, of Juno,
of Jupiter, and of Saturn. The Saturnalia, December 19, in honor of
Saturn, the annual Thanksgiving, lasted seven days, when the rich kept
open house and slaves had their liberty,--the most joyous of the
festivals. The feast of Minerva lasted five days, when offerings were
made by all mechanics, artists, and scholars. The feast of Cybele,
analogous to that of Ceres in Greece and Isis in Egypt, lasted six days.
These various feasts imposed great contributions on the people, and were
managed by the pontiffs with the most minute observances and legalities.

The principal Roman divinities were the Olympic gods under Latin names,
like Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Minerva, Neptune, Vesta, Apollo, Venus, Ceres,
and Diana; but the secondary deities were almost innumerable. Some of
the deities were of Etruscan, some of Sabine, and some of Latin origin;
but most of them were imported from Greece or corresponded with those of
the Greek mythology. Many were manufactured by the pontiffs for
utilitarian purposes, and were mere abstractions, like Hope, Fear,
Concord, Justice, Clemency, etc., to which temples were erected. The
powers of Nature were also worshipped, like the sun, the moon, and
stars. The best side of Roman life was represented in the worship of
Vesta, who presided over the household fire and home, and was associated
with the Lares and Penates. Of these household gods the head of the
family was the officiating minister who offered prayers and sacrifices.
The Vestal virgins received especial honor, and were appointed by the
Pontifex Maximus.

Thus the Romans accounted themselves very religious, and doubtless are
to be so accounted, certainly in the same sense as were the Athenians by
the Apostle Paul, since altars, statues, and temples in honor of gods
were everywhere present to the eye, and rites and ceremonies were most
systematically and mechanically observed according to strict rules laid
down by the pontiffs. They were grave and decorous in their devotions,
and seemed anxious to learn from their augurs and haruspices the will of
the gods; and their funeral ceremonies were held with great pomp and
ceremony. As faith in the gods declined, ceremonies and pomps were
multiplied, and the ice of ritualism accumulated on the banks of piety.
Superstition and unbelief went hand in hand. Worship in the temples was
most imposing when the amours and follies of the gods were most
ridiculed in the theatres; and as the State was rigorous in its
religious observances, hypocrisy became the vice of the most prominent
and influential citizens. What sincerity was there in Julius Caesar when
he discharged the duties of high-priest of the Republic? It was
impossible for an educated Roman who read Plato and Zeno to believe in
Janus and Juno. It was all very well for the people so to believe, he
said, who must be kept in order; but scepticism increased in the higher
classes until the prevailing atheism culminated in the poetry of
Lucretius, who had the boldness to declare that faith in the gods had
been the curse of the human race.

If the Romans were more devoted to mere external and ritualistic
services than the Greeks,--more outwardly religious,--they were also
more hypocritical. If they were not professed freethinkers,--for the
State did not tolerate opposition or ridicule of those things which it
instituted or patronized,--religion had but little practical effect on
their lives. The Romans were more immoral yet more observant of
religious ceremonies than the Greeks, who acted and thought as they
pleased. Intellectual independence was not one of the characteristics of
the Roman citizen. He professed to think as the State prescribed, for
the masters of the world were the slaves of the State in religion as in
war. The Romans were more gross in their vices as they were more
pharisaical in their profession than the Greeks, whom they conquered and
imitated. Neither the sincere worship of ancestors, nor the ceremonies
and rites which they observed in honor of their innumerable divinities,
softened the severity of their character, or weakened their passion for
war and bloody sports. Their hard and rigid wills were rarely moved by
the cries of agony or the shrieks of despair. Their slavery was more
cruel than among any nation of antiquity. Butchery and legalized murder
were the delight of Romans in their conquering days, as were inhuman
sports in the days of their political decline. Where was the spirit of
religion, as it was even in India and Egypt, when women were debased;
when every man and woman held a human being in cruel bondage; when home
was abandoned for the circus and the amphitheatre; when the cry of the
mourner was unheard in shouts of victory; when women sold themselves as
wives to those who would pay the highest price, and men abstained from
marriage unless they could fatten on rich dowries; when utility was the
spring of every action, and demoralizing pleasure was the universal
pursuit; when feastings and banquets were riotous and expensive, and
violence and rapine were restrained only by the strong arm of law
dictated by instincts of self-preservation? Where was the ennobling
influence of the gods, when nobody of any position finally believed in
them? How powerless the gods, when the general depravity was so glaring
as to call out the terrible invective of Paul, the cosmopolitan
traveller, the shrewd observer, the pure-hearted Christian missionary,
indicting not a few, but a whole people: "Who exchanged the truth of God
for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the
Creator, ... being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication,
wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife,
deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, insolent,
haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affections,
unmerciful." An awful picture, but sustained by the evidence of the
Roman writers of that day as certainly no worse than the
hideous reality.

If this was the outcome of the most exquisitely poetical and
art-inspiring mythology the world has ever known, what wonder that the
pure spirituality of Jesus the Christ, shining into that blackness of
darkness, should have been hailed by perishing millions as the "light of
the world"!

       *       *       *       *       *

AUTHORITIES.


Rawlinson's Religions of the Ancient World; Grote's History of Greece;
Thirlwall's History of Greece; Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Max Müller's
Chips from a German Workshop; Curtius's History of Greece; Mr.
Gladstone's Homer and the Homeric Age; Rawlinson's Herodotus;
Döllinger's Jew and Gentile; Fenton's Lectures on Ancient and Modern
Greece; Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Mythology; Clarke's Ten
Great Religions; Dwight's Mythology; Saint Augustine's City of God.




CONFUCIUS.


SAGE AND MORALIST.

550-478 B.C.

About one hundred years after the great religious movement in India
under Buddha, a man was born in China who inaugurated a somewhat similar
movement there, and who impressed his character and principles on three
hundred millions of people. It cannot be said that he was the founder of
a new religion, since he aimed only to revive what was ancient. To quote
his own words, he was "a transmitter, and not a maker." But he was,
nevertheless, a very extraordinary character; and if greatness is to be
measured by results, I know of no heathen teacher whose work has been so
permanent. In genius, in creative power, he was inferior to many; but in
influence he has had no equal among the sages of the world.

"Confucius" is a Latin name given him by Jesuit missionaries in China;
his real name was K'ung-foo-tseu. He was born about 550 B.C., in the
province of Loo, and was the contemporary of Belshazzar, of Cyrus, of
Croesus, and of Pisistratus. It is claimed that Confucius was a
descendant of one of the early emperors of China, of the Chow dynasty,
1121 B.C.; but he was simply of an upper-class family of the State of
Loo, one of the provinces of the empire,--his father and grandfather
having been prime ministers to the reigning princes or dukes of Loo,
which State resembled a feudal province of France in the Middle Ages,
acknowledging only a nominal fealty to the Emperor.

We know but little of the early condition of China. The earliest record
of events which can be called history takes us back to about 2350 B.C.,
when Yaou was emperor,--an intelligent and benignant prince, uniting
under his sway the different States of China, which had even then
reached a considerable civilization, for the legendary or mythical
history of the country dates back about five thousand years. Yaou's son
Shun was an equally remarkable man, wise and accomplished, who lived
only to advance the happiness of his subjects. At that period the
religion of China was probably monotheistic. The supreme being was
called Shang-te, to whom sacrifices were made, a deity who exercised a
superintending care of the universe; but corruptions rapidly crept in,
and a worship of the powers of Nature and of the spirits of departed
ancestors, who were supposed to guard the welfare of their descendants,
became the prevailing religion. During the reigns of these good emperors
the standard of morality was high throughout the empire.

But morals declined,--the old story in all the States of the ancient
world. In addition to the decline in morals, there were political
discords and endless wars between the petty princes of the empire.

To remedy the political and moral evils of his time was the great desire
and endeavor of Confucius. The most marked feature in the religion of
the Chinese, before his time, was the worship of ancestors, and this
worship he did not seek to change. "Confucius taught three thousand
disciples, of whom the more eminent became influential authors. Like
Plato and Xenophon, they recorded the sayings of their master, and his
maxims and arguments preserved in their works were afterward added to
the national collection of the sacred books called the 'Nim Classes.'"

Confucius was a mere boy when his father died, and we know next to
nothing of his early years. At fifteen years of age, however, we are
told that he devoted himself to learning, pursuing his studies under
considerable difficulties, his family being poor. He married when he was
nineteen years of age; and in the following year was born his son Le,
his only child, of whose descendants eleven thousand males were living
one hundred and fifty years ago, constituting the only hereditary
nobility of China,--a class who for seventy generations were the
recipients of the highest honors and privileges. On the birth of Le, the
duke Ch'aou of Loo sent Confucius a present of a carp, which seems to
indicate that he was already distinguished for his attainments.

At twenty years of age Confucius entered upon political duties, being
the superintendent of cattle, from which, for his fidelity and ability,
he was promoted to the higher office of distributer of grain, having
attracted the attention of his sovereign. At twenty-two he began his
labors as a public teacher, and his house became the resort of
enthusiastic youth who wished to learn the doctrines of antiquity. These
were all that the sage undertook to teach,--not new and original
doctrines of morality or political economy, but only such as were
established from a remote antiquity, going back two thousand years
before he was born. There is no improbability in this alleged antiquity
of the Chinese Empire, for Egypt at this time was a flourishing State.

At twenty-nine years of age Confucius gave his attention to music, which
he studied under a famous master; and to this art he devoted no small
part of his life, writing books and treatises upon it. Six years
afterward, at thirty-five, he had a great desire to travel; and the
reigning duke, in whose service he was as a high officer of state, put
at his disposal a carriage and two horses, to visit the court of the
Emperor, whose sovereignty, however, was only nominal. It does not
appear that Confucius was received with much distinction, nor did he
have much intercourse with the court or the ministers. He was a mere
seeker of knowledge, an inquirer about the ceremonies and maxims of the
founder of the dynasty of Chow, an observer of customs, like Herodotus.
He wandered for eight years among the various provinces of China,
teaching as he went, but without making a great impression. Moreover, he
was regarded with jealousy by the different ministers of princes; one of
them, however, struck with his wisdom and knowledge, wished to retain
him in his service.

On the return of Confucius to Loo, he remained fifteen years without
official employment, his native province being in a state of anarchy.
But he was better employed than in serving princes, prosecuting his
researches into poetry, history, ceremonies, and music,--a born scholar,
with insatiable desire of knowledge. His great gifts and learning,
however, did not allow him to remain without public employment. He was
made governor of an important city. As chief magistrate of this city, he
made a marvellous change in the manners of the people. The duke,
surprised at what he saw, asked if his rules could be employed to
govern a whole State; and Confucius told him that they could be applied
to the government of the Empire. On this the duke appointed him
assistant superintendent of Public Works,--a great office, held only by
members of the ducal family. So many improvements did Confucius make in
agriculture that he was made minister of Justice; and so wonderful was
his management, that soon there was no necessity to put the penal laws
in execution, since no offenders could be found. Confucius held his high
office as minister of Justice for two years longer, and some suppose he
was made prime minister. His authority certainly continued to increase.
He exalted the sovereign, depressed the ministers, and weakened private
families,--just as Richelieu did in France, strengthening the throne at
the expense of the nobility. It would thus seem that his political
reforms were in the direction of absolute monarchy, a needed force in
times of anarchy and demoralization. So great was his fame as a
statesman that strangers came from other States to see him.

These reforms in the state of Loo gave annoyance to the neighboring
princes; and to undermine the influence of Confucius with the duke,
these princes sent the duke a present of eighty beautiful girls,
possessing musical and dancing accomplishments, and also one hundred and
twenty splendid horses. As the duke soon came to think more of his
girls and horses than of his reforms, Confucius became disgusted,
resigned his office, and retired to private life. Then followed thirteen
years of homeless wandering. He was now fifty-six years of age,
depressed and melancholy in view of his failure with princes. He was
accompanied in his travels by some of his favorite disciples, to whom he
communicated his wisdom.

But his fame preceded him wherever he journeyed, and such was the
respect for his character and teachings that he was loaded with presents
by the people, and was left unmolested to do as he pleased. The
dissoluteness of courts filled him with indignation and disgust; and he
was heard to exclaim on one occasion, "I have not seen one who loves
virtue as he loves beauty,"--meaning the beauty of women. The love of
the beautiful, in an artistic sense, is a Greek and not an
Oriental idea.

In the meantime Confucius continued his wanderings from city to city and
State to State, with a chosen band of disciples, all of whom became
famous. He travelled for the pursuit of knowledge, and to impress the
people with his doctrines. A certain one of his followers was questioned
by a prince as to the merits and peculiarities of his master, but was
afraid to give a true answer. The sage hearing of it, said, "You should
have told him, He is simply a man who in his eager pursuit of knowledge
forgets his food, who in the joy of his attainments forgets his sorrows,
and who does not perceive that old age is coming on." How seldom is it
that any man reaches such a height! In a single sentence the philosopher
describes himself truly and impressively.

At last, in the year 491 B.C., a new sovereign reigned in Loo, and with
costly presents invited Confucius to return to his native State. The
philosopher was now sixty-nine years of age, and notwithstanding the
respect in which he was held, the world cannot be said to have dealt
kindly with him. It is the fate of prophets and sages to be rejected.
The world will not bear rebukes. Even a friend, if discreet, will rarely
venture to tell another friend his faults. Confucius told the truth when
pressed, but he does not seem to have courted martyrdom; and his manners
and speech were too bland, too proper, too unobtrusive to give much
offence. Luther was aided in his reforms by his very roughness and
boldness, but he was surrounded by a different class of people from
those whom Confucius sought to influence. Conventional, polite,
considerate, and a great respecter of persons in authority was the
Chinese sage. A rude, abrupt, and fierce reformer would have had no
weight with the most courteous and polite people of whom history speaks;
whose manners twenty-five hundred years ago were substantially the same
as they are at the present day,--a people governed by the laws of
propriety alone.

The few remaining years of Confucius' life were spent in revising his
writings; but his latter days were made melancholy by dwelling on the
evils of the world that he could not remove. Disappointment also had
made him cynical and bitter, like Solomon of old, although from
different causes. He survived his son and his most beloved disciples. As
he approached the dark valley he uttered no prayer, and betrayed no
apprehension. Death to him was a rest. He died at the age of
seventy-three.

In the tenth book of his Analects we get a glimpse of the habits of the
philosopher. He was a man of rule and ceremony.-He was particular about
his dress and appearance. He was no ascetic, but moderate and temperate.
He lived chiefly on rice, like the rest of his countrymen, but required
to have his rice cooked nicely, and his meat cut properly. He drank wine
freely, but was never known to have obscured his faculties by this
indulgence. I do not read that tea was then in use. He was charitable
and hospitable, but not ostentatious. He generally travelled in a
carriage with two horses, driven by one of his disciples; but a carriage
in those days was like one of our carts. In his village, it is said, he
looked simple and sincere, as if he were one not able to speak; when
waiting at court, or speaking with officers of an inferior grade, he
spoke freely, but in a straightforward manner; with officers of a
higher, grade he spoke blandly, but precisely; with the prince he was
grave, but self-possessed. When eating he did not converse; when in bed
he did not speak. If his mat were not straight he did not sit on it.
When a friend sent him a present he did not bow; the only present for
which he bowed was that of the flesh of sacrifice. He was capable of
excessive grief, with all his placidity. When his favorite pupil died,
he exclaimed, "Heaven is destroying me!" His disciples on this said,
"Sir, your grief is excessive." "It is excessive," he replied. "If I am
not to mourn bitterly for this man, for whom should I mourn?"

The reigning prince of Loo caused a temple to be erected over the
remains of Confucius, and the number of his disciples continually
increased. The emperors of the falling dynasty of Chow had neither the
intelligence nor the will to do honor to the departed philosopher, but
the emperors of the succeeding dynasties did all they could to
perpetuate his memory. During his life Confucius found ready acceptance
for his doctrines, and was everywhere revered among the people, though
not uniformly appreciated by the rulers, nor able permanently to
establish the reforms he inaugurated. After his death, however, no honor
was too great to be rendered him. The most splendid temple in China was
built over his grave, and he received a homage little removed from
worship. His writings became a sacred rule of faith and practice;
schools were based upon them, and scholars devoted themselves to their
interpretation. For two thousand years Confucius has reigned
supreme,--the undisputed teacher of a population of three or four
hundred millions.

Confucius must be regarded as a man of great humility, conscious of
infirmities and faults, but striving after virtue and perfection. He
said of himself, "I have striven to become a man of perfect virtue, and
to teach others without weariness; but the character of the superior
man, carrying out in his conduct what he professes, is what I have not
attained to. I am not one born in the possession of knowledge, but I am
one who is fond of antiquity, and earnest in seeking it there. I am a
transmitter, and not a maker." If he did not lay claim to divine
illumination, he felt that he was born into the world for a special
purpose; not to declare new truths, not to initiate any new ceremony,
but to confirm what he felt was in danger of being lost,--the most
conservative of all known reformers.

Confucius left behind voluminous writings, of which his Analects, his
book of Poetry, his book of History, and his Rules of Propriety are the
most important. It is these which are now taught, and have been taught
for two thousand years, in the schools and colleges of China. The
Chinese think that no man so great and perfect as he has ever lived. His
writings are held in the same veneration that Christians attach to their
own sacred literature. There is this one fundamental difference between
the authors of the Bible and the Chinese sage,--that he did not like to
talk of spiritual things; indeed, of them he was ignorant, professing no
interest in relation to the working out of abstruse questions, either of
philosophy or theology. He had no taste or capacity for such inquiries.
Hence, he did not aspire to throw any new light on the great problems of
human condition and destiny; nor did he speculate, like the Ionian
philosophers, on the creation or end of things. He was not troubled
about the origin or destiny of man. He meddled neither with physics nor
metaphysics, but he earnestly and consistently strove to bring to light
and to enforce those principles which had made remote generations wise
and virtuous. He confined his attention to outward phenomena,--to the
world of sense and matter; to forms, precedents, ceremonies,
proprieties, rules of conduct, filial duties, and duties to the State;
enjoining temperance, honesty, and sincerity as the cardinal and
fundamental laws of private and national prosperity. He was no prophet
of wrath, though living in a corrupt age. He utters no anathemas on
princes, and no woes on peoples. Nor does he glow with exalted hopes of
a millennium of bliss, or of the beatitudes of a future state. He was
not stern and indignant like Elijah, but more like the courtier and
counsellor Elisha. He was a man of the world, and all his teachings have
reference to respectability in the world's regard. He doubted more than
he believed.

And yet in many of his sayings Confucius rises to an exalted height,
considering his age and circumstances. Some of them remind us of some of
the best Proverbs of Solomon. In general, we should say that to his mind
filial piety and fraternal submission were the foundation of all
virtuous practices, and absolute obedience to rulers the primal
principle of government. He was eminently a peace man, discouraging wars
and violence. He was liberal and tolerant in his views. He said that the
"superior man is catholic and no partisan." Duke Gae asked, "What should
be done to secure the submission of the people?" The sage replied,
"Advance the upright, and set aside the crooked; then the people will
submit. But advance the crooked, and set aside the upright, and the
people will not submit." Again he said, "It is virtuous manners which
constitute the excellence of a neighborhood; therefore fix your
residence where virtuous manners prevail." The following sayings remind
me of Epictetus: "A scholar whose mind is set on truth, and who is
ashamed of bad clothes and bad food, is not fit to be discoursed with. A
man should say, 'I am not concerned that I have no place,--I am
concerned how I may fit myself for one. I am not concerned that I am not
known; I seek to be worthy to be known.'" Here Confucius looks to the
essence of things, not to popular desires. In the following, on the
other hand, he shows his prudence and policy: "In serving a prince,
frequent remonstrances lead to disgrace; between friends, frequent
reproofs make the friendship distant." Thus he talks like Solomon.
"Tsae-yu, one of his disciples, being asleep in the day-time, the master
said, 'Rotten wood cannot be carved. This Yu--what is the use of my
reproving him?'" Of a virtuous prince, he said: "In his conduct of
himself, he was humble; in serving his superiors, he was respectful; in
nourishing the people, he was kind; in ordering the people, he
was just."

It was discussed among his followers what it is to be distinguished. One
said: "It is to be heard of through the family and State." The master
replied: "That is notoriety, not distinction." Again he said: "Though a
man may be able to recite three hundred odes, yet if when intrusted with
office he does not know how to act, of what practical use is his
poetical knowledge?" Again, "If a minister cannot rectify himself, what
has he to do with rectifying others?" There is great force in this
saying: "The superior man is easy to serve and difficult to please,
since you cannot please him in any way which is not accordant with
right; but the mean man is difficult to serve and easy to please. The
superior man has a dignified ease without pride; the mean man has pride
without a dignified ease." A disciple asked him what qualities a man
must possess to entitle him to be called a scholar. The master said: "He
must be earnest, urgent, and bland,--among his friends earnest and
urgent, among his brethren bland." And, "The scholar who cherishes a
love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar." "If a man," he said,
"take no thought about what is distant, he will find sorrow near at
hand." And again, "He who requires much from himself and little from
others, he will keep himself from being an object of resentment." These
proverbs remind us of Bacon: "Specious words confound virtue." "Want of
forbearance in small matters confound great plans." "Virtue," the master
said, "is more to man than either fire or water. I have seen men die
from treading on water or fire, but I have never seen a man die from
treading the course of virtue." This is a lofty sentiment, but I think
it is not in accordance with the records of martyrdom. "There are three
things," he continued, "which the superior man guards against: In youth
he guards against his passions, in manhood against quarrelsomeness, and
in old age against covetousness."

I do not find anything in the sayings of Confucius that can be called
cynical, such as we find in some of the Proverbs of Solomon, even in
reference to women, where women were, as in most Oriental countries,
despised. The most that approaches cynicism is in such a remark as this:
"I have not yet seen one who could perceive his faults and inwardly
accuse himself." His definition of perfect virtue is above that of
Paley: "The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first
business, and success only a secondary consideration." Throughout his
writings there is no praise of success without virtue, and no
disparagement of want of success with virtue. Nor have I found in his
sayings a sentiment which may be called demoralizing. He always takes
the higher ground, and with all his ceremony ever exalts inward purity
above all external appearances. There is a quaint common-sense in some
of his writings which reminds one of the sayings of Abraham Lincoln. For
instance: One of his disciples asked, "If you had the conduct of
armies, whom would you have to act with you?" The master replied: "I
would not have him to act with me who will unarmed attack a tiger, or
cross a river without a boat." Here something like wit and irony break
out: "A man of the village said, 'Great is K'ung the philosopher; his
learning is extensive, and yet he does not render his name famous by any
particular thing.' The master heard this observation, and said to his
disciples: 'What shall I practise, charioteering or archery? I will
practise charioteering.'"

When the Duke of Loo asked about government, the master said: "Good
government exists when those who are near are made happy, and when those
who are far off are attracted." When the Duke questioned him again on
the same subject, he replied: "Go before the people with your example,
and be laborious in their affairs.... Pardon small faults, and raise to
office men of virtue and talents." "But how shall I know the men of
virtue?" asked the duke. "Raise to office those whom you do know," The
key to his political philosophy seems to be this: "A man who knows how
to govern himself, knows how to govern others; and he who knows how to
govern other men, knows how to govern an empire." "The art of
government," he said, "is to keep its affairs before the mind without
weariness, and to practise them with undeviating constancy.... To
govern means to rectify. If you lead on the people with correctness,
who will not dare to be correct?" This is one of his favorite
principles; namely, the force of a good example,--as when the reigning
prince asked him how to do away with thieves, he replied: "If you, Sir,
were not covetous, although you should reward them to do it, they would
not steal." This was not intended as a rebuke to the prince, but an
illustration of the force of a great example. Confucius rarely openly
rebuked any one, especially a prince, whom it was his duty to venerate
for his office. He contented himself with enforcing principles. Here his
moderation and great courtesy are seen.

Confucius sometimes soared to the highest morality known to the Pagan
world. Chung-kung asked about perfect virtue. The master said: "It is
when you go abroad, to behave to every one as if you were receiving a
great guest, to have no murmuring against you in the country and family,
and not to do to others as you would not wish done to yourself.... The
superior man has neither anxiety nor fear. Let him never fail
reverentially to order his own conduct, and let him be respectful to
others and observant of propriety; then all within the four seas will be
brothers.... Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles, and be
moving continually to what is right." Fan-Chi asked about benevolence;
the master said: "It is to love all men." Another asked about
friendship. Confucius replied: "Faithfully admonish your friend, and
kindly try to lead him. If you find him impracticable, stop. Do not
disgrace yourself." This saying reminds us of that of our great Master:
"Cast not your pearls before swine." There is no greater folly than in
making oneself disagreeable without any probability of reformation. Some
one asked: "What do you say about the treatment of injuries?" The master
answered: "Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with
kindness." Here again he was not far from the greater Teacher on the
Mount "When a man's knowledge is sufficient to attain and his virtue is
not sufficient to hold, whatever he may have gained he will lose again."
One of the favorite doctrines of Confucius was the superiority of the
ancients to the men of his day. Said he: "The high-mindedness of
antiquity showed itself in a disregard of small things; that of the
present day shows itself in license. The stern dignity of antiquity
showed itself in grave reserve; that of the present shows itself in
quarrelsome perverseness. The policy of antiquity showed itself in
straightforwardness; that of the present in deceit." The following is a
saying worthy of Montaigne: "Of all people, girls and servants are the
most difficult to behave to. If you are familiar with them, they lose
their humility; if you maintain reserve to them, they are discontented."

Such are some of the sayings of Confucius, on account of which he was
regarded as the wisest of his countrymen; and as his conduct was in
harmony with his principles, he was justly revered as a pattern of
morality. The greatest virtues which he enjoined were sincerity,
truthfulness, and obedience to duty whatever may be the sacrifice; to do
right because it is right and not because it is expedient; filial piety
extending to absolute reverence; and an equal reverence for rulers. He
had no theology; he confounded God with heaven and earth. He says
nothing about divine providence; he believed in nothing supernatural. He
thought little and said less about a future state of rewards and
punishments. His morality was elevated, but not supernal. We infer from
his writings that his age was degenerate and corrupt, but, as we have
already said, his reproofs were gentle. Blandness of speech and manners
was his distinguishing outward peculiarity; and this seems to
characterize his nation,--whether learned from him, or whether an inborn
national peculiarity, I do not know. He went through great trials most
creditably, but he was no martyr. He constantly complained that his
teachings fell on listless ears, which made him sad and discouraged; but
he never flagged in his labors to improve his generation. He had no
egotism, but great self-respect, reminding us of Michael Angelo. He was
humble but full of dignity, serene though distressed, cheerful but not
hilarious. Were he to live among us now, we should call him a perfect
gentleman, with aristocratic sympathies, but more autocratic in his
views of government and society than aristocratic. He seems to have
loved the people, and was kind, even respectful, to everybody. When he
visited a school, it is said that he arose in quiet deference to speak
to the children, since some of the boys, he thought, would probably be
distinguished and powerful at no distant day. He was also remarkably
charitable, and put a greater value on virtues and abilities than upon
riches and honors. Though courted by princes he would not serve them in
violation of his self-respect, asked no favors, and returned their
presents. If he did not live above the world, he adorned the world. We
cannot compare his teachings with those of Christ; they are immeasurably
inferior in loftiness and spirituality; but they are worldly wise and
decorous, and are on an equality with those of Solomon in moral wisdom.
They are wonderfully adapted to a people who are conservative of their
institutions, and who have more respect for tradition than for progress.

The worship of ancestors is closely connected with veneration for
parental authority; and with absolute obedience to parents is allied
absolute obedience to the Emperor as head of the State. Hence, the
writings of Confucius have tended to cement the Chinese imperial
power,--in which fact we may perhaps find the secret of his
extraordinary posthumous influence. No wonder that emperors and rulers
have revered and honored his memory, and used the power of the State to
establish his doctrines. Moreover, his exaltation of learning as a
necessity for rulers has tended to put all the offices of the realm into
the hands of scholars. There never was a country where scholars have
been and still are so generally employed by Government. And as men of
learning are conservative in their sympathies, so they generally are
fond of peace and detest war. Hence, under the influence of scholars the
policy of the Chinese Government has always been mild and pacific. It is
even paternal. It has more similarity to the governments of a remote
antiquity than that of any existing nation. Thus is the influence of
Confucius seen in the stability of government and of conservative
institutions, as well as in decency in the affairs of life, and
gentleness and courtesy of manners. Above all is his influence seen in
the employment of men of learning and character in the affairs of state
and in all the offices of government, as the truest guardians of
whatever tends to exalt a State and make it respectable and stable, if
not powerful for war or daring in deeds of violence.

Confucius was essentially a statesman as well as a moralist; but his
political career was an apparent failure, since few princes listened to
his instructions. Yet if he was lost to his contemporaries, he has been
preserved by posterity. Perhaps there never lived a man so worshipped by
posterity who had so slight a following by the men of his own
time,--unless we liken him to that greatest of all Prophets, who, being
despised and rejected, is, and is to be, the "headstone of the corner"
in the rebuilding of humanity. Confucius says so little about the
subjects that interested the people of China that some suppose he had no
religion at all. Nor did he mention but once in his writings Shang-te,
the supreme deity of his remote ancestors; and he deduced nothing from
the worship of him. And yet there are expressions in his sayings which
seem to show that he believed in a supreme power. He often spoke of
Heaven, and loved to walk in the heavenly way. Heaven to him was
Destiny, by the power of which the world was created. By Heaven the
virtuous are rewarded, and the guilty are punished. Out of love for the
people, Heaven appoints rulers to protect and instruct them. Prayer is
unnecessary, because Heaven does not actively interfere with the soul
of man.

Confucius was philosophical and consistent in the all-pervading
principle by which he insisted upon the common source of power in
government,--of the State, of the family, and of one's self.
Self-knowledge and self-control he maintained to be the fountain of all
personal virtue and attainment in performance of the moral duties owed
to others, whether above or below in social standing. He supposed that
all men are born equally good, but that the temptations of the world at
length destroy the original rectitude. The "superior man," who next to
the "sage" holds the highest place in the Confucian humanity, conquers
the evil in the world, though subject to infirmities; his acts are
guided by the laws of propriety, and are marked by strict sincerity.
Confucius admitted that he himself had failed to reach the level of the
superior man. This admission may have been the result of his
extraordinary humility and modesty.

In "The Great Learning" Confucius lays down the rules to enable one to
become a superior man. The foundation of his rules is in the
investigation of things, or _knowledge_, with which virtue is
indissolubly connected,--as in the ethics of Socrates. He maintained
that no attainment can be made, and no virtue can remain untainted,
without learning. "Without this, benevolence becomes folly, sincerity
recklessness, straightforwardness rudeness, and firmness foolishness."
But mere accumulation of facts was not knowledge, for "learning without
thought is labor lost; and thought without learning is perilous."
Complete wisdom was to be found only among the ancient sages; by no
mental endeavor could any man hope to equal the supreme wisdom of Yaou
and of Shun. The object of learning, he said, should be truth; and the
combination of learning with a firm will, will surely lead a man to
virtue. Virtue must be free from all hypocrisy and guile.

The next step towards perfection is the _cultivation of the
person_,--which must begin with introspection, and ends in harmonious
outward expression. Every man must guard his thoughts, words, and
actions; and conduct must agree with words. By words the superior man
directs others; but in order to do this his words must be sincere. It by
no means follows, however, that virtue is the invariable concomitant of
plausible speech.

The height of virtue is _filial piety_; for this is connected
indissolubly with loyalty to the sovereign, who is the father of his
people and the preserver of the State. Loyalty to the sovereign is
synonymous with duty, and is outwardly shown by obedience. Next to
parents, all superiors should be the object of reverence. This
reverence, it is true, should be reciprocal; a sovereign forfeits all
right to reverence and obedience when he ceases to be a minister of
good. But then, only the man who has developed virtues in himself is
considered competent to rule a family or a State; for the same virtues
which enable a man to rule the one, will enable him to rule the other.
No man can teach others who cannot teach his own family. The greatest
stress, as we have seen, is laid by Confucius on filial piety, which
consists in obedience to authority,--in serving parents according to
propriety, that is, with the deepest affection, and the father of the
State with loyalty. But while it is incumbent on a son to obey the
wishes of his parents, it is also a part of his duty to remonstrate with
them should they act contrary to the rules of propriety. All
remonstrances, however, must be made humbly. Should these remonstrances
fail, the son must mourn in silence the obduracy of the parents. He
carried the obligations of filial piety so far as to teach that a son
should conceal the immorality of a father, forgetting the distinction of
right and wrong. Brotherly love is the sequel of filial piety. "Happy,"
says he, "is the union with wife and children; it is like the music of
lutes and harps. The love which binds brother to brother is second only
to that which is due from children to parents. It consists in mutual
friendship, joyful harmony, and dutiful obedience on the part of the
younger to the elder brothers."

While obedience is exacted to an elder brother and to parents, Confucius
said but little respecting the ties which should bind husband and wife.
He had but little respect for woman, and was divorced from his wife
after living with her for a year. He looked on women as every way
inferior to men, and only to be endured as necessary evils. It was not
until a woman became a mother, that she was treated with respect in
China. Hence, according to Confucius, the great object of marriage is to
increase the family, especially to give birth to sons. Women could be
lawfully and properly divorced who had no children,--which put women
completely in the power of men, and reduced them to the condition of
slaves. The failure to recognize the sanctity of marriage is the great
blot on the system of Confucius as a scheme of morals.

But the sage exalts friendship. Everybody, from the Emperor downward,
must have friends; and the best friends are those allied by ties of
blood. "Friends," said he, "are wealth to the poor, strength to the
weak, and medicine to the sick." One of the strongest bonds to
friendship is literature and literary exertion. Men are enjoined by
Confucius to make friends among the most virtuous of scholars, even as
they are enjoined to take service under the most worthy of great
officers. In the intercourse of friends, the most unbounded sincerity
and frankness is imperatively enjoined. "He who is not trusted by his
friends will not gain the confidence of the sovereign, and he who is not
obedient to parents will not be trusted by friends."

Everything is subordinated to the State; but, on the other hand, the
family, friends, culture, virtue,--the good of the people,--is the main
object of good government. "No virtue," said Emperor Kuh, 2435 B.C.,
"is higher than love to all men, and there is no loftier aim in
government than to profit all men." When he was asked what should be
done for the people, he replied, "Enrich them;" and when asked what more
should be done, he replied, "Teach them." On these two principles the
whole philosophy of the sage rested,--the temporal welfare of the
people, and their education. He laid great stress on knowledge, as
leading to virtue; and on virtue, as leading to prosperity. He made the
profession of a teacher the most honorable calling to which a citizen
could aspire. He himself was a teacher. All sages are teachers, though
all teachers are not sages.

Confucius enlarged upon the necessity of having good men in office. The
officials of his day excited his contempt, and reciprocally scorned his
teachings. It was in contrast to these officials that he painted the
ideal times of Kings Wan and Woo. The two motive-powers of government,
according to Confucius, are righteousness and the observance of
ceremonies. Righteousness is the law of the world, as ceremonies form a
rule to the heart. What he meant by ceremonies was rules of propriety,
intended to keep all unruly passions in check, and produce a
reverential manner among all classes. Doubtless he over-estimated the
force of example, since there are men in every country and community who
will be lawless and reckless, in spite of the best models of character
and conduct.

The ruling desire of Confucius was to make the whole empire peaceful and
happy. The welfare of the people, the right government of the State, and
the prosperity of the empire were the main objects of his solicitude. As
conducive to these, he touched on many other things incidentally,--such

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