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Comparative Religion

by J. Estlin Carpenter · English · Gutenberg #43947 · 373,041 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Comparative Religion

Author: J. Estlin Carpenter


        
Release date: October 13, 2013 [eBook #43947]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COMPARATIVE RELIGION ***

  COMPARATIVE
  RELIGION


  BY

  J. ESTLIN CARPENTER

  D.LITT.

  PRINCIPAL OF MANCHESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD



  NEW YORK
  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

  LONDON
  WILLIAMS AND NORGATE




  CONTENTS


  CHAP.

  I  INTRODUCTORY
  II  THE PANORAMA OF RELIGIONS
  III  RELIGION IN THE LOWER CULTURE
  IV  SPIRITS AND GODS
  V  SACRED ACTS
  VI  SACRED PRODUCTS
  VII  RELIGION AND MORALITY
  VIII  PROBLEMS OF LIFE AND DESTINY
  BIBLIOGRAPHY
  INDEX




        "Those first affections,
    Those shadowy recollections,
    Which, be they what they may,
  Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
  Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
    Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
  Our noisy years seem moments in the being
  Of the eternal Silence."
                              WORDSWORTH.

"To the philosopher the existence of God may seem to rest on a
syllogism; in the eyes of the historian it rests on the whole evolution
of human thought."--MAX MÜLLER.




{7}

COMPARATIVE RELIGION




CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Over the chancel-arch of the church at South Leigh, a few miles west of
Oxford, is a fresco of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection, of the
type well known in mediæval art.  On the adjoining south wall stands
the stately figure of the archangel Michael.  In his right hand he
holds a pair of scales.  In one scale is the figure of a soul in the
attitude of prayer; beside it is Our Lady carrying a rosary.  The other
contains an ox-headed demon blowing a horn.  This scale rises steadily,
though another demon has climbed to the beam above to weigh it down,
and a third from hell's mouth below endeavours to drag it towards the
abyss.  The same theme recurs in several other English churches; and it
is carved over the portals of many French cathedrals, as at Notre Dame
in Paris.

Unroll a papyrus from an Egyptian tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty before
the days of Moses, and you will see a somewhat similar {8} scene.  The
just and merciful judge Osiris, "lord of life and king of eternity,"
sits in the Hall of the two goddesses of Truth.  Hither the soul is
brought for the ordeal which will determine his future bliss or woe.
Before forty-two assessors he declares his innocence of various
offences: "I am not a doer of what is wrong; I am not a robber; I am
not a slayer of men; I am not a niggard; I am not a teller of lies; I
am not a monopoliser of food; I am no extortioner; I am not unchaste; I
am not the causer of others' tears...."  Then he is led, sometimes
supported by the two goddesses of Truth, to the actual trial.  Resting
on an upright post is the beam of a balance.  It is guarded by a
dog-headed ape, symbol of Thoth, "lord of the scales."  Thoth has
various functions in the ancient texts, and even rises into a kind of
impersonation of the principle of intelligence in the whole universe.
Here as the computer of time and the inventor of numbers he plays the
part of secretary to Osiris.  In one scale is placed the heart of the
deceased, the organ of conscience.  In the other is sometimes a square
weight, sometimes an ostrich plume, symbol of truth or righteousness.
Thoth stands beside the scales, tablet in hand, to record the issue as
the soul passes to the great award.

The scenes and the persons differ; but the fundamental conception of
judgment is the same, and it is carried out by the same method.  Is
this an accidental coincidence of metaphor?  {9} The figure of the
balance was naturally suggestive for the estimate of worth, and the
Psalmist cried in bitterness of heart--

  Surely men of low degree are vanity,
  And men of high degree are a lie,
  In the balances they will go up;
  They are altogether lighter than vanity.


The mysterious hand wrote upon the wall of Belshazzar's palace the
strange word Tekel, which contained the dreadful sentence, "Thou art
weighed in the balances and art found wanting."  To early Indian
imagination, before the days of the Buddha (500 B.C.), the ordeal of
the balance was part of the outlook into the world beyond.  In the
ancient Persian teaching, Rashnu, the angel of justice, before the
shining "Friend," the mediator Mithra, presided over the weighing of
the spirits at the bridge of destiny, over which they would pass to
heaven or hell.

Is Michael the heir of Thoth or Rashnu?  He passed into the Christian
Church from the Jewish Synagogue, where he was specially connected with
the destinies of the dead.  He guided the souls of the just to the
heavenly world, where he led them into the mystic city, the counterpart
of Jerusalem below; or he stood at the gate as the angel of
righteousness to decide who should be admitted.  So for the Greeks
Hermes was the guardian of the spirits of the departed, whom he
conducted {10} to the judgment in the under-world.  In this respect,
then, Hermes and Michael were akin.  But Hermes also played many other
parts, and the Greeks identified him with the Egyptian Thoth.  When the
destinies of Hector and Achilles were weighed against each other, ere
the last mortal combat, the vase-painter could represent Hermes as
holding the balance in the presence of Zeus, much as Thoth had presided
over it before Osiris.  The Etruscan artists depicted Mercury, the
Italian equivalent of Hermes, fulfilling the same function.  True, the
purport of the test was different.  But the symbol was the same; and
when Hermes gave place to Michael, as Christianity was carried to the
West, the scales passed from the Hellenic to the Jewish Christian
figure, though they had in the one case been used to decide the
allotment of fate, and in the other were employed for judgment.  Why
they remained so long unused in Christian symbolism is obscure.  The
revival of intercourse with the East through the Crusades may have
given new force to the idea as part of the great judgment-process; and
the figure to which it was most natural to assign it was that of
Thoth-Hermes-Michael.


The religion of the ancient Hindus was founded, as every one knows,
upon the venerable hymns collected into one sacred book under the name
of the Rig Veda.  These hymns, 1017 in number, containing over {11}
10,000 verses, are now arranged in ten books, twice the number of the
divisions of the Hebrew Psalter.  Like most of the Psalms they are
traditionally ascribed to different poets, in whose families they were
sung; and their authors were regarded as Rishis, bards, or sages.  Of
their real origin nothing is definitely known; their composition
probably extends over many generations, perhaps over several centuries;
and dim suggestions of their super-earthly origin already appear in
some of the latest poems.  They became the peculiar treasure of the
priestly order; the most laborious efforts were devised for the study
and preservation of the sacred text; the methods of pronunciation, the
rules of grammar, the principles of metre, the derivations of words,
were all elaborated with the utmost minuteness into different branches
of Vedic lore.  Two other smaller Vedas, collections of sacrificial
formulæ and hymns, were very early placed beside the main work, and a
fourth collection gained similar rank much later.  With the development
of the great schools of Hindu philosophy, especially after the decline
of Buddhism, the whole question of authority as the foundation of
belief and reasoning was forced to the front, and this in due time was
applied to the Veda.  Brahmanical speculation had been long concerned
with its divine origin.  It sprang from one of the mysterious figures
in which the ancient theologians expressed their sense of the real {12}
unity of the heavenly powers, Prajāpati, the "lord of creatures,"
through the medium of Vach, or sacred Speech.  As such it was "the
firstborn in the universe."  But as proceeding from Prajāpati it
issued from the world of the _an-anta_, the "un-ending" or "infinite,"
which was likewise the sphere of the _a-mrita_, the "im-mortal" or
"deathless."  So it belonged to the realm of the eternal, where it
could be beheld, not indeed with the eye of sense, but with the higher
discernment of the holy Seer.  The philosophical schools occupied
themselves accordingly with the defence of the eternity and consequent
infallibility of the Veda.  Elaborate arguments were devised to explain
the relation of words to things, and of sound in the abstract to
uttered speech or again to show how behind individuals which had their
origin in time there existed species (even of the gods) which belonged
to the timeless order transcending our experience.  So the conclusion
was reached, in the words of the great philosopher Çankara (A.D.
788-820), that "the authority of the Veda with regard to the matters
stated by it is independent and direct; just as the light of the sun is
the direct means of our knowledge of form and colour."

Just at this era, by a singular coincidence, a remarkable controversy
was raging in the schools of Mohammedan theology.  Mohammed died in
A.D. 632.  He had himself recorded nothing; the traditions about him
are not even {13} agreed whether he could read or write.  His oracles
were taught to his disciples, who began to note down some of them
during the prophet's life; soon after his death the formal collection
of them was undertaken; and under Caliph Othman (651) four copies were
deposited in the cities of Mecca, Cufa, Basra, and Damascus.  We know
the work under the name of the Koran (_Qurān_ = reading), one of the
numerous expressions which Mohammed was said to have coined for the
revelation imparted to him from on high.  Later generations attached
the title exclusively to the utterances fixed in literary form, and
discerned in them a unity designed by the prophet; but it seems more
consonant with his view to regard each of the 114 discourses (_suras_)
as a unit in itself, and the whole as only a fragment of his teaching.
Many passages raise a claim to specific divine origin; others allude to
the uncreated Scripture, _umm-al-kitab_, "the mother of the book."

On such hints was founded the remarkable doctrine that the Koran was
eternal in its essence as the word of God, a necessary attribute of the
Most High.  First formulated in the middle of the eighth century (A.D.
747-748), it roused extraordinary interest outside the theological
schools.  It was fostered by the early Caliphs, for it supported their
political authority, and the emphasis which it placed on the doctrine
of predestination supplied them with a potent weapon.  Opposition {14}
arose on the ground of free will; the passages enforcing the principle
of predestination were evaded by the handy method of allegorical
interpretation, and the revolt of the moral consciousness led, as it
has done elsewhere, to rationalism.  Public debates were held amid
general excitement, when the Caliph Ma'mun (813-833) unexpectedly
espoused the rationalist cause, and issued a decree forbidding the
discussion.  The popular forces, however, were in the long run
triumphant.  In 847 a new Caliph came into power, inclined for
political reasons to the higher doctrine.  Lectures were instituted in
the mosques on the attributes of God, and vast audiences--the
historians report twenty and even thirty thousand hearers--listened
eagerly while the theologians disputed whether God's word could be
conceived distinct from his absolute being.  Faith in the prophet
triumphed; the exaltation of the product reacted on that of the person;
and the Arabian shepherd could be regarded as the inerrant, sinless,
uncreated light, sent forth from Deity himself, who for his sake spread
out the earth and arched the heavens, and proclaimed the great
confession "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."


Every great historical religion passes through numerous phases, as it
is brought into contact with different cultures, and evokes various
forms of speculative thought and inward {15} experience.  Buddhism has
been no exception to this rule.  It sprang up in a moral revolt against
the claims of the Brahmanical teachers, and in the midst of the
discussions of the sophists turned its back on metaphysics and sought
to concentrate attention on the Noble Path of the good life.  It
offered a way of deliverance from the weary round of births and deaths
by the victory over ignorance and sin, and sought to overcome
selfishness by eliminating the idea that man has, or is, a Self.
Accordingly it presented its founder Gotama (500 B.C.), as the man who
had attained the Truth, who had by a long series of lives devoted to
the higher righteousness acquired the insight into the causes and
meaning of existence, and imparted it to his followers with
instructions to carry it forth for the welfare of their fellow-men.
For this end he founded a union or order; he instituted a discipline,
and committed his teaching to a body of disciples whose successors
gradually bore it into distant lands.  He himself passed away, leaving
no trace behind.  His memory was cherished with dutiful devotion.
Pilgrimages to the scenes of his birth and Buddhahood, commemorative
festivals and pious rites, kept the image of the Teacher before the
mind of the believer.  But no prayer was offered to him; no worship
created any bond of fellowship between the departed Gotama and the
community which he had left on earth.

{16}

But in the course of several generations remarkable changes took place.
Environed by philosophical speculations, Buddhism could not remain
wholly unaffected by the great ideas of metaphysics.  While one branch,
now surviving in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, remained faithful to the
Founder's exclusion of all such conceptions as being, substance, and
the like, others began to interpret the person of the Buddha in terms
of the Absolute, and identified him with the Eternal and the
Self-Existent, who from time to time for the welfare of the world took
on himself the semblance of humanity, and appeared to be born, to
attain Enlightenment, and die.  The great aim of the deliverance of all
sentient beings from error, suffering, and guilt, expressed itself
further in the association with him of numerous other holy forms
sharing the same purpose of the world's salvation.

Among these was the Buddha Amitâbha, the Buddha of Boundless Light,[1]
who had made a wondrous vow in virtue of which a blessed future of
righteousness and joy in the Western Paradise was secured for all who
put their trust in him.  Carried into China, this devotion acquired
great popularity, and centuries later it passed into Japan.  There,
while Europe was sending its warriors to win back from the Crescent the
city of the Cross, while Bernard and Francis and Dominic were awakening
new enthusiasm for the monastic {17} life, two famous teachers, Honen
(1133-1212) and Shin-ran (1173-1262), developed the doctrine of
"salvation by faith."  Honen was the only son of a military chief who
died of a wound inflicted by an enemy.  On his deathbed he enjoined the
boy never to seek revenge, and bade him become a monk for the spiritual
enlightenment both of his father and his father's foe.  So the lad
passed in due time into one of the great Buddhist monasteries on mount
Hiei.  Long years of laborious study followed, till in 1175 he reached
the conviction that faith in Amida[2] was the true way of salvation.  A
deep sense of human sinfulness and the belief in an All-Merciful
Deliverer were the essential elements of his religion.  Three emperors
became his pupils, and his life, compiled by imperial order after his
death, resembles that of a mediæval Christian saint.  Visions of Amida
and of the holy teachers of the past were vouchsafed to him.  He
preached--like another St. Francis--to the serpents and the birds.  His
person was mysteriously transfigured, and a wondrous light filled his
dwelling.


[1] Also called Amitâyus, the Buddha of Boundless Life.

[2] The Japanese form of the Sanskrit Amitâbha.


His disciple Shin-ran carried the doctrine of his master yet a little
farther.  Filled with adoring gratitude to the Buddha of Boundless
Light, who, as the deliverer, was also the Buddha of Boundless Life, he
argued that infinite mercy and infinite wisdom must belong to him; and
these in their turn implied the {18} power to give effect to his great
purpose.  He passed from village to village through the Eastern
provinces, rousing enthusiasm by the hymns into which he wrought his
new faith.  They are still sung in the temples at the present day.  But
whereas Honen had recognised a value in good works, and had enjoined
the duty of constant repetition of the sacred name of Amida, Shin-ran
insisted that all element of "self-exertion" must be purged away, and
faith in the merits of Amida--"the exertion of another"--should alone
remain.  Some of the conceptions of Western teaching thus present
themselves in Japan in the midst of modes of life and thought of purely
Indian origin.  Christian theologians had debated whether faith was to
be regarded as an _opus_ or a _donum_, a "work" or a "gift," was it
something to be attained by man or was it bestowed by God?  The
Japanese answer was unhesitating.  Faith was not earned by effort, or
achieved by merit, it was granted out of immeasurable love.  "The
Buddha," we read, "confers this heart.  The heart which takes refuge in
his heart is not produced by oneself.  It is produced by the command of
Buddha.  Hence it is called the believing heart by the Power of
Another."  The natural corollary was that in due course this grace
would be bestowed on all.  The Buddha of Boundless Light and Life would
overcome the darkness of ignorance and death; and this type of
Buddhism, now the most active and {19} influential in Japan, preaches
the doctrine of universal salvation.  The student finds here a whole
series of parallels to the Evangelical interpretation of Christianity.
Both schemes are founded on the same essential ideas, man's need of a
deliverer, and the attainment of salvation by no human conduct but by
faith in a divine person.


The foregoing sketches raise many problems.  What are the actual
features in different religions which are susceptible of comparison?
How can we distinguish between resemblances which are deep-seated and
spring from the fundamental principles of two given faiths, and those
which are only on the surface, and probably accidental?  How far can
such parallels be ascribed to suggestion through historical contact,
and, if they lie too far apart for possibilities of any form of mutual
dependence, out of what common types of experience are they derived,
what forces of thought have shaped them, what feelings do they express?

The student of Comparative Religion seeks answers to these and similar
questions.  A vast field of inquiry is at once opened before him.  It
embraces practically every continent, people, and tribe on the face of
the globe.  It begins in the last period of the great ice age, when men
lived in this country in the company of the elephant, the rhinoceros,
and the mammoth, and hunted their game through {20} Germany, Belgium,
and France.  In dim recesses of the caves they painted the deer, the
bison, the antelope and the wild boar, under conditions which imply
some kind of mysterious or holy place.  They buried their dead with
care, and though we can ask them no questions we may infer with much
probability that they celebrated some kind of funeral meal, and
deposited implements and ornaments in the grave for the use of the
departed in the world beyond.  In one case hundreds of shells were
found buried with the skull of a little child.  Similar usages may be
traced through the slow advances of culture to the present day.  Death
is an element of universal experience; and it is not unreasonable to
suppose that if the negroid peoples of Western Europe had worked out
some view of its meaning and consequences, there were other things to
be done or avoided out of fear or reverence for the Unseen.

The first objects of comparison are thus found in the outward acts
which fall more or less clearly within the sphere of religion, the
places where these are performed, the persons who do them, the means
required for them, the occasions to which they are attached.  These all
belong to the external world; they can be observed and recorded, even
though we may not be sure what they mean.  When they are brought
together, a series of gradations of complexity can be established,
while a common purpose may be traced through all.  {21} From the negro
who lays his offering of grain or fruit at the foot of a tree with the
simple utterance, "Thank you, gods," to a great Eucharistic celebration
at St. Peter's, a continuous line of ritual may be followed, in which
the action becomes more elaborate, the functions and character of the
officiating ministers more strictly defined, the accessories of worship
more complicated.  This corresponds to the enrichment and elevation of
the ideas and emotions that animate the act, as that which is at first
performed as part of tribal usage and ancestral custom acquires the
force of divine institution and personal duty.

Behind the external act lies the internal world of thought and feeling.
The social sanction may invest the ceremony itself with so much force
that the worshipper's interest may lie rather in the due performance of
the rite than in the deity to whom it is addressed.  The element of
belief may be relatively vague and indefinite.  But in the more highly
organised religions belief also may externalise itself through hymn and
prayer, through myth and history and prophecy.  When a religion is
strong enough to create a literature, a fresh object of comparison is
presented.  The utterances of poet and sage, of lawgiver and seer, can
be set side by side.  Their conceptions of the Powers towards which
worship is directed can be studied; the characters and functions of the
several deities can be determined.  This {22} is the intellectual
element in religion.  It has often been regarded as the element of most
importance, because it seemed most readily to admit of the test of
truth.  It finds its most formal expression in the articles of a creed,
and has sometimes been erected into the chief ground of the supreme
arbitrament of heaven and hell.

There remains the element of feeling.  This also may be so entangled in
tradition, so enveloped in the pressure of surrounding influences, that
it is at first obscure and indistinct.  But its importance was early
recognised when the origin of religion was ascribed to fear, in the
oft-quoted line of the Roman Satirist Petronius Arbiter at the court of
Nero (who committed suicide A.D. 66)--

  "Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.


In the eighteenth century the genius of Lessing (1729-1781) fastened on
the feeling of the heart as the essential foundation of religion.  No
written record, no historical event, could guarantee its truth; that
lay in the constitution of the human spirit in its interpretation of
its experience.  In his famous drama of "Nathan the Sage" he applied
this to the representatives of three great historical religions which
were thus brought together for comparison: the Christian Templar, the
Mohammedan Saladin, and the Jew Nathan.  Herder (1744-1803) endeavoured
with the {23} materials then at command to trace the origin and
development of religion, starting from the primitive impressions made
upon the mind by the world without, and sought to interpret mythology
as the imaginative utterance of man's consciousness of the power,
light, and life in Nature.  In the next generation Schleiermacher
(1767-1834) placed the essence of religion in the feeling of absolute
dependence, without attempting to define the object towards which it
was directed.  The study of origins has passed out of the hands of the
philosophers and the theologians.  But it cannot dispense with
psychology; and among the factors of early religious life will be found
the beginnings of wonder, reverence and awe.  And this element, often
cruelly twisted into false and degraded forms, and sometimes refined in
the higher types of mysticism into the loftiest spirituality, inheres
in all practice and belief.

What, then, is the basis of comparison among different faiths?  The
student who is engaged in tracing the life-history of any one religion
will naturally start from the field of investigation thus selected.  As
he widens his outlook he will find that a number of illustrative
instances force themselves upon his view.  The people whose
institutions and ideas he is examining are members of a given ethnic
group.  The ancient Hebrews, for instance, belong on the one side to
the life of the desert, and are kin with the nomad Arabs, {24} on the
other they are related to the authors of Babylonian culture.  Or in the
course of events a new religion is brought by missionary impulse into a
less-developed civilisation, as when Buddhism passed from China through
Corea into Japan, and was planted in the midst of a cruder faith.
Widely different modes of thought are thus brought into close
juxtaposition, their relation and interaction can be examined, and the
inner forces of each compared.

That such inquiries must be conducted without prejudice need not now be
enforced.  An eighteenth-century writer might lay it down that "the
first general division of _Religion_ is into _True and False_," and
might draw the conclusion that "the chapter of _False Religions_ is by
much the longest in the History of the religious opinions and practices
of mankind."[3]  Dr. Johnson could sententiously declare that "there
are two objects of curiosity, the Christian world and the Mohammedan
world--all the rest may be considered as barbarous."  A learned Oxford
scholar of the last generation could speak of the "three chief false
religions," Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism.  Missionaries and
travellers of an elder day, who took some form of Christianity as their
foundation, sometimes found the savages among whom they laboured
destitute of religion because they had no Father in heaven {25} and no
everlasting hell.  These attitudes, it is now freely recognised, are
not scientific.  For purposes of comparison no single religion can be
selected as a standard for the whole human race.  Particular products
may be set side by side.  The asceticism of India may be compared with
that of early Christianity.  The ritual of sacrifice may be studied in
the book of Leviticus or the Hindu Brāhmanas.  What are sometimes
called "Ethnic Trinities" may be examined in the light of Alexandrian
theology.  The _suras_ of the Koran may be read after the prophecies of
Isaiah.  The various phases of the Buddhist Order, with its missionary
zeal, its power of adaptability to different cultures, its readiness to
accept new teaching, may be contrasted with the wonderful cohesiveness
and expansion of the Roman Catholic Church.  The ideas of the Hellenic
mystery-religions may be found to throw light on the language of St.
Paul.  Out of the multitudinous phases of human experience all the
world over innumerable resemblances will be discovered.  Each is a fact
for the student, and must be treated on equal terms in the field of
science.  But they will have more or less intrinsic significance in the
scale of values.  Philosophy may attempt to range them in gradations of
worth, in nobility of form, in dignity of expression, in moral purity,
in social effectiveness.  Beneath infinite diversity the mystic will
affirm the unity of the whole, with the poet of the {26} _Masnavi_,
Jalálu-'d-Dïn of Balkh (A.D. 1207-1273)--

  "Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One,
  In this respect all religions are only one religion."


[3] Broughton, _Dictionary of all Religions_, 1745.


The materials of comparison are, of course, of the most varied kind.
The interest of the ancient Greeks was early roused in the diverse
practices which they saw around them, and the observations of Herodotus
concerning the Egyptians, the Persians, the Scythians, and many another
tribe upon the fringe of barbarism, have earned for him the modern
title of the "Father of Anthropology."  Travellers, missionaries,
government officers, men of trade and men of learning, have recorded
the usages of the lower culture all over the world, naturally with
varying accuracy and penetration, and a vast range of facts has been
registered through successive stages of complexity in social and
religious development.  Many of these have their parallel in the
folklore of countries where the uniformity of modern civilisation has
not crushed out all traditional beliefs, while annual customs or even
village games may contain survivals of what were once important
ceremonial rites.  The irruption of the Arab conquerors into Europe
brought Christianity face to face with Mohammedanism and its sacred
book.  In the {27} seventeenth century the Jesuit Fathers in China
first made known the teachings of Kong-fu-tse ("Philosopher Kong") 500
B.C. whose name they Latinised into Confucius.  Towards the end of the
eighteenth century a brilliant little band of English scholars in
Calcutta began to reveal the astounding copiousness of the sacred
literature of India.  During the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in
1799 the Rosetta Stone (now in the British Museum) yielded the clue to
the hieroglyphics which cover the walls of temple and tomb.  A
generation later a young British officer, Lieutenant Henry Rawlinson,
began in 1835 to copy a triple inscription on a cliff of Mount
Behistun, near Kermanshah in Persia.  The work was dangerous and
difficult, but he was enabled to complete it ten years later.  It
contained an identical record in three languages, Persian, Median, and
Babylonio-Assyrian, and provided the means for deciphering the
cuneiform script of the tablets and cylinders soon recovered from the
mounds of Mesopotamia.

Meanwhile the lovers of the past were at work in many other directions.
The Swedish Lonrott collected the ancient songs of the Finnic people,
under the name of the Kalevala.  Other scholars brought to light the
treasures of Scandinavian mythology in the Icelandic Edda with its two
collections of poetry and prose.  In Wales and Ireland the texts which
enshrined the Celtic faith awoke new interest.  The students of
classical antiquity began to {28} collect inscriptions, and it was soon
realised that the spade might be no less useful in Greece or Asia Minor
than beside the Nile or the Euphrates.

The last century has thus accumulated an immense mass of material in
literature and art.  There are codes of law regulating in the name of
deity the practice of family and social life.  There are hymns of
praise or of penitence, sometimes in strange association with the
spells of magic.  There are books of ritual and sacrifice, of
ceremonial order, of philosophical speculation and moral precept.
There are rules of discipline for religious communities; and there are
pictures of judgment and delineations of the heavenly life.  Sculpture
and painting have been employed to give external form to the objects of
pious reverence; and the architecture of the sanctuary has wrought into
stone the fundamental conceptions of majesty, proportion, and grace.

All this, it is plain, rests upon history.  When Confucius visited the
seat of the imperial dynasty at the court of Chow, he studied with deep
interest the arrangements for the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth;
he surveyed the ancestral temples in which the emperor offered his
worship; he inspected the Hall of Light whose walls bore paintings of
the sovereigns from the remotest times; and then he turned to his
disciples with the remark: "As we use a glass to examine the forms of
things, so must we study the past to {29} understand the present."
Comparison that confines itself solely to counting up resemblances here
and there will be of small value.  We cannot comprehend the real
meaning of a single religious rite, a single sentence of any scripture,
apart from the context to which it belongs.  Acts and words alike issue
out of experiences that may be hundreds of years old, and sum up
generations, it may be whole ages, of a continuous process.  To trace
the successive forms of these changes, to describe the steps through
which they have passed, is like making a chart of a voyage, and laying
down the lines of continent and ocean, island and cape.  Or just as the
races of man are sorted, and their characteristics are enumerated
without reference to the various causes which have produced their
modifications, so geography and ethnography might companion
_hierography_, the delineation of "the Sacred" in its concrete
manifestations.

But behind the external evolution of a given religion, its modes of
worship, its ministers, its doctrines, lie more complicated questions.
What causes shaped these acts and moulded these beliefs?  What elements
of race are to be discerned in them?  How can we account for the
diversities between the religions of peoples belonging to a common
stock, like those of India and those of ancient Italy?  What have been
the effects of climate, of the struggle with alien peoples and new
environment?  How does the food-supply influence {30} the formation of
religious ideas?  What contacts have been felt with other races, and
what positive loans or more impalpable influences have passed from one
side to the other?  We, find here in _hierology_, the science of "the
Sacred," an analogue to the reasoning which accounts for the
distribution of land and water, the rise of mountain ranges and the
sculpture of valleys and river-beds out of the stratification of the
earth's crust, and builds up a science of geology; or which traces the
results of migration upon peoples, the consequences of inter-marriage
with other tribes, the disastrous issues of war, surveys the immense
variety of causes which have contributed to new developments of racial
energy, and arranges this knowledge in the science of ethnology.

And, lastly, the values of these facts must be estimated.  How far can
they be accepted as expressing the reality of the Unseen Power, and
man's relation to it?  Hierology may explain how men have developed
certain practices or framed certain beliefs; to determine their
reasonableness is the task of the philosophy of religion or
_hierosophy_.[4]


[4] These three terms have been suggested by Count Goblet d'Alviella,
of Brussels.



The study of "Comparative Religion" assumes that religion is already in
existence.  It deals with actual usages, which it places side by side
to see what light they can throw upon each other.  It leaves the task
of {31} formulating definitions to philosophy.  It is not concerned
with origins, and does not project itself into the prehistoric past
where conjecture takes the place of evidence.  An old miracle-play
directed Adam to pass across the stage "going to be created."  Whether
religion first appeared in the cultus of the dead, or only entered the
field after the collapse of a reign of magic which had ceased to
satisfy man's demands for help, or was born of dread and desired to
keep its gods at a distance, only remotely affects the process of
discovering and examining the resemblances of its forms, and
interpreting the forces without and within which have produced them.
The sphere of speculation has its own attractions, but in this little
book an attempt will be made to keep to facts.

Three hundred years ago Edward Herbert,[5] an Oxford scholar who played
many parts and played them well, in deep revolt against the
ecclesiastical doctrine that all the world outside the pale of the
Church was doomed to eternal damnation, devoted himself to the study of
comparative religion.  With the materials which the classics afforded
him, he examined the recorded facts among the Greeks and Romans, the
Carthaginians and Arabs, the Phrygians, the Persians, the Assyrians.
The whole fabric of human experience was built up, he argued, on
certain common knowledges or notions, which could be distinguished by
{32} specific marks, such as priority, independence, universality,
certainty, necessity for man's well-being, and immediacy.  Here were
the bases of law in relation to social order, and of religion in
relation to the Powers above man.  These principles in religion were
five: (1) that there is one supreme God; (2) that he ought to be
worshipped; (3) that virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine
worship; (4) that we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them;
(5) that divine goodness doth dispense rewards and punishments both in
this life and after it.  These truths had been implanted by the Creator
in the mind of man, and their subsequent corruption produced the
idolatries of antiquity.


[5] 1583-1648., elder brother of "Holy George Herbert."


The theory held its ground in various forms till its last echoes
appeared in highly theologic guise in the writings of Mr. Gladstone.
He pleaded that there must have been a true religion in the world
before an untrue one began to gather and incrust upon it, and this
religion included three great doctrines--the existence of the Triune
Deity, the advent of a Redeemer, and the power of the Evil One and the
defeat of the rebel angels.  These had formed part of a primeval
revelation.  In the Homeric theology he traced the first in the three
sons of Kronos--Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon.  The second he found in
Apollo, whose mother Leto represented the Woman from whom the Redeemer
should descend.  The rebel angels were equated with the Titans; {33}
the power of temptation was personified in Ate; the rainbow of the
covenant was identified with Iris.  The student of to-day can hardly
believe that this volume could have been published in the same year in
which Darwin and Wallace formulated the new scientific principle of
"natural selection" as the great agent in the formation of species, and
thus laid the foundation of the modern conception of evolution (1858).

It is on this great idea that the whole study of the history of
religion is now firmly established.  At the foundation of all
endeavours to classify the multitudinous facts which it embraces, lies
the conviction that whatever may be the occasional instances of
degeneration or decline, the general movement of human things advances
from the cruder and less complex to the more refined and developed.  In
the range of knowledge, in the sphere of the arts, in the command over
nature, in the stability and expansion of the social order, there are
everywhere signs of growth, even if isolated groups, such as the
Australians, the Todas of India, or the Veddas of Ceylon, seem to be in
the last stages of stagnation or decay.  Religion is one phase of human
culture, it expresses man's attitude to the powers around him and the
events of life.  Its various forms repose upon the unity of the race.
The anthropologist is convinced that if a new tribe is discovered in
some forest in central Africa, whether its stature be large or small,
its {34} persons will contain the same limbs as other men, and will
live by the same physical processes.  The sociologist expects that
their social groups will approximate to other known types of human
relations.  The philologist anticipates that behind the obscurities of
their speech he will find modes of thought which he can match
elsewhere.  The student of religions will in the same way be on the
look-out for customs and usages akin to those which he already knows;
he will assume that under similar conditions experience will be moulded
on similar lines, and the streams of thought and feeling--though small
causes may easily deflect their course--will tend to flow in parallel
channels as they issue from minds of the same order, and traverse
corresponding scenes.

And just as the general theory of evolution includes the unity of
bodily structure and mental faculty, so it will vindicate what may be
called the unity of the religious consciousness.  The old
classifications based on the idea that religions consisted of a body of
doctrines which must be true or false, reached by natural reflection or
imparted by supernatural revelation, disappear before a wider view.
Theologies may be many, but religion is one.  It was after this truth
that the Vedic seers were groping when they cried, "Men call him Indra,
Mitra, Varuna, Agni; sages name variously him who is but one"; or
again, "the sages in their hymns give many forms to him {35} who is but
one."  When the Roman Empire had brought under one rule the
multitudinous peoples of Western Asia, North Africa, and Southern and
Middle Europe, and new worships were carried hither and thither by
priest and missionary, soldier and merchant and slave, the titles and
attributes of the gods were freely blended and exchanged.  Thinkers of
different schools invented various modes of harmonising rival cults.
When "Jupiter best and greatest" was surrounded by a vast crowd of
lesser deities, the philosophic mind discerned a common element running
through all their worship.  "There is one Supreme God," wrote Maximus
of Madaura to Augustine, about A.D. 390, "without natural offspring,
who is, as it were, the God and Mighty Father of all.  The powers of
this Deity, diffused through the universe which he has made, we worship
under many names, as we are all ignorant of his true name.  Thus it
happens that while in diverse supplications we approach separated, as
it were, certain parts of the Divine Being, we are seen in reality to
be the worshippers of him in whom all these parts are one."  Here is
the prayer of a Blackfoot chief of our generation in the great
ceremonial of the Sun-Dance, reported by Mr. McClintock,[6] which
blends the implications of theology with the impulses and emotions of
religion--


[6] _The Old North Trail_, 1910, p. 297.


"Great Sun Power!  I am praying for my people that they may be happy in
the summer {36} and that they may live through the cold of winter.
Many are sick and in want.  Pity them and let them survive.  Grant that
they may live long and have abundance.  May we go through these
ceremonies correctly, as you taught our forefathers to do in the days
that are past.  If we make mistakes, pity us!

"Help us, Mother Earth! for we depend upon your goodness.  Let there be
rain to water the prairies, that the grass may grow long and the
berries be abundant.

"O Morning Star! when you look down upon us, give us peace and
refreshing sleep.

"Great Spirit! bless our children, friends, and visitors through a
happy life.  May our trails lie straight and level before us.  Let us
live to be old.  We are all your children, and ask these things with
good hearts."




{37}

CHAPTER II

THE PANORAMA OF RELIGIONS

Twice in the history of the world has it been possible to survey a wide
panorama of religions, and twice has the interest of travellers, men of
science, and students of philosophy, been attracted by the immense
variety of worships and beliefs.  In the second century of our era the
Roman Empire embraced an extraordinary range of nationalities within
its sway.  In the twentieth the whole history of the human race has
been thrown open to the explorer, and an overwhelming mass of materials
from every land confronts him.  It may be worth while to take a hasty
glance at the chief groups of facts that are thus disclosed, and make a
sort of map of their relations.


I

The scientific curiosity of the ancient Greeks was early awakened, and
Thales of Miletus (624-546 B.C.), chief of the seven "wise men," and
founder of Greek geometry and philosophy, was believed to have studied
under the priests of Egypt, as well as to have {38} visited Asia and
become acquainted with the Chaldean astronomy.  Still more extensive
travel was attributed to his younger contemporary Pythagoras, whose
varied learning was explained in late traditions by his sojourn east
and west, among the Persian Magi, the Indian Brahmans, and the Druids
of Gaul.  The first great record of observations is contained in the
History of Herodotus of Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor.  Born
in 484 B.C., six years after Marathon, and four years old when the
Greeks put Xerxes to flight at Salamis, he devoted his maturity to the
record of the great international struggle.  Hither and thither he
passed, collecting information, an eager student of human things.  In
Egypt he compared the gods with those of Greece, and attempted to
distinguish two sets of elements in Hellenic religion, Egyptian and
Pelasgic.  He left notes on the Babylonians and the Persians, on the
Scythians in the vast tracts east of northern Europe, on the Getæ south
of the Danube.

When the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) threw open the
gates of Asia, a stream of travellers passed into Persia and India,
whose reports were utilised by the geographers of later days.  The
religion of Zoroaster, whose name was already known to Plato, attracted
great attention.  At the court of Chandragupta on the Ganges, at the
opening of the third century B.C., Megasthenes, {39} the ambassador of
Seleucus (who had succeeded to the dominions of Alexander in Asia), set
down brief memoranda on the usages and belief of the Hindus among whom
he resided.  Nearer home the representatives of Mesopotamian and
Egyptian learning commended their national cultures to their
conquerors.  Berosus, priest of Bel in Babylon, translated into Greek a
Babylonian work on astronomy and astrology, and compiled a history of
his country from ancient documents; while his contemporary, Manetho, of
Sebennytus in the Nile Delta, undertook a similar service for his
native land.

Meanwhile the great library and schools at Alexandria had been founded.
Hither came students from many lands; and the Christian fathers
Eusebius and Epiphanius in the fourth century attributed to the
librarian of the royal patron of literature, Ptolemy Philadelphus
(285-247 B.C.), the design of collecting the sacred books of the
Ethiopians, Indians, Persians, Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians,
Romans, Phœnicians, Syrians, and Greeks.  The Jews had settled in
Alexandria in considerable numbers; they began to translate their
Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and little by little they planted their
synagogues all round the Eastern Mediterranean, and finally established
their worship in Rome.  The Egyptian deities in their turn went abroad.
The worship of Serapis was introduced at Athens.  Isis, the sister-wife
of {40} Osiris and mother of Horus, goddess of many functions--among
others of protecting sailors--was carried round the Levant to Syria,
Asia Minor, Greece, and as far north as the Hellespont and Thrace.
Westwards she was borne to Sicily and South Italy.  In due time she
entered Rome, and in spite of senatorial orders five times repeated (in
the first century B.C.), to tear down her altars and statues, she
secured her place, and received homage all through the West from the
outskirts of the Sahara to the Roman wall north of our own Tyne.

The introduction of Greek gods had begun centuries before.  As early as
493 B.C., at a time of serious famine, a temple had been built to
Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephonê; many others followed; resemblances
among the native gods quickly led to identifications; and new forms of
worship tended to displace the old.  After another crisis (206 B.C.)
the "Great Mother," Cybelê, the Phrygian goddess of Mount Ida, was
imported.  The black aerolite which was supposed to be her abode, was
presented by King Attalus to the ambassadors of the Roman senate.  The
goddess was solemnly welcomed at the Port of Ostia, and was ultimately
carried by noble Roman ladies on to the Palatine hill.

The history of later days was full of notes upon religion.  Cæsar
interspersed them among the narratives of his campaigns in Gaul;
Tacitus drew on his recollections as {41} an officer in active service
for his description of the Germans.  There was as yet no literature in
Wales or Ireland to embody the Celtic traditions; and the Scandinavian
Saga was unborn.  But the geographers, like Strabo (first century
A.D.), collected a great deal of material that must have been gathered
ultimately from travellers, soldiers, traders, and slaves.  A wise and
gentle philosophic Greek, Plutarch of Chæronea in Bœotia (A.D.
46-120), student at the university of Athens, lecturer on philosophy at
Rome, and finally priest of Pythian Apollo in his native city, is at
home in many religions.  Beside altars to the Greek gods Dionysus,
Herakles, and Artemis, in his own streets, were those of the Egyptian
Isis and Anubis.  The treatise on Isis and Osiris (commonly ascribed to
him) is an early essay in comparative religion.  In the latter half of
the second century the traveller Pausanias passes through Greece,
describing its sacred sites, noting its monuments, recording
mythological traditions, and observing archaic rites.  In this
fascinating guide-book to religious practice are survivals of ancient
savagery, still lingering at country shrines, set down with curious
unconsciousness of their significance.  The historical method is as yet
only in its infancy.  But Pausanias rightly discerned that its first
business is to know the facts.

In Rome, where ritual tradition held its ground with extraordinary
tenacity amid the {42} decay of belief, Marcus Terentius Varro,
renowned for his wide learning (116-28 B.C.), devoted sixteen books of
his great treatise on Antiquities to "Divine Things."  Like so many
other precious works of ancient literature it has disappeared, but its
contents are partly known through its use by St. Augustine in his
famous work on "The City of God."  Following a division of the gods by
the chief pontiff Mucius Scævola, he treated religion under three
heads.  In the form presented by the poets' tales of the gods it was
mythical.  Founded by the philosophers upon nature (_physis_) it was
physical.  As administered by priests and practised in cities it was
civil.  It was an old notion that religion was a legal convention
imposed by authority for purposes of popular control; and Varro does
not disdain to declare it expedient that States should be deceived in
such matters.  This police-notion long regulated public custom, and
tended to render the identification of deities presenting superficial
resemblances all the more easy.

By this time the origin of the term "religion" had begun to excite
interest, as its meaning began slowly to change.  Varro's
contemporaries, Cicero (106-43 B.C.) and Lucretius (about 97-53),
discussed its derivation.  Cicero connected it with the root _legere_,
to "string together," to "arrange"; while Lucretius found its origin in
_ligare_, to "bind."  Philology gives little help when it {43} speaks
with uncertain voice.  More important is the primitive meaning which
Mr. Warde Fowler defines as "the feeling of awe, anxiety, doubt, or
fear, which is aroused in the mind by something that cannot be
explained by a man's experience or by the natural course of cause and
effect, and which is therefore referred to the supernatural."  It has
nothing to do at the outset with any special rites or doctrines.  It is
not concerned with state-usage or with priestly law.  In its adjectival
form "religious days" or "religious places" are not days or places
consecrated by official practice; they are days and places which have
gathered round them man's sentiments of awe and scruple.  The word thus
came to be applied to anything that was in some way a source or
embodiment of mysterious forces.  The naturalist Pliny can even say
that no animal is "more full of religion than the mole," because
strange medicinal powers were supposed to reside in its heart and teeth.

But, on the other hand, a new use of it passes into Roman literature in
the writings of Cicero.  The feeling of awe still lies in the
background, but the word takes on a reference to the acts which it
prompts, and thus comes to denote the whole group of rites performed in
honour of some divine being.  These make up a particular cult or
worship, ordained and sanctioned by authority or tradition.  "Religion"
thus comes to mean a body of religious duties, the entire series of
sacred acts in which {44} the primitive feeling is expressed.  Roman
antiquity conceived these as under the care of priesthoods, legitimated
by the State.  Around them lay a fringe of superstitions, which a
hostile critic like Lucretius could also sum up under the same term.
And thus in an age when philosophy was addressing itself to the whole
question of man's relation to the world and its unseen Rulers, and a
single word was wanted to describe his attitude to the varied
spectacle, "religion" was at hand to fill the place.  It covered the
whole field of human experience, and as different nations presented it
in different forms, it became possible to speak of "religions" in the
sense of separate systems of worship and belief.  The champion of
Christianity naturally distinguished his religion as the true from the
false; and over against the multiformity of polytheism he set the unity
of the faith of the Church.

Of these "religions" history and philosophy sought to give some
account.  As will be seen hereafter (Chap. VI), Babylon and Egypt both
claimed a divine origin for their rites, their arts, and laws.
Plutarch expressly defends the idea of revelation in the cases of Minos
of Crete, the Persian Zoroaster, Zaleucus the shepherd legislator of
the Locrians, Numa of Rome, and others.  Pan was in love with Pindar,
and Æsculapius conversed with Sophocles: if such divine diversions were
allowed, how much more should these greater {45} attempts for human
welfare be prompted from heaven!  Numa had been enabled through Camena
Egeria to regulate the ceremonial law as priest-king, and pontiffs,
augurs, flamens, virgins, received their duties from him with
supernatural sanctions.

Philosophers, on the other hand, discussed the meaning of religion upon
different lines.  A wide-spread view already noted presented it as a
mere instrument of policy, devised to overawe the intractable.  The
diversity of religions seemed to support this view.  Plato's Athenian,
in one of his latest works, the Laws, mentions the teaching of sophists
who averred that the gods existed not by nature but by art, and by the
laws of States which are different in different places, according to
the agreement of those who make them.  In a fragment of a drama on
Sisyphus ascribed to Critias, the friend of Alcibiades, it was alleged
that in the primeval age of disorder and violence laws might strike
crimes committed in open day, but could not touch secret sins, hidden
in the gloomy depths of conscience.  A sage advised that to moralise
men they must be made afraid.  Let them invent gods who could see and
hear all things, cognisant not only of all human actions but also of
men's inmost thoughts and purposes.  They were accordingly connected
with the source of the most terrifying and the most beneficent
phenomena, the sky, home alike of thunder and lightning, of the shining
sun and fertilising {46} rain, seat of divine powers helpful and
hurtful to mankind.  In the discussion on "the Nature of the Gods" (by
Cicero), Cotta, of the Academic school, inquires of his Epicurean
opponent Velleius, "What think you of those who have asserted that the
whole doctrine concerning the immortal gods was the invention of
politicians, whose notion was to govern that part of the community
which reason could not influence, by religion?"

From another point of view, however, the practical universality of
religion was again and again cited in proof of its truth.  Antiquity
was not scientific in its method of treatment, and though it did not
accept all religions as altogether equal, it had no difficulty in
regarding them as substantially homogeneous.  The Egyptian worship of
animals might be lashed with satiric scorn, but the mysteries of its
religion, venerable from an immemorial past, deserved the highest
respect.  The process of identification of the gods of different
religions was always going on as they were carried from land to land.
The Apologist, therefore, like the Cretan Cleinias in Plato's _Laws_
when the Athenian stranger asked him to prove the existence of the
gods, could always appeal to two main arguments--first, the fair order
of the universe and the regularity of the seasons, and secondly, the
common belief of all men, both Hellenes and barbarians.  This common
belief, however, itself required explanation.  Its value {47} really
depended on its origin.  If that ranked no higher than the crouching
impulses of fear, it had little worth.  Even if it was sought in the
sense of dependence, in quiet trust in a sheltering order, or in
intelligent inference based on the demand for a cause, the question
still pressed for an answer, "What made this possible?"  The answer was
given by the doctrine of the _Logos_.

The term _logos_ has played a famous part in philosophical theology.
It appears in our New Testament at the opening of the fourth Gospel,
"In the beginning was the Logos."  Our translators render the Greek
term by the English "Word."  It is derived from the verb _legein_, to
"speak" or "say."  _Logos_ is primarily "what is said," utterance, or
speech.  Speech, however, must mean something.  When we look out upon
the objects of the world around us--rock, river, tree, horse, star--we
learn to separate them into groups, because while some say quite
different things to us, others speak to us, as it were, with nearly the
same meaning.  We recognise a common meaning in various sorts of dogs,
or in still larger classes such as the whole family of birds.  But in
human intercourse what is said has first been thought.  _Logos_ thus
takes on another meaning; it is what thinking says _to itself_, or what
we call "reason."  The processes of science consist in finding out
these meanings or reasons, and getting them into intelligible relations
with each other.  {48} And when the early Greek thinkers had reached
the conception of the unity of the world, here was a term which could
be called in to express it.  The world must have a meaning; it must
express some thought.  And did not thought imply thinking?

The philosophy of Heracleitus "the Obscure" (at Ephesus, 500 B.C.) has
received in modern times widely different interpretations; but whether
or not the Stoics were right in understanding his doctrine of the Logos
to imply the existence of a cosmic reason universally diffused, present
both in nature and man, it is certain that such ideas appear soon
afterwards in Greek literature.  Pindar affirms the derivation of the
soul from the gods.  Plato and Euripides declare the intelligence of
man both in nature and origin to be divine; and Pseudo-Epicharmus lays
it down (in the second half of the fifth century) that "there is in man
understanding, and there is also a divine Logos; but the understanding
of man is born from the divine Logos."  On this basis the Stoics worked
out the conception of a fellowship between man and God which explained
the universality of religion.  Its seat was in human nature.  Every one
shared in the Generative Reason, the Seminal Word (the _Logos
spermatikos_).  In the long course of ages, says Cicero, when the time
arrived for the sowing of the human race, God quickened it with the
gift of souls.  So we possess a certain kinship with the heavenly {49}
Powers; and while among all the kinds of animals Man alone retains any
idea of Deity, among men themselves there is no nation so savage as not
to admit the necessity of believing in a God, however ignorant they may
be what sort of God they ought to believe in.

The part played by this doctrine in the early Church is well known.
When the new faith began to attract the attention of the educated, it
was impossible that the resemblances between Christian and Hellenic
monotheism should be ignored.  Philosophy had reached many of the same
truths, and poets and sages bore the same witness to the unity and
spirituality of God as the prophets and psalmists of Israel.  It was
easy to suggest that the Hebrew seers had been the teachers of the
Greek; might not Plato, for instance, have learned of Jeremiah in
Egypt?  On the other hand, the pleas of chronological and literary
dependence might be insufficient; there were radical differences as
well as resemblances; the Apologist might deride the diversities of
opinion and make merry over the contradictions of the schools.
Nevertheless Christianity was often presented by its defenders as "our
philosophy."  The Latin writer Minucius Felix (in the second century)
is so much struck by the parallels in the higher thought that he boldly
declares, "One might think either that Christians are now philosophers,
or that philosophers were then already Christian."  The martyr Justin
(about {50} A.D. 150) incorporates such teachings into the scheme of
Providence by the aid of the Logos.  For Justin, as for his
co-believers, the popular religion was the work of demons.  But
philosophy had combated them in the past like the new faith.  If
Socrates had striven to deliver men from them, and they had compassed
his death through evil men, it was because the Logos condemned their
doings among the Greeks through him, just as among the barbarians they
were condemned by the Logos in the person of Christ.  The great truths
of God and Providence, of the unity of the moral government of the
world, of the nature and destiny of man, of freedom, virtue, and
retribution, which were to be found in the writings of the wisest of
the past, were the product of "the seed of the Logos implanted in every
race of men."  Those who had lived with the Logos were Christians
before Christ, though men might have called them atheists, like
Heracleitus and Socrates.  All noble utterances in theology or
legislation arose through partial discovery or contemplation of the
Logos, and consequently Justin could boldly claim "whatever things have
been rightly said among all men" as "the property of us Christians."

The cultivated and mystical Clement, who became head of the
catechetical school of Alexandria towards the close of the second
century, enforced the same theme.  An enormous reader, he loved to
compare the {51} truths enunciated by Greek poets and philosophers with
the wisdom of the barbarians.  Philosophy, indeed, was a special
historical manifestation of thought along a peculiar line of
development.  It affected a particular race, it spread over a distinct
area, and appeared in a definite time.  In these respects it resembled
the preparatory work of Israel itself.  It was a discipline of
Providence, so that beside the generalisation of St. Paul that the Law
had been a tutor to bring the Jews to Christ, Clement could set
another, that philosophy had played the same part for the Greeks.  On
the field of common speech Clement's contemporary, the fiery Tertullian
of Carthage, appealed to the worshipper who bore the garland of Ceres
on his brow, or walked in the purple cloak of Saturn, or wore the white
robe of Egyptian Isis--what did he mean by exclaiming "May God repay!"
or "God shall judge between us?"  Here was a recognition of a supreme
authority and power, the "testimony of a soul naturally Christian."

Such comparisons, however, had a very different side.  Greece had long
had its secret mysteries, with their sacred initiations, their rites of
purity and enlightenment, their promises of welfare beyond the grave.
When the new deities from Asia Minor, from Egypt, Syria, and the
further East, were brought to Italy, the resemblances of their practice
to that of the Christian Church excited the {52} believer's alarm, and
roused at once the charge of plagiarism.  There was a congregation of
Mithra at Rome as early as 67 B.C., and towards the end of the first
century of our era his mysteries began to be widely spread.  Here was a
baptism; here was a "sacrament" as the neophyte took the oath on
entering the warfare with evil; here were grades of soldiership and
service; here were oblations of bread and water mingled with wine which
were naturally compared with the Lord's supper; here were doctrines of
deliverance from sin, of judgment after death and ascent to heaven,
which brought the theology and practice of Mithraism very close to that
of the Church.  So Mithra bore the august titles of the holy and
righteous God; or he was the Mediator, author of order in nature and of
victory in life between the ultimate powers of good and evil.

For a time the rivalry was acute, as his worship was carried through
the West as far as York and Chester and the Tyne.  But with the triumph
of Christianity in the fourth century the sounds of conflict die away.
The men of learning, Eusebius of Cæsarea (about A.D. 260-340),
Augustine (A.D. 354-430) bishop of Hippo, surveyed the religions and
philosophies of antiquity as conquerors.  The faiths of Egypt,
Phœnicia, Greece, and Rome, are passed in review.  With a broad
sweep of learning Eusebius comments on the ancient mythologies, the
oracles, the theory of demons, {53} the practice of human sacrifice,
the history of Mosaism.  His treatise on the "Preparation for the
Gospel" is the first great work on comparative religion which issued
out of Christian theology.  With generous recognition of what lay
beyond the Church he taught (in the _Theophania_) that all higher
culture was due to participation in the Logos.  Idolatry might be the
work of demons; the world might be filled with the babblings of
philosophers and the follies of poets; but the Logos had been
continuously present, sowing in the hearts of men the rudiments of the
divine laws, of various orders of teaching, of doctrines of every kind.
Thus ethics, art, science, and the fairest products of human thought,
were genially brought within the scope of Revelation.


II

The panorama of religions unrolled before the student of the present
day is far vaster than that which offered itself to the thinkers of
Greece and Rome, and its meaning is far better understood.  When
Pausanias describes the daily sacrifice to a hero at Tronis in Phocis,
where the blood of the victim was poured down through a hole in the
grave to the dead man within, while the flesh was eaten on the spot, he
notes, like the careful author of a guide-book, a curious local usage,
but he does not know that it belongs to a group of {54} savage
practices that may be traced all round the globe.  On Mount Lycæus in
Arcadia, he tells us, was a spring which flowed with equal quantity in
summer as in winter.  In time of drought the priest of Lycæan Zeus,
after due prayer and sacrifice, would dip an oak-branch into the
surface of the spring, and a mist-like vapour would rise and become a
cloud.  In the midst of Hellenic culture it was still possible, as
among the negroes of West Africa or the Indians of North America, to
make rain.

From continent to continent a multitude of observers have gathered an
immense range of facts, which show that amid numerous differences in
detail the religions of the lower culture may all be ranked together on
the basis of a common interpretation of the surrounding world.
Philosophy suggests that man can only explain nature in terms of his
own experience.  He is encompassed by powers that are continually
acting on him, as he to a much smaller extent can in his turn act on
them.  By various processes of observation and reflection (p. 85), he
comes to the conclusion that within his body lives something which
enables it to move and feel and think and will, until at death it goes
away.  To this mysterious something many names are given, and for
purposes of modern study they are all ranked under the term "spirits."
This explanation is then applied to the behaviour of all kinds of
objects within {55} his view; though it does not at all follow that
this was actually the first explanation.  The animals that are stronger
and more cunning than himself, the trees that move in the wind, the
corn that grows so mysteriously, the bubbling spring, even the things
that he himself has made, his weapons, tools, and jars, all have their
"spirits," so that the entire scene of his existence is pervaded by
them.  To this doctrine, with its many branches of belief and practice,
Sir E. B. Tylor, in his classical work on _Primitive Culture_ (1871),
gave the name of "Animism," and the religions founded upon it are
called "animistic," or sometimes, from the multitude of unorganised
spirits which they recognise, "polydæmonistic" religions.

Such religions belong to no specific ethnic group.  They appear either
in existing practice or in the shape of occasional survivals in all of
the three great racial divisions of mankind--the white or Caucasic, the
yellow or Mongolian, and the black or Negroid.  They are to be found
under the Equator and among the Arctic snows.  They are sometimes
associated with a peculiar form of social structure regulating
inter-tribal relations known as _totemism_.  It was at one time
supposed that this designated a stage of evolution through which all
peoples had passed.  The totem or clan-sign, whether animal or plant,
or more rarely an inanimate object like wind, sun, or star, was
supposed to have {56} become an object of worship, and various theories
were invented to explain the divisions and subdivisions of the clans,
and the selection of their special signs.  Hence, it was argued, came
the cultus of beast and bird and tree; hence the altar and the idol;
hence the animal sacrifice and the sacramental meal.  In clever hands
it supplied a universal key.  The extraordinary intricacy of the
subject, and the widely scattered character of the evidence, prevent
any discussion here.  But the most recent researches have not sustained
these attempts.  Among the Central Australian tribes the totems are not
worshipped, they are in no sense deities, no prayers or sacrifices are
offered to them.  They may be brought into the sphere of religion in
some tribes as part of a social order to which a superhuman origin is
ascribed (p. 171).  But totemism cannot be established as the typical
form of "primitive religion" any more than any other complicated
system.  Its general diffusion is questionable.  At the present day
there are large areas over which no signs of totemic organisation are
found; and many phenomena which were formerly assumed to be proofs of
totemism in the higher religions of antiquity, in Egypt, Greece, and
Italy, now receive other explanations.

The higher forms of animistic religion pass out into polytheisms of
more or less dignity.  They do not succeed in embodying themselves in
permanent literary product, they create no {57} scriptures or sacred
books.  They have their rude chants, their songs for weddings and
funerals, their genealogies and tales of ancient heroes.  Strange
cosmogonies float from island to island in Polynesia.  The Finnic
peoples enshrined their faith in the ballads collected under the name
of the Kalevala.  Among the Indians of North America speculation is
sometimes highly elaborated in mythologic tradition; and out of the
fusion of nationalities in Mexico rose a developed polytheism in which
lofty religious sentiment seems strangely blended with a hideous and
sanguinary ritual.  Peru, no less, presented to the Spanish conquerors
bewildering and incongruous aspects.  In these two cultures native
American civilisation reached its highest forms.  In Mexico the
apparatus of religion was very minutely organised.  There were immense
temples, which required large numbers of priests and servitors.  The
capital alone is said to have contained 2000 sacred buildings, and the
great temple had a staff of 5000 priests.  There were religious orders
and temple-schools; rites of baptism and circumcision; feasts and
sacrifices and sacraments, in which the monkish chroniclers found
strange parallels to their own practice.  The issues of victory were
disastrous.  With the death of the last Aztec emperor (1520) the doom
of the old gods was assured, and the Inquisition (1571) completed what
the sword of Cortes had begun.

{58}

In the old world Asia has been the mother of religions, but various
fates have befallen her offspring.  The ancient cults of Babylonia,
after an existence longer than the period from Moses to the present
day, vanished from the scene.  The teachings of Zoroaster were planted
in China in A.D. 621, and a temple was erected at the capital, Changan;
but the Persian faith could not maintain itself in such a different
culture.  After the Mohammedan conquest in the eighth century it was
finally carried by a little band of exiles into India, and is still
cherished by their descendants who bear the name of Parsees.  The Jew
and the Christian have only a precarious toleration in the land which
was once their home.  In India and in China alone is the religion of
to-day linked in unbroken continuity with the distant past.  Islam may
set itself in lineal succession to the teachers of old, and claim a
place for Mohammed in the sequence of Abraham, Moses, and Christ.  But
it is the youngest, and in some respects the least original, of the
world's great faiths.

India has its own panorama of religions, from the animistic practice of
the tribes of the jungle and the hills, up to the refined pantheism of
the philosophical school.  Diversities of race have been strangely
intermingled, and fifty languages make it impossible to secure any
uniformity of culture.  There are the descendants of the ancient
inhabitants who occupied the country before {59} the Aryan ancestors of
the Hindus settled themselves upon the fertile lands.  They are
represented to-day by the wild tribes of Central India such as the
Bhils and Gonds.  Some ten million probably profess a religion of a
well-marked animistic type.  But this also lies at the base of
wide-spread popular belief and custom, where the propitiation of
spirits, the cultus of Mother Earth, and the veneration of village
deities, engage much more attention than the higher gods of Hinduism.

The literary foundation of the religions of India lies in the ancient
hymns of the Rig Veda, sung by the immigrant Aryans as they entered
from the North-west and gradually established themselves in the Ganges
valley.  These hymns were addressed to gods of earth and air and sky;
they celebrated the glories of dawn and day; they told of the conflict
between sunshine and storm; they praised Agni, the god of fire,
messenger between heaven and earth, himself as agent of the sacrifice a
kind of priest among the gods; they commemorated the dead who passed
into the upper world and adorned the sky with stars.  Already in some
of the later hymns the poet's thought endeavoured to find some
principle or power that should unite these different agencies as
manifestations of one ultimate reality; and philosophic imagination at
length fixed on the conception of Brahman, a term whose original
meaning {60} seems to hover between that of sacred spell and prayer.
Viewed in a personal aspect (Brahma) as a god of popular worship, he
could be described as "Lord of all, the Maker, the Creator, Father of
all that are and are to be."[1]  But behind this sovereign ruler
metaphysical abstraction placed a neuter Brahma, all-embracing, the
ground of all existence, summed up in three terms--Being, Thought, and
Bliss.  Here was the ultimate Self of the whole universe; and to know
the identity of the human self with the Absolute, to be able to repeat
the mysterious words _tat tvam asi_, "that art thou," was the aim of
the forest-sages and the highest attainment of holy insight.


[1] So in the early Buddhist texts describing the popular religion.
Many new forms appear in these documents.


Meantime the social order was acquiring the first forms of caste.  The
priests and the fighting men, the people who settled on the lands for
pasture and tillage, and the tribes of aborigines whom they
dispossessed and subdued, formed the basis of divisions which were
gradually multiplied with extraordinary complexity.  A religious
authority was found for the whole system in the teachings of the Veda,
and to contest its claims was to defy the power which slowly spread
with subtle hold through the whole peninsula.  By its side arose the
doctrine of the Deed (_karma_, p. 217), which explained the varied
conditions of human life by the principle that {61} "a man is born into
the world that he has made."  The lot of each individual had a moral
meaning: it was the result of previous conduct, good or ill.  This is
the conception embodied in the word "transmigration."  It pictures man
as involved in a continuous series of births and deaths, and religion
and philosophy undertook in their several ways to secure him a
favourable destiny hereafter, or by various means of divine grace, or
strenuous self-discipline, or pious contemplation, to extricate him
altogether from the weary round of ignorance and pain.

Out of these elements, a crude and ever-varying animism at the bottom,
a highly refined metaphysical pantheism at the top, figures of
incarnation and deliverance, the cultus of the dead, caste, and
transmigration, the complex strands of modern Hinduism have been woven.
Many have been the growths upon the way.  The early Buddhist texts,
representing the society of the "Middle Country," show already in the
fifth century B.C. a surprising activity of speculation, busily engaged
in questioning every received doctrine of religion and morals.  Some
forms held their ground for a few centuries and then disappeared.  One
religious community of that date alone survives, viz. the Jains, who
still number about a million and a third.  Buddhism, after sending out
its missionaries into Ceylon in the south and China in the north, was
driven from its ancient seats, and {62} only some 300,000 hold its
creed in India itself.  In Burma, however, it numbers between ten and
eleven million lay adherents, and in the adjacent kingdom of Siam it
has 13,000 temples, and more than 93,000 mendicants have taken its vows.

But Hinduism still lives on with a marvellous and self-renewing power.
Two great divine figures have been set beside the original creative
Brahma, representatives of the forces that preserve and destroy, Vishnu
and Çiva (p. 128).  Vishnu succeeded to the place of the Buddha; and
Hindu religion gave prominence in him to the conception of a Divine
Person who out of love for man assumed human shape to conquer evil and
establish truth.  The worship of Çiva has been carried everywhere by
the Brahmans; if he destroys, he also reproduces; he, too, appears to
bless and help, and the Tamil poets of South India in the early Middle
Ages sang his praises in hymns that still feed the piety of the people.
Again and again reforming teachers have initiated movements on behalf
of spiritual religion.  Their followers have multiplied and broken up
into sects, but still remain within the general area of the ancestral
faith, which now embraces considerably more than 200 million souls.
The disciples of Nānak (1469-1538), however, known as Sīkhs,
formed into a semi-military organisation by the Guru Gobind "the Lion"
(1675-1708), retain their religious independence, {63} touching
Hinduism on one side and Mohammedanism on the other.  They number at
the present day more than two millions, and are found almost
exclusively in the Punjab.

China, like India, illustrates the principle of religious continuity.
Its earliest historic date is fixed by an eclipse in 776 B.C.; and the
traditions of its dynasties stretch more than a thousand years beyond.
The ancient religion depicted in the books known as the _Shu_ and the
_Shî Kings_, which Confucius (550-478 B.C.) was supposed to have edited
out of much older documents, rested upon the solemn order of the living
Heaven and Earth, with multitudinous ranks of associated spirits, and
the generations of the dead.  This has remained the formal basis of the
national religion (p. 97).  Meanwhile the ethical sayings of Confucius
acquired extraordinary ascendency.  They formed the chief element in
the national education, and supplied the ideals of popular culture.
Carried into Japan in the sixth century of our era, they filled a gap
in the old Japanese teaching, which we know by the name of Shin-To or
"Spirits' way."  Confucius himself became the object of general
commemorative homage; and annual ceremonies are still celebrated in his
honour with great splendour in the Confucian temples which adorn every
city within the empire above a certain rank.[2]


[2] These are at present in danger, like other public forms of Chinese
State Religion, of being rudely abolished.


{64}

In the popular religion demonology and magic play a constant part, and
numerous growths out of the worship of ancestors provide ever fresh
additions to the higher ranks of spirits.  These are regulated by
decrees of the Board of Rites, one of the most ancient religious
institutions in China.  The spirit of a departed governor, perhaps two
centuries ago, is believed to have appeared in time of flood, and by
his beneficent influence dangers have been averted.  Memorials are sent
up to Peking by the local authorities, and after repeated
manifestations divine honours are awarded.  Beneath these august
personages are the spirits which preside over the trades and
professions, over the parts of a house--the door, the bed, or the
kitchen range--over the breeding of domestic animals, and a large
variety of occupations, to say nothing of medicine and disease, the
limbs of the body, and the stars.  They are analogous to the Kami, the
equivalent powers in Japan (p. 91); and they are not without parallel
in religions further west.

Half a century before Confucius, in 604, was born another sage, known
in history as Lao Tsze.  Fragments of his teaching are embodied in a
small book of aphorisms, concerned with the doctrine of the Tao, the
way, the path, or course.  In nature this corresponded to the ordered
round of the seasons, and the regularities which we call laws.  In man
it might be seen in the line of right {65} conduct, and the inner
principles which pointed to it.  On this conception, which was much
older than Lao Tsze himself, a kind of metaphysical mysticism was
reared by later disciples, not without affinities with some aspects of
the Brahmanical philosophy.  They have been explained by suggestions of
travel and contact which more careful study cannot justify.  The
religion of the Tao (whence the name Taoism) could never have been
popular had it not become strangely entangled with alchemy and
transformed under the influence of its later rival, Buddhism, from
which it derived much both in ritual, in ethics, and in doctrine.

The statements about the appearance of Buddhist teachers and Buddhist
books in China before our era have been much disputed: the first
trustworthy record relates that in the year A.D. 65, a deputation of
eighteen persons was sent to Khotan to make inquiries, and they
returned two years later with books and images and a teacher.  A second
teacher arrived shortly after, a temple was built at the imperial
capital, Lo-Yang, and the laborious work of translation was begun.  A
stream of missionaries, Hindus, Parthians, Huns, slowly flowed into the
Flowery Land, "moved," says the chronicler, "by the desire to convert
the world."  After a while the Chinese students sought the holy places
in India, and learned Sanskrit at the great Buddhist university at
Nalanda, near Buddha {66} Gaya.  Vast collections of sacred literature
were gathered.  The first Chinese catalogue, dated A.D. 520, enumerates
2,213 distinct works.  Twelve successive revisions were made under
imperial order, and to the last, in 1737, the Emperor himself,
following the example of some of his predecessors, contributed a
preface.

Opposed again and again by the Confucian _literati_, its temples
destroyed, its religious houses suppressed, its monks and nuns driven
back into the world, Buddhism has still lived on.  It has created
impressive devotions, and generated numerous sects.  It has spread
through Corea, Mongolia, and Japan; on the west it is planted in Tibet.
It has exercised immense influence on Chinese culture; architecture,
art and letters being all deeply indebted to it.  In numerical
estimates of different religions common in the last century Buddhism
always headed the list, for the whole population of China--vaguely
reckoned at 400,000,000--was included in its fold.  Such estimates are
no longer trustworthy.[3]  The ancestral cultus of the dead under the
shelter of Confucianism, the rites of Taoist and of Buddhist priests,
are strangely blended.  The incidents of life from birth to death are
never completed without help from one or other of the two faiths once
rivals, and now {67} so curiously intertwined.  As early as the sixth
century a famous Buddhist scholar Fu Hhi was asked by the Emperor Wu-ti
if he was a Buddhist, and he pointed to his Taoist cap.  "Are you a
Taoist?" he showed his Confucian shoes.  "Are you a Confucian?" he wore
a Buddhist scarf.  When the Abbé Hue made his famous journey two
generations ago, he observed that when strangers met, politeness
required that each should ask his neighbour, "To what sublime religion
do you belong?"  The first might be a Confucian, the second a Taoist,
the third a disciple of the Buddha.  Each would then begin to commend
the religion not his own, and they would conclude by saying, "Religions
are many, reason is one, we are all brothers."  It was the maxim of Lu
Shun Yang (a distinguished Buddhist) centuries ago that "the teaching
of the sects is not different.  The large-hearted man regards them as
embodying the same truths.  The narrow-minded man observes only their
differences."


[3] The latest official estimate, February 1911, based on a reckoning
of families, gives 312,400,590 for the total Chinese people.


Yet another great religion, the latest born among the higher faiths of
the world, has established itself in both India and China.  The first
Mohammedan invasion of India took place in A.D. 664.  The followers of
the prophet are now reckoned at more than 66 millions.  In 628 Mohammed
himself sent his uncle to China with presents to the Emperor.  He
travelled by sea to Canton, where the first mosque was afterwards
built.  {68} Good observers number the Mohammedans in China to-day at
30 millions, mostly in the north and west; and it is supposed that
there are about as many more in the Malay Archipelago.  In Africa,
especially among the negroes of the west, their numbers have increased
enormously in the last century, and some two-fifths of the
multitudinous peoples of the Dark Continent, 80 millions out of 200,
are believed to live in the obedience of Islam.

Islam, resignation or submission to the will of God, was the name given
to his religion by the prophet himself, who died in A.D. 632.  But in
the hands of his first followers submission was no passive virtue.
Tradition ascribed to him the idea of addressing all known sovereigns,
and promising them safety if they accepted the faith.  His successors,
therefore, conceived that the fulfilment of Allah's will demanded a
resolute effort to make known the new revelation.  A fierce burst of
missionary effort carried the Moslem armies far and wide.  In the year
of Mohammed's death they attacked Persia and Syria; a few years later
they invaded Egypt.  Within the first century they had entered India,
and had swept through north Africa into Spain.  But they had twice been
obliged to retreat from Constantinople, and in 732 they were defeated
on the Loire by Charles Martel near Tours, and forced to retire behind
the Pyrenees.

With the same astonishing energy they {69} created centres of culture
from Baghdad to Cordova.  Through Syriac versions of Aristotle's works
Arabian teachers carried Greek philosophy into Western Europe when the
light of ancient learning had grown dim.  The contact with new thought
stimulated theological discussion, and the Moslem had to justify
himself against the Christian, the Zoroastrian, the Manichæan and the
Buddhist.  Above the simple ritual demands of the prophet, the recital
of the creed--"There is no god but God (Allah), Mohammed is the apostle
of God"--the observance of prayer five times daily, the annual fast in
the month of Ramadhān, the bestowal of alms, and the pilgrimage to
Mecca, arose the debates of the schools and the divisions of sects.
The nature of the divine attributes, and their relation to the being or
essence of the Deity, the problems of predestination and free will, of
reason and revelation, excited eager interest.  Beside the Koran vast
numbers of traditions concerning religious life and practice were
gradually put in circulation, and in the third century after Mohammed's
death they were reduced to writing in six great collections.  To these
sources of truth and rules of conduct the jurists and theologians added
two others: agreement or universal consent, where beliefs and practices
are generally received though not specially sanctioned by the Koran or
tradition; and analogy, by which a doctrine or usage may be accepted as
valid because {70} of its resemblance to something legitimated by
revelation.

Like the higher religions of India, like Judaism in its long and
chequered career whether in Palestine or in the Dispersion, like the
"universal religions" of Buddhism and Christianity, Mohammedanism has
known how to accommodate itself to very different levels of culture.
In the Arabian deserts much of the earlier animism still remains.  It
is not rudely expelled either at the present day as Islam advances
through Africa.  Other impulses have worked in different directions.
There are religious orders and mendicant ascetics.  There are mystical
schools of refined spirituality, to which the influences of
Neo-platonism, of Christianity, and Buddhism, have all contributed.
Sūfiism (as this type of thought is called) was fed from various
sources, and has assumed different forms in different countries, but
its best-known literary products came from the great poets of Persia.

From that subtle race issues the most remarkable movement which modern
Mohammedanism has produced.  In 1844 a young man not twenty-five years
of age, named Ali Mohammed, of Shiraz, appeared under the title of the
"Bab" or Gate.  Disciples gathered round him, and the movement was not
checked by his arrest, his imprisonment for nearly six years, and his
final execution in 1850.  Thirteen years later one of his disciples
named Bahá-ullah, "Splendour of God," announced {71} himself as "He
whom God shall manifest," whose advent the Bab had foretold.  Exiled to
Acre, he died in 1892, and was succeeded in the leadership by his son
Abbas Efendi.  The new faith declared that there was no finality in
revelation, and while recognising the Koran as a product of past
revelation, claimed to embody a new manifestation of the divine Unity.
Carried to Chicago in 1893 by a Bâbî merchant, it succeeded in
establishing itself in the United States; and its missionaries are
winning new adherents in India.  It, too, claims to be a universal
teaching; it has already its noble army of martyrs and its holy books;
has Persia, in the midst of her miseries, given birth to a religion
which will go round the world?




{72}

CHAPTER III

RELIGION IN THE LOWER CULTURE

Religion presents itself in its most obvious form as a mode of
activity.  It is seen in some kind of behaviour; it prompts a
particular sort of conduct.  Behind the customs and rites which are its
visible sign lie certain thoughts and feelings, often dim, indistinct,
obscure.  In the totality of its beliefs, emotions, and institutions,
it is as much the product of the human spirit as poetry, or art,
science, morals, and law.  It will therefore always bear some kind of
relation to the general circumstances of the social development to
which it belongs.  The interpretation of the surrounding scene which is
implied in its intellectual outlook will vary with the elements of the
scene itself.  But the limits of variation are much smaller than might
be expected.  The questions "why" and "how" may be answered very
differently under the Equator and within the Arctic zone, but they are
the same questions, and spring from common impulses of thought.
Moreover, while race, climate, and economic conditions may all vary, it
happens to all men to be born {73} and to die.  The family must be
maintained, children must be reared, food must be procured, the tribal
group must preserve its stability and, if possible, increase.  There
are universal elements in human life all over the globe; and the
manifestations of religion founded upon them exhibit in consequence
marked resemblances from land to land.

Religion always implies some kind of want.  The young husband wants
male children, the hunter game, the warrior victory, the diviner the
knowledge of secrets, the saint holiness.  The wants may be crude or
refined, the satisfaction of a physical appetite, protection against
some anticipated danger, the realisation of an exalted spiritual
fellowship.  But religion suggests that there is some Power capable of
satisfying these wants, and undertakes to provide the means for setting
man in proper relations with it.  All round him are the objects and
forces of the visible world.  He learns by degrees that some help him
to gratify his desires, and others hinder them.  There are many things
that he cannot understand, and some of which he dimly feels that he
must not presume to try: he is only conscious towards them of a strange
wonder and awe; they are uncanny; he cannot bring them into his
experience; he must not meddle with them, he must keep away.  But other
things are more kindly, and fulfil his hopes.

Out of such vague consciousness he gradually frames a working method.
Some sort {74} of theory is at length established after many trials,
concerning what must be done to obtain what he seeks.  The line of his
action is determined in part by the ideas and expectations which have
slowly emerged out of his endeavours to get into fruitful connection
with the powers by which he is encompassed.  This is the element of
belief, which lies behind religion proper, and supplies the soil in
which religious feeling and action germinate and grow.  What, then, is
the kind of belief which, in the sphere of the lower culture, makes
religion possible?

It is plain at once that no records remain of what is still sometimes
called "primitive religion."  Even tribes that seem to be living in the
Stone Age have as long a past behind them as any European of light and
leading.  Whatever the beliefs may be that belong to any given stage of
social culture, they are not new inventions, they depend on immemorial
tradition.  And they are not, as now cherished, the results of
individual research or reflection.  They are held in common by all the
members of the tribe, so that they have a kind of collective force.  No
doubt in the long process of their formation and transmission
modifications may have been introduced, as some elder, shrewder than
his fellows, gave new emphasis to some leading idea, or suggested the
adoption of some fresh action.  Trace them back into the dim realm of
conjecture, and some mind {75} a little more observant or ready than
his comrades must have started the first explanation, some will a
little more adventurous must have made the first experiments in
conduct.  Thoughts do not issue from a "collective consciousness"; they
bear the stamp of personality, they are not begotten by abstractions,
and every fresh development starts from a single brain.  But the
uniformity of experience within the group gives enormous weight to the
wisdom of the past; and constitutes a sanction which only some grave
shock can change or overthrow.

With religion is constantly associated, both in historical record and
in the lower forms of present-day practice, another kind of activity
known as Magic.  The relation between them has been variously
interpreted.  The modern anthropologist, Dr. Frazer, finds himself in
unexpected agreement with the philosopher Hegel in supposing that magic
was the first to appear upon the scene.  It is represented as a kind of
primitive science, founded on certain elementary axioms, such as that
"like produces like," or that things once in contact with each other
will continue to act upon each other when the contact is broken.  The
Central Australian performs elaborate ceremonies to stimulate the
multiplication of the totem which provides the supply of food for his
tribe.  Suppose it is the witchetty grub.  A kind of pantomime is
performed representing the emergence of the {76} fully-developed insect
out of the chrysalis, typified by a long, narrow structure made of
boughs.  The totem men sit inside and chant rude songs, and then crawl
out singing of the insect coming forth.

One of the commonest illustrations is the attempt to compass the death
of an enemy by injuring or destroying an image or figure supposed to
correspond to him.  Such images were made in ancient Babylonia, Egypt,
Greece, and Rome.  One North American Indian will draw a figure of his
adversary in the sand, or in ashes, and prick it with a sharp stick.
Another will make a wooden image, and insert a needle into the head or
the heart.  Clay is used for the purpose by the African Matabele, wax
in Arabia, the guelder rose in Japan, materials of all kinds in India.
In Scotland the _corp chre_, as it was called, was a clay body, which
was stuck full of pins, nails, and broken bits of glass, and set in a
running stream with its head to the current; a modern specimen from
Inverness-shire may be seen in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.  Is
all this really as Dr. Frazer supposes, prior to the birth of religion,
and does man only turn to the propitiation of superior powers when he
cannot get what he wants through magic?  Of that process no evidence
can be offered.

The essence of magic lies in some kind of compulsion or constraint.
Through the proper spell, or through the will of the magician, {77} a
control is exerted which produces the desired result.  The power which
is thus claimed implies an attitude wholly unlike that of religion.
Into that attitude there enter elements of wonder and submission in the
presence of energies which man cannot master, though he desires to get
them on his side.  But no observer was at hand to watch the first
processes of feeling and thought which the interaction of man and his
environment produced.  The crudest forms of religion which we actually
know, meet us in tribes which have possessed them from an unknown past.
Here religion has a social character binding the members of a group
together, and tending to maintain certain uniformities of conduct and
character.  Over against it stands the antisocial character of magic,
at any rate when directed against individuals.  Along this line it is
urged that magic and religion have both issued out of common
conditions.  In the world around all sorts of events are continually
happening.  Man, in the midst of them, moves to and fro impulsively
among various objects and agencies.  Out of these arise various
reactions for self-maintenance, for protection and defence.  Certain
acts tend to establish themselves as successful; they make for security
and welfare.  At first man's efforts have no definite direction; but
some are found effective, others are futile, and attention is
concentrated on those that produce satisfactory results.  After {78}
many trials certain beliefs, certain processes, certain persons,
gradually stand out above the rest, and through them relations of
advantage are established with the environing powers.

In such experiences lie the roots of both religion and magic.  In their
earliest forms they may be as difficult to discriminate as the simplest
types of animal and vegetable life.  If it be asked what distinguishes
them outwardly, when both are transmitted by tradition, both rest upon
custom, it may be answered that religion is concerned with what tends
to the stability of the community.  Its interests are those of the
group.  It supplies the bond of united action for clan or tribe or
people.  It is pre-eminently social; it expresses itself in ceremonies,
feasts, and rites in which all can join, or in commands which all can
obey.  Even the Australians, so poor in elements of worship, have
tribal laws which have been imparted to them from on high (Chap. VII).

Over against the community stands the individual, object of all kinds
of jealousies and enmities.  All sorts of antisocial arts may be
practised for his destruction.  The pointing-stick of Australia
provides a common magical weapon.  It is carried away into a lonely
spot in the bush, and the intending user plants it in the ground,
crouches down over it, and mutters a curse against the object of his
hatred: "May your heart be rent asunder, may your backbone be split
open!"  Then {79} one evening, as the men sit round the campfire in the
dark, he creeps up stealthily behind his enemy, stoops down with his
back to the camp, points the stick over his shoulder, and mutters the
curse again.  A little while after, unless saved by a more powerful
magic, the victim sickens and dies.

Of course magic may also be used for the benefit of the individual, and
the practice of exorcism for the cure of diseases caused through
possession by evil spirits long found shelter in some branches of the
Christian Church.  The kinship between Magic and Religion is clearly
marked when the priest takes the place of the devil-dancer or the
medicine man.  Yet they are on different planes; religion is prescribed
and official, and demands specific services; magic falls into the
background, it becomes a secret, perhaps a forbidden, art.
Nevertheless, between religion and antisocial magic lies a large group
of rites, essentially magical in character, like the North American
Indian rain-dances or the totem-ceremonies of the Arunta in Central
Australia, designed for the general welfare.  Even in much higher
cultures the spell frequently mingles with the prayer, and ceremonies
of sacrifice carry with them elements of compulsion or constraint.

What traces, then, do the phases of religion in the lower culture
exhibit of a view of the world and its powers out of which these
diverging lines of practice might emerge?  {80} In widely different
regions of the globe the forces that operate in unexpected ways, or
play through things beyond man's reach, or appear in natural objects of
striking character--an animal, a tree--are summed up in some general
term of mystery and awe.  Such is the Melanesian term _mana_, first
noted by Bishop Codrington, common to a large group of languages.  It
implies some supersensual power or influence; it is not itself
personal, though it may dwell in persons as in things.  It is known by
the results which reveal its working.  You find a stone of an unusual
shape; it may resemble some familiar object like a fruit; you lay it at
the root of the corresponding tree, or you bury it in a yam-patch; an
abundant crop follows; clearly, the stone has _mana_.  It lives in the
song-words of a spell; it secures success in fighting, perhaps through
the tooth of some fierce and powerful animal; it imparts speed to the
canoe, brings fish into the net, enables the arrow to inflict a mortal
wound.  But the word has a yet wider range, in the sense of power,
might, influence.  By it a parent can bring a curse on a disobedient
child, a man who possesses it can work miracles; it even denotes the
divinity of the gods.  And so mysterious is the whole range of the
inner life, that _mana_ covers thought, desire, feeling, and affection;
and in Hawaian it reaches out to spirit, energy of character, majesty.
Here is an immense reserve of potency pervading {81} the world, on
which man may draw for good or ill.

Among the North American Indians similar conceptions may be traced.
The Algonquin _manitou_ represents a subtle property believed to exist
everywhere in nature, though some persons and objects possess more of
it than others.  Among the Sioux the sun, the moon, the stars, thunder,
wind, are all _wakanda_.  So are certain trees and animals, the cedar,
the snake, the grey elephant; and mystery-places like a particular lake
in North Dakota, or some peculiar rocks on the Yellowstone River.  The
term carries with it power and sacredness; it belongs to what is
ancient, grand, and animate.  The Iroquoian tribes designate this
mysterious force _orenda_.  It expresses an incalculable energy,
manifested in rocks and streams and tides; in plants and trees, in
animals and man; it belongs to the earth and its mountains; it breathes
in the winds and is heard in the thunder; the clouds move by it, day
and night follow each other through it; it dwells in sun, moon, and
stars.  The shy bird or quadruped which it is difficult to snare or
kill, possesses it; so does the skilful hunter; it gives victory in
intertribal games of skill, and is the secret force of endurance or
speed of foot.  The prophet or the soothsayer discloses the future by
its aid; and whatever is believed to have been instrumental in
accomplishing some purpose or obtaining some good, finds in _orenda_
the source of its effectiveness.

{82}

Not dissimilar is the conception of _mulungu_ among the Yaos, east of
Lake Nyassa.  The term is wide-spread through the eastern group of
Bantu tongues, and is said to have the meaning of "Old One" or "Great
One"; and in this sense it has been employed as equivalent to God.  But
we are expressly told that in its native use and form it does not imply
personality.  Etymologically it ranks with the leg, arm, heart, head,
of the human frame.  Yet it denotes rather a state or property inhering
in something, like life or health in the body, than any single object.
It indicates a kind of supernormal energy, displayed in actual
experience, but not to be detected by any physical sense.  It is the
agent of wonder and mystery; the rainbow is _mulungu_; and it sums up
at once the creative energy which made the earth and animals and man,
and the powers which operate in human life.  At the foot of a tree in
the village courtyard, where men sit and talk, a small offering of
flour or beer is placed on any distinctive occasion in the communal
life; at a meal, or on a journey at cross roads, a little flour is set
aside.  It is "for Mulungu"; sometimes dimly conceived as a spirit
within; sometimes regarded as a universal agency in nature and affairs,
impalpable, impersonal; sometimes rising into distinctness as God.

Such terms are, of course, generalisations from many separate
experiences.  Out of this sense of mystery grow more definite ideas.
{83} The dark and solemn forest, the rushing river, the precipitous
rock, the lofty cloud-crowned mountain, the winds and storms, all
manifest a common power;[1] it lives in the snake or the bull, in the
tiger or the bear.  This may be conceived in a highly complex and
abstract form.  Thus the Zuñis of Mexico, we are told, suppose the sun
and moon, the stars, the sky, the earth and sea, with all their various
changes, and all inanimate objects, as well as plants, animals, and
men, to belong to one great system of all-conscious and interrelated
life.  One term includes them all: _hâi_, "being" or "life."  With the
prefix _â_, "all," the whole field of nature is summed up as _âhâi_,
"life" or "the Beings."  This comprehensive term includes the objects
of sensible experience regarded as personal existences, and
supersensual beings who are known as "Finishers or Makers of the paths
of life," the most exalted of all being designated "the Holder of the
paths of our lives."  So in Annam life is regarded as a universal
phenomenon.  It belongs not only to men and animals and plants, but to
stones and stars, to earth, fire, and wind.  But it is seen in groups
and kinds rather than individuals, and the limits of its forms are not
sharply drawn; it can pass through many transformations, and possesses
indefinite possibilities of change.  {84} Such conceptions have a long
history behind them.


[1] M. Durkheim has recently applied conceptions of the _mana_ order to
the explanation of totemism.


The poets of the ancient Vedic hymns beheld everything around them full
of energy.  The names by which they designated what they saw all
denoted action or agency.  The swift flow of the stream gained it the
title of the "runner"; as it cut away the banks or furrowed its course
deep between the rocks, it was the "plougher"; when it nourished the
fields it was the "mother"; when it marked off one territory from
another it was the "defender" or "protector."  So the seers addressed
their invocations to the dawn or the sun, to the winds and the fire, to
the river or the mountain, to the earth-mother or the sky-father, as
living powers, capable of responding to the prayers of their
worshippers.  Similar energy dwelt in the horse or the cow, the bird of
omen and the guardian dog.  It was even shared by ritual implements
such as the stones by which the sacred soma-juice was squeezed out, or
by the products of human handiwork, the war-car, the weapon, the drum,
and the peaceful plough.

At the present day the Batak in the north-west of Sumatra interpret the
world about them in terms of a soul-stuff or life-power called _tondi_.
A vast reservoir of this exists in the world above, and flows down upon
men and animals and plants.  The biggest animal, like the tiger, the
most important of plants, like rice (chief source of food), have most
{85} _tondi_, but it is not confined to living things; the smith
attributes it to his iron, the fisherman to his boat, the tiller of the
ground to his hoe, the householder to his hearth and home.  But a
further analysis is beginning.  What is the relation of a man's _tondi_
to himself?  When he dies, it passes into some fresh organism.  But the
rest of him, his shadow, his double, or his self, becomes a _begu_.  In
life, it is the body that thinks and feels, that fears and hopes and
wills, though the presence of the _tondi_ supplies the needful energy.
But the _tondi_ also has the functions of consciousness, for it can go
away in dreams and meet the _begus_ of parents and ancestors.  And the
apprehension that it may depart begets reverence and even offerings to
the _tondi_, rather than to distant gods for whom man can feel neither
fear nor love.

We touch here another root of religious belief, which produces growths
so wide-spreading that some interpreters bring the whole range of
objects of worship within their shade.  How, after all, does man
explain himself to himself?  At first he does not think about thinking.
Such words as he uses are vague and elastic, like the Polynesian
_mana_, which covers a multitude of facts without and within.  Only
through long dim processes does any idea corresponding to our
conception of personality come into his consciousness.  He is as
confused about the objects round him as he is about himself.  {86} Yet
he has some sort of initiative.  Whence comes it?  Little by little a
variety of experiences force on him the belief that beside the body and
its limbs he possesses something which he cannot ordinarily see, but
which is essential to his activity.  He falls asleep, and lies still
upon the ground; he wakes, full of remembrance of adventure, the
localities which he has visited, the animals that he has hunted, the
dead kinsmen whom he has met.  The Australians explain their dreams by
the supposition that the _yambo_, the mūrup, or the _boolabong_, can
quit the body and return.  "I asked one of the Kurnai" (of Gippsland),
relates Mr. Howitt, "whether he really thought his _yambo_ could go out
during sleep."  "It must be so," was the answer, "for when I sleep, I
go to distant places, I see distant people, I even see and speak with
those that are dead."  The great apostle of the East in the sixteenth
century, the devoted Francis Xavier, wrote home from India to the
Society of Jesus in Europe--


"I find that the arguments which are to convince these ignorant people
must be by no means subtle, such as those which are found in the books
of learned schoolmen, but such as their minds can understand.  They
asked me again and again how the soul of a dying person goes out of the
body, how it was, whether it was as happens to us in dreams, when we
seem to be conversing with our {87} friends and acquaintances.  Ah, how
often this happens to me, dearest brethren, when I dream of you!  Was
this because the soul then leaves the body?"


This explanation is found all round the globe.

Many other experiences confirm the impression of some kind of dual
existence.  The shadow or shade which follows a man repeats his
movements, and appears as a sort of double.  It is even widely believed
in the face of the simplest evidence that a dead body casts no shadow
(of course, as it lies upon the ground the shadow may almost
disappear).  Your reflection in river, pool, or lake, actually
reproduces your colour as well as your form: beware lest a crocodile
seizes it and drags you in.  From ancient times down to Shelley and
Walt Whitman, poetry has designated Sleep and Death as "brothers"; in
death that which was temporarily absent in sleep has gone away for
good.  It may have rushed out with the blood from a gaping wound; it
may have quietly departed with the last faint breath.  So it may be
summoned back, as in Chinese custom, on the housetop, in the garden or
the field.  Ghostly sounds may be heard in the forest, among the rocks,
borne along the wind; the clairvoyant may discern dimly strange faces,
vanished forms; the dead can sometimes make themselves seen in their
old haunts; {88} the world is full of unexpected indications of
presences beyond our sense.

Such presences are grouped, for the modern student, under the general
title "spirits."  But the explanations which lead to these beliefs are
not concerned with human beings only.  Animals share in the incidents
of life and death; plants, even, grow and blossom and decay; and
animals, plants, and inanimate objects of all sorts may be seen in
dreams.  Hence the analysis which is applied to man can be readily
extended; and another world is called into existence, strangely blended
with this, a realm of immaterial counterparts and impalpable forces.  A
Fiji native, placed before a mirror, recognising himself and object
after object, whispered softly, "Now I can see into the world of
spirits."

With the help of this elementary philosophy a vast machinery of
causation is always at hand for explaining untoward events.  The
Tshi-speaking negro on the West Coast of Africa has inside him a kind
of life-power named _kra_.  It existed long before his birth, for it
served in the same capacity a whole series of predecessors; and it will
continue its career after his death, when the man himself becomes a
_srahman_ or ghost.  The adjoining Ga-speaking tribes modify the _kra_
into two _kla_, one male and one female, the first of a bad
disposition, the second good, who give advice and prompt to actions
according {89} to their respective characters.  Yet a third inmate
dwells in the neighbouring Yoruba-speaking folk, one in the head, one
in the stomach, and one in the great toe.  Offerings are made to the
first by rubbing fowl's blood and palm oil on the forehead.  The second
needs none, for it shares whatever the stomach receives.  The third is
propitiated as an agent of locomotion before starting on a journey.
But the curious theme of the plurality of souls must not beguile us.

Meantime the original _kra_ is set behind all the activities of nature,
and extended to the whole sphere of material objects.  Each town or
village or district has its own local spirits, rulers of river and
valley, rock and forest and hill.  Sometimes they take human shape, and
colour, white or black, for transformations of all kinds are always
possible.  They are not all of equal rank; the broad lake, the
mountain, the sea where the surf breaks heavily and the frail craft are
upset--the lightning, the storm, and the earthquake--the leopard, the
crocodile, the shark, and the devastating smallpox--such are among the
dreaded manifestations of these dangerous and mysterious powers.  But
the actual dead must not be forgotten; they must be provided with
ghostly counterparts of food and weapons and utensils, with cloth and
gold-dust, just as a departed chief must be accompanied into the next
life by the wives and slaves who adorned his household state in this.

{90}

The ritual of the dead belongs, as we have seen (p. 20), to the
earliest-known activities of European man.  It is found in some form or
other in every country under the sun.  Sometimes it is prompted by
fear, and has for its object to keep the dead imprisoned in the grave,
or to prevent their spirits from returning to their old haunts (p.
228).  Sometimes it is warmed by affection, as the departed are
recalled to the homes where they were loved.  In ancient Egypt it was
developed with the utmost elaboration, and created a literature
describing a kind of "pilgrim's progress" through the scenes of the
next world (p. 237); while in Greece and Rome the cultus of the dead
acquired, as in India and China, immense social significance.  The
question that arises in the study of religion in the lower culture is
concerned with the probable connection between the two groups of
spirits, which may be broadly distinguished as spirits of nature and
spirits of the dead.  That the latter are constantly propitiated in
various forms is well known.  They are to be found everywhere, lurking
in the trees, flying through the air, sojourning in caves, haunting the
promontories on the rivers or hidden in the forest-depths.  With them
lie the causes of disease and madness; they are malevolent and hurtful,
as well as kindly and good.  What differences are to be discerned
between them and the powers of nature?  Are we to suppose, with some
{91} students, that all the higher forms of religion have been
developed out of the worship of the dead, and that for gods we must
everywhere read originally ghosts?

Consider, for example, the ancient religion of Japan, which we know by
an adaptation of two Chinese words as Shin-To, the "spirits' way," or
in its native form _kami-no-michi_.[2]  Who are the _kami_, or
"spirits"?  The title of "religion" has sometimes been denied to their
cultus on the ground that it contains "no set of dogmas, no sacred
book, and no moral code."  Greece and Rome might, on the same plea, be
described as having no religion.  The term _kami_ has for its root-idea
the significance of "that which is above."  It may be applied in the
widest range of relations from the hair which is on the top of the head
to the government which rules the people.  The _kami_ are, as it were,
the "highnesses"; the word is used of big things by land and sea, great
rivers, mighty mountains, roaring winds and rolling thunder; then of
rocks and trees, of animals like the tiger and the wolf, of metals, and
so of innumerable objects in earth and sky.  It is not always clear
whether these were originally conceived as themselves living, or
whether they had been resolved into material body and controlling
spirit.  The {92} functions of the _kami_, however, are extended and
distributed by a kind of fission; the _kami_ of food split into the
produce of trees and the parent of grasses; they preside over guilds
and crafts, the weavers, the potters, the carpenters, the swordsmen,
the boatbuilders; they guide the operations of agriculture; they
superintend the household, and watch over the kitchen range, the
saucepan, the ricepot, the well, the pond, the garden, and the
scarecrow.


[2] Chinese culture has probably exerted considerable influence on the
exponents of the Shinto revival in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.  Very different aspects are reflected in the ancient
chronicles.


But in this vast assembly are included also the spirits of the dead.
They likewise become _kami_ of varying rank and power.  Some dwell in
temples built in their honour; some hover near their tombs; some are
kindly, and some malevolent.  They mingle in the immense multiplicity
of agencies which makes every event in the universe, in the language of
the Shinto writer Motowori (1730-1801), "the act of the Kami."  They
direct the changing seasons, the wind and the rain; and the good and
bad fortunes of individuals, families, and States, are due to them.
From birth to death the entire life of man is encompassed and guided by
the Kami.

Hence came the duty of worship on which Hirata (1776-1843) lays great
stress.  The heaven-descended Ninigi, progenitor of the imperial line,
was taught by his divine forefathers that "everything in the world
depends on the spirits of the _kami_ of heaven and earth, and therefore
the worship of the _kami_ is a {93} matter of primary importance.  The
_kami_ who do harm are to be appeased, so that they may not punish
those who have offended them; and all the _kami_ are to be worshipped
so that they may be induced to increase their favours."  Accordingly
Hirata's morning prayer before the _kami-dana_, the wooden shelf fixed
against the wall in a Shinto home about six feet from the floor,
bearing a small model of a temple or "august spirit-house," ran thus--


"Reverently adoring the great God of the two palaces of Isé (the
Sun-goddess) in the first place, the 800 myriads of celestial _kami_,
the 800 myriads of ancestral _kami_, all the 1500 myriads to whom are
consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands
and all places in the great land of 8 islands, the 1500 myriads of
_kami_ whom they cause to serve them....  I pray with awe that they
will deign to correct the unwitting faults which, heard and seen by
them, I have committed, and, blessing and favouring me according to the
powers which they severally wield, cause me to follow the divine
example, and to perform good works in the way."


Here, the spirits of the dead are blended with those of nature, without
any definite attempt to assign them to different ranks or functions.
Among the dead themselves there are such distinctions, which do not,
however, concern us here; there are "spirits of crookedness," {94} and
there are spirits of the clans and of the imperial line.  But above the
multitudinous groups of nameless _kami_, whether once human or attached
to the physical scene, rise certain great powers which it seems very
difficult to identify with departed ghosts.  The earliest traditions of
the divine evolution in the ancient chronicles contain no hint pointing
in that direction; and the comparison of the Japanese deities of earth,
fire, wind, sea, and similar great elemental forces elsewhere, is not
favourable to their derivation from the hosts of the dead.

The student of the hymns to Fire in the Rig-Veda (_Agni_ = Latin
_ignis_) cannot fail to notice the emphasis laid upon the birth of the
god out of the wood, as the fire-drill kindles the first sparks, and
the flame leaps forth.  Here is something quick-moving, vital; the fire
is the god; he may rise into cosmic significance as a pervading energy
sustaining the whole world; but he never loses his physical character,
any more than the solid earth or the encompassing sky.  These are again
and again the chief co-ordinating powers of the higher animism.  Their
separation out of the primeval mass of obscure and indiscriminate chaos
has been the theme of myth from Egypt to New Zealand; just as their
"bridal" has served to express the union and co-operation of the forces
of nature all around the world.

Of this the ancient Chinese religion, still the {95} formal basis of
the national worship as performed by the Emperor, supplies perhaps the
best example.  The cultus of the dead is practised in every home, and
around the incidents of life and death have gathered various Buddhist
and Taoist rites.  Moreover, a rampant demonology environs the entire
field of existence; but this disordered multitude of noxious spirits
has no recognition in the imperial homage.  From immemorial generations
the Chinese practice made religion a department of the State, and the
venerable book of the Rites of the great dynasty of Chow requires the
Grand Superior of Sacrifices to superintend the worship due to three
orders of _Shin_ or spirits, celestial, terrestrial, and human.  Under
the sovereignty of the sky the first includes the spirits of the sun,
moon, stars, clouds, wind, rain, thunder, and the changes of the
atmosphere.  In the sphere of earth are reckoned the spirits of the
mountains, rivers, plains, seas, lakes, woods, fields, and grains.

Taken together Heaven and Earth thus include all the energies of the
universe.  The world, as we see it, is, indeed, full of opposing
powers, one group (_yang_) representing light and warmth and life, the
contrary (_yin_) manifesting themselves in cold and darkness and
death.[3]  But these are both encompassed by {96} the "Path" or _Tao_,
the daily course of the universe, the abiding guarantee of justice in
the distribution of good and evil in the human lot.  Heaven and earth
are thus regarded as themselves active or living; they constantly
maintain the order of nature for the welfare of man.  In the ancient
Odes (which Confucius was supposed to have edited) "heaven" is called
great and wide and blue.  This is plainly the visible firmament; it is
addressed as parent, and sky and earth together are father and mother
of the world.  They are not spirits, but are themselves animate.
"Why," laments Dr. Edkins of his Chinese hearers, "they have been often
asked, should you speak of these things which are dead matter,
fashioned from nothing by the hand of God, as living beings?"  "And why
not?" they have replied.  "The sky pours down rain and sunshine, the
earth produces corn and grass, we see them in perpetual movement, and
we therefore say they are living."


[3] The sky is the home of the _yang_; the _yin_ are referred to the
earth; in curious contrast to its powers of production and nourishment.


The Chinese genius was ethical rather than metaphysical.  It was not
concerned with the Infinite, the Eternal, and the Absolute.  But it was
deeply impressed with the moral aspects of the sky, its universality,
its comprehensive embrace of all objects and powers beneath its
far-stretching dome, its all-seeing view, its inflexible impartiality.
Its decrees are steadfast, and proceeded from its sovereign sway; and
in this capacity it bore the {97} august title of Shang Tî, "Supreme
Ruler."  The scholastic philosophers of a later day analysed "Heaven"
in this capacity into the actual sky and its controlling personality,
and Shang Tî became the Moral Governor of the Universe, the equivalent
of the western God.

Beneath the sky lay the earth, receptive of the energies descending
upon it from on high; "Heaven and Earth, Father and Mother," are
conjoined in common speech.  Together they guided the changes of the
year, in steadfast tread along the annual round.  Folded in their wide
compass were the Shin, charged with the regulation of the elemental
powers.  Under Heaven's control were the Shin of sun and moon, planets,
stars, meteors, comets; of clouds and winds, thunder and rain; of the
seasons, months, and days.  Those of the earth were organised in
territorial divisions, representing the dominions of the vassal princes
down to the district areas.  The higher were graded according to the
political rank of the several provinces; beneath them were reckoned the
spirits of the mountains, forests, seas, rivers, and grains.  The
privileges of worship granted to the various officials were part of the
State order, and helped to maintain political and civic stability.

The imperial sacrifices to Heaven and Earth were performed at the
winter and the summer solstices.  The great altar to Heaven {98} stands
in a large park in the southern division of Peking, a vast marble
structure in three stages, the lowest being 210 feet across.  It is the
largest altar in the world.  Its white colour symbolises the light
principle of the Yang.  The upper stage, ninety feet in diameter, has
for its centre a round blue jade stone, the symbol of the vault above.
Here is placed the tablet to Heaven, inscribed "Throne of Sovereign
Heaven," and associated with it are tablets to deceased emperors as
well as to the Sun and Moon, the seven stars of the Great Bear, the
five Planets, the twenty-eight Constellations, and the Stars.  On the
second stage, beneath the richly carved balustrade above, are the
tablets to the Clouds and Rain, to Wind and Thunder.  At the
corresponding altar to the Earth on the north side of the city, square
in shape, and dark-yellow in hue, the imperial worship at the summer
solstice embraces also the five lofty Mountains, the three Hills of
Perpetual Peace, the four Seas, the five celebrated Mountains, and the
four great Rivers.[4]


[4] It is stated by the _North China Herald_ for July 13, that the
present Chinese Government proposes to convert the Temple of Heaven
into a model farm, and the Temple of Earth into a horse-breeding
establishment.


Splendid processions of princes and dignitaries, musicians and singers,
accompany the Emperor to the great ceremonial.  The recent Manchu
sovereigns employed the prayers of the Ming dynasty which preceded
them: here {99} are one or two stanzas of a psalm in which the Emperor
Kia-tsing in the sixteenth century announced to Shang Tî that he would
be addressed as "dwelling in the sovereign heavens":--


"O Tî, when thou hadst separated the Yin and the Yang (_i.e._ the earth
and the sky), thy creative work proceeded.

"Thou didst produce the sun and moon and the five planets, and pure and
beautiful was their light.

"The vault of heaven was spread out like a curtain, and the square
earth supported all upon it, and all things were happy.

"I thy servant venture reverently to thank thee, and while I worship,
present the notice to thee, calling thee Sovereign.

      *      *      *      *      *

"All the numerous tribes of animated beings are indebted to thy favour
for their beginning.

"Men and things are all emparadised in thy love, O Tî.

"All living things are indebted to thy goodness, but who knows from
whom his blessings come to him.

"It is thou alone, O Lord, who art the true parent of all things."


Here the ancient view of the living sky has given place under the
influences of {100} philosophy to a creative monotheism.  No image is
made of Shang Tî.  As he stands at the head of the manifold ranks of
the _Shin_, he represents the last word of animism in providing an
intellectual form for religion.




{101}

CHAPTER IV

SPIRITS AND GODS

Religion in the lower culture takes many forms, but, speaking broadly,
they rest upon a common interpretation of the world.  Man sees around
him all kinds of motion and change.  He finds in everything that
happens some energy or power; and the only kind of power which he knows
is that which he himself exerts.  As long as he is alive he can run and
fight, he can throw the spear or guide the canoe; death comes to the
comrade by his side, and all is still.  So in wind and stream, in beast
and tree, in the stones that fall upon the mountain side, in the stars
that march across the nightly sky, he sees a like power; they, too,
have some sort of life.

Life as an abstract idea, a potency or principle, is but rarely
grasped.  But its manifestations early attract notice, and can be
roughly explained.  They are due to something inside the living body,
which can pass in and out, and can finally leave it altogether.  Here
is an immense store of causality provided, to account for all the
incidents of each day's experience.  Modern language calls {102} such
agents spirits, and recognises in their multitude two mingled groups,
both active: the spirits of the dead on the one hand, and those of
natural objects, the bubbling well, the gloomy forest, the raging
storm, upon the other.

Sometimes these are merged under a common term, like the Japanese
_kami_, sometimes they are separately named.  They bear different
characters of good and evil, as they are ready to help or hurt; and the
same spirit may be now kindly and now hostile, without fixity of
disposition or purpose.  To such spirits the ancient Babylonians gave
the name of _zi_.  Literally, we are told, the word signified "life";
it was indicated in their picture-writing by a flowering plant; the
great gods, and even heaven and earth themselves, all had their _zi_.
The Egyptians, in like manner, ascribed to every object, to human
beings, and to gods, a double or _ka_.  The word seems to be identical
with that for "food"; it was another way of indicating that all visible
things, the peoples of the earth, the dwellers in the realms above and
below, shared a common life.

The history of religion is concerned with the process by which the
great gods rise into clear view above the host of spirits filling the
common scene; with the modes in which the forces of the world may be
grouped under their control; with the manifold combinations which
finally enable one supreme power to {103} absorb all the rest, so that
a god of the sky, like the Greek Zeus, may become a god of rain and
sunshine and atmospheric change, of earth and sea, and of the nether
world; and may thus be presented as the sole and universal energy, not
only of all outward things but also of the inner world of thought.  Of
this immense development language, archæology, literature, the
dedications of worship, the testimonies of the ancient students of
their still more ancient past in ritual and belief, contain the
scattered witness, which the student of to-day laboriously gathers and
interprets.  It is the humbler object of a little manual of Comparative
Religion to set some of the principal issues of such historic evolution
side by side, and show how similar reactions of the mind of man upon
the field of his experience have wrought like results.

As the inquirer casts his eye over the manifold varieties of the
world's faiths, he sees that they are always conditioned by the stage
of social culture out of which they emerge.  The hunter who lives by
the chase, and must range over large areas for means of support; the
pastoral herdsman who has acquired the art of breeding cattle and
sheep, and slowly moves from one set of feeding-grounds to another; the
agriculturist who has learned to rely on the co-operation of earth and
sky in the annual round,--have each their own way of expressing their
view of the Powers on which they depend.

{104}

Little by little they are arranged in groups.  The Celts, for instance,
coming to river after river in their onward march, employed the same
name again and again, "Deuona," divine (still surviving in this country
in different forms, Devon, Dee, etc.), as though all rivers belonged to
one power.  They were the givers of life and health and plenty, to whom
costly sacrifices must be made.  So they might bear the title "Mother,"
and were akin to the powers of fertility living in the soil, the
"Mothers" (_Matres_ or _Matronæ_), cognate with the "Mothers" who
fulfil similar functions in modern India.  The adjacent Teutonic
peoples filled forest and field with wood-sprites and elves, dwellers
in the air and the sunlight.  The springs, the streams, and the lakes,
were the home of the water-sprites or nixes; in the fall of the mighty
torrent, among the rocks on the mountain heights, in the fury of the
storm or the severity of the frost, was the strength of the giants.

Yet further east and north the Finnic races looked out on a land of
forest and waters, of mists and winds.  The spirits were ranged beneath
rulers who were figured in human form.  The huntsman prayed with vow
and sacrifice to the aged Tapio, god of the woods and the wild animals.
Kekri watched over the increase of the herd, while Hillervo protected
them on the summer pastures.  The grains and herbs--of less importance
to tribes {105} only imperfectly agricultural--were ascribed to the
care of Pellervoinen, who falls into the background and receives but
little veneration.  Water, once worshipped as a living element
(_vesi_), is gradually supplanted by a water-god (Ahto) who rules over
the spirits of lakes and rivers, wells and springs.  "Mother-earth"
still designates in the oldest poetry the living energy of the ground,
though she afterwards becomes the "lady of the earth" and consort of
the lord of the sky.  The sky, Jumala, was first of all conceived as
itself living; "Jumala's weather" was like "Zeus's shower" to an
ancient Greek.  And then, under the name Ukko, the sky becomes a
personal ruler, with clouds and rain, thunder and hail, beneath his
sway; who can be addressed as--

  Ukko, thou of gods the highest,
  Ukko, thou our Heavenly Father.


Many causes contribute to the enlargement and stability of such
conceptions.  Tribes of limited local range and a meagre past without
traditions may conceive the world around them on a feeble scale.  But
migration helps to enlarge the outlook.  Local powers cannot accompany
tribes upon the march.  Either they must be left behind and drop out of
remembrance, or they must be identified with new scenes and adapted to
fresh environments.  When the horizon moves ever further forwards with
each advance, earth and sky loom vaster {106} before the imagination,
and sun and moon, the companion of each day or the protector of each
night, gain a more stately predominance.  The ancestors of the Hindus,
the Greeks, the Romans, the Teutons, carried with them the worship of
the sky-god under a common name, derived from the root _div_, to
"shine" (Dyaus = Zeus = Jovis = old High German Tiu, as in Tuesday).
Other names gathered around the person in the actual firmament, such as
the Sanskrit Varuna (still recognised by some scholars as identical
with the Greek Ouranos, heaven), loftiest of all the Vedic gods.  The
Aryan immigrants are already organised under kings, and Varuna sits
enthroned in sovereignty.  His palace is supported by a thousand
pillars, and a thousand doors provide open access for his worshippers.
But he is in some sense omnipresent, and one of the ancient poets sang--


"If a man stands or walks or hides, if he goes to lie down or to get
up, what two people sitting together whisper, King Varuna knows it, he
is there as the third.

"This earth, too, belongs to Varuna, the king, and this wide sky with
its ends far apart.  The two seas (sky and ocean) are Varuna's loins;
he is also contained in this small drop of water.

"He who should flee far beyond the sky, even he would not be rid of
Varuna, the king."


{107}

The supreme power of the universe is here conceived under a political
image.  Conceptions of government and social order supply another line
of advance, parallel with the forces of nature.  On the African Gold
Coast, after eighteen years' observation, Cruickshank ranged the
objects of worship in three ranks: (1) the stone, the tree, the river,
the snake, the alligator, the bundle of rags, which constituted the
private fetish of the individual; (2) the greater family deity whose
aid was sought by all alike, sometimes in a singular act of communion
which involved the swallowing of the god (p. 144); and (3) the deity of
the whole town, to whom the entire people had recourse in times of
calamity and suffering.

The conception of the deity of a tribe or nation may be greatly
developed under the influence of victory.  War becomes a struggle
between rival gods.  Jephthah the Gileadite, after recounting the
triumphs of Israel to the hostile Ammonite king, states the case with
the most naked simplicity: "Yahweh, Israel's god, hath dispossessed the
Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldest thou possess
them?  Wilt thou not possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to
possess?  So whomsoever Yahweh our god hath dispossessed from before
us, them will we possess" (Judges xi. 23, 24).  The land of Canaan was
the gift of Israel's God, but at first his power was limited by its
boundaries: to be driven from the country was to be {108} alienated
from the right to offer him worship or receive from him protection.  In
the famous battle with the Hittites, celebrated by the court-poet of
Rameses the Great (1300-1234 B.C.), the king, endangered by the flight
of his troops, appeals to the great god Amen, a form of the solar deity
Rê, with confidence of help, "Amen shall bring to nought the ignorers
of God": and the answer comes, "I am with thee, I am thy father, my
hand is with thee, I am more excellent for thee than hundreds of
thousands united in one."  Success thus enhanced the glory of the
victor's gods.  Like the Incas of Peru in later days, the Assyrian
sovereigns confirmed their power by bringing the deities of tributary
peoples in a captive train to their own capital: and the Hebrew prophet
opens his description of the fall of Babylon by depicting the images of
the great gods Bel and Nebo as packed for deportation on the
transport-animals of the conqueror.

Other causes further tended to give distinction to the personality of
deities, and define their spheres.  A promiscuous horde of spirits has
no family relationships.  A god may have a pedigree; a consort is at
his side; and the mysterious divine power reappears in a son.  Instead
of the political analogy of a sovereign and his attendants, the family
conception expresses itself in a divine father, mother and child.  Thus
the Ibani of Southern Nigeria recognised Adum as the father of all
{109} gods except Tamuno the creator, espoused to Okoba the principal
goddess, and mother of Eberebo, represented as a boy, to whom children
were dedicated.  The Egyptian triad, Osiris, Isis and Horus, is well
known; and the divine mother with the babe upon her lap passed into the
Christian Church in the form of the Virgin Mary and her infant son.

The divisions of the universe suggested another grouping.  The Vedic
poets arranged their deities in three zones: the sky above, the
intervening atmosphere, and the earth beneath.  Babylonian cosmology
placed Anu in the heaven, Bel on the earth, and Ea in the great deep,
and these three became the symbols of the order of nature, and the
divine embodiments of physical law.  Homer already divides the world
between the sky-god Zeus, Poseidon of earth and sea, and Hades of the
nether realm: and Rome has its triads, like Jupiter, Mars, and
Quirinus, or again Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.  Whatever be the origin
of the number three in this connection, it reproduces itself with
strange reiteration in both hemispheres.  Other groups are suggested by
the sun and moon and the five planets, and appear in sets of seven.
Egyptian summaries recognised gods in the sky, on earth, and in the
water; and the theologians of different sanctuaries loved to arrange
them in systems of nine, or three times three.

Out of this vast and motley multitude emerge certain leading types in
correspondence {110} with certain modes of human thought, with certain
hopes and fears arising out of the changes of the human lot.  Curiosity
begins to ask questions about the scene around.  The child, when it has
grasped some simple view of the world, will inquire who made it; and to
the usual answer will by and by rejoin "And who made God?"  Elementary
speculation does not advance so far: it is content to rest if necessary
in darkness and the void, provided there is a power which can light the
sun, and set man on his feet.  But the intellectual range of thought
even in the lower culture is much wider than might have been
anticipated; while the higher religions contain abundant survivals of
the cruder imagination which simply loves a tale.

Sometimes the creative power (especially on the American continent) is
figured as a marvellous animal, a wondrous raven, a bird-serpent, a
great hare, a mighty beaver.  Or the dome of sky suggests an original
world-egg, which has been divided to make heaven and earth.  Even the
Australians, whose characteristics are variously interpreted as
indications of extreme backwardness or of long decline, show figures
which belong to what Mr. Andrew Lang designated the "High Gods of Low
Races."  Among the Narrinyeri in the west Nurrundere was said to have
made all things on the earth; the Wiimbaio told how Nurelli had made
the whole country with the rivers, trees, and animals.  Among the {111}
Western Bantu on the African continent Nzambi (a name with many
variants over a large area) is described as "Maker and Father."  "Our
forefathers told us that name.  Njambi is the One-who-made-us.  He is
our Father, he made these trees, that mountain, this river, these goats
and chickens, and us people."  That is the simple African version of
the "ever-and-beyond."  But as with so many of the chief gods, not only
on the dark continent, but elsewhere, he is regarded as a
non-interfering and therefore negligible deity.

Sometimes speculation takes a higher flight.  The Zuñis of Mexico have
remained in possession of ancient traditions, uninfluenced by any
imported Christianity.  After many years' residence among them Mr.
Cushing was able to gather their ideas of the origin of the world.
Awona-wilona was the Maker and Container of all, the All-Father-Father.
Through the great space of the ages there was nothing else whatever,
only black darkness everywhere.  Then "in the beginning of the
new-made" Awona-wilona conceived within himself, and "thought outward
in space," whereby mists of increase, steams potent of growth, were
evolved and uplifted.  Thus by means of his innate knowledge the
All-Container made himself in the person and form of the sun.  With his
appearance came the brightening of the spaces with light, and with the
brightening of the spaces the great {112} mist-clouds were thickened
together and fell.  Thereby was evolved water in water, yea and the
world-holding sea.  And then came the production of the
Fourfold-Containing Mother-Earth and the All-Covering Father-Sky.

With a yet bolder leap of imagination did a Polynesian poet picture the
great process.  From island to island between Hawaii and New Zealand is
a "high god" known as Taaroa, Tangaloa, Tangaroa, and Kanaroa.  The
Samoans said that he existed in space and wished for some place to
dwell in, so he made the heavens; and then wished to have a place under
the heavens, so he made the earth.  Tahitian mythology declared (the
versions of priests and wise men differed) that he was born of night or
darkness.  Then he embraced a rock, the imagined foundation of all
things, which brought forth earth and sea; the heavens were created
with sun, moon, and stars, clouds, wind, and rain, and the dry land
appeared below.  The whole process was summed up in a hymn--

  "He was: Taaroa was his name.
  He abode in the void; no earth, no sea, no sky.
  Taaroa calls, but nought answers,
  Then, alone existing, he became the universe."


The relations of these creative Powers to man are conceived very
differently.  The {113} Maker of the world may be continually
interested in it, and may continue to administer the processes which he
has begun.  The Akkra negro looks up to the living sky, Nyongmo, as the
author of all things, who is benevolently active day by day: "We see
every day," said a fetish-man, "how the grass, the corn, and the trees,
spring forth through the rain and sunshine sent by Nyongmo [_Nyongmo
ne_ = 'Nyongmo rains'], how should he not be the creator?"  So he is
invoked with prayer and rite.  The great Babylonian god, Marduk, son of
Ea (god of wisdom and spells), alone succeeds in overcoming the might
of Tiamat (the Hebrew _tehôm_ or "deep"), the primeval chaos with her
hideous brood of monsters, and out of her carcass makes the firmament
of heaven.  He arranges the stations of the stars, he founds the earth,
and places man upon it.  "His word is established," cries the poet,
"his command is unchangeable: wide is his heart, broad is his
compassion."  A conqueror so splendid could not relinquish his energy,
or rest on his achievements: he must remain on the throne of the world
to direct and support its ways.  Here is a prayer of Nebuchadrezzar to
this lofty deity--


"O eternal ruler, lord of all being, grant that the name of the king
thou lovest, whose name thou hast proclaimed, may flourish as seems
pleasing to thee.  Lead him in the right {114} way.  I am the prince
that obeys thee, the creature of thy hand.  Thou hast created me, and
hast entrusted to me dominion over mankind.  According to thy mercy, O
lord, which thou bestowest upon all, may thy supreme rule be merciful!
The worship of thy divinity implant within my heart.  Grant me what
seems good to thee, for thou art he that hast fashioned my life."


On the other hand, the "High Gods of Low Races" often seem to fade away
and become inactive, or at least are out of relations to man.  Olorun,
lord of the sky among the African Egbas, also bore the title of Eleda,
"the Creator."  But he was too remote and exalted to be the object of
human worship, and no prayer was offered to him.  Among the southern
Arunta of central Australia, reports Mr. Strehlow, Altjira is believed
to live in the sky.  He is like a strong man save that he has emu feet.
He created the heavenly bodies, sun, moon, and stars.  When rain-clouds
come up, it is Altjira walking through the sky.  Altjira shows himself
to man in the lightning, the thunder is his voice.  But though thus
animate, he is no object of worship.  "Altjira is a good god; he never
punishes man; therefore the blacks do not fear him, and render him
neither prayer nor sacrifice."  In Indian theology the reason for the
discontinuance of homage was thus frankly stated by one of the poets
{115} of the great epic, the Mahābhārata; "Men worship Çiva the
destroyer because they fear him; Vishnu the preserver, because they
hope from him; but who worships Brahman the creator?  _His work is
done._"[1]


[1] Hopkins, _India, Old and New_, p. 113.  Prof. Hopkins adds that in
India to-day there are thousands of temples to Çiva and Vishnu, but
only two to Brahman.


If the deity who has provided the scene of existence thus recedes into
the background, it is otherwise with the powers which maintain and
foster life.  Among the impulses which drive man to action is the need
of food; and the sources of its supply are among the earliest objects
of his regard.  A large group of agencies thus gradually wins
recognition, out of which emerge lofty forms endowed with functions far
transcending the simple energies at first ascribed to them.  Even the
rude tribes of Australia, possessing no definite worship, perform
pantomimic ceremonies of a magical kind, designed to stimulate the food
supply.  The men of the plum-tree totem will pretend to knock down
plums and eat them; in the initiation ceremony of the eagle-hawks two
representatives will imitate the flapping of wings and the movements of
attack, and one will finally wrench a piece of meat out of the other's
mouth.  At a higher stage of animism the Indians of British North
America pray to the spirit of the wild raspberry.  When the young
shoots are six or eight inches high above the ground, a small bundle is
{116} picked by the wife or daughters of the chief and cooked in a new
pot.  The settlement assembles in a great circle, with the presiding
chief and the medicine-man in the midst.  All close their eyes, except
certain assisting elders, while the chief offers a silent prayer that
the spirit of the plants will be propitious to them, and grant them a
good supply of suckers.

Here the whole class of plants is already conceived as under the
control of a single power.  In ruder stages the hunter will address his
petitions to the individual bear, before whose massive stature he feels
a certain awe, entreating him not to be angry or fight, but to take
pity on him.  Pastoral peoples will employ domesticated animals in
sacrifice, while the products of the field occupy a second place; the
cow may become sacred, and the daily work of the dairy may rise, as
among the Todas, to the rank of religious ritual.  Some element of
mysterious energy will even lie in the weapons of the chase, in the net
or the canoe, and may be found still lingering in the implements of
agriculture, such as the plough.

Among settled communities which live by tillage the succession of the
crops from year to year acquires immense importance.  Earth and sky,
the sun, the rain, and time itself in the background, are all
contributory powers, but attention is fastened upon the spirit of the
grains.  The Iroquois look on the spirits of corn, of squashes, and of
beans, as three {117} sisters, who are known collectively as "Our Life"
or "Our Supporters."  In central America each class of food-plants had
its corresponding spirit, which presided over its germination,
nourishment, and growth.  This was called the _mama_ or "mother" of the
plant: in Peru there was a cocoa-mother, a potato-mother, a
maize-mother; just as in India the cotton-spirit is worshipped as
"cotton-mother."  A "maize-mother," made of the finest stalks, was
renewed at each harvest, that the seed might preserve its vitality.
The figure, richly clothed, was ceremoniously installed, and watched
for three nights.  Sacrifice was solemnly offered, and the interpreter
inquired, "Maize-mother, canst thou live till next year?"  If the
spirit answered affirmatively, the figure remained for a twelvemonth;
if no reply was vouchsafed, it was taken away and burnt, and a fresh
one was consecrated.  In Mexico maize was a much more important food
than in Peru, and the maize-deity acquired in consequence a much higher
rank.  She became a great harvest goddess.  Temple and altar were
dedicated to her; spring and summer festivals were celebrated in her
honour; and a youthful victim was slain, whose vitality might enter the
soil, and recruit her exhausted energies.

The ceremonies connected with the cultus of the rice-spirit in the East
Indies still perpetuate in living faith beliefs once vital {118} in the
peasantry of Europe, and surviving to this day (as Mannhardt and Frazer
have shown) in many a usage of the harvest-field.  Out of this group of
ideas arise divine forms which express mysteries of life and time.
What is it that guides the circle of the year?  What power brings forth
the blade out of the ground, and clothes the woods with verdure?  As
the months follow their constant course, are not the seasons the organs
of some sacred force, lovely figures as Greek poets taught, born of
Zeus and Themis (holy law); or angels of the Most High, ruling over
heat and cold, summer and winter, spring and autumn, as the later
Israel conceived the continuance of God's creative work?  And when the
fields are bare and the leaves fall, have not the energies of
vegetation suffered an arrest, to come to life again when the great
quickening of the spring returns?  So while here and there dim
speculations (as in India or Persia or the Orphic hymns of Greece)
hover round Time, the generator of all things, and the recurring
periodicity of the Year, more concrete imagination conceives the
processes of the growth, decay, and revival of vegetation under the
symbols of the life, the death, and resurrection of the deities of corn
and tree.

To such a group belong different forms in Egypt, Syria and Greece,
whose precise origin cannot always be traced amid the bewildering
variety of functions which they came to fulfil.  But they all
illustrate the same general theme.  {119} In the ritual of their
worship similar motives and symbols may be traced; and the incidents of
their life-course were presented in a sort of sacred drama which
reproduced the central mystery.  Such were Osiris in Egypt, Adonis (as
the Greeks called the Syrian form of the ancient Babylonian Tammuz),
Attis of Phrygia in Asia Minor, and in Greece the Thracian Dionysus,
and the divine pair Demeter and her daughter Persephonê blended with
the figure of Korê "the Maid."

The worship of Osiris early spread throughout Egypt, and its various
phases have given rise to many interpretations of his origin and
nature.  Recent studies have converged upon the view that he was
primarily a vegetation deity.  In the festival of sowing, small images
of the god formed out of sand or vegetable earth and corn, with yellow
faces and green cheek-bones, were solemnly buried, those of the
preceding year being removed.  On the temple wall of his chamber at
Philæ stalks of corn were depicted springing from his dead body, while
a priest poured water on them from a pitcher.  This was the mystery of
him "who springs from the returning waters."  The annual inundation
brought quickening to the seed, and in the silence and darkness of the
earth it died to live.

Of this process Osiris became the type for thousands of years.  Already
in the earliest days of the Egyptian monarchy he is presented as the
divine-human king, benevolent, wise, {120} just.  To him in later times
the arts and laws of civilised life could be traced back; he was the
founder of the social order and the worship of the gods.  But the
jealousy of his brother Set brought about his death.  The ancient texts
do not explicitly state what followed.  But his body was cut to pieces
and his limbs were scattered, until his son Horus effected their
reunion.  Restored to life, he ascended to the skies, and became "Chief
of the Powers," so that he could be addressed as the "Great God." There
by his resurrection he became the pledge of immortality.  Each man who
died looked to him for the gift of life.  Mystically identified with
him, the deceased bore the god's name and was thus admitted into
fellowship with him.  Over his body the ceremonies once performed upon
Osiris were repeated, the same formulæ were recited, with the
conviction that "as surely as Osiris lives, so shall he live also." But
magic was early checked by morals, and by the sixth dynasty Osiris had
also become the august and impartial judge (p. 8).

Such might be the splendid evolution of a deity of the grains.  But
food was not, of course, the only need.  The family as well as each
individual must be maintained.  Mysterious powers wrought through sex.
Strange energies pulsed in processes of quickening, and these, too,
were interpreted in terms of divine agency.  They found their parallels
in the operations of nature (like the Yang and {121} Yin of ancient
China), and begot new series of heavenly forms.  The greater gods all
had their consorts.  Birth must be placed under divine protection, just
as the organ of generation might itself be sacred.  The Babylonian
looked to the spouse of Marduk, "creator of all things," to whom as
Zēr-panîtum, "seed-creatress," the processes of generation were
especially referred.  Or with ceremony and incantation the child was
set beneath the care of Ishtar, queen of Nineveh, and goddess of the
planet Venus.  The Greek prayed to Hera, Artemis, or Eileithyia; and
all round the world superhuman powers, for good or ill, gathered round
the infant life, whose aid must be sought, or whose hurt averted.
Dread agencies of disease, like fever, smallpox, or cholera, were in
like manner personalised.  Demonic forces cut short the tale of years.
From the equator to the arctic zone Death is ascribed in the lowest
culture to witchcraft.  Strange stories were told of his intrusion into
the world, commonly through man's transgression of some divine command.
And gradually the other world must be ruled like this; the multitudes
of the dead need a sovereign like the living; and after the fashion of
Osiris the Indian Yama, "first to spy out the path" to the unseen
realm, becomes the "King of Righteousness" before whom all must in due
time give their account (p. 244).

Such deities, however, represent much more than the physical life.
They have a social {122} character, and have become the expression of
organised morality.  On this field another group of divine powers comes
into view, symbols of order in the home or the city, charged with the
maintenance of the family or the State.  Round the hearth-fire gathers
a peculiar sanctity.  There is the common centre of domestic interests;
there, too, the agent by which gifts are conveyed to the spirits of the
dead.  There, then, was a sacred force, dwelling in the hearth itself,
and animating the fire that burned upon it.  The Greek Hestia seems
originally to have been not the goddess who made the hearth holy, nor
the sacrificial fire which it sustained, but the mysterious energy in
the actual stones upholding the consecrated flame.  All kinds of
associations were attached to it; and though her personality remained
somewhat dim and indistinct, and carven forms of her were rare, and her
worship was never sacerdotalised like that of the Latin Vesta, she
nevertheless had the first place in sacrifice and prayer.  She was
worshipped in the city council-hall.  Athenian colonists carried her
sacred fire across the seas.  The poets provided her with a pedigree,
and made her "sister of God most high, and of Hera the partner of his
throne."  The sculptor placed her statue at Athens beside that of
Peace.  The family deity expanded into an emblem of the unity of
government and race.  But the primitive character of the ancient
hearth-power still clung to her.  {123} She never rose into the lofty
functions of guide and protector of moral order like the great
city-gods Zeus, Athena, or Apollo.

In Rome numerous powers were recognised in early days as guardians of
the home and the farm-lands.  Vesta had her seat upon the hearth, which
was the centre of the family worship, and afterwards became the object
of an important city-cult.  The store-chamber behind was the
dwelling-place of the Penates, and with its contents no impure person
might meddle.  Where farm met farm stood the chapel of the local Lares,
and there whole households assembled, masters and slaves together, in
annual rejoicings and good fellowship.  Brought into the home, the Lar
became the symbol of the family life, and the ancestral pieties
gathered round him.  More vague and elastic was the conception of the
Genius, a kind of spiritual double who watched over the fortunes of the
head of the home, and through the marriage-bed provided for the
continuity of descent.  This protecting power could take many forms
with continually expanding jurisdiction.  The city, the colony, the
province, the "land of Britain," Rome, the Emperor himself, were thus
placed under divine care, or rather were viewed as in some way the
organs of superhuman power.  In the energy which built up states and
brought peoples into order lived something that was creative and divine.

From distant times in many forms of society {124} it was felt that
there was something mysterious in sovereignty.  The king (once
connected with the priest) was hedged round with some sort of divinity
which expressed itself in language amazing to the modern mind.  In the
ancient monarchies of Egypt and Babylon the royal deity was the
fundamental assumption of government, and it was represented upon the
monuments beside the Nile with startling realism.  In later days the
Greek title _Theos_ (god) was boldly assumed by the sovereigns of Egypt
and Syria.  It was conferred, with the associated epithet _Sotér_
(Saviour or Preserver), as early as 307 B.C., on Demetrius and his
father Antigonus, who liberated Athens from the tyranny of Cassander.
On the Rosetta stone (in the British Museum) Ptolemy V, 205 B.C.,
claims the same dignity, and is described as "eternal-lived," and "the
living image of Zeus."  Ephesus designated Julius Cæsar as "God
manifest and the common Saviour of human life."

This is something more than the extravagance of court-scribes, or the
fawning adulation of oriental dependents.  In the worship paid to the
Roman Emperor many feelings and associations were involved.  The power
which had brought peace, law, order, into the midst of a multitude of
nations and languages, and subdued to itself the jarring wills of men,
seemed something more than human.  When Tertullian of Carthage coined
the strange word "Romanity," he summed up the infinite {125} variety of
energies which spread one culture from the Persian Gulf to the
Atlantic, from the cataracts of the Nile to the sources of the Tyne.
Of this mysterious force the Emperor was the symbol.  So Augustus was
saluted throughout the East as "Son of God," and in inscriptions
recently discovered in Asia Minor, and referred by the historian
Mommsen to the year 11 or 9 B.C., we read the startling words: "the
birthday of the God is become the beginning of glad tidings
(_evangelia_[2]) through him to the world."  He is described as "the
Saviour of the whole human race"; he is the beginning of life and the
end of sorrow that ever man was born.  An inscription at Philæ on the
Nile equated him with the greatest of Greek deities, for he is "star of
all Greece who has arisen as great Saviour Zeus."


[2] The word which designates our "Gospels."


This is the most highly developed form of the doctrine of the divine
king, which the Far East has retained for the sovereigns of China and
Japan to our own day.  The language and practice of Roman imperialism
called forth the impassioned resistance of the early Christians, and
the clash of opposing religions is nowhere portrayed with more
desperate intensity than in the Book of Revelation at the close of our
New Testament, where Rome and her false worship are identified with the
power of the "Opposer" or Sâtân, and are hurled with all their
trappings of wealth and luxury into the abyss.

{126}

The conception of a god as "saviour" or deliverer is founded on
incidents in personal or national experience, when some unexpected
event opens a way of escape from pressing danger.  When the Gauls were
advancing against Rome in 388 B.C., a strange voice of warning was
heard in the street.  It was neglected, but when they had been
repelled, Camillus erected an altar and temple to the mysterious
"Speaker," Aius Locutius, whose prophetic energy was thus manifested.
In the second Punic war, when the Carthaginian general, Hannibal, was
marching against the city in 211 B.C., he suddenly changed his course
near the Capena gate.  Again the might of an unknown deity was
displayed, and the grateful Romans raised a shrine to him under the
name of Tutanus Rediculus, the god who "protects and turns back."  It
might be the attack of an enemy, it might be the imminence of
shipwreck, it might be a desolating plague, or any one of the
vicissitudes of fortune, the distresses and anxieties of the soul or of
the State, in the power which brought rescue or health or peace to body
or mind, or life hereafter in a better world, the grateful believer
recognised the energy of some superhuman being.  Just as the making of
the world required a creative hand, just as the arts and laws of social
life were the product of some divine initiative (p. 171), just as the
higher virtues belonged to a band of spiritual forces which had a kind
of individuality of their own, {127} so the shaping of affairs bore
witness to the interest and intervention of wills above those of man.
All through the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean the greater
deities, such as Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Æsculapius, Dionysus, Isis,
Zeus, bore the title of "Deliverer."  And in the mysteries which drew
so many worshippers to their rites in the first centuries of our era,
this deliverance took the form of salvation from sin, and carried with
it the promise of re-birth into eternal life.

Similar conceptions are seen in India.  The founder of Buddhism, Gotama
of the Sākyan clan, was believed to have attained the Enlightenment
which enabled him to discern the whole secret of existence.  After a
long series of preparatory labours in previous lives he had appeared as
a man in his last birth, to "lift off from the world the veils of
ignorance and sin."  He had himself repudiated all ontological
conceptions; he had explained the human being without the hypothesis of
a soul or self, and the world without the ideas of substance or God.
But in due time the rejected metaphysics insisted on recognition; and
some three hundred years or more after his death a new interpretation
of his person arose.  Under the stress of pious affection, the
influence of philosophical Brahmanism, and the need of permanent
spiritual help, he was conceived as a manifestation of the Infinite and
Eternal, who for the sake of suffering humanity from time to time {128}
condescended to seem to be born and die, that in the likeness of a man
he might impart the saving truth.  So he was presented as the
Self-Existent, the Father of the world, the Protector of all creatures,
the Healer of men's sicknesses and sins.

Over against this great figure Brahmanism placed another, that of
Vishnu, with his series of "descents," in which the Buddha was formally
incorporated as the ninth.  The most famous of these were the heroes
Rama and Krishna; and Krishna became the subject of the best-known book
of Indian devotion, the Bhagavad-Gita or the "Divine Lay," which has
been sometimes supposed to show traces of the influence of the Gospel
of St. John.  Here was a religion founded on the idea of divine grace
or favour on the one part, and adoring love and devotion on the other.
Krishna, also, taught a way of deliverance from the evils of human
passion and attachment to the world; and Vishnu came to be the
embodiment of divine beneficence, at once the power which maintained
the universe and revealed himself from time to time to man.

Vishnu was an ancient Vedic deity connected with the sun; and by his
side Hindu theology set another god of venerable antiquity, once fierce
and destructive, but now known under the name of Çiva, the
"auspicious."  The great epic entitled the Mahābhārata does not
conceal their rivalry; but with the facility of identification {129}
characteristic of Indian thought, either deity could be interpreted as
a form of the other.  Çiva became the representative of the energies of
dissolution and reproduction; and his worship begot in the hearts of
the mediæval poets an ardent piety, while in other aspects it
degenerated into physical passion on the one side and extreme
asceticism on the other.  But in association with Brahma, Vishnu and
Çiva constituted the Trimurti, or "triple form," embracing the
principles of the creation, preservation, destruction, and renewal of
the world.  Symbolised, like the Christian Trinity, by three heads
growing on one stem,[3] these lofty figures were the personal
manifestations of the Universal Spirit, the Sole Existence, the
ultimate Being, Intelligence, and Bliss.


[3] Some of the Celtic deities are three-faced, or three-headed.


By various paths was the goal of monotheism approached, but popular
practice perpetually clung to lower worships, and philosophy could
often accommodate them with ingenious justifications.  A bold and
decisive judgment like that of the Egyptian Akhnaton might fix on one
of the great powers of nature--the sun--as the most suitable emblem of
Deity to be adored, and forbid all other cults.  Or the various groups
and ranks of divine beings might be addressed in a kind of collective
totality, like the "all-gods" of the Vedic hymns.  At Olympia {130}
there was a common altar for all the gods; and a frequent dedication of
Roman altars in later days consecrated them "to Jupiter Greatest and
Best, and the Other Immortal Gods."  If reflection was sufficiently
advanced to coin abstract terms for deity, like the Babylonian
_'ilûth_, or the Vedic _asuratva_ or _devatva_, some poet might
apprehend the ultimate unity, and lay it down that "the great
_asuratva_ of the _devas_ is one."  Both India and Greece reached the
conception of a unity of energy in diversity of operation; "the One
with many names" was the theme of the ancient Hindu seers long before
Æschylus in almost identical words proclaimed "One form with many
names."  The great sky-god Zeus, whose personality could be almost
completely detached from the visible firmament, brought the whole world
under his sway, and from the fifth century before Christ Greek poetry
abounded in lofty monotheistic language which the early Christian
apologists freely quoted in their own defence.  A philosophic sovereign
like Nezahuatl, lord of Tezcuco, might build a temple to "the Unknown
God, the Cause of Causes," where no idol should be reared for worship,
nor any sacrifice of blood be offered.  But other motives were more
often at work.  Conquest led to the identification of the deities of
the victor and the vanquished; and the importance of military triumph
enhanced the majesty of the successful god.  In his great inscription
{131} on Mount Behistun Darius celebrated the grandeur of Ahura Mazda,
"Lord All-Wise," in language resembling that of a Hebrew psalm, "A
great God is Ahura Mazda, the greatest of the gods."  Under the Roman
Empire the principle of delegated authority could be invoked to explain
the unity of the Godhead above inferior agencies; in the heavenly order
there was but one sovereign, though there were many functionaries.
Even Israel had its hierarchy of ministering spirits, and the Synagogue
found it necessary to forbid pious Jews to pray to Michael or to
Gabriel.

When the unity of the moral order was combined with the unity of
creative might, the transition to monotheism was even more complete.
It could, indeed, be deferred.  In the ancient poems of the great
religious reformer whom the Greeks called Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda is the
supremely Good.  Beside him are the Immortal Holy Ones, Holy Spirit,
Good Mind, Righteous Order, and the rest.  True, in the oppositions of
light and darkness, heat and cold, health and sickness, plenty and
want, life and death, he is for a time hampered by the enmity of "the
Lie"; but the power of evil would be finally destroyed, and the
sovereignty of Ahura established for ever (p. 247).

From another point of view the divine purpose of deliverance must be
conceived upon an equally world-wide scale.  One type of Indian
Buddhism looked to Avalokiteçvara {132} (Chinese Kwanyin, Japanese
Kwannon), who made the famous vow not to enter into final peace until
all beings--even the worst of demons in the lowest hell--should know
the saving truth and be converted.  And in the Far East rises the
figure of the Buddha of Infinite Light, who is also the Buddha of
Infinite Life, whose grace will avail for universal redemption (p. 18).
The motive of creation falls away.  The world is the scene of the moral
forces set in motion under the mysterious power of the Deed.  No praise
rises to Amida for the wonders of the universe or the blessings of
life.  But to no other may worship be offered.  Here is a monotheism
where love reigns supreme, and it is content to trust that Infinite
Mercy will achieve its end.




{133}

CHAPTER V

SACRED ACTS

One morning, Plato tells us, as Socrates was in the Porch of the King
Archon, he met Euthyphro, a learned Athenian soothsayer, on his way to
accuse his father of impiety for having caused the death of a slave.
Socrates, who was also expecting an accusation against himself, engaged
him in a conversation, as his manner was, on the nature of impiety, and
its opposite, piety.  The talk leads Euthyphro to maintain that piety
or holiness consists in learning how to please the gods in word and
deed, by prayers and sacrifices.  "Then," inquires Socrates, "sacrifice
is giving to the gods, and prayer is asking of the gods?" and Euthyphro
is driven to assent to the conclusion that piety is an art which gods
and men have of doing business with one another.  It was a satirical
description of the popular Greek view.

But the argument of Socrates really corresponds to world-wide practice.
However dim and confused the elements of belief may be, every tribe has
some rites and ceremonies which express the desire to get the Powers
{134} which encompass it upon its side.  And when this desire, after
many ineffectual trials, has succeeded in establishing suitable methods
of approach, the endeavours which produce the result tend to become
fixed; they are cherished from generation to generation; they form
solemn customs which must be maintained with strict inviolate order,
even though their original meaning may have been long forgotten.
Belief may fluctuate in a kind of fluid medium of imagination, but
action cannot have this indeterminate and elastic character.  Action is
the mode through which feeling obtains expression, while it helps at
the same time to intensify the emotion which calls it forth.  The rite
must be done or omitted; it cannot trail off into shadow and vagueness.
And it gathers the whole weight of tribal sanction around it; so that
even the simplest elements of common usage are moulded under the
powerful pressure of the "weight of ages."

The active side of religion may be considered under two aspects.  There
is, on the one hand, the effort to enter into helpful relations with
the energies which pervade nature and operate on man.  Such efforts
spring from manifold emotions of hope and fear, of affection and
reverence.  They seek to inaugurate such relations; to maintain them
through the vicissitudes of experience, the phases of life, the
sequences of time; and to renew them when they have suffered sudden
{135} shock or gradual decay.  By such action the original emotion is
reawakened when it has declined, and is raised to greater vividness and
higher tension.  It may be summed up in the term worship, including
sacrifice and prayer, often associated with a wide range of acts
cognate in purpose, as well as with manifold varieties of sacred
persons and sacred products (Chap. VI).

And, secondly, apart from public or private acts of homage,
thanksgiving, submission, propitiation, addressed specifically to the
higher Powers, there are modes of behaviour which are believed to be
pleasing or displeasing to them.  Some things may be done, and others
may not.  Certain acts, or words, or even thoughts, are forbidden;
others are enjoined.  The sphere of daily conduct is thus brought into
connection with what is "above."  "Act," said the Japanese teacher of
Shinto, Hirata, in the last century, "so that you shall not be ashamed
before the Kami" (p. 93).  It was a universal rule.  Morality is thus
placed under the guardianship of religion (Chap. VII).


At the funeral of Lord Palmerston (1865), the chief mourner was
observed to drop several diamond and gold rings upon the coffin as it
was lowered into the grave.  A little child, seeing a steam-tram
advance with irresistible might along the road, offered it her bun.  It
may be surprising to meet with a piece {136} of the primitive ritual of
the dead in the midst of a sophisticated and conventional society; but
when strong feeling is excited something must be done to give it
relief, and in parting with his rings the donor found the outlet for
his emotion as irrationally as the child before the monster which
excited at once her wonder and her impulse of goodwill.  Out of such
impulses of self-expression, it may be suggested, arises the largest
class of sacrifices, when gifts are made in doing various kinds of
"business with the gods."

In its widest use the word covers an extensive range of purposes, and
begets a large variety of questions.  On whose behalf is the offering
made, a single individual, or some social group, his family or clan, a
secret society, a tribe, a nation?  What persons are required for the
due performance of the rite, the head of the family, the village
magistrate, the fetish man, the priest?  A complicated Vedic sacrifice
needed the co-operation of various orders of priests.  What objects are
effected by it, a house or city-gate to be protected, a river to be
crossed, a battle to be won, a covenant or contract to be sealed?  To
what powers does the worshipper address himself, in gratitude, homage,
or submission, seeking renewal of favour, or purging himself of some
sin, or desiring actual fellowship with his god?  Behind these external
features lie more difficult problems in connection especially with
animal sacrifices, concerned {137} with the victim's qualities, and the
appropriation of them by the deity or the worshipper; with the peculiar
sanctity of blood, and the mysterious properties which it can impart;
with the notion of the transmission of the life of which it was the
vehicle; and the whole set of indefinite influences capable of
propagation by contact, like the clean and the unclean, the common and
the holy.  And why, when the victim was offered, was the god supposed
to be satisfied with bones and entrails and a modest piece of meat, all
wrapped in fat?  Greek wonder at so strange a practice could find no
better answer than the tale of how Prometheus once cheated the gods of
their share, and men had ever since followed his example.  These
questions belong to the obscure realm of beginnings, in which various
answers are possible.  All that can be attempted here is to offer a few
illustrations of the different motives that seem to lie behind
different forms of rite.

Offerings to the dead pass through a long series of stages, from the
simple provision for the wants of the dead man in the grave up to his
proper equipment with all that is due to his rank and state in the next
life, or the maintenance of the ties of guardianship and protection
over unborn generations.  The earliest human remains imply some dim
belief that the grave was the dead man's dwelling (p. 20), and there he
must be supplied with the requisites for some kind of continued {138}
existence.  All over the world, food, weapons, ornaments, utensils, are
found deposited in barrow and tomb; and this practice culminates in the
complicated arrangements of an Egyptian sepulchre, where the wealthy
landowner constructed an enduring home for his double, and filled it
with representations and objects which could be magically converted to
his entertainment after death.  When the dead man passes into another
world, and enters a land resembling that which he has left (Chap.
VIII), he may need wives and slaves appropriate to his rank.  From
ancient Japan and still more ancient China all round the globe to
Mexico are traces of such ritual murder.  The widow's self-devotion was
exalted in India to religious duty, and cases still occasionally occur
when (in spite of the British Government) she seeks to mount the pyre
and immolate herself beside her husband's corpse.  In West Africa the
ghastly tale of the Grand Customs of Dahomey in the last century is
well known; and it is supposed that thousands of lives are still
annually sacrificed in the Dark Continent to this belief.  Other
personal needs must be supplied, and on the Gold Coast in the last
century an observer saw fine clothes and gold buried with the chief;
and a flask of rum, his pipe and tobacco, were laid ready to his hand.
Moreover, goods of all kinds can be made over by fire; and in the
funeral rites of a Chinese family a paper house with paper {139}
furniture and large quantities of paper money may be burned for the
endowment of a departed member in his next life.

Or the offering may be made for the cherishing of the dead in their
former home.  The simplest and the most common sacrificial act in
Melanesia, Bishop Codrington tells us, is that of throwing a small
portion of food to the dead.  It may be nothing more than a bit of yam
or a morsel of betel-nut; it is not for food, but for remembrance and
affection.  But sometimes it is for actual nourishment.  The dead in
ancient India who had none to render to them the needful sustenance,
wandered as dismal ghosts round their former dwellings, or haunted the
cross roads, compelled to feed themselves on the garbage of the
streets.  The funeral meals, continued at intervals, were celebrated
for the purpose of providing the departed with new forms, and
converting them into the higher rank of "Fathers."  In many lands, from
Europe to Japan and Central America, an annual feast for the dead has
been maintained in various modes both in classic antiquity and in
modern usage; and the ancient practice still survives in strangely
altered fashion in the cakes and confectionery carried on All Souls'
Day to the graves in the great Parisian cemetery of Père Lachaise.

Such acts of recognition and fellowship pass through very different
stages.  They begin with a desire for self-identification with the
{140} mysterious power which helps or hurts; as the power is conceived
on a greater and more personal scale they turn into tribute and homage.
The West African negro passing a big rock or an unusually large tree
will add a stone or bit of wood or tuft of grass to the little heap of
such trifles at its foot; it is for the Ombwiri, or spirit of the
place.  After the harvest on the plateau of Lake Tanganyika,
pilgrimages are made to the mountain of Fwambo-Liamba; at the top is a
sort of altar of small stones, and there scraps of calico, bits of
wood, flowers, beads, are laid in honour of a vague "High God" called
Lesa.  The nature of such gifts may be traced through all gradations of
economic advance, just as the mode of conveying it passes through
various phases from the coarse to the refined.  The pastoral nomad
brings the firstling of his flocks; the more advanced agriculturist
adds the produce of the ground.  The immigrant Hebrew under Canaanite
tuition adopted the festivals of harvest and vintage, and with
firstlings and tithes wrought his husbandry into his religion when he
went to the sanctuary "to see Yahweh's face."  The daily sacrifice in
the great temple of Marduk at Babylon under Nebuchadrezzar was an
epitome of the whole tillage of the land; the choicest fruits, the
finest produce of the meadow, honey, cream, oil, wine of different
vintages, must be served.  In the early ritual of an Egyptian temple,
when the daily toilet of the god had {141} been performed and he had
been duly robed, painted, and oiled, his table was spread with bread,
goose, beef, wine, and water, and decorated with the flowers needed to
adorn a meal.

In many cases such offerings carried with them the additional purpose
of actually increasing the vigour of the god.  Dim notions of promoting
the divine vitality hovered in the background.  The physical effect
might be reached by divers modes.  Food was at first conveyed by actual
contact; it might be smeared upon the idol's mouth.  Offerings to earth
spirits were buried in the ground.  Water deities received them when
they were thrown into the well, the river, or the lake.  Even in Greece
Poseidon's horses were driven into the sea, just as the horses of the
defeated Mallius were offered by the Gallic victors to the Rhine.
Indian realism provided the Fathers who assembled for the rice-ball
sacrifice with water and tufts of wool to cleanse themselves after the
meal.  In more refined usage fire conveyed the essence of the food to
the upper airs.  At Noah's sacrifice on the subsidence of the flood
Yahweh smelt the sweet savour, and in the corresponding Babylonian
narrative the gods, drawn by the scent, gathered together around the
offerer "like flies."  The American Osages invited the Great Spirit,
Fire, and Earth, to smoke with them at the beginning of a new
enterprise.  The Sioux lighted the pipe of peace and offered it {142}
to the sun, with the invocation, "Smoke, O Sun."

Many and various are the ideals which have gathered round the offering,
as magic and religion have strangely blended.  The sacred tree, whether
among the Celts of the West or the Syrians of the East, is hung with
rags of clothing, sometimes doubtless with the same motive which
prompts similar gifts at the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, for the
transference of diseases from the sick.  The highest value was reached
among the ancient Irish, as among the Semites, in the sacrifice of the
first-born; and the long tale of human victims indicates man's
passionate desire to secure in divers forms supernatural aid.  They
have been slain in crises of national danger by plague or war, in
atonement for sin,[1] or in thanksgiving for victory.  They have been
immured in the foundations of houses or cities that their spirits might
remain as guardians of the gates.  They have been done to death in the
seasons of the agricultural year that their lives might fertilise the
soil and quicken the grain.  They have been forced to yield their
entrails to the diviner that the secrets of the future might be
unveiled.


[1] The sacrifices of purification and atonement are briefly considered
in Chapter VII.


Brahmanical speculation carried the ideas of sympathetic magic in
association with sacrifice to their highest pitch.  The Vedic hymns
early formulated the idea of reciprocal {143} obligation in the crudest
terms: _Dehi me, dadāmi te_--"Give to me, I give to thee."  But this
simple relation was superseded in the priestly ceremonial by elaborate
parallels between the daily order of the ritual and the daily order of
the skies.  The earthly sacrifices were the counterparts of those
offered by celestial priests.  The "Fathers" accomplished the rising of
the sun; and when the heavenly process was imitated in the world below,
the kindling of the sacred fire came to be regarded as the actual
instrument for stimulating and maintaining the activities above.  From
a yet higher point of view the whole world had issued from the
mysterious sacrifice of a cosmic Man (described in one of the latest
hymns of the Rig-Veda), out of whose person the visible universe, the
Veda, and the human race in four castes, had been created.  In the
Brahmanical theology his place was taken by Prajāpati, the "Lord of
Creatures," who underwent repeated offering in every sacrifice.  And
just as the primeval sacrifice effected the generation of the world, so
every fresh oblation was a miniature reproduction of the cosmic event.
The Lord who had been dismembered must be reconstituted that he might
offer himself anew; and thus sacrifice was blended with the course of
Time and the period of the Year, and the perpetual dissolution and
renewal of the life that animated the mighty frame of earth and heaven.
In that upper world, moreover, the sacrificer, {144} through mystical
identification with Prajāpati, was enabled to prepare a new body for
the celestial abode, and out of the altar-ground below to generate his
future divine self in the world above.

Along other lines the conception of fellowship with Deity may be
realised through a common act.  Above the personal fetish of a Gold
Coast negro to which he made offerings of rum and palm-wine, oil, corn,
sheep, goats, stood the patron god of the family.  Before a separation
which would prevent them from ever again worshipping together, they
engaged in a strange kind of communion.  The fetish-priest pounded up
some sacred substance and mixed it with water, which was then drunk by
the whole family in turn.  During the rite the priest enjoined all
present in the name of the deity to abstain from some particular kind
of food, fish, beef, fowl, milk, or other article of diet.  None of the
company tasted it again.  They were united by the deity within them;
and obedience to his command bound them, however far apart, in common
worship.

Sometimes the worshipper sat at the table of the god, who was in some
sense present at the meal celebrated in his honour.  In the usage of
ancient Israel the householder shared with his family, kinsmen,
neighbours, and guests, in the sacred feast "before Yahweh."  How far
the belief in Yahweh's presence was actually cherished by the
participants cannot {145} be definitely affirmed; it does not appear,
for instance, in the Babylonian ritual.  But a corresponding idea may
certainly be traced in Greece and Rome.  From the early cult of the
sacred stone or pillar as the abode of deity, some kind of divine power
inhered in the altar and the image; and when the members of the clan
feasted together on solemn occasions, the clan-god was present with his
worshippers.  The Greek ritual sometimes provided a place for the
table-companions or "parasites," at sacred banquets, such as were held
in the temples of Apollo at Acharnæ or Delos.

An inscription at Magnesia describes a festival of twelve gods, whose
images, adorned with festal array, were carried into the marketplace,
and arranged on three cushions under a canopy.  When sacrifices had
been offered, the priests and people partook of a common meal with the
gods.  The old Latins and other Italians believed the deities of the
house to be present at their meals.  The Penates, Mr. Warde Fowler
tells us, were the spirits of the foods.  Rome celebrated its solemn
feast of Jove in the Capitoline temple every September on full-moon
day, when Jupiter, with his face painted red, Juno, and Minerva, were
present in their statues to share the meal with the magistrates and
Senate of the city.  To "lay a couch for the god" (as we might say "to
lay a table") was a common phrase.  Recently discovered papyri,
illustrating so {146} many aspects of daily life in the Eastern
Mediterranean, show that such hospitalities were of frequent
occurrence, alike in temples and in private houses.  Among the precious
remains from Oxyrhynchus are such notes as this: "Antonius son of
Ptolemæus invites you to dine with him at the table of our Lord Sarapis
in the house of Claudius Sarapion on the 16th at 9 o'clock."

But the worshipper might not only eat with the god, he might more
rarely, and under special circumstances, even eat _him_.  A more
intimate union was thus effected.  When the altar imparted its sanctity
to the victim laid upon it, the holy food distributed to the worshipper
had some kind of divine presence in it, and virtue passed through the
meat into the eater.  The late Prof. Robertson Smith, in his famous
lectures on "the Religion of the Semites," endeavoured to show that
sacrifice originally consisted in slaying the animal of the
totem-group, of which members of the totem-kin partook so that they
received into their own persons the divine power incarnated in the
totem animal.  Further research has failed to confirm this view; but a
similar conception has been illustrated from another side.  The
agricultural usages of which Dr. Frazer has collected so many examples,
show how out of the last sheaf, which had become the home of the
corn-spirit, the grain was baked in human form as its embodiment, and
solemnly eaten.  In the East Indian archipelago, on {147} the island of
Buro, the approaching rice-harvest was welcomed by a tribal meeting
when each man brought some first-fruits from the fields, and the meal
of inauguration was known as "eating the soul of the rice."

Twice a year was the great Mexican deity Huitzilopochtli presented in
the form of dough images to his worshippers, and with elaborate
ceremonies was consumed.  Tezcatlipoca, in like manner, chief god of
the Aztecs, represented by a handsome and noble captive wearing the
divine emblems, was slain on the great altar; the body of the victim
was respectfully carried down into the court below, divided into small
pieces, and distributed among priests and nobles as blessed food.  It
is strange to find such savagery associated with prayers of exalted
fervour and devotion.  But ecstasy is roused by various means, and is
not affronted at the most brutal rites.  There were incidents in the
Orphic cult of the Thracian Dionysus grouped under the name of the
"Omophagy" (literally "raw-eating") of like character.  In frenzied
excitement the devotees flung themselves on bull or goat, rent it
asunder, and devoured the bleeding flesh.  Such was the condition of
securing the actual entry of the god into the believer's person, so
that he became _entheos_, "with the god inside him."  Words have
strange histories, and few now remember, when they describe the welcome
of a monarch by acclaiming crowds, or the excitement roused by a {148}
great orator, what was the earlier meaning of "enthusiasm."


In the "art which gods and men have of doing business with each other,"
Socrates associated sacrifice with prayer (p. 133).  The association is
world-wide, and here religion reaches its utmost inwardness.  The
feeling which expresses itself in action will also prompt gesture and
speech; rude rhythms mould words into chant and song; and even without
a definite object of address some utterance breathes a desire.  "May it
be well with the buffaloes, may they not suffer from disease and die
... may there be water and grass in plenty."  So runs the dairy-ritual
of the Indian Todas, without the direct invocation of any gods.  But
there is no element here of compulsion or constraint.  The distinction
between prayer and spell is clear; the attitude is religious, not
magical.  On the other hand, sacrifices are sometimes offered to a
"High God," as by the Dinkas of the Bahr-el-Ghazal in Central Africa to
Deng-deet, who is described as "Ruler of the universe, Creator of
mankind, the actual Father of human beings"; but, adds Captain Cummins,
imagine it does not occur to them to pray.  Others, by contrast, make
morning and evening prayer part of their daily practice; the Nandi of
East Africa concludes his devotions (addressed to Asista, the ordinary
word for the sun): "I have prayed to thee, thou {149} sleepest and thou
goest, I have prayed to thee, do not say 'I am tired.'"  Sometimes
prayer is offered only to the powers of mischief.  The Lepchas of the
Himalayas told Dr. Hooker that they did not pray to the good spirits.
"Why should we?  They do us no harm; the evil spirits that dwell in
every grove and rock and mountain, to them we must pray, for they hurt
us."  To the Australian it may seem foolishness to address Baiame from
day to day: he knows, why weary him by repetitions, disturbing his rest
after his earthly labours?  But the impulse of prayer does not always
take articulate form, any more than it always seeks a personal object;
and after long residence among the Euahlayi in South East Australia
Mrs. Langloh Parker pleaded that the man who invoked aid in his hour of
danger, or the woman who crooned over her babe an incantation to keep
him honest and true, shared, however dimly, the same spirit of devotion
which elsewhere prompts elaborate litanies.  It is with a pious reserve
that the Khonds of Orissa pray: "We are ignorant of what it is good for
us to ask for.  You know what is good for us; give it to us."

Prayer in the lower culture is rarely individualised.  It is almost
always a social act.  Common prayers for food or rain, for protection
against danger, the

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