HISTORY OF RELIGION

A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of theOrigin and Character of the Great Systems

by

ALLAN MENZIES, D. D. 

Professor of Biblical Criticism in the University of St. Andrews

Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of theworld. --ACTS xv. 18. 

New YorkCharles Scribner's Sons597-599 Fifth Avenue1917

FIRST EDITION . . . _April_ 1895SECOND EDITION . . _September_ 1895_Reprinted_ . . . . _March_ 1897_Reprinted_ . . . . _June_ 1900_Reprinted_ . . . . _January_ 1902_Reprinted_ . . . . _March_ 1903_Reprinted_ . . . . _October_ 1905THIRD EDITION . . . _January_ 1908FOURTH EDITION . . _September_ 1911_Reprinted_ . . . . _June_ 1914_Reprinted_ . . . . _October_ 1918

PREFACE

This book makes no pretence to be a guide to all the mythologies, orto all the religious practices which have prevailed in the world. Itis intended to aid the student who desires to obtain a general ideaof comparative religion, by exhibiting the subject as a connected andorganic whole, and by indicating the leading points of view fromwhich each of the great systems may best be understood. A certainamount of discussion is employed in order to bring clearly before thereader the great motives and ideas by which the various religions areinspired, and the movements of thought which they present. And theattempt is made to exhibit the great manifestations of human piety intheir genealogical connection. The writer has ventured to deal withthe religions of the Bible, each in its proper historical place, andtrusts that he has not by doing so rendered any disservice either toChristian faith or to the science of religion. It is obvious that ina work claiming to be scientific, and appealing to men of everyfaith, all religions must be treated impartially, and that the samemethod must be applied to each of them. 

In a field of study, every part of which is being illuminated almostevery year by fresh discoveries, such a sketch as the present can bemerely tentative, and must soon, in many of its parts, growantiquated and be superseded. And where so much depends on theselection of some facts out of many which might have been employed, it will no doubt appear to readers who have some acquaintance withthe subject, that here and there a better choice might have beenmade. The writer hopes that the great difficulty will not beoverlooked with which he has had to contend, of compressing a vastsubject into a compendious statement without allowing its life andinterest to evaporate in the process. 

For a fuller bibliography than is given in this volume the reader mayconsult the works of Dr. C. P. Tiele, and of Dr. Chantepie de laSaussaye. It will readily be believed that the writer of this volumehas been indebted to many an author whom he has not named. 

ST. ANDREWS, 1895. 

PREFACE TO THE THIRD (REVISED) EDITION

Since this book first appeared twelve years ago it has been severaltimes reprinted without change. Advantage has now been taken, however, of a call for a fresh issue, to introduce into it somealterations and additions, such as its stereotyped form allows. Somemistakes have been corrected, the names of recent books have beenadded to the bibliographies, and in some chapters, especially thosedealing with the Semitic religions, considerable changes have beenmade. In going over the book for this purpose, I have seen veryclearly that if it had been called for and written at this timeinstead of twelve years ago, some things which are in it need nothave appeared, and additions might have been made which are not nowpossible. The last twelve years have made a great change in the studyof religions; the prejudices with which it was regarded have almostpassed away, powerful forces have been enlisted in its service, andadmirable works have appeared dealing with various parts of the vastfield. Yet I am glad to think that the attempt made in this book tofurnish a simple introduction to a deeply important study, andespecially to promote the understanding of the religions of the Bibleby placing them in their connection with the religion of mankind atlarge, may still prove useful. 

ST. ANDREWS, _June_ 1907. 

PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION

This book is now being reprinted in a somewhat larger type, and anopportunity is given, less restricted than the last, for makingchanges in it. It is impossible for me at present to re-write it; itappears substantially as it was. Some alterations and additions havebeen made in the earlier chapters, and the bibliographies have beenbrought more nearly up to date. I would take this opportunity ofdirecting the attention of readers of this book to the publishedProceedings of the Oxford Congress of the History of Religion, heldin September 1908. They will there see how large this field of studyhas now grown, and what varied life and movement every part of itcontains. I have given references only to the addresses of thePresidents of the Sections of the Congress, in which a fresh reviewwill be found of recent progress in the study of each of the greatreligions. 

ST. ANDREWS, _July_ 1910. 

CONTENTS

PART ITHE RELIGION OF THE EARLY WORLD

CHAPTER IINTRODUCTION PAGEPosition of the science--Unity of all religion--The growth ofreligion continuous--Preliminary definition of religion--Criticism of other definitions--Fuller definition--Religionand civilisation advance together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1-18

CHAPTER IITHE BEGINNING OF RELIGION

Origin of civilisation--It was from the savage state thatcivilisation was by degrees produced--The religion ofsavages--All savages have religion--It is a psychologicalnecessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19-28

CHAPTER IIITHE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP

Nature-worship--Ancestor-worship--Fetish-worship--A supremebeing--Which gods were first worshipped?--Fetish-gods camefirst--Spirits, human or quasi-human, came first--Theoriesof Mr. Spencer and Mr. Tylor--Animism--The minornature-worship came first--Theories of Mr. M. Müller and ofEd. Von Hartmann--The great nature-powers came first--Bothnature-worship and the worship of spirits are sources ofearly religion--Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29-50

CHAPTER IVEARLY DEVELOPMENTS--BELIEF

Growth of the great gods--Polytheism--Kathenotheism--Theminor nature-worship--The worship of animals--Trees, wells, stones--The state after death--Growth of the great religionsout of these beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51-65

CHAPTER VEARLY DEVELOPMENTS--PRACTICES

Sacrifice--Prayer--Sacred places, objects, persons--Magic--Character of early religion--Early religion and morality . . 66-78

CHAPTER VINATIONAL RELIGION

Classifications of religions--Rise of national religion--Itaffords a new social bond--And a better God--Example--TheInca religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79-90

PART IIISOLATED NATIONAL RELIGIONS

CHAPTER VIIBABYLON AND ASSYRIA

People and literature--Worship of spirits--Worship ofanimals--The great Gods--Mythology--The state religion . . . 91-105

CHAPTER VIIICHINA

History of China--The literature of the religion--The statereligion of ancient China--Heaven--The spirits--Ancestors--Confucius--His life--His doctrine--Taoism--Buddhism in China 106-125

CHAPTER IXTHE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT

History and literature--1. Animal worship--Theoriesaccounting for it--2. The great Gods--They also are local--Mythology--Dynasties of gods--Ra--Osiris--Ptah--Was theearliest religion monotheistic?--Syncretism--Pantheism--Worship--3. The doctrine of the other life--Treatment of thedead--The spirit in the under-world--_The Book of the Dead_--Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126-157

PART IIITHE SEMITIC GROUP

CHAPTER XTHE SEMITIC RELIGION

Home of the Semites--Character of the race--Their earlyreligious ideas--Difference between Semitic and Aryanreligion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159-169

CHAPTER XICANAANITES AND PHENICIANS

The Religion of the Canaanites--The Phenicians--Their gods--Astral deities of Phenicia--Influence of Phenician art . . . 170-178

CHAPTER XIIISRAEL

The sacred literature--The people--Jehovah--The early ritualwas simple--Contact with Canaanite religion--Danger offusion--Religious conflict--The monarchy--Religion notcentralised--The Prophets--The old religion national--Criticism of the old religion by the prophets--Appearance ofUniversalism--Ethical monotheism--Individualism of theprophetic teaching--The reforms--Deuteronomy--Earlier codes--The exile--The return; the reform of Ezra--Character of thelater religion--Heathenish elements of Judaism--Spiritualelements--The Psalms--The Synagogue--The national hopes--Thestate after death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179-216

CHAPTER XIIIISLAM

Arabia before Mahomet--The old religion--Confusion ofworship--Allah--Judaism and Christianity in Arabia--Mahomet, early life--His religious impressions--The revelations--Hispreaching--Persecution--Trials; decides to leave Mecca--Mahomet at Medina--New religious union--Breach with Judaismand Christianity--Domestic--Conquest of Mecca--Mecca made thecapital of Islam--Spread of Islam--The duties of the Moslem--The Koran--Islam a universal religion . . . . . . . . . . . . 217-242

PART IVTHE ARYAN GROUP

CHAPTER XIVTHE ARYAN RELIGION

The Aryans, their early home--Their civilisation described--Little known of their gods--Their worship was domestic . . . 243-255

CHAPTER XVTHE TEUTONS

The Aryans in Europe--The ancient Germans--The early Germangods--The working religion--Later German religion--Iceland--The Eddas--The gods of the Eddas--The twilight of the gods . 256-273

CHAPTER XVIGREECE

People and land--Earliest religion; functional deities--Growth of Greek gods--Stones, animals, trees--Greek religionis local--Artistic tendency--Early Eastern influences--Homer--The Homeric gods--Worship in Homer--Omens--The stateafter death--Hesiod--The poets and the working religion--Riseof religious art--Festivals and games--Zeus and Apollo--Change of the Greek spirit in sixth century B. C. --Newreligious feeling; the mysteries--Religion and philosophy . . 274-304

CHAPTER XVIITHE RELIGION OF ROME

Roman religion was different from Greek--The earliest gods ofRome are functional beings--The worship of these beings--Thegreat gods--Sacred persons--Roman religion legal rather thanpriestly--Changes introduced from without--Etruria--Greekgods in Rome--The Graeco-Roman religion--Decay and confusion 305-323

CHAPTER XVIIITHE RELIGIONS OF INDIA

I. _The Vedic Religion_

Relation of Indian to Aryan religion--The Rigveda--The Vedicgods--Hymns to the gods--To what stage does this religionbelong?--It is primitive--It is advanced--In spite of manygods, a tendency to Monotheism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324-337

CHAPTER XIXINDIA

II. _Brahmanism_

The caste system: the Brahmans--The growth of the sacredliterature--Sacrifice--Practical life--Philosophy--Transmigration--Later developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338-352

CHAPTER XXINDIA

III. _Buddhism_

The literature--Was there a personal founder?--The story ofthe founder--Is Buddhism a revolt against Brahmanism?--TheBuddha--The doctrine--Buddhist morality--Nirvana--No gods--The order--Buddhism made popular--Conclusion--Buddhism is nota complete religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353-380

CHAPTER XXIPERSIA

Sources--The contents of the Zend-Avesta are composite--Zoroaster--Primitive religion of Iran--The call ofZarathustra--The doctrine--Its inconsistencies--Man is calledto judge between the gods--This religion is essentiallyintolerant--Growth of Mazdeism--Organisation of the heavenlybeings--The attributes of Ahura--Ancient testimonies to thePersian religion--The Vendidad: laws of purity--How thisdoctrine entered Mazdeism--Influence of Mazdeism on Judaismand in other directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381-408

PART VUNIVERSAL RELIGION

CHAPTER XXIICHRISTIANITY

State of Jewish religion at the Christian era--The teachingof Jesus--His person and work--Universalism of Christianity--The Apostle Paul--What Christianity received from Judaism--And from the Greek world--The different religions ofChristian nations and the common Christianity . . . . . . . . 409-425

CHAPTER XXIIICONCLUSION

Tribal, national, and individual religion--This the centraldevelopment--Has to be studied in nations--Periods of generaladvance in religion--Conditions of religious progress . . . . 426-434

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435-440

PART ITHE RELIGION OF THE EARLY WORLD

CHAPTER IINTRODUCTION

The science to which this little volume is devoted is a comparativelynew one. It is scarcely half a century since the attention of WesternEurope began to fix itself seriously on the great religions of theEast, and the study of these ancient systems aroused reflection onthe great facts that the world possesses not one religion only, butseveral, nay, many religions, and that these exhibit both greatdifferences and great resemblances. The agitation of mind thenawakened by the thought that other faiths might be compared withChristianity, has to a large extent passed away; and on the otherhand fresh fields of knowledge have been opened to the student of theworships of mankind. By new methods of research the religions ofGreece and Rome have come to be known as they never were before; andall the other religions of which we formerly knew anything have beenled to tell their stories in a new way. A new study--that of theearliest human life on the earth--has brought to light many primitivebeliefs and practices, which seem to explain early religious ideas;and the accounts of missionaries and others about savage tribes nowexisting in different parts of the world, are seen to be full of asignificance which was not noticed formerly. We are thus in a verydifferent position from our fathers for studying the religion of theworld as a whole. To them their own religion was the true one and allthe others were false. Calvin speaks of the "immense welter oferrors" in which the whole world outside of Christianity is immersed;it is unnecessary for him to deal with these errors, he can at onceproceed to set forth the true doctrine. The belief of the earlyfathers of the Church, that all worships but those of Judaism andChristianity were directed to demons, and that the demons bore swayin them, practically prevailed till our own day; and it could not butdo so, since no other religions than these were really known. Thatignorance has ceased, and we are responsible for forming a view ofthe subject according to the light that has been given us. 

The science of religion, though of such recent origin, has alreadypassed beyond its earliest stage, as a reference even to its earlierand its later names will show. "Comparative Religion" was the titlegiven at first to the combined study of various religions. What hadto be done, it was thought, was to compare them. The facts about themhad to be collected, the systems arranged according to the bestinformation procurable, and then laid side by side, that it might beseen what features they had in common and what each had todistinguish it from the others. Work of this kind is still abundantlynecessary. The collection of materials and the specifying of thesimilarities and dissimilarities of the various faiths will longoccupy many workers. 

Unity of all Religion. --But recent works on the religions of theworld regarded as a whole have been called "histories. " We have thewell-known _History of Religion_ of M. Chantepie de la Saussaye, nowin its third edition, and the _Comparative History of the Religionsof Antiquity_ of M. Tiele. A history of religion may be either of twothings. The word history may be used as in the term Natural History, to denote a reasoned account of this department of human life, without attempting any chronological sequence; or it may be used aswhen we speak of the History of the Romans, an attempt being made totell the story of religion in the world in the order of time. Ineither case the use of the term "history" indicates that the studynow aims at something more than the accumulation of materials and thepointing out of resemblances and analogies, namely, at arranging thematerials at its command so as to show them in an organic connection. This, it cannot be doubted, is the task which the science of religionis now called to attempt. What every one with any interest in thesubject is striving after, is a knowledge of the religions of theworld not as isolated systems which, though having many points ofresemblance, may yet, for all we know, be of separate and independentgrowth, but as connected with each other and as forming parts of onewhole. Our science, in fact, is seeking to grasp the religions of theworld as manifestations of the religion of the world. [1]

[Footnote 1: The above statement is criticised by Mr. L. H. Jordan inhis excellent work, _Comparative Religion_, p. 485, but is in themain a true account of what has taken place. Mr. Jordan stronglyholds that Comparative Religion is a science by itself, and ought tobe distinguished from the History of Religion, though the latter is, of course, its necessary foundation. ]

In rising to this conception of its task, the science of religion isonly obeying the impulse which dominates every department of study inmodern times. What every science is doing is to seek to show theunity of law amid the multiplicity of the phenomena with which it hasto deal, to gather up the many into one, or rather to show how theone has given rise to the many. In the study of religion, if it bereally a science, this impulse of all science must surely be felt. Here also we must cherish the conviction that an order does existamid the apparent disorder, if we could but find it. We must believethat the religious beliefs and practices of mankind are not a merechaos, not a mere incessant outburst of unreason, consistent only inthat it has appeared in every age and every country of the world, butthat they form a cosmos, and may be known, if we take the right way, as a part of human life from which reason has never been absent, andin which a growing purpose has fulfilled and still fulfils itself. Some theories, it is true, from which the world formerly hoped much, are not now relied on, and the present tendency is to abstain fromany general doctrine of the subject, and to be content with carefulcollection and arrangement of the facts in special parts of thefield. Caution is no doubt most needful in the attempt to form a viewof this great study as a whole. Yet something of this kind ispossible, and is beyond all doubt much called for. It is the aim ofthis little work not only to describe the leading features of thegreat religions, but also to set forth some of the results whichappear to have been reached regarding the relation in which thesesystems stand to each other. 

The Growth of Religion Continuous. --We shall not pretend to set outon this enterprise without any assumptions. The first and principalassumption we make is that in religion as in other departments ofhuman life there has been a development from the beginning, even tillnow, and that the growth of religion has gone on according to theordinary laws of human progress. This is a position which, begin thestudy at whatever point he may, the student of this subject will findhimself compelled to take up, if he is not to renounce altogether theidea of understanding it as a whole. To understand anything means, tothe thought of the present day, to know how it has come to be what itis; of any historical phenomenon at least it is certain that itcannot be understood except by tracing its history up to the root. Weassume, therefore, until it be disproved, that in this as in otherdepartments of human activity, growth has been continuous from thefirst. In every other branch of historical study, this assumption ismade. The history of institutions is traced back in a continuous lineto an age before there was any family or any such thing as property. The methods by which men have earned their subsistence on the earthare known equally far back; and there is no break in the developmentfrom the hooked stick to the steam plough. And should it not be thesame in religion? Here also shall we not assume, until we find itproved to be incorrect, that there has been no break in the growth ofideas and practices from the earliest days till now, and that thehighest religion of the present day is organically connected withthat religion which man had at first? It is, indeed, in many ways farremoved from the earliest religion, but what was most essential inthe earliest belief still lives in it, and what was fittest tosurvive of its earliest motives, still prompts its worship. Should weadopt this view, we shall find many of the difficulties disappearwhich have frequently stood in the way of this study. When, accordingto the new tendency that seems to govern all modern thought, institutions and beliefs are regarded not as fixed things, but asthings growing from something that was there before, and tendingtowards something that is coming, they cease to arouse contempt, orjealousy, or hatred. If we can regard religions as stages in theevolution of religion, then we have no motive either to depreciate orunduly to extol any of them. The earlier stages of the developmentwill have a peculiar interest for us, just as we look with affectionon the home of our ancestors even though we should not choose todwell there. We shall not divide religions into the true one, Christianity, and the false ones, all the rest; no religion will beto us a mere superstition, nor shall we regard any as unguided byGod. Feeling that we cannot understand our own religion arightwithout understanding those out of which it has been built up, weshall value these others for the part they have played in the greatmovement, and our own most of all, without which they could not bemade perfect. In the light of this principle of growth we shall findgood in the lowest, and shall see that the good and true rather thanthe evil and false, furnish the ultimate meaning of even the poorestsystems. 

We start then with the assumption that religion is a thing which hasdeveloped from the first, as law has, or as art has; and the bestmethod we can follow, if it should prove practicable, will be tofollow its movement from the beginning. We must not presume to hopethat everything will be made clear, or that we shall meet with noreligious phenomena to which we cannot assign their place in thedevelopment. We must remember that ground is often lost as well aswon in human history, and that in religions as in nationsdegeneration frequently occurs as well as progress. We must not betoo sure that we shall be able to find any plain path leading throughthe immeasurable forests of man's religious sentiments and practices. Yet we may at least expect to find evidence of the direction which onthe whole the growth of religion has followed. 

Preliminary Definition of Religion. --But, before we can set out onthis inquiry, we are met by the question, What is it that we supposeto have been thus developed? In order to trace any process ofevolution it is necessary to define that which is evolved; for itbelongs to the very idea of evolution that the identity of thesubject of it is not changed on the way up, but that the germ and thefinished product are the same entity, only differing from each otherin that the one has still to grow while the other is grown. Futilewere it indeed to sketch a history of religion with the savage at oneend of it and the Christian thinker at the other, if it could be saidthat in no point did the religion of the savage and that of theChristian coincide, but that the product was a thing of entirelydifferent nature from the germ. It seems necessary, therefore, in thefirst place, to say what that is, of which we are to attempt thehistory; or in other words, to say what we mean by religion. 

It must not be forgotten that an adequate definition of a thing whichis growing can only be reached when the growth is complete. Duringits growth it is showing what it is, and its higher as well as itslower manifestations are part of its nature. The world has not yetfound out completely, but is still in the course of finding out, whatreligion is. Any definition propounded at this stage must, therefore, be of an elementary and provisional character. I propose then as aworking definition of religion in the meantime, that it is "Theworship of higher powers. " This appears at first sight a very meagreaccount of the matter; but if we consider what it implies, we shallfind it is not so meagre. In the first place it involves an elementof belief. No one will worship higher powers unless he believes thatsuch powers exist. This is the intellectual factor. Not that theintellectual is distinguished in early forms of religion from theother factors, any more than grammar is distinguished by early man asan element of language. But something intellectual, some creed, ispresent implicitly even in the earliest worships. Should there be nobelief in higher powers, true worship cannot continue. If it becontinued in outward act, it has lost reality to the mind of theworshipper, and the result is an apparent or a sham religion, aworship devoid of one of the essential conditions of religion. Thisis true at every stage. But in the second place, these powers whichare worshipped are "higher. " Religion has respect, not to beings menregard as on a level with themselves or even beneath themselves, butto beings in some way above and beyond themselves, and whom they aredisposed to approach with reverence. When objects appear to beworshipped for which the worshipper feels contempt, and which amoment afterwards he will maltreat or throw away, there also one ofthe essential conditions is absent, and such worship must be judgedto fall short of religion. There may no doubt be some religion in it;the object he worships may appear to the savage, in whose mind thereis little continuity, at one moment to be higher than himself and thenext moment to be lower; but the result of the whole is somethingless than religion. And in the third place these higher powers areworshipped. That is to say, religion is not only belief in the higherpowers but it is a cultivating of relations with them, it is apractical activity continuously directed to these beings. It is notonly a thinking but also a doing; this also is essential to it. Whenworship is discontinued, religion ceases; a principle indeed not tobe applied too narrowly, since the apparent cessation of worship maybe merely its transition to another, possibly a higher form; butreligion is not present unless there be not only a belief in higherpowers but an effort of one kind or another to keep on good termswith them. 

Criticism of other Definitions. --What has now been said will enableus to judge of several of the definitions of religion which have beenput before the world in recent years. Without going back to thedefinitions offered by philosophers who wrote before the scientificstudy of our subject had begun, and limiting ourselves to those whichhave been propounded in the interests of our science, we notice thatseveral make religion consist in an intellectual activity. [2] ThusMr. Max Müller[3] says that "Religion is a mental faculty ordisposition which independent of, nay, in spite of, sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names, andunder varying disguises. Without that faculty ... No religion wouldbe possible. " To this definition there are various strong objections. It implies that there is only one way in which men come to believe inhigher beings; they arrive at that belief by finding something whichtranscends them and which they cannot understand; _i. E. _ by anintellectual process. It may be doubted whether the sense ofdisappointment with the finite is the only road, or even a commonroad, to belief in gods. Mr. Müller's omission, moreover, from hisdefinition, of the practical side of religion, of the element ofworship, is a fatal objection to it. Belief and worship areinseparable sides of religion, which does not come fully intoexistence till both are present. In a later work[4] Mr. Müller admitsthe force of this objection, urged by several scholars, to hisdefinition, and modifies it as follows: "Religion consists in theperception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able toinfluence the moral character of man. " In this form the definitionrecognises that worship, the practical activity in which man's moralcharacter shows itself in fear, gratitude, love, contrition, is anessential part of religion, and that perceptions of the infiniteapart from this are only one side of it. His original definition, however, has played too large a part in the history of our subject tobe left without careful notice. The same objection applies to Mr. Herbert Spencer's account of the matter. Mr. Spencer finds the basisof all religion in the inscrutableness of the Power which theuniverse manifests to us. The belief common to all religions, heholds, is the presence of something which passes comprehension. Theidea of the absolute and unconditioned he regards as accompanying allour consciousness of things conditioned and limited, and as being nota negative notion, not merely the denial of limits, but a positiveone. The unconditioned is that of which all our thoughts and ideasare manifestations, but which we never can know, with regard to whichwe cannot affirm anything but that it exists. This definition likethat last noticed traces religion to the defects in man's knowledge, and rather to a negative than a positive element in his experience. It also comes under the objection that it traces religion rather toan intellectual than a practical motive, and omits the element ofworship. 

[Footnote 2: Though Mr. Tylor defines religion as the "belief inspiritual beings, " he is not to be charged with making it too much amatter of the intellect. He uses the word belief in a wide sense asincluding the practices it involves. In the word "spiritual, "however, Mr. Tylor brings into the definition his theory of Animism, and thus makes it unserviceable for those who do not adopt thattheory. ]

[Footnote 3: _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, 1882, p. 13. The definition was put forward in the year 1873, and in his lectureson the Origin of Religion, 1882, Mr. Müller adhered to it as being inthe main sound (p. 23). ]

[Footnote 4: _Natural Religion_, 1888, pp. 188, 193. ]

Other scholars have explained religion as the action of the curiosityof the human mind, of that impulse which prompts man to investigatethe causes of things, and specially to seek for the first cause ofall things. Here we touch what is certainly to be recognised as aninvariable feature of religion; it always professes to explain theworld, and to bring unity to man's mind by clearing up the problemswhich perplex him, and affording him a commanding point of view, fromwhich he may see all the parts of the world and of life fall intotheir places. This, however, does not tell us what religion itselfis. This curiosity, this impulse to know, are not specificallyreligious; they belong rather to philosophy. Other motives than thoseconnected with knowledge entered from the first into man's worship. Curiosity impelled him to seek the first cause of things; in religionhe saw something that promised to explain the world to him, and toexplain him to himself. But it was something more than curiosity thatmade him regard that cause, when found, as a god, and pay itreverence and sacrifice. What is the motive of worship? Wonder, nodoubt, is always present in it, but what is there in it beyondwonder? No definition of religion can be regarded as complete inwhich the motive of worship is left undetermined. That is of theessence of the matter. There must be a moral as well as anintellectual quality which is characteristic of religion. What isreligion morally? Acts of worship may be specified in which everyconceivable moral quality seeks to express itself. The mostcontradictory motives, pride and anger and revenge, as well as fearor hunger or contrition, enter into such acts. But if religion is amatter of sentiment as well as of outward posture, these acts ofworship cannot all be equally entitled to the name, and something iswanted to complete our definition. 

Fuller Definition. --Let us add what seems to be wanting; and say thatreligion is the "worship of higher powers from a sense of need"! Thiswill remind the reader of Schleiermacher's definition--"a sense ofinfinite dependence. " It was always objected to that definition, thatit made religion no more than a sentiment, a mood, but that besidesthis, it is both belief and action. But the truth Schleiermacherurged was one of essential importance to the matter. Belief in godsand acts of worship paid to them do not constitute religion unlessthe sentiment, the sense of need, be also there. These threetogether, feeling, belief, and will expressing itself in action, constitute religion both in the lowest and in the highest levels ofcivilisation. 

A belief must exist, to take a step farther, that the beingworshipped is capable of supplying what the worshipper requires. Mendo not pray nor bring offerings to beings they suppose to beincapable of attending to them, or powerless to do them any good orevil. It is implied in every act of worship that the being addressedis a power who is able to do for the worshipper what he cannot do forhimself. It is his inability to help himself or to supply his ownneeds that sends the worshipper to his god, who has a power hehimself has not. If he could help himself he would not need religion, if his life were either perfectly prosperous and even, so that therewas nothing left to wish for, or perfectly miserable andunsuccessful, so that there was no room for hope, he would not resortto higher powers; but neither of these two being the case, his lifeon the contrary being a mixed lot of good and evil, in which thereare blessings his own forces cannot secure, and dangers from which noefforts of his own can save him, and the belief having arisen withinhim, in what way we need not now inquire, that higher powers existwho can, if they will, defend and prosper him, in this way he hasreligion, he keeps up intercourse with higher powers. And thusreligion is not necessarily, even in its most primitive form, amanifestation of mere selfishness. Though gifts are offered which areexpected to please the higher beings, and though benefits are askedof which the worshipper is urgently in need, such transactions arenot necessarily sordid any more than similar applications betweenhuman beings, between two friends, or between a parent and a child. Even the savage living in entire isolation, at war with every one andconscious of no needs but those of food and shelter, will not seekbenefits from his god without some feeling of attachment, nor withoutsome sense of strengthened friendship should the benefit be grantedhim. When once this sense of friendship has arisen, religion ispresent, the man has come to be in living relation with a higherpower, whom he conceives, no doubt, after his own likeness, butnevertheless as greater than he is. 

This then is what we conceive to be the essence of religion--theworship of higher powers, from a sense of need; and it is of thisthat we are to trace the history though only in the barest outlines. The definition itself suggests in what way the development may beexpected to work itself out. According as the needs change theircharacter, of which men are conscious, so will their religion alsochange. The gradual elevation and refinement of human needs, in thegrowth of civilisation, is the motive force of the development ofreligion. The deities themselves, their past history and theirpresent character, the sacrifices offered to them, and the benefitsaimed at in intercourse with them, all must grow up as man himselfgrows, from rudeness to refinement and from caprice to order. At itslowest, religion is perhaps an individual affair between the savageand his god, and has to do with material individual needs. At ahigher stage (not always nor even commonly later in time) it is theaffair of a family, of a tribe, or of a combination of tribes, andwith each of these extensions the requests grow broader and lesspersonal which have to be presented to the deity; the religionbecomes a common worship for public ends. The needs of the nomad areother than those of the settled agriculturist, and those of thecountryman differ from those of the citizen, and those of theLaplander from those of the Negro, and these differences will bereflected in the aspect of the deities and in the observancescelebrated in their honour. When art begins to stir within a nation, the gods have to adapt themselves to the new taste. As society growsmore humane, cruel and sanguinary religious observances, though theymay long keep a hold of the ignorant and excitable, lose theirsupport in the public conscience and are sentenced to change or toextinction. And when a new consciousness of personal human dignitysprings up, and men come to feel the infinite value and the infiniteresponsibility of personal life, the old public religion is felt tobe cold and distant, and religious services of a more personal andmore intimate kind are sought for. 

Thus religion and civilisation advance together; according as thecivilisation is in any people, so is its religion. It is vain, broadly speaking, to look for the combination of primitive mannersand customs with a lofty spiritual faith. The converse it is true mayoften seem to take place. Religion, or rather religious creeds andpractices, often seem to lag behind civilisation and to maintainthemselves long after the reason and the conscience of a people hascondemned them. That is because religion is what man values most inhis life, and he is loath to change observances in which hisaffections are powerfully engaged. But religion must reflect theideals of the society in which it exists; the needs which the societyfeels at the time must be the burden of its prayers; its sacrificesmust be such as the general sentiment allows; its gods, to retain theallegiance of the community, must alter with time and provethemselves alive and in touch with their people. And if it be thecase that civilisation has on the whole advanced upwards from thefirst; if, as Mr. Tylor assures us, [5] man began with his lowest andhas, in spite of occasional declines, on the whole been improvingever since, then of religion also the same will be true. It also willbe found to begin with its rudest forms and gradually to grow better. Religion in fact is the inner side of civilisation, and expresses theessential spirit of human life in various ages and nations. Thereligion of a race is the truest expression of its character, andreflects most faithfully its attitude and aims and policy. Thereligion of an age shows what at that time constituted the object ofman's aspiration and endeavour, as older hopes grew pale and newhopes rose on his sight. Thus the study of the religions of the worldis the study of the very soul of its history; it is the study of thedesires and aspirations which throughout the course of history menhave not been ashamed, nay, which they have been proud and determinedto confess. No more fascinating study could possibly engage us. It istrue that the requirements for the adequate treatment of the subjectare such as few indeed can hope to possess. He who would treat thehistory of religion aright ought to know thoroughly the whole of thehistory of civilisation; he should have explored the vast domain ofsavage life and thought that has recently been opened up to us, andhe should be at home in every century of every nation from thebeginning of history. At a time like this, when new light is beingpoured every year on every part of our subject, no statement of itcan be more than tentative and partial. The student will be directedat each step to sources of fuller information. 

[Footnote 5: _Primitive Culture_, chap. Ii. ]

BOOKS RECOMMENDED (GENERAL)

_Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the UniversalReligions_. By Dr. C. P. Tiele. Translation. In Trübner's OrientalSeries. Very condensed and in somewhat technical language; but thework of one of the greatest masters of the subject. A fullBibliography is appended to the various chapters. 

_Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte_, von P. D. Chantepie de laSaussaye. Freiburg, 1887. The English translation has an alteredtitle, viz. _Manual of the Science of Religion_, Longmans, 1891. TheThird Edition (1905) is practically a different book, and consists ofstudies, each by an expert, of the various religions. 

_Religious Systems of the World_ (Sonnenschein, 1892) is a fullcollection of descriptions of the various religions, by personsspecially acquainted with them; of very unequal merit. 

Mr. Max Müller's works cited above, also his more recent volumes ofGifford Lectures, contain a number of general discussions. 

See also the Gifford Lectures of the late Mr. Ed. Caird, and the lateProf. Tiele. 

Pfleiderer's _Philosophy of Religion_, 4 vols. 

Pünjer, _Geschichte der christl. Religionsphilosophie_, 2 vols. 1880-83. 

Rauwenhoff, _Wijsbegeerde van den Godsdienst_, 2 vols. 1887 (also inGerman). 

M. Jastrow, _The Study of Religion_, 1901. 

L. H. Jordan, _Comparative Religion, its Origin and Growth_, 1905. 

_Revue de l'histoire des religions_, edited by M. J. Réville. 

_Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, edited by Alb. Dieterich. 

Reinach, Orpheus, _Histoire Générale des Religions_, 1909. 

Hastings, _Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics_, vol. I. A-Art, 1908. 

_The New Schaff-Heizog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge_ hasexcellent articles on the various religions. 

Louis H. Jordan, _Comparative Religion_, 1905. An account of theprogress of our study, with extensive bibliography. 

Galloway, _The Principles of Religious Development_, a psychologicaland philosophical study, 1909. 

_Proceedings of the Oxford International Congress of the History ofReligions_, 1908. 2 vols. The addresses of the Presidents of theSections give a record of the most recent progress in every part ofour study. Of these see, for this chapter, Count Goblet d'Alviella, vol. Ii. Pp. 365 _sqq_. On the Method and Scope of the History ofReligion. 

CHAPTER IITHE BEGINNING OF RELIGION

Origin of Civilisation. --Every inhabited country, we are assured byethnologists, was once peopled by savages; the stone age everywherecame before the age of metals. Antecedent to every civilisation thathas sprung up on the earth is this dim period, the period of the cavedwellers and afterwards of the lake dwellers. There can be nochronology nor any exact knowledge of these early men who lived byhunting, with stone weapons, animals which are now extinct. How fromhis earliest and most helpless state man came in various ways to helphimself; how he discovered fire, how he improved his weapons andinvented tools, how he learned to tame certain of the animals onwhich he had formerly made war, and instead of wandering about theworld came to settle in one place and till the soil, and how familylife came to be instituted, and the father as well as the mother toact as guardian to the children; all that is a vast history, whichmust be read in its own place. Immense, indeed, were the laboursearly man had to undergo, in wrestling his way up from a life likethat of the brutes to a life in which his own distinctive naturecould begin to display itself. 

It was from the savage state that civilisation was by degreesproduced. The theory that man was originally civilised and humane, and that it was by a fall, by a degeneration from that earliestcondition, that the state of savagery made its appearance, is nowgenerally abandoned. There may be instances of such degenerationhaving taken place; but on the whole, the conviction now obtains thatcivilisation is the result of progressive development, and was theresult man conquered for himself by his age-long struggles with hisenvironment. That development did not take place in all lands alike. In some it proceeded faster than in others, and its advances were dueoftener to propagation from without, than to unaided growth fromwithin; as one race came in contact with another new ideas werearoused of the possibilities of life in various directions. In somelands the development has scarcely taken place at all. There remainto this day races who are judged to be still in the primitivecondition. Not all savage tribes are thought to be in that condition. The bushmen of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, and others, [1] arefound to be in such a state in point of habits and acquirements thatthey must be considered as races which have fallen from a higherposition, and present instances of degeneration. But a multitude ofsavage tribes remain in all quarters of the globe who do not appearto have been thus enfeebled, and who are held to be still in thatstate in which the dwellers in all parts of the earth were beforewhat we now call civilisation began. They are races among whomcivilisation did not spring up, as it did in China or in Peru. Fromthese races we may learn in a general way, though in this greatcaution is required, what the ancestors of all the civilised nationswere. It confirms this conclusion that we find in every civilisednation a number of phenomena, practices, beliefs, stories, which themental condition of the nation as we know it does not account for, which manifestly are not outgrowths of the civilisation, but relicsof an older state of life, which civilisation has not entirelyobliterated; and that these practices, beliefs, and stories can beexactly matched by those of the savage races. The inference is drawnthat civilisation has sprung from savage life, that, as Mr. Tylorsays, "the savage state represents the early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed bycauses still in operation. " To trace the history of civilisation, therefore, it is necessary to go back to the earliest knowledge wehave of human life upon the earth, and to ask what germs andrudiments can be discovered among savages of law, of institutions, ofarts and sciences. Such works as Maine's _Ancient Law_, Tylor's_Primitive Culture_, Lubbock's _Origin of Civilisation_, show howfruitful this method is, and what floods of light it pours on thehistory of society. 

[Footnote 1: Instances in Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, chap. Ii. , where the theory of degeneration is fully discussed. ]

Now what is true of civilisation generally will be true also ofreligion, which is one of its principal elements. If every countrywas once inhabited by savages, then the original religion of everycountry must have been a religion of savages; and in the laterreligion there will be features which have been carried on from theearlier one. This, indeed, we must in any case expect to find. No newreligion can enter on its career on a soil quite unprepared, on whichno gods have been worshipped before. (That would imply that there hadbeen races in the world without religion, on which we shall speakpresently. ) A new faith has always to begin by adjusting itself tothat which it found in possession of the soil, and it always adoptswhat it can of the old system. We should expect then that the greatreligions of the world should exhibit features which do not belong totheir own structure, but which they inherited, with or against theirwill, from their uncivilised predecessors. And that is the case, aswe shall see afterwards, with all the great religions. They are allfull of survivals of the savage state. The old religious associationscling to the face of a land and refuse to be uprooted, whateverchanges take place among the gods above. Superstitious practicescontinue among a race long after a truth has been preached there withwhich they are entirely inconsistent. Stories are long told about thegods, quite out of keeping with their character in the theology ofthe new faith, pointing to a time when not so much was expected of agod. In Mr. Lang's _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, the reader will findan admirable collection of material showing how the popular elementsof an old religion survive in a new one in which they are quite outof place. There is none of the great religions to which this does notapply. 

Now, if it be the case that each of the great religions has beenbuilt upon a primitive religion formerly occupying the same ground, it might appear that we must, in order to understand any of the greatreligions, study first, in each case, the savage system which itsuperseded. It would be a serious prospect for the student if he hadto make a separate study of a set of savage beliefs as an approach toeach of the ten or twelve great religions. But this, as we shall seeafterwards, is not the case. There is a great family likeness in thereligions of savages, and we may even allow ourselves to speak not ofthe religions but of the religion of early races. In the next chapteran attempt will be made to describe that religion; but we may sayhere that there are some features which are generally, though by nomeans always found in it, and that these features may be regarded forpractical purposes as the religion of the primitive world, whicheverywhere was the forerunner of the great systems. This is thejungle, as it were, overspreading all the early world, out of whichlike giant trees the great religions arose, and from which theyderived and still derive a nourishment they cannot disown. Indeed, wemay go much farther. In some of their leading doctrines, the greatreligions show the most striking affinity with one another. China andEgypt have some doctrines in common which are also found in thereligion of the Incas; the Aryan and the Semitic religions know themtoo. Should these doctrines be found in the religion of savages, itwill at least be a question whether the great religions all alikeborrowed and developed them from that source, or whether any otherexplanation of the case can be found. Evidently we cannot make anyprogress with our subject till we have taken a general view of thisreligion of savages and come to some conclusions regarding it. 

A few words must be said, by way of preface to this subject, on themental habits of early races. We cannot hope to understand thethoughts of those people without knowing how they came to have suchthoughts, how they were accustomed to think. Now of the savage we maysay that he is just like a child who has not yet learned to thinkcorrectly, or to know things truly. He is making all kinds ofexperiments in thought, and being led into all sorts of errors andconfusion; and if the child takes years, the savage may takemillenniums, to get free from these. He does not know the differencebetween one thing and another, between himself and the lower animals, or between an animal and a water-spout. He does not know how farthings are away from him, nor what makes them move and act as theydo; why, for example, the sun and moon go round the sky, or why thewind blows. He cannot tell why things have this or that peculiarappearance; why, for example, the rabbit has no tail, why the sky isred in the morning, why some stones are like men. And he wants toknow all these things, and is for ever asking questions. But almostany answer will do for him, the first explanation that turns up isaccepted; and while a child finds out pretty soon if he has been toldwrong, the savage is so ignorant that he cannot see the absurdestexplanation to be false, but sticks to it seriously and goes on usingit. There is no consistency in the contents of his mind, andinconsistency does not distress him. He has no classes and orders ofthings, but considers each thing by itself as it occurs, withoutputting it in its place with reference to other things. He has noidea of what is possible and what is impossible; these words in factwould have no meaning for him, since he is not aware of any laws bywhich events are governed. His imagination, accordingly, is not underany restraint; he hits upon all kinds of grotesque theories, and, having no critical faculty to test them, he repeats them andseriously believes them. The stories of the nursery, in which thereare no impossibilities, in which a man may visit the sun and thewinds in their homes and find them at their broth, in which thebeasts can speak, in which the witch or the fairy knows at anydistance what is going on and can turn up just at the nick of time, in which ghosts walk, in which anything can be changed into anything, a hero going through half a dozen transformations to escape from somany dangers, --these are to the savage not incredible nor foolishtales, to him they are very real, and very serious matters. He lives, in fact, we are told by the authorities on the subject, in themyth-making period of the world; in the period when such incidents asoccur in the tales of fairyland and in the stories of mythology arematter of common belief, and even, it is thought, of commonexperience, so that when the story is put in a good form, it livesand is believed as a true record of what has actually taken place. 

On one feature of the savage imagination in particular we must fixour attention. The savage regards all things as animated, --asanimated with a life like his own. Of his own life he has no veryexalted idea; he has no notion how different he really is fromanything around him; as he is himself, so he supposes other beings tobe also, not only the animals but the trees and all that moves andeven what does not move, even rocks and stones. He is living himself;he regards all these as living too. He imagines them like himself, and supposes them to have feelings and passions like his own, toreason as he does, and even if he is told they speak as he does, thatis not incredible to him. Thus he lives in a world of infiniteconfusion, in which there are no laws, no classes of beings, no meansof knowing what may happen, or of verifying any statement, whereevery effort of fancy may be believed. The mental world of savageshas been compared to the ravings of a whole world turned lunatic. Wesurvey it, however, without horror, because we know that reason isnot unseated there, but striving towards her kingdom. That is theexperience that had to be gone through, these are part of theexperiments, such as every child has still to make, by which theknowledge of the world is gradually arrived at. 

Amid this apparent universal confusion a certain consistency of viewis to be observed. It might be expected that the savage habit ofthought, acting independently in different parts of the world, wouldlead to an infinite number of divergent and inconsistent views of thenature of things and of man's place in the world. But this is notfound to be the case. Mr. Lang accounts as follows for the diffusionof the same stories all over the world: "An ancient identity ofmental status, and the working of similar mental forces at theattempt to explain the same phenomena, will account without anytheory of borrowing, or of transmission of myth, or of original unityof race, for the world-wide diffusion of many mythical conceptions. "Mr. Tylor says that the same imaginative processes regularly recur, that world-wide myths show the regularity and the consistency of thehuman imagination. M. Réville, in his _Religions des peuplesnon-civilisés_, remarks that the character of savage religions iseverywhere the same; that only the forms vary. 

Now of the things that all savages possess, certainly religion isone. It is practically agreed that religion, the belief in andworship of gods, is universal at the savage stage; and the accountswhich some travellers have given of tribes without religion areeither set down to misunderstanding, or are thought to beinsufficient to invalidate the assertion that religion is a universalfeature of savage life. 

How did it get there? How comes it that men so near the lowest humanstate, so devoid of all that has been since acquired, should yet befound to have this mode of thought universally diffused among them?

It has been ascribed to a primitive revelation. At the beginning, itis said, God, with the other gifts He gave to man, gave him religion;that is to say, gave him not only a disposition for reverence andpiety, but a certain amount of religious knowledge, so that he setout with a stock of religious ideas which were not elaborated by hisown efforts, but bestowed on him ready made. It is impossible, however, to conceive how this could be done. If the religion given atfirst was a lofty and pure one, --and no other need be thought of insuch a connection, --then it implies a condition of human life farabove the struggles and uncertainties of savage existence; and boththe civilisation and the religion must have been lost afterwards. Buthow could all mankind forget a pure religion? Mankind in that casecannot have been fit for the possession of it; it was givenprematurely. No. The history of early civilisation is the history ofa struggle in which man has everything to conquer, and in which he isnot remembering something he had lost, but advancing by new routes toa land he never reached before. And if civilisation was won for thefirst time, so was religion. 

We may also put aside the theory that man had religion from the firstas an innate idea, that he found information all ready and preparedin his mind of what it was proper to do in this direction, and how itwas to be done. There was indeed a suggestion from within; but it wasdue not to any special faculty lying outside the essential structureof human nature, but to the constitution of the human mind itself. Wecannot go into the philosophical question of the basis of religion inthe human mind. [2] It would seem to be a psychological necessity. Atall stages of his existence the world of which man is aware outsidehim, and the world of feelings and desires within him are inconflict. But the conviction lives within him that in some way theycan be brought into harmony, and that a power exists which rules inboth of these discordant realms and in which, if he can identifyhimself with it, he also will escape from their discord. If this beso, then this necessity to seek after a higher power must have begunto operate as soon as human consciousness appeared. The savagecertainly was never unacquainted with the discrepancy between what hewanted and what the world would give him, between the inner man sofull of desires and plans, and that outward nature which denied himhis desires and thwarted his plans, and before which he felt sofeeble and insecure. He also could not but be driven, if his life wasto go on at all on any tolerable basis, to believe in something thathad to do both with the world outside him and with the world of hisheart, in a being which both had sympathy with his desires and powerto give effect to them outwardly. 

[Footnote 2: See on this subject Prof. Edward Caird's GiffordLectures, _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893. Galloway, _ThePrinciples of Religious Development_. ]

The whole of the early world did entertain such a belief. This is thefirst and the most important instance of uniformity of thought at astage through which every nation once passed; all men at that stagebelieve in gods. We will not refuse the name of religion to this sideof savage life, even should the needs be low and material which sendthe savage to his god, though his god be a being who in us wouldexcite the very opposite of reverence, and though his treatment ofhis god be far from what to us seems worthy, or even though he stroveto appease a multitude of spirits which he conceived as flittingabout him, before he came to form a settled relation of confidencewith one being whom he took for his own god. Where the sense of needhas sent a human being to hold intercourse with a higher power, therewe hold religion is making its appearance. And if this is universallythe case among men at the savage stage, then religion is universalamong the ancestors of all nations; it did not need to be inventedwhen kings and priests appeared and wanted it as an instrument fortheir own purposes; it was there before there were any kings orpriests, and is an inheritance which has come down to all mankindfrom the time when human intelligence first turned to the effort tounderstand the world. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

_For this and the three following chapters_

J. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_, Third Edition, 1891. 

J. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Fourth Edition, 1903. 

Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, Third Edition, 1900. A new edition is nowappearing in parts. 

A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, new edition, 1899. 

Th. Achelis, in De la Saussaye. 

Waitz und Gerland, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, 1859-72. 

Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, 1897. 

The reports of travellers and missionaries are, of course, important. 

CHAPTER IIITHE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP

We must now make some attempt to set forth the principal features ofthe religion of savages. It is an attempt of some difficulty; forsavage religion is an immense and bewildering jungle of all manner ofextraordinary growths. It is described in detail in large books andif we try to sum it up in a short statement, we may be told thatessential features have been omitted. No one set of savages hasanything that can be called a system, and different sets of savagesare not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to includeunder the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale ofhuman advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions, in hot climates and in cold, both rude savages and those who arenobler; and these will, of course, have a variety of ideas and needs, and in so far, different religions. After reading such a book as Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_, or turning over the pages of Waitz andGerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, one is inclined to regardit as a hopeless task to reduce savage religion to any compactstatement. 

Mr. Tylor's orderly collections, in his great book _PrimitiveCulture_, of materials bearing on different features of earlyreligion are a help for which the student cannot be sufficientlythankful. After all, it is not the whole of savage religion that weare responsible for here, but only those parts of it that grew andsurvived in higher faiths. Remembering what has been said as to theuniformity of savage thought amid its great variety of forms, andlooking for those parts of it which have proved to have life in them, rather than for what is merely curious and grotesque, we may ventureon our task not without hope. In the present chapter we shall inquirewhat beings savages worship as gods. Of these we shall find thatthere are several classes; and it will be necessary to notice thegreat discussions which have arisen on the question which of theseclasses of deities was first worshipped by man. The objectsworshipped by men in low stages of civilisation may be arranged infour classes, viz. --

 1. Parts of nature (_a_) great, (_b_) small. 2. Spirits of ancestors and other spirits. 3. Objects supposed to be haunted by spirits (fetish-worship). 4. A Supreme Being. 

1. Nature-worship. --It is not difficult to realise why early manturned to the great elements of nature as beings who could help him, and whom he ought, therefore, to cultivate. The farther we go back incivilisation, the less protection has man against the weather, themore do his subsistence and his comfort depend on the action of thesun, the winds, the rain. If, according to the habits of earlythought, he conceived these beings as living like himself and asguided by feelings and motives similar to his own, he could not failto wish to open up communication with them. That simple view, thatthey were living beings with feelings like his own, was enough to goupon. In his anxieties for food or warmth he could not fail to thinkof the beings who, he had observed, had power to supply him withthese comforts, of the rain which he had noticed was able to makefood grow, of the sun whose warmth he knew. The thunderstorm was abeing who had power to put an end to a long drought; the winds couldbreak the trees, could dry up the wet earth, or could bring rain. Heaven was over all, and the Earth was the supporter and fertileproducer of all; from her all life came. The moon as well as the sunwas a friendly power, nay, in some climates, more friendly. Fire wasa living being certainly, on whom much depended; and so was the greatlake or the ocean. This is what M. Réville calls the greatNature-worship, in comparison with the minor Nature-worship to benoticed presently. 

We do not now enter on the subject of mythology; that is to say, ofthe names men very early began to give to the great natural objectsof worship, the characters they ascribed to them, the stories theytold about them. That process of myth-making began very early, and isto be found at work in every part of the world. But at first it wassimply the natural being itself, conceived as living, that wasworshipped, not a spirit or a person thought to dwell in it. Of this, abundant evidence has survived in the great religions. Jupiter isjust the sky, the Greek god Helios is just the sun, and the goddessSelene the moon. In China heaven itself is worshipped to this day. The Babylonians worshipped the stars. The Vedic gods are primarilythe elements. From savage life examples of this earliest state ofmatters can also be quoted, though mythology has nearly everywheregreatly confused it. The Mincopies adore the sun as a beneficentdeity, the moon as an inferior god. To the Natchez the sun is thesupreme god; with some tribes of North America the chief god isheaven blowing, the sky with a wind in it, what Longfellow calls the"Great Spirit" or blowing. The Incas invoked together the Creator andthe Sun and Thunder. Thunder was one of the great gods of theGermans. The Samoyede bows to the Sun every morning and every eveningand says. "When thou arisest I also arise; when thou settest I alsobetake myself to rest. " To the Ojibways Fire is a divine being, to bewell entertained, with whom no liberties must be taken. In every landmen are to be found who worship the Earth as a great deity, callingher by her own name and serving her with suitable rites. In the_Prometheus_ of Æschylus the hero addresses his appeal as follows tothe beings he regards as gods of old race who will sympathise withhim against the upstart Zeus:--

 Ether of Heaven and Winds untired of wing, Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea, Laughing in waves innumerable! O Earth, All-mother!--Yea and on the Sun I call, Whose orb scans all things; look on me and see How I, a god, am wronged by gods. _Lewis Campbell_, line 85 _sq_. 

The minor Nature-worship has to do with rivers and springs, withtrees and groves, with crops and fruits, with rocks and stones, andwith the lower animals. Here also we must bear in mind the habit ofmind of early man, who regarded all things as animated and as likehimself. It was not necessary for one who thought in this way tosuppose that the spring was haunted by a nymph or the oak inhabitedby a dryad, before he felt that the spring or the oak had a claim onhim, and brought offerings to secure their friendship. The Nile andthe Ganges did not become sacred by having a mythical being added tothem as their spirit; they were themselves sacred beings. Everycountry is studded with names which reveal to the scholar theprimeval sanctity of the spots they belong to; the mountain, thegrove, and the individual tree, the rocky gorge, the rock, the grassyknoll, each was once an object of reverence. Britain is full ofsacred wells, which once received prayers and offerings. There is noanimal that has not once been worshipped. A marked feature ofprimitive life also is the worship of nature not in its particularobjects but in its living processes. In a multitude of curious rites, some of which still survive in local usages, and have only recentlybeen explained, primitive man brought himself into relations withnature in its growth, decay, and resurrection. He sympathised with itand imitated it, and he thus sought to make himself sure of thebenefits which he saw bestowed by some power which he apprehended inits processes and believed able to further him. 

2. Ancestor-worship. --A set of beings of a very different kind comesnext. If man found in the world which he beheld outside him a numberof objects he could make gods, his domestic experience forced him toconsider certain beings of a different kind, of whom the outwardworld could tell him nothing. The worship of the dead, of ancestors, is diffused throughout nearly the whole of antiquity, it is practisedby most savages. Man at an early stage does not fully realise themeaning of death. He interprets death after the analogy of dreams, inwhich he judges that the spirit leaves the body and traverses distantregions, coming back to the body again when the journey is ended. Avision is to him an instance of the same thing. He sees a friend, who, he afterwards learns, was far from him at the time, and hejudges that it was the spirit of his friend which visited him. Thusthere arises in his mind the conception of a human spirit which isable to leave the body and dwell at a distance from it. It is calledby various names, --the shade, the image, the heart, as perhaps whenElisha says his heart went with Gehazi when he went to meet Naamanthe Syrian (2 Kings v. 26), the breath, the soul. When the breath orspirit goes away and stays away (in spite of efforts made to bring itback) the man dies. But the spirit is not dead. It has gone away andis staying somewhere else. The spirit resembles the body in shape, but it is of a thin and light consistence, and is able to move aboutand to pass through the smallest openings, to make unpleasant noises, and to cause its presence to be felt in a variety of ways. In thevery earliest times, the savage regards the spirit which has left thehouse as an enemy, and uses a variety of precautions to keep it fromcoming back to trouble him (vampires, ghosts, _lemures_). Whetherfrom such fear or from more liberal motives, much is done to pleasethe spirits of the departed and to increase their comfort in theabodes to which they have gone. At their burial or cremation all theymay be supposed to want where they are going, _i. E. _ the things theyused on earth, are made to accompany them; food and weapons areplaced beside them; servants are killed whose spirits are to wait onthem, even a wife, voluntarily or without being asked, gives up herearthly life to accompany her husband. Offerings of food and drinkare made to them afterwards, prayers are addressed to them, memorialsof them, of various kinds, are preserved in the houses they occupied. 

It was the universal belief of the early world that the personcontinued to exist after the death of the body; and this furnishedthe materials for a religion which was more widely prevalent inantiquity than the worship of any god. In some forms of it, indeed, the spirit appears to have been treated as an enemy, and this worshipmight be judged to fall short of religion, which is the cultivation, not the avoidance, of intercourse with higher powers. The savage hasno hope from the spirit, and does not seek his intercourse. But inmost forms of the belief in the continued life of the departed, othersentiments than fear prevail; natural affection is felt for the lostrelative; the ancestor represents the family, to which the individualis called to subordinate and to some extent even to sacrificehimself; the spirit of the dead is the upholder of a family traditionwhich the living must hold sacred. Even in those cases in whichnothing but fear is apparent, these latter sentiments may also be tosome extent operative. 

3. Fetish-worship. --The early world has still another kind of deity. In the case of all those we have considered, the god stands in somerespect above the worshipper; man reverences the sun, spirit, oranimal, for some quality in them that is admirable or that gives thema hold over him; they are in some ways beyond him. Among certain setsof savages, however, notably in South Africa, this feature ofreligion partially disappears, and objects are reverenced not for anyintrinsic quality in them that makes them worthy of regard, butbecause of a spirit which is supposed to be connected with them. Stones, trees, twigs, pieces of bark, roots, corn, claws of birds, teeth, skin, feathers, articles of human manufacture, any conceivableobject, will be held in reverence by the savage and regarded asembodying a spirit. Anything that strikes his fancy as being out ofthe common he will take up and add to his museum of objects, each ofwhich has in it a hidden power. That power, be it repeated, is notconnected with the natural quality of the object, but is due to aspirit which has come to reside in it, and which may very possiblyleave it again. Having chosen this deity and set it up for worship, the man can use it as he thinks fit. He addresses prayers to it andextols its virtues; but should his enterprise not prosper, he willcast his deity aside as useless, and cease to worship it; he willaddress it with torrents of abuse, and will even beat it, to make itserve him better. It is a deity at his disposal, to serve in theaccomplishment of his desires; the individual keeps gods of his ownto help him in his undertakings. 

The name "fetishism, " by which this kind of worship is known, is ofPortuguese origin; it is derived from _feitiço_, "made, " "artificial"(compare the old English _fetys_, used by Chaucer); and this term, used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion ofthe period, was applied by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenthcentury to the deities they saw worshipped by the negroes of the WestCoast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant of last century, broughtthe word fetishism into use as a term for the type of religion of thelowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having beenapplied by Comte and other writers to the worship of the heavenlybodies and of the great features of nature. It is best to limit it, as has been done above, to the worship of such natural objects as arereverenced not for their own power or excellence but because they aresupposed to be occupied each by a spirit. 

Can this be called religion? In the full sense of the term it cannot. We should remember that it is not the casual object, but the spiritconnected with it that the savage worships; but even then we shall beobliged to hold that the fetish worshipper is rather seeking afterreligion than actually in possession of it. 

4. A Supreme Being. --Is it necessary to add another class of deity tothese three, and to say that besides nature-gods and spirits earlyman also worshipped a Supreme Being above all these? In most savagereligions there is a principal deity to whom the others aresubordinate. But if we carefully examine one by one the supreme godsof these religions, we shall find reason to doubt whether they reallyhave a common character so as to form a class by themselves. Many ofthem are nature gods who have outgrown the other deities of thatclass and come to occupy an isolated position. The North AmericanIndians, as we saw, worship the Great Spirit, the heaven with itsbreath, to whom sun and moon and other ordinances of nature act asministers. In many cases heaven is the highest god. In others againthe sun is supreme. Ukko the great god of the Finns is a heaven- andrain-god. Perkunas the god of the Lithuanians is connected withthunder. On the other hand there are instances in which the supremegod appears to be a different being from the nature-god. TheSamoyedes worship the sun and moon and the spirits of other parts ofnature; but they also believe in a good spirit who is above all. TheSupreme Being of the islands of the Pacific bears in New Zealand thename of Tangaroa, and is spoken of in quite metaphysical terms as theuncreated and eternal Creator. Here we may suspect Christianinfluence. With the Zulus Unkulunkulu the Old-old one might besupposed to be a kind of first cause. But on looking nearer we findhe is distinctly a man, the first man, the common ancestor; beyondwhich idea speculation does not seem to go. Among many North Americantribes it is usual to find an animal the chief deity, the hare or themusk-rat or the coyote. It is very common to find in savage beliefs avague far-off god who is at the back of all the others, takes littlepart in the management of things, and receives little worship. But itis impossible to judge what that being was at an earlier time; he mayhave been a nature-god or a spirit who has by degrees grown faint andcome to occupy this position. We cannot judge from the supreme beingsof savages, such as they are, that the belief in a supreme being wasgenerally diffused in the world[1] in the earliest times, and is notto be derived from any of the processes from which the other godsarose. We shall see afterwards how natural the tendency is which, where there are several gods, brings one of them to the front whilethe others lose importance. For a theory of primitive monotheism thesupreme gods of savages certainly do not furnish sufficient evidence;they do not appear to have sprung all from the same source, but tohave advanced from very different quarters to the supreme position, in obedience to that native instinct of man's mind which causes him, even when he believes in many gods, to make one of them supreme. 

[Footnote 1: _Cf. _ A. Lang, _The Making of Religion_ (1898);Galloway, _Studies in the Philosophy of Religion_ (1904), p. 123, _sqq. _]

Which Gods were First Worshipped?--If then early man formed his godsfrom parts of nature and from spirits of departed ancestors orheroes, and even, should the more backward races now existingrepresent a stage of human life belonging to the early world, fromspirits residing in outward objects, which of these is the originalroot of all the religions of the world? The claim has been made foreach of these kinds of religion, that it came first. 

1. Fetish-gods came First. --Till recently the view prevailed that allthe religion of the world has sprung out of fetishism. First thesavage took for his god some casual object, as we have described, then he chose higher objects, trees and mountains, rivers and lakes, and even the sun and stars. The heavens at last became his supremefetish, and at a higher level, when he had learned about spirits, hewould make a spirit his fetish, and so at last come to Monotheism. 

This view is attractive because it places the beginning of religionin the lowest known form of it and thus makes for the belief that thecourse of the world's faith has been upward from the first. But itpresents the gravest difficulties; for why should the savage make agod of a stick or a stone, and attribute to it supernatural powers?Who told him about a god, that he should call a stick god, or aboutsupernatural powers, that he should suppose a stick to work wonders?There is nothing in the stick to suggest such notions; that he shouldmake gods in this way, that the belief in wonderful powers shouldoriginate in this way, is surely quite incredible. Much more likelyis it, surely, that he got the notion of God from some other quarterand applied it in his own grotesque and degraded way; than that thenotion of God was taken first from such poor forms and appliedafterwards to objects better suited to it. Religion and civilisationgo hand in hand, and if civilisation can decay (and leadinganthropologists declare that the debased tribes of Australia and WestAfrica show signs of a higher civilisation they have lost) thenreligion also may decay. A lower race may borrow religious ideas froma higher and adapt them to their own position, _i. E. _ degrade them. And the progress of religion may still have been upwards on thewhole, although retrograde movements have taken place in certainraces. On these and other grounds it is now held with growingcertainty that fetishism cannot be the original form of religion, andthat the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. Theraces among whom fetishism is found exhibit a well-known feature ofthe decadence of religion, namely that the great god or gods havegrown weak and faint, and smaller gods and spirits have crowded in tofill up the blank thus caused. Worship is transferred from the greatbeings who are the original gods of the tribe and whom it stillprofesses in a vague way to believe, to numerous smaller beings, andfrom the good gods to the bad. 

2. Spirits, Human or Quasi-human, came First. --Is the worship ofspirits then the original form of religions. This has been powerfullymaintained in this country by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor. According to Mr. Spencer "the rudimentary form of all religion is thepropitiation of dead ancestors. " Men concluded, as soon as they werecapable of such reasoning, that the life they witnessed in plants andanimals, in sun and moon and other parts of nature, was due to theirbeing inhabited by the spirits of departed men. With all respect forthe splendid exposition given by Mr. Spencer[2] of the early beliefsof mankind regarding spirits, it is impossible to think that he hasmade out his case when he treats the gods of early India and ofGreece as deified ancestors. If the natural incredulity we feel atbeing told that Jupiter, Indra, the sun, the sacred mountain, and thestars all alike came to be worshipped because each of themrepresented some departed human hero, is not at once decisive, wehave only to wait a little to see whether some other theory cannotaccount for these gods in a simpler way. 

[Footnote 2: _Sociology_, vol. I. Also _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, p. 675; "ghost-propitiation is the origin of all religions. "]

Mr. Tylor also derives all religion from the worship of spirits, butin a different way. His is the most comprehensive system of Animism, using that term in the narrower sense of soul-worship. Starting fromthe doctrine of souls, reached by early man in the way describedabove (p. 33, _sqq. _), he argues that when once this notion wasreached it would be applied to other beings as well as man. Nothaving learned to distinguish himself clearly from other beings, manwould judge that they had souls like his own; and so every part ofnature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in theuniverse was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in thisway, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animationof nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As thehuman body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabitingspirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried onby other spirits. " At this point the soul is an unsubstantial essenceinhabiting a body, it has its life and activity only in connectionwith the body; but the step was easily taken to the further belief inspirits like the souls, but not attached to any body. The spiritsmoved about freely, like the genii, demons, fairies, and beings ofall kinds, with whom to the mind of antiquity the world was socrowded. 

Three classes of spirits we have up to this point: those ofancestors, those attached to the various parts of the life of nature, and those existing independently. Can the higher nature-deities beaccounted for by this theory as well as the minor spirits of theparts of nature? Mr. Tylor considers that they can; he declares thatthe "higher deities of polytheism have their place in the generalanimistic system of mankind. " He acknowledges that, with fewexceptions, great gods have a place as well as smaller gods in everynon-civilised system of religion. But in origin and essence he holdsthey are the same. "The difference is rather of rank than of nature. "As chiefs and kings are among men so are the great gods among thelesser spirits. The sun, the heavens, the stars, are living beings, because they have spirits as man has a soul, or as a spring has aspirit that haunts it. Thus in the doctrine of souls is found theorigin of the whole of early religion. Mr. Tylor confesses, however, that it is impossible to trace the process by which the doctrine ofsouls gave rise to the belief in the great gods. 

The weakness of this view is that it involves a denial that the greatpowers of nature could be worshipped before the process of reasoninghad been completed which led to the belief that they had souls orspirits. But how did early man regard these great powers before this?Did they not appear to him adorable by the very impressions they madeupon his various senses? Did he really need to argue out the beliefthat they had souls, before he felt drawn to wonder at them, and toseek to enter into relations with them?

Animism. --The word Animism, it should here be noticed, is used in thestudy of religions in a wider sense than that of Mr. Tylor. Many ofthe great religions are known to have arisen out of a primitiveworship of spirits and to have advanced from that stage to aworship of gods. The god differs from the spirit in having a markedpersonal character, while the spirits form a vague and somewhatundistinguishable crowd; in having a regular _clientèle_ ofworshippers, whereas the spirit is only served by those who need tocommunicate with him; in having therefore a regular worship, whilethe spirit is only worshipped when the occasion arises; and in beingserved from feelings of attachment and trust, and not like thespirits from fear. When gods appear, some writers hold, then and nottill then does religion begin; before that point is reached magic andexorcism are the forms used for addressing the unseen beings, butwhen it is reached we have worship; intercourse is deliberatelysought with beings who hold regular relations with man. The wordAnimism is best employed to denote the worship of spirits asdistinguished from that of gods. Whether or not early man derived hisbelief in the multitude of spirits by which he believed himself to besurrounded, from his belief in the separable human soul, there is nodoubt that he did consider himself to be so surrounded. Animism inthis sense is undoubtedly the beginning of some at least of the greatreligions. 

3. The Minor Nature-worship came First. --M. Réville holds[3] that thetree and the river and other such beings were the first gods, andthat the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards asan extension of the same principle. Mr. Max Müller seems to sharethis view when he says that man was led from the worship ofsemi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to thatof intangible objects, which gave him deities proper. The Germans, asa rule, hold the view that the great nature-worship came first, andthat the sanctity of the tree and the river came to them from above, these objects being regarded as lesser living beings deserving to beworshipped as well as the greater ones. The English school let thesanctity of these objects come to them as it were from below; whenman has come to believe in spirits, he concludes that they havespirits too, and worships the spirits he supposes to dwell in them. It does not seem that these theories are entirely exclusive of eachother. French writers suppose that the minor nature-worship firstsprang up of itself, half-animal man respecting the animals asrivals, the trees as fruit-bearers for his hunger, and so on, andthat spirits were added to these beings when the great animisticmovement of thought in which these writers believe took place, ofcourse at a very early period. [4]

[Footnote 3: Réville, _Histoire des religions des peuplesnon-civilisés_, ii. 225. ]

[Footnote 4: This view is the basis of M. André Lefèvre's _LaReligion_. Paris, 1892. ]

4. The Great Nature-powers came First. --We come in the last place tothat class of deities which we spoke of first--the powers of nature. By several great writers it is held that the worship of these is theoriginal form of all religion. We shall give two of the leadingtheories on the subject, that of Mr. Max Müller and that of Ed. VonHartmann. 

Mr. Max Müller has written very strongly against the view thatfetishism is a primary form of religion, and holds that the worshipof casual objects is not a stage of religion once universallyprevalent, but is, on the contrary, a parasitical development and ofaccidental origin. He does not tell us what the original religion ofmankind was. The work in which he deals most directly with thisquestion[5] is concerned chiefly with the Indian faith, the earlystages of which he regards as the most typical instance of the growthof religion generally. He does not, however, tell us definitely outof what earlier kind of religion that of the Aryans grew, which Indiabest teaches us to know, or what religion they had before theydeveloped that of the Vedic hymns. We may infer, however, what hisview on this point is from the very interesting sketch he draws ofthe psychological advance man could make, in selecting objects ofreverence, from one class of things to another (p. 179, _sqq. _). First, there are tangible objects, which, however, Mr. Max Müllerdenies that mankind as a whole ever did worship; such things asstones, shells, and bones. Then second, semi-tangible objects; suchas trees, mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, which supply thematerial for what may be called _semi-deities_. And third, intangibleobjects, such as the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the moon; inthese are to be seen the germs of _deities_. At each of these stagesman is seeking not for something finite but for the infinite; fromthe first he has a presentiment of something far beyond; he graspssuccessive objects of worship not for themselves but for what theyseem to tell of, though it is not there, and this sense of theinfinite, even in poor and inadequate beliefs, is the germ ofreligion in him. When he rises after his long journey to fix hisregards on the great powers of nature, he apprehends in themsomething great and transcendent. He applies to them great titles; hecalls them _devas_, shining ones; _asuras_, living ones; and, atlength, _amartas_, immortal ones. At first these were no more thandescriptive titles, applied to the great visible phenomena of natureas a class. They expressed the admiration and wonder the young mindof man felt itself compelled to pay to these magnificent beings. Butby giving them these names he was led instinctively to regard them aspersons; he ascribed to them human attributes and dramatic actions, so that they became definite, transcendent, living personalities. Inthese, more than in any former objects of his adoration, his cravingfor the infinite was satisfied. Thus the ancient Aryan advanced, "from the visible to the invisible, from the bright beings that couldbe touched, like the river that could be seen, like the thunder thatcould be heard, like the sun, to the devas that could no longer betouched or heard or seen.... The way was traced out by natureherself. "

[Footnote 5: _Lectures on the Origin of Religion_, 1882. ]

This famous theory is, when we come to examine it, rather puzzling. It does not account for the first beginnings of religion except byinference, and it does so in two contradictory ways; for, on the onehand, Mr. Max Müller enumerates tangible objects first as those fromwhich men rose to higher objects, and on the other he denies thatfetishism is a primitive formation. He suggests that there wereearlier gods than the devas, but he tells us nothing about them, except that they were not fully deities; they were only semi-deities, or not deities at all. The worship of spirits he leaves entirely outof consideration; religion did not, in his view, begin with Animism. When he does tell us of the beginnings of religion, what is his view?The religion of the Aryans began, and it is a type--the otherreligions presumably began in the same way, _e. G. _ those of China andof Egypt--by the impression made on man from without by great naturalobjects co-operating with his inner presentiment of the infinite, which they met to a greater degree than any objects he had triedbefore. Religion was due accordingly to æsthetic impressions fromwithout, answering an æsthetic and intellectual inner need. Thoseneeds, then, which led men to make gods of the great powers of earthand heaven were not of an animal or material nature, but belonged tothe intellectual part of his constitution. Those who framed such areligion for themselves must have been raised above the pressingnecessities and cares of savage life; they were not absorbed in thetask of making their living, but had leisure to stand and admire theheavenly bodies, and to analyse the impressions made on them by thewaters and the thunder. Nay, they had sufficient power of abstractionto form a class of such great beings, to bestow on them a commontitle, not only one but several progressive common titles, eachexpressing a deeper reflection than the last. Thus did they reflecton the nature of the cosmic powers, taken as a class. This, evidently, is not the beginning of religion. It is the religion of acomparatively lofty civilisation; lower stages of civilisation, andof religion also, must have preceded this one. Even the heavenlybodies, it appears to many scholars, must have been worshipped by menwho regarded them not with æsthetic admiration and intellectualsatisfaction only, but in the light of more pressing and practicalinterests. 

We take Edward von Hartmann as the representative of those who, likeMr. Max Müller, trace the origin of religion to the worship of theheavenly powers, but who carry back that worship to the earlieststage. Writers who disagree with his philosophy take grave exceptionto his treatment of religion, for he regards religion, as heconsiders consciousness itself, not as an original and inseparableelement of human nature, but as a thing acquired by man on his wayupwards; and he finds the original motive of religion to have lain inegoistic eudæmonism, in the selfish desire of happiness, which atthat stage of man's life determined all his actions. The account, however, given by Von Hartmann of the beginning of religion in theadoration of the powers of nature is of singular freshness and power, and we can deduct from it, after stating it, the peculiaritiesarising out of his philosophical system. 

The first religion that existed in the world had for its objects theheavenly powers. The objects worshipped are known, indeed, beforereligion begins; the illusions of early thought have settled on theheavenly powers before they are worshipped; on the outward object themind has conferred the character of a living and acting being, whichit is henceforth to wear. This transformation, poetic fancy, not merelogic and not merely utilitarian considerations, has brought about. But religion only begins when man sets himself to worship thesebeings, and to this he is driven by his material needs. Religionbegins in a being as yet without religion and without morality. Theneed for food is the motive that brings about the change, for thatpure egoist early man has seen that the powers of nature are able tohelp or hinder him in his search for a living; the sun can set hisplants growing or can burn them up, and the thunderstorm can revivethem. His happiness depends on these powers, and he seeks to set uprelations with them. He seeks to gain as an ally the heavenly powerwho is so able to further or to thwart his aims; he makes known to ithis wishes by calling upon it, and he offers presents to it. Heworships the heavenly powers, and religion has begun. Worship lendsto these powers, though they were known before, a fixity and realitythey did not formerly possess. Von Hartmann is inclined to trace allthe various worships of these powers, which have prevailed in themost different parts of the earth, to the same original centre, whileat the same time he maintains that even if all the instances of thisworship cannot be referred to any common origin, it must have arisenin this way, wherever men of the same nature dwelt; the psychologicalnecessity of this development accounts for the appearance of thissame religion in different lands and among dissimilar races. 

The worship of the heavenly powers, accordingly, is with this writerthe original religion. While admitting that the worship of domesticspirits grew up in the way described by the English anthropologists, he denies that Animism is ever a religion by itself without beingcombined with higher beliefs. He denies also that fetishism couldever be an original religious product, or that men could ever passfrom having no religion to the religion of fetishism. Wherever itappears, it is a religion of decay. All the religion in the world hascome from the worship of nature, which, whether arising at one centreor at several, spread over the world, and is to be recognised, clearly or dimly, in the religions of all lands. 

This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by OttoPfleiderer, [6] and other German writers. It was from the impressionsmade on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and notfrom his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was notnecessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; theearliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt atbribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenlypowers surely arose from other needs than that for food alone. Theintellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world helived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as faras that could be attained; the æsthetic need, the desire to have todo with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, thedesire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himselfunder some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, thoughin the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clearconsciousness, entered into the earliest worship of the heavenlypowers. This view has the great advantage over that of Von Hartmann, that it makes the development of religion continuous from the first, instead of representing it as being originally a purely selfishthing, into which the character of affection and devotion onlyentered at some subsequent stage. If man's nature is essentiallyreligious, then all that constitutes religion must have been with himfrom the first, in however unconscious and undeveloped form. 

[Footnote 6: _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. Iii. Chap. I. ]

Conclusion. --We have enumerated the different kinds of godsworshipped by early man--fetishes, spirits, the powers of nature. Wehave found a general agreement that fetishism is not an original formof religion, but a product of the decay of higher forms inunfavourable conditions. As to the other two kinds of deities, it isimpossible to deny that gods have been formed from the very first ineach of these two ways. The domestic worship of the early worldcannot be derived from nature-worship, but grew out of the beliefawakened in early man, by the familiar experiences mentioned above. That the greater nature-worship, on the other hand, can be derivedfrom the belief in spirits is an assertion which can never be proved, or even made probable; that it arose from the impressions produced onearly man by the great objects and forces of nature, is a thing wecan understand and believe. The minor nature-worship is also a veryintelligible thing, even without Mr. Tylor's theory of souls toexplain it. What more natural than that the savage should worship thegreat oak or the waterfall, or should think himself surrounded byinvisible beings, even if he did not frame the latter on the model ofthe human soul? We arrive therefore at the conclusion that with theexception of the doctrines about death and the abode of spirits, wemust regard the worship of nature as the root of the world'sreligion. 

We must beware, however, of imputing to the thoughts of early menabout their gods, any such qualities as consistency or regularity. The power of holding at one and the same time religious beliefs whichare inconsistent with each other, is one which even in the mostdeveloped religions is by no means wanting; and how much more wasthis the case among men who lived before there was any exact thought!The savage could have a variety of gods of very different natures, who formed in his mind quite a happy family. When he found a new god, that did not oblige him to part with any old one; it was one god hewas seeking, but he could not settle on one god as yet, when therewere so many beings with a good claim to the position. He made hisgods not out of nothing, but out of a great variety of experiencesand impressions, and they acted and reacted on each other in anendless variety of ways. One god came to the front here and anotherthere; an object was deified here from one reason and there fromanother; new gods in time turned old and were less thought of whileforgotten gods of former days came back to memory and were worshippedonce more. Endless change, endless recurrences of growth and of decayfilled up those great spaces and periods, measureless and tracklessalmost as the expanses of the ocean, that were covered by theprehistoric life of mankind. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

Jevons, _Introduction to the History of Religion_, 1896. 

E. S. Hartland, in _Proceedings of Oxford Congress of the History ofReligion_, p. 21, _sqq. _

Of the large class of books reporting the manners and beliefs ofspecial savage races we may specify--

D. G. Brinton, _The Myths of the New World_, 1896. 

W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, 1876. 

Kingsley, Miss, _West African Studies_, 1899. 

Callaway, _The Religious System of the Amazulu_, 1863-72. 

Duff Macdonald, _Africana, the Heart of Heathen Africa_, 1882. 

G. Grey, _Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-Westernand Western Australia_, 1841. 

Spencer and Gilpen. _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, 1899. 

CHAPTER IVEARLY DEVELOPMENTS--BELIEF

We have seen from what materials early man made his gods. As the godsdiffered in their origin, they differed also from the very first inthe mode of their development. The great nature-gods gave rise to onekind of religion, and the minor nature-gods to another, the thoughtof the departed members of the household to a third. But thesevarious religions could not develop side by side without influencingeach other. These different worships began in the very earliest timesto get mixed up together; there is none of the great religions whichwe do not find to be a combination of them. It will be well toconsider them in the first place separately. 

1. Growth of the Great Gods. --Taking them in the order we havealready followed, we come first to the great nature-worship, of whichheaven, the sun, the moon, the stars, dawn and sunset, and then thephenomena of the weather, rain, storm, and thunder and lightning, arethe objects. It cannot be too clearly borne in mind that what wasworshipped was originally the natural object itself, regarded, afterthe earliest habit of thought, as living. To heaven itself, to thesun as he rose or set, to the storm itself, men addressed prayers andmade offerings; and in many quarters, both among savages and in thegreat religions, the same thing occurs to this day. 

But it was impossible for man to stop here, his imagination would notallow him to do so. In some races, imagination was more active thanin others, but nowhere was it quite inoperative; and so it happenedthat man was led, here to a greater there to a less extent, beyondthe direct and simple adoration of the powers of nature. When hebegan to give them names, a first and a great step was taken inadvance of the original simplicity. A name is a power; if it isanything more than a mere title or label, and all primitive names aremore than this, it brings with it associations of its own, and thusmen are led to ascribe to the object indicated by the name, a newcharacter and new powers. They proceed to argue about the name anddraw conclusions from it as to the nature of the being they worship, and so come to think of their deity in quite a different manner. Evento classify objects together and give them a common title, "thebright ones, " or "the living ones, " as the early Aryans did, givesthem an independent position of their own, and tempts the imaginationto go further in describing them. Striving to find names for thosebeings he worships and thinks about so much, early man gives them thenames of living creatures with whom he is familiar, and in this wayhe brings them much nearer to himself, and at the same time appearsto himself to know a great deal more about them. The moon, forexample, has horns, the moon is a cow. Heaven is over all, heaven isa father. And as he knows all about a cow, and all about a father, heat once has these deities made much more real to him, they have anindependent existence to him. But, on the other hand, he has gotsomething more in his deity than there is in the natural object. Itis no longer the mere naked heaven or the mere moon he worships; butthese beings with additions made to them by his own imagination. 

As time goes on the additions grow more and more. Having got livingpersons for his deities, early man readily goes on to weave theirhistories and their relations. If the moon is a cow, the sun is abull chasing her round the sky. This is an instance of a principlewhich obtains in many at least of the early religions and which it isimportant to remember, viz. That the powers of nature were firstidentified with animals. The zoomorphic stage of the nature-godscomes before the anthropomorphic (_cf. _ the signs of the zodiac), andin many savage tribes it still survives. 

But it is when the gods begin to be thought of after the likeness ofhuman beings that the decisive step is made in their development. Ifheaven is a father, it is easy to go on from that. Earth will be thecorresponding mother (an idea found all over the world); and all menwill be their children. If the sun is invested with a name ofmasculine gender (but the sun is frequently feminine), he must dofeats becoming such a character. If the storm is a male god, he willbe a warrior or a huntsman. Thus the god acquires a personalcharacter and an independent movement; what is told about him hasreference, of course, to the natural object he sprang from, or theseason with which he is connected; but the deity is becoming more andmore separate from the natural object, and acquiring a character andhistory of his own. The stories connected with the god vary accordingto the habits and the imaginations of different peoples; in somecases the gods remain pure and exalted beings, in others savage andindecent myths are accumulated around them, and these primitive mythsadhere to their persons long after they themselves have felt anupward tendency and acquired a civilised character with the moralelevation of their peoples. We shall see in many instances how thenature-gods were personified, made into beasts, made into men, andsurrounded with myths and legends. That is the natural history of thenature-gods; the process through which they must pass if they grow atall. 

Polytheism. --Another general feature of the worship of the greatnatural objects has to be mentioned. Each god has a history of hisown; he has grown up separately as men concentrated their attentionupon him. But as one god grows up after another, or as the gods whogrow up in two countries are afterwards brought together, it comes topass that there are many of them, and none of them is necessarilysupreme. What is the worshipper to do? The least reflection willconvince us that in any act of worship man fixes his attention on oneobject only. That belongs to the very nature of religion; as a childcould not treat several men at once as its father, nor a servant beequally faithful to several masters, so man naturally tends to haveone god. He turns to the highest he knows, who is most likely to beable to help him, and there cannot be two highests, but only one. Butman's position in the early world does not allow him to be true tothis religious instinct. As he sees one aspect of the world to-day, and another to-morrow, he cannot, when his god is a power of nature, always see the same god before him. But can he not worship anothergod when the first one is out of sight and out of mind? Though heworshipped heaven yesterday, can he not worship the sun to-day, orthe storm, or the great sea? And though the former generationworshipped one of these beings in the foremost place, may not theexisting generation devote itself principally to another? That powerdoes not cease to be a deity which is not immediately before hismind. It is still a deity, and in a while he will turn to it again, and make it first. Thus it comes about by inevitable logic that whenman gets his gods from nature, he has a number of them. When he getsa new god he does not deny the god he had before; he is not yet in aposition to conclude that there can only be one god. When he isworshipping he feels as if there were only one; but this feelingapplies at different times to a number of different beings, and fromsuch inconsistency he lacks the power to free himself. The other is agod too; all the gods he has ever worshipped he may on occasionworship again. Nor can he refuse to recognise the gods of others; tothem no doubt they are gods, if not to him; they are beings of thesame class with his god. And thus early man is a polytheist. Polytheism is a complex product; it is the addition to each other ofa number of cults which have grown up separately. 

In Polytheism, however, very different religious positions arepossible. Men may feel that the whole set of the gods in whoseexistence they believe have claims on them, and may regard themselvesas worshippers of them all, resorting, as feeling and old associationmoves them, now to one and now to another, or defining the places oroccasions at which each of them is to be sought, or in some other wayadjusting their various claims; or, on the other hand, whilebelieving in the existence of many gods, they may confine theirworship to one. A man knows that there are many gods, but says thathe has only to do with one of them. This is a religious position veryfrequently met with in antiquity. A circle of gods is believed in, but one of them comes into prominence at a time and is worshipped assupreme. This is called Kathenotheism: the worship of one god at atime. The title was invented by Mr. Max Müller, who also gives thetitle of Henotheism to that position in which many gods are believedin as existing, but worship is given to only one. The following areexamples of the various positions:--

 The language of Polytheism is--"Father Zeus that rulest from Ida, most glorious, most great, and thou sun that seest all things, and ye rivers and thou earth, and ye that in the underworld punish whosoever sweareth falsely--be ye witnesses. "--_Iliad_, iii. 280. 

The Jews at the time of Josiah were accomplished polytheists, as wemay see from the catalogue of the worships suppressed at Jerusalem bythat monarch, 2 Kings xxiii. The gods of each of the surroundingtribes appear to have been worshipped there, and the old gods of theseparate tribes and families of Israel appear to have been kept up. 

Kathenotheism. --The Vedic poets, as we shall see, speak of the godthey are immediately addressing as supreme, and heap upon him all thehighest attributes, while not thinking of denying the divinity ofother gods. 

 The language of Henotheism is--"Thou, O Jehovah, art far above all the earth; thou art exalted far above all gods" (Ps. Xcvii. 9). "There is none like unto Thee among the gods, O Lord!... Thou art great, and doest wondrous things: Thou art God alone" (Ps. Lxxxvi. 8, 10). Here the other gods are recognised as existing, but only one is worshipped. Compare also St Paul: "There are gods many, and lords many, but to us there is one God" (1 Cor. Viii. 5, 6). 

 The language of Monotheism is--"All the gods of the peoples are idols: but Jehovah made the heavens" (Ps. Xcvi. 5), and "Thou shalt have no other god before Me. "

A further religious position to be noticed here is that of Dualism. Not all dualism comes from nature-worship, but in a land where abeneficent and a harmful natural force are in striking antagonism toeach other, this may take place. Man, when he interprets the kindlyinfluences of nature as the blessings of the good god, naturallyinterprets the agencies which blight or ruin as being also themanifestation of a living power, but of an evil one. Thanks to thegood god alternate, in this case, with efforts to counteract or toappease the bad one; if the two appear to be nearly balanced, thenneither is supreme, and both overawe the mind and receive worship. But in general we may remark that the greater nature-worship is of anelevating tendency. It brings man into relations with powers whichare truly great, and places him even physically in the position oflooking up, not down. Where the nature-power is a harsh one, ascorching sun, a tempestuous sea, the self-command and self-sacrificecalled out by the worship of them may be, if not carried to extremes, a bracing discipline; but with some exceptions the nature-gods aregood, and have to do with light and with kindness. 

2. The Minor Nature-worship. --The worship of the great powers ofnature has a universal character; it can be carried on anywhere;wandering tribes carry it with them; heaven and the sun and the windscan be addressed in every land. The minor nature-worship differs fromit in this respect: an animal is only worshipped in the country whereit occurs, and the worship of the tree, the well, the stone, isaltogether local. With this local nature-worship the world was, inearly times, thickly overspread; and manifold survivals of it arestill to be found even in lands where the primitive religion has beenlongest superseded. This is the religion of local observance andlocal legend, which clings to the face of a country in spite ofpublic changes of creed, and, when the old religion has departed, isfound to have secured a shelter for itself in the new one. 

In this minor nature-worship which spreads its network over all theearly world, the character of primitive society is clearlyrepresented; the small communities have their small localworships--each clan, almost each kraal, has its shrine, its god, andlimits itself to its own sacred things. Religion is a bond connectingtogether the members of small groups of men, but separating them fromthe members of other groups. The following are some of the moreimportant developments of this. 

(_a_) The Worship of Animals. --Primitive man had to hold his ownagainst the animals by force of strength and cunning; and he was wellacquainted with them. He respected them for the qualities in whichthey excelled him, the hare for his swiftness, the beaver for hisskill, the fox for his craftiness. What he worshipped, however, wasnot the individuals of a species, but the species as a whole, typified perhaps in a great hare or a great fox, the mythical firstparent of the species, and possessing its qualities in a supremedegree. It happened apparently over the whole world, with theexception of most branches of the Aryan family, that men at a veryearly stage regarded themselves as related by the tie of descent, some to one species of animals or of plants and some to another. Fromthis belief tribes took their names, each member tattooing the figureof his animal ancestor on his person. The Bechuanas, for example, aredivided into crocodile-men, fish-, ape-, buffalo-, elephant-, andlion-men, and so on. The hairy or scaly ancestor is the "totem" ofthe tribe, and they consider that animal sacred, and will not eat theflesh of it. All who bear the same totem regard each other as ofkindred blood, as descended from the same ancestor. The totem mayalso be a vegetable, in which case no member of the stock will gatheror eat it. 

Totemism is to be seen in operation at the present day in variousparts of the world. North America is, perhaps, its classic land inmodern times. It is, however, a stage of society through which allraces have at one time or another passed. According to the latestinvestigations totemism is not to be regarded as itself a religion;the totem being regarded not as a superior but as an equal. Itsinfluence on the early growth of religion, however, was great, andwidely ramified. [1] From this two important consequences follow whichwill meet us again and again in our study of the great religions. Thefirst is animal-worship, a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and ofperplexing import. Mr. McLennan has shown that much at least of thewidespread worship of animals is to be traced to an early totem-stageof society, [2] when animals were held sacred as the ancestors of men. In the second place, totemism explains the view taken in the earlyworld of the nature of religious fellowship. In modern times peopleregard each other as brothers in religion when they believe the samedoctrines. It is belief, an intellectual or spiritual agreement, thatbinds them together. The ancient religious union was of a quitedifferent nature. People then regarded each other as brothers becausethey were of the same blood, descended from the same ancestor. In theBible the Hebrews are all descended from Abraham, the Edomites fromEsau, etc. That is the necessary condition of brotherhood in earlytimes; only those could join in a religious rite who were of the sameblood. For men of another blood there was another worship, anothergod. It is an earlier stage of this view, when men are of the sameworship because they are descended from the same animal, and whenthey worship that animal. 

[Footnote 1: J. G. Frazer, "Totemism, " in the _EncyclopædiaBritannica_, vol. Xxiii. , and now his _Totemism and Exogamy_. It wasformerly held that the Semites were an exception, having never passedthrough the totemistic stage. Mr. Robertson Smith, in his _Religionof the Semites_, maintains that, though they are past that stage whenwe first know them, the traces of it are apparent in theirinstitutions, and that their sacrifices especially are based on ideasbelonging to it. Wellhausen does not agree with him in this. ]

[Footnote 2: _Fortnightly Review_, 1869-70. See also Mr. Lang's_Myth, Ritual and Religion_ in many passages. ]

(_b_) Trees, Wells, Stones. --The worship of each of these three is initself a great subject, and we can do no more than mention theleading views which appear to have entered into them. Mannhardt inhis _Feld- und Waldkulte_ and Frazer in _The Golden Bough_ havestudied the survivals of tree-worship in the local customs of thepeasantry of Europe. Early man appears to have worshipped trees aswonderful living beings; but his thought soon advanced to theconception of a tree-spirit, of which the tree itself was either thebody or the dwelling, and which possessed various powers, such asthat of commanding rain, or that of causing fertility in plants or inanimals. From the tree-spirit, again, the tree-god was furtherformed, a being who was able to quit the sacred tree or who presidedover many trees. Of these beliefs the fast-decaying usages of theMaypole and the Harvest May still remind us. 

The well, in a similar manner, may first have been worshipped in andfor itself, and then a nymph may have been added to it. The worshipof wells consisted in throwing precious articles into them, orhanging such offerings on the surrounding trees, and asking some boonfrom the deity. [3] Rivers and lakes were also held sacred. Theworship of stones, that is of stones not treated by art, but regardedas sacred in the form in which they were found, was widely diffusedamong early races; but this is a subject on which light is stillcalled for. The Caaba of Mecca and the stone of the temple of Dianaat Ephesus are famous isolated instances of it; but it has beensuggested that the standing stones or menhirs which are found inevery part of Europe, and in the south and west of Asia, were objectsof this worship. In Palestine these stones are not found, though theyoccur in the neighbouring lands; and this is attributed by MajorConder[4] to the zeal of the orthodox kings, who, we know from theBible, destroyed all the monuments of idolatry in their territory. 

[Footnote 3: In Mr. G. A. Gomme's _Ethnology in Folklore_ many sacredwells are mentioned which are still, or were lately, frequented inEngland. St. Wallach's well and bath, in the parish of Glass, Morayshire, was much resorted to within living memory. ]

[Footnote 4: _Scottish Review_, 1894, vol. Xvii. P. 33, "Rude StoneMonuments in Syria. "]

What is common to these cults, and cannot be disregarded, is theirlocal nature. This gives its colour to all the religion of early man. The god of the sacred tree cannot be worshipped anywhere else thanwhere the tree stands, and he who would have his wishes granted bythe well must come to it. The deity of this kind of religion has hisabode at a certain spot, and he is a fixed, not a movable deity. There is a story, or a set of stories, connected with his shrine, andthere are observances of one kind or another to be done there; andthis goes on from age to age. Now a deity who is fixed to one spotwill be worshipped by the people who dwell around that spot. The godwill have his own people and dwell among them, and they alone will behis worshippers. And thus the surface of the earth comes to beparcelled out among a number of deities, each seated, like a littleprince, at his own court among his own people. In passing from hisown home to a distant spot, a man will leave the territory of his owngod and enter on that of another, and as the god can only beworshipped at his own shrine, the man will leave his religion when heleaves his home, and either be compelled to serve the gods ofstrangers, or to perform no religious duties at all. [5] Thus theideas connected with totemism meet and harmonise in many oldcountries with those connected with local shrines. [6] Those dwellingaround the shrine form a kindred of one blood, of which the local godis both the progenitor and the living head. Religion is thus bothstrictly tribal and strictly local. It is for his brethren of thetribe, for those in whose veins the blood of the same divine ancestorruns, that a man's enthusiasm is kindled in acts of worship; it ishis duty to his clan that he then realises, the prosperity of hisclan that he desires. To those of other stems no religious bondunites him, they are men of another blood, of another worship. Hisreligious duty is to love his neighbour, or fellow-tribesman, to hatehis enemy, the man of another tribe. And on the other hand, asreligion consists in approaches to a particular spot and theperformance of certain rites, it is left behind when these rites areaccomplished, and the man is away from his god. The sanctuary isregarded with extreme veneration, often with shrinking and terror, but distance makes a change, the religion alters with travel, and isleft behind. This religion was on the whole a more exciting andintense thing than that of the great nature powers; and was far moreinterwoven with social life; but it also presented the greatestobstacles to progress, limiting men's affections to their own kin andtheir own land, and confining them in an inveterate conservatism. 

[Footnote 5: As illustrating this circle of ideas, compare thefollowing passages in the Bible: Genesis xxviii. ; Ruth i. 16; 1 Sam. Xxvi. 19; 2 Kings v. 17; and of a later period, Psalm xlii. ]

[Footnote 6: See on this whole subject Mr. Robertson Smith's_Religion of the Semites_. ]

3. The State after Death. --The belief that the human spirit was notextinguished at the death of the body, but entered on an existencewithout the body somewhere else, opened the door to a wide range ofspeculation; and the ideas arrived at by early man as to the place ofspirits and the life beyond, are a principal part of that antiquereligion of which the great systems are the heirs. The funeralpractices of prehistoric times, when various articles were placed inthe tomb along with the body of the departed hero or father, andvarious sacrifices made to him at his burial or cremation and atanniversary festivals afterwards, show that the spirits of the deadwere conceived as carrying on the same kind of existence as they hadled here, though an existence unsubstantial and of little power;"strengthless heads" Homer calls them. Food and drink were of use tothem; for the finer part of it was supposed to reach them. The tasteof blood revived them; and various pleasures were possible tothem. [7] This belief, it will be seen, differs from all the moderndoctrines of a continued existence. It is not the resurrection of thebody that the savage believes in. He knows well enough that the bodydoes not rise; but he also knows that the spirit can exist and moveand do a number of things that were done in life, without the body. Nor can he be said to believe in the immortality of the soul. Thatterm describes a free and unfettered existence after death, but tothe savage the spirit after death has but a troubled and frailexistence; it is tethered to certain spots on the earth, known to itformerly; it cannot do much, it lives under many limitations andconstraints. Nor, again, can it be said that retribution after deathis a true designation of the early belief. That may be found here andthere in early times, but generally the other life is less under adivine government than this one; death takes a man away from his godas well as from his family, and the dead are left to themselves. 

[Footnote 7: On this subject compare Mr. Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, twelfth and thirteenth chapters. ]

While, however, this is the general background of primitive beliefabout the other life, imagination is at work on the subject veryearly, and various features of that life are touched with more vividcolours, here in one way and there in another. The place where thedeparted stay, their occupations, their delights, are variouslydescribed; the land where they dwell is modelled on a land that isknown, with the addition of ideal features; they do very much whatthey did on earth, hunt or feast, make music or carry on discussions. In some cases there is a judgment-seat before which the soul appearsfor its trial, and here of course the spirit-world must be dividedinto two parts or more, for the reception of those who are approvedand of those who are condemned. The detailed description of theabodes of the blest and of the damned, by no means peculiar toChristianity, are later developments in the early world. Hell, Mr. Tylor says, is unknown to savage thought. The doctrine oftransmigration, however, whether into plants or into lower animals, is of early growth. 

Growth of the Great Religions out of these Beliefs. --These variousdevelopments of thought about the gods did, as a matter of fact, takeplace in primitive times, and that is almost all that can be said. Inthe religion of savages the various elements we have so brieflyindicated cross and recross each other, in endless combinations; noneof them is to be found entirely by itself. There is no fetish worshipwhich is not accompanied by traces of an early belief in great gods;there is no belief in great gods which is not accompanied by a beliefin lower spirits. With regard to every savage religion the studenthas to ask what the constituent elements of it are, in what way thevarious beliefs of the early world, beliefs arising from suchdifferent sources, meet in it and combine with one another. 

In each of the higher religions, too, the same questions have to beasked. The beliefs which we have sketched are the materials out ofwhich they also arose. They did not _originate_ the belief in highgods with power over nature, nor the belief in the lesser spiritswhich busy themselves with man's affairs. They did not originate thebelief in a life after death, nor was it left to them to appointsacred seasons in the year, or to consecrate the spots to whichworship has always clung. All these beliefs are prehistoric, and whatremained for the great religions was not to bring them forward forthe first time, but to surround them with a new kind of authority, and to establish as a matter of positive ordinance or revelation whathad formerly grown up without any ordinance by the unconscious workof custom. It was not left for any of the great founders to plantreligion in the world as a new thing, but only to add to the oldreligion new forms and new sanctions. 

It may be said that if these are the elements of which religion as awhole is made, then religion arose at first out of illusions. That isno doubt true, in a sense. It was an illusion on the part of earlyman to suppose that the powers of heaven were animated beings whocould be his allies and answer his appeals; it was an illusion tothink that the tree or the stone contained a spirit, and an illusionto think that men's spirits can go and wander about the earth bythemselves, leaving their bodies untenanted. But these illusions wereafter all only the outward and inadequate expression in which thespirit of religion then clothed itself. Religion must always expressitself in terms of the knowledge which exists in the world at aparticular time; and if the knowledge is defective to which the worldhas attained, religious beliefs must share in its defects. But, onthe other hand, religion is something more than knowledge; it is alsofaith and communion, and these can be deep and true, even when theknowledge which provides their forms of expression is greatlymistaken. And when the forms of knowledge in which religion hasclothed itself are found to be mistaken, religion has power to leavethem behind and to adopt other forms, as the tree is clothed withfresh leaves in place of those which are withered. 

Yet it would be wrong to admit that even in its character asknowledge early religion was illusion and no more. The poeticfaculty, the faculty which prompts us to find outside us what we feelto be within us and to assert its reality, led man right and notwrong. What he worshipped was not the bare object which met the eyeand ear, but the thing as he conceived it. He conceived that therewas without him that of which his inner consciousness bore witness, an ideal, a being not grasped by the senses, which could help him, with which he could hold intercourse, which had the power he himselfhad not. This, not the faulty outward expressions in which thesentiment clothed itself, was the living and growing element of hisreligion. 

In addition to the books cited in this chapter, we may mention--

C. Bötticher, _Der Baumkultus der Hellenen_, 1856. 

J. Ferguson, _Tree and Serpent Worship_, 1868. 

J. Ferguson, _Rude Stone Monuments in all Countries_, 1872. 

J. G. Fraser, _Totemism and Exogamy_, 4 vols. 1910. An immensecollection of material on the subject of totemism, with freshconclusions as to the origin and meaning of the system. 

CHAPTER VEARLY DEVELOPMENTS--PRACTICES

In early religion it is important to remember that belief counted formuch less than it now does; a man's religion consisted in thereligious acts he did, and not in the beliefs or thoughts hecherished about his god. Worship, moreover, is that element ofreligion which in all ages and lands is apt to advance most slowly. Even in times of ferment of ideas and change of belief, we often seethat the worship of a former time, be it simple or stately, goes onin its old forms, as if it were a thing that could not change. Menalter their beliefs more readily than their habits, especially thehabits connected with their faith. If this is the case generally, itwas much more the case in the early world than it is now. Thereligion of a shrine in old times consisted of a certain story aboutthe god, and certain acts done before or near the object whichrepresented him. There was no compulsion, however, to believe thestory if a man did the acts or took part in them. As to his privatebeliefs no one inquired; if he took part in the proper acts ofworship he counted as a religious man, unless he went so far asopenly to flout the current opinions of his time. 

Nor were the acts which went to make up religion of an elaborate ordifficult nature. No minute ritual regulated in early times theapproaches to the deity; they were a matter of common knowledge, andwere fixed not by law, which did not yet exist in any form, but bypublic custom and public opinion. The manner in which a god is to beserved is known of course to his own people who dwell around him;others do not know it. The immigrants from Assyria had to send for aHebrew to teach them the ritual of the God of Palestine, as they wereon his ground and did not know the right way to worship Him (2 Kingsxvii. 24 _sqq. _). It is later that the rite becomes a mystery, knownonly to the professional guardian of the shrine or to the initiatedfew. 

Sacrifice is an invariable feature of early religion. Wherever godsare worshipped, gifts and offerings are made to them of one kind oranother. It is in this way that, in antiquity at least, the relationwith the deity was renewed, if it had been slackened or broken, orstrengthened and made sure. Sacrifice and worship are in the ancientworld identical terms. The nature of the offering and the mode ofpresenting it are infinitely various, but there is always sacrificein one form or another. Different deities of course receive differentgifts; the tree has its roots watered, or trophies of battle or ofthe chase are hung upon its branches; horses are thrown into the sea. But of primitive sacrifice generally we may affirm that it consistsof such food and drink as men themselves partake of. Whether it bethe fruit of the field or the firstling of the flock that is offeredat the sacred stone, whether the offering is burnt before the god orset down and left near him, or whether he is summoned to come downfrom the sky or to travel from the far country to which he may havegone, it is of the materials of a meal that the sacrifice consists. In some cases it appears to be thought that the god consumes theoffering, as when Fire is worshipped with offerings which he burnsup, or when a fissure in the earth closes upon a victim; but in mostcases it is only the spirit or finer essence of the sacrifice thatthe god enjoys; the rest he leaves to men. And thus sacrifice isgenerally accompanied by a meal. The offering is presented to the godwhole, but the worshippers help to eat it. The god gets the savour ofit which rises into the air towards him, while the more material partis devoured below. Every sacrifice is also a festival. [1] If this bethe case it is unnecessary to spend much time in considering a numberof theories formerly regarded with favour as to the original meaningand intention of sacrifice. The view that it is originally simply abribe to the deity to induce him to afford some needed help, receivesa good deal of countenance from primitive expressions. "_Do ut des_, ""I give to thee that thou mayest give to me. " "Here is butter, giveus cows!" "By gifts are the gods persuaded, by gifts great kings. "Was early sacrifice then simply a business transaction, in which manbringing a prayer to the deity brought a gift too, as he wasaccustomed to do to the great ones of the earth, in order that thedeity might be well disposed towards him and grant his petition? Evenif this was the case, if sacrifice were offered with the direct andalmost the avowed intention of getting good value for it, yet if ittakes the form of a meal, it is lifted above the most sordid form ofbribery. There is a difference between slipping money into a man'shand and asking him to dinner, even if the object aimed at be in bothcases the same; and when the invitations are numerous and formal, there must be a moral, not an immoral, relation between the twoparties. Where the sacrifice is a meal, intercourse is sought for; acertain sympathy exists between worshipper and worshipped; they standto each other not only in the relation of briber and bribed, buyerand seller, but in that of patron and client, or of father and son. 

[Footnote 1: Mr. Tylor (_Prim. Cult. _ vol. Ii. P. 397) states that"sacrifices to deities, from the lowest to the highest levels ofculture, consist, to the extent of nine-tenths or more, of gifts offood and sacred banquets. "]

But granting that early sacrifice was for the most part a meal, anobservance, with a social element in it, between the god and theworshipper, what was the object of this meal, what was the motive forholding it? In some cases it looks as if the intention had been tostrengthen the god, and to make him more vigorous, so that he mightbe able to do what was wanted of him. In the Vedic hymns this motiveundeniably is to be met with. The notion is by no means unknown inearly thought, that not only does man need God, but that God is alsodependent on man, and capable of being aided and encouraged. In riteswhich are not strictly sacrifices, we notice men seeking tosympathise with their gods in what the gods are doing, and to take ashare in it by doing similar things themselves. The Christmas andEaster fires in pagan times connected with the worship of the sun, are examples of this, and many other instances might be cited. 

This, however, is not the principal motive of early sacrifice. Allthe incidents of it suggest that it is not merely a thing offered tothe deity, but a thing in which man takes part; if it is a meal, itis one of which the god and the worshippers partake in common. InChina the ancestors are invited to the family feast; their place isset for them; their share in the feast is placed before them. In the_Iliad_, [2] we have an account of a solemn religious act: afterprayers the victims were slaughtered, choice slices were cut fromthem and cooked at the fire by the worshippers, who then ate anddrank their fill; after this "all day long they worshipped the godwith music, singing the beautiful pæan to Apollo, and his heart wasglad to hear. " In the Bible we know that the blood is poured out forthe Deity, and in various sacrifices the parts He is to have arespecified, while the rest is to be eaten by the priests. In theearlier sacrifices of the Hebrews there are no priests; those whopresent the sacrifice consume it after the act of presentation, andthe occasion is one of mirth and jollity, as at a banquet (1 Sam. Ix. 12, 13, and the following description; see also Exod. Xxxii. 5, 6). In fact it is a banquet. This is specially plain in the sacrifices ofthe Semites, as Mr. Robertson Smith has shown. Early Semitic usageexhibits clearly how sacrifice was an act of communion, in which thegod and his human family proclaimed and renewed their unity with eachother. The details may differ in other races, but in general it maybe said that early sacrifice was an act done not by an individual, though plenty of individual sacrifices are also to be met with, butby a tribe, in which all the partakers of the blood of the tribe tookpart before the god who was their common ancestor, and who, as itwere, presided over and shared in their feast. In some cases oftotem-clans the totem animal is sacrificed, and all the members ofthe clan eat their animal ancestor (only on such a solemn occasioncould the totem be eaten), and so renew their bond of membership andbrotherhood. A covenant is made by sacrifice, to which the deity andall the members of his people are parties. 

[Footnote 2: I. 457 _sqq. _]

To these primitive conceptions others no doubt should be added. Themood was not always the same which prevailed when the tribe renewedits union with its god; that depended on circumstances. In generalthe sacrifice of early days is a joyous thing, but to a fierce godcruel rites belonged. When cannibalism was practised it also was sucha primitive sacrifice, and the most powerful means, no doubt, ofcementing the union of the god with the members of the tribe. Whenthe god was noted for suffering, a tragic tone prevailed, and thesacrifice might have a dramatic character and represent the leadingincident in the history of the god. 

If we trace the history of sacrifice in any particular people we findtwo opposite tendencies at work in connection with it. On the onehand there is a disposition to smooth matters, to drop the harsherpractices, to let an animal victim suffice where a man used to besacrificed, to let the man off with some slight mutilation, such ascircumcision; or to allow poor people to offer a less costly victimthan the former custom claimed--the rite, in fact, becomes civilised, and adapts itself to the feelings of a humaner period. On the otherhand there is a tendency to add to the value of the offerings, and toreckon the efficacy of sacrifice by its cost and painfulness. Inperiods of outward distress sacrifice attains a deeper earnestness, nothing is to be left undone, and no cost to be spared to bring thedeity back to his people; darker customs which had become obsoleteare revived again, [3] the ceremonial is made more elaborate, newkinds of sacrifice are introduced. The old social aspect of sacrificegrows faint; it becomes a propitiation or a trespass-offering; thenotion is entertained that sacrifice is the more efficacious the moreit has cost, or the more magnificent and awful its mode ofpresentation. 

[Footnote 3: An instance of human sacrifice has just taken place in aremote part of Russia. ]

Prayer is the ordinary concomitant of sacrifice; the worshipperexplains the reason of the gift, and urges the deity to accept it, and to grant the help that is needed. The prayers of the earlieststage are offered on emergencies, and often appear to be intended toattract the attention of the god who may be engaged in anotherdirection. The requests they contain are of the most primary sort. Food is asked for, success in hunting or fishing, strength of arm, rain, a good harvest, children, etc. The prayers have a ring ofurgency; they state the claims the worshipper has on the god, andmention his former offerings as well as the present one; they praisethe power and the past acts of the deity, and adjure him by his wholerelationship to his people (and also to their enemies) to grant theirrequests. As life grows more secure, the note of immediate urgencyfades out of prayer; being a feature not of an occasional worshiparising from some pressing need, but of a worship statedly offered atset times, it tends to run into forms, and to become fixed and tohave the nature of a liturgy. Then it comes about that the wordsthemselves are regarded as sacred, and that the efficacy of thesacrifice is supposed to be partly dependent on them. They areincantations which the deity cannot resist, --charms which inthemselves have virtue to secure the desired result. 

Sacred Places, Objects, Persons. --The early world had no temples, noridols, nor priests. The worship of nature does not suggest theenclosing of a space for religious acts. The natural object itselfbeing the sacred thing, worship is brought to it where it stands; thegift is carried to the tree or to the well, and if the deities areconceived as being above the earth, then the tops of hills are thespots where man can be nearest to them. High places are sacred in alllands. Groves and remote spots are also sacred. When man was carryingon his struggle with the wild beasts he would regard with terror theplaces where they had their lairs and strongholds; it was in thisform that the feeling of mystery with which moderns regard placeswhere they are cut off from all human intercourse, first appealed toman. After this earliest stage had passed, and the grove had come tobe regarded as the dwelling of a deity, it became a place man did notdare to approach except with the necessary precautions. We may hereexplain a notion which plays a great part in early religion, but isnot specially connected with any one institution of it, the notion, namely, of taboo. Taboo is a Polynesian term, and indicates thatwhich man must not use or touch, because it belongs to a deity. Thegod's land must not be trodden, the animal dedicated to the god mustnot be eaten, the chief who represents the god must not be lightlytreated or spoken of. These are examples of taboo where theinviolable object or person belongs to a good god, and where thetaboo corresponds exactly with the rule of holiness. [4] But instancesare still more numerous among savages of taboo attaching to an objectbecause it is connected with a malignant power. The savage issurrounded on every side by such prohibitions; there is danger atevery step that he may touch on what is forbidden to him, and drawdown on himself unforeseen penalties. The nature of the early deitiesalso excludes idolatry in connection with them; there is no need fora representation of a being who is visibly present, and can beextolled and worshipped in his own person. It was at a later stage, when the god came to be personified and separated in thought from hisnatural basis, that the need arose to make representations of him toaid the imagination. The stones of early religion are not idols. Theyare natural, not artificial stones; they are not images of the god, but the god himself, or at least that in which the divine spiritdwells, [5] or with which it associates itself for the purpose ofworship. And, further, the earliest time knows no priests; there isno special class to whom alone the celebration of sacrifice isentrusted. It would be quite inconsistent with the whole view ofsacrifice which then prevailed, to suppose that it could be done byproxy. It was a man's own act, by which he identified himself withhis god and with his tribe, and that could only be done by a personalservice. We often find kings and chiefs sacrificing. Agamemnon doesso, Abraham and Saul do so, though the sacrifice of the latter isdisapproved of by the priestly writer. David does so without beingrebuked for it. The king or chief does this as the natural head ofhis clan; some one must take the leading part in the transaction. Asreligion is the principal part of politics, and the first business ofthe state is to keep itself right with the gods, the head of thestate is its most natural representative on such an occasion. Thehead of a household also sacrifices for his house, not only to thespirits of the house, but in cases like that of Job, where there isno question of ancestor-worship. Early custom did not fix in anyuniform manner by whose hands a sacrifice was to be made. 

[Footnote 4: _Religion of the Semites_, by W. R. Smith, p. 142, _sqq. _]

[Footnote 5: _Religion of the Semites_, by W. R. Smith, p. 192. ]

Magic. --In another direction, however, we see in the earliest timesthe growth of a class of persons with religious functions andattributes. While the ordinary worship of the gods does not requirethe services of any special class, there is everywhere found the manof special knowledge and gifts, to whom men resort for needs lyingoutside the scope of that worship. Every savage religion contains acertain amount of magic, of practices, that is to say, by which it isthought possible to influence or to foretell outward events. Earlyman is not limited in his views of what may happen by any accurateknowledge of natural laws, or of the sequence of cause and effect, and he imagines it possible to influence nature in various ways. Heimitates what he supposes to be the causes of things, judging thatthe effect will also follow; or he uses such powers as he may haveover spirits, to induce or compel them to accomplish his wishes; orhe manipulates objects he believes to have a hidden virtue, in a wayhe believes calculated to bring about the desired result. Magic isthus related both to the cult of spirits and to that of casualobjects, both to animism and to fetishism. There is generally aspecial person in a tribe who knows these things, and is able to workthem. It may be the chief or king, --there are many instances in whichthe chief is believed to have power to bring rain, --or it may be aseparate functionary, medicine-man, sorcerer, diviner, seer, orwhatever name be given him. He has more power over spirits than othermen have, and is able to make them do what he likes. He can healsickness, he can foretell the future, he can change a thing intosomething else, or a man into a lower animal or a tree, or anything;he can also assume such transformations himself at will. He usesmeans to bring about such results; he knows about herbs, he hasstones or other objects endowed with special virtues, he also hasrecourse to rubbing, to making images of affected parts of the body, and to various other arts. Very frequently he is regarded asinspired. It is the spirit dwelling in him which brings about thewonderful results; without the spirit he could not do anything. Whilethe details of course vary infinitely in different tribes, the figureof the worker of magic is an essential feature of any general sketchof early religion. He is often a person of great politicalimportance; being supposed to be in closer alliance than any one elsewith spiritual beings, he has a power which is much dreaded, andwhich even the chief cannot disregard. 

Of Sacred Seasons there can be but few in the earliest human life, when there is no fixed measure of time, nor any notion of regularity, but all depends on the occurrence of need and of danger. As soon asagriculture was engaged in, however, attention must have been fixedon the recurrence of the seasons, and the measures of time affordedby the moon must, at least, have been observed. The summer and thewinter solstice, the equinoxes, the new moons, these were to theearly cultivator epochs to be observed; and certain annual feasts arefound to have come into use in very early times, epochs of man'ssimplest and earliest calendar, and occasions for tribal gatheringsand for such fixed religious observances as we have described. Aprivate religious emergency arising in the interval between twofeasts is dealt with by means of a vow; the help of the deity, thatis to say, is claimed at once, but the payment of the dueconsideration for it on man's part is deferred till the time ofsacrifice comes round. [6]

[Footnote 6: Genesis xxviii. 20; Judges xi. 30; 2 Sam. Xv. 8. ]

Character of Early Religion. --We have now passed in review theprincipal observances and usages of primitive religion; but beforeconcluding this chapter some remarks have to be made as to theposition religion held in the life of ancient times, and as to thespirit and temper which it exhibited. In the first place, as weremarked above, religion was in these times the most important branchof the public service. Every uncommon occurrence had to be laidbefore the god, and no important step could be taken withoutconsulting him; and it was a principal duty of the head of the stateto keep the god on good terms with the tribe, and to apply to him forall the aid and protection the tribe required from him. In attendingto this, however, the chief was acting for his tribesmen; where therewas no chief these matters were not neglected, but were looked afterby common spontaneous action by the members of the tribe. The god wastheir lord, their father, and they must always take him along withthem. This identification of the god with the interests of hissubjects is so close that the latter are troubled with no doubts asto whether or not their god is with them. If they observe thecustomary rules for cultivating his friendship, he must be with them;they never imagine that he can be estranged from them. It is thehabitual attitude of early religion to take it for granted that thegod goes with his people (he generally has no other people to gowith) and helps them against their adversaries. To doubt this and toresort to sacrifices of atonement to bring him back from hisestrangement is a later stage of religion. But if religion is in thisway a public matter, a matter of the tribe and its concerns, whatplace is there in it for the individual? Individual cares and needsmay form the subject of prayers and vows, but religion on the wholehas to do with the tribe, not with the individual, or with theindividual only as a member of the tribe. It is the duty of every oneto take his part in the public approaches to the god; he must eitherdo so or be cut off from his tribe. For his own griefs there islittle comfort in the tribal worship; indeed, personal sorrows andperplexities meet with but little consideration in early religion. Asthe tribe is in no doubt of the goodwill of its god, and regards himas a firm ally not easily turned away, old religion has a confidentand joyous air, strongly contrasting with the doubts and thecontrition of modern faith. The acts of worship are feasts at whichthe members of the tribe rejoice and make merry before their god. Tothe delights of feasting those of dance and song are added ("Thepeople sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play"), andfrequently the merrymaking goes to the pitch of frenzy; theworshippers dance themselves into an ecstasy; they feel the godtaking possession of them, and are hurried along by the sacredinspiration to behaviour they would not dream of at any other time. 

Early Religion and Morality. --How did this early religion bear uponmorality? In how far was it a power for righteousness? There are twosides to this question. In the first place, the religion of theinfant world was a strong influence for the restraint of individualexcess. The god being the parent of the tribe, its customs had hissanction, he had no higher interest than its welfare, he wasidentified with all its enterprises, its battles were his battlesalso. The worship of the god therefore made strongly for loyalty tothe tribe, and for the observance of its customs; it caused a man toforget his own interest where that of the tribe was concerned, andunhesitatingly to sacrifice himself for the public cause. But, on theother hand, primitive religion was an intensely conservative force;it subjected the whole life to the customs of the tribe, anddiscouraged spontaneity and independence in moral action. The dutiesit prescribed were of a conventional order; a man had no duties tothose beyond his tribe, and to his fellow-tribesmen religion bade himrather walk by rule than consult his own feelings. Of the moralitywhich consists in discipline and subordination to the community, early religion was an efficient school; to the higher morality, thelaw of which is found written in the heart, and which aims atrendering higher services than those of custom, it did not attain. The worship of the higher nature-powers, the heavenly powers of lightand kindness, tending as it did to transcend the limits of place andof nationality, was destined powerfully to foster a more generousmorality than that of the tribal worship, and this tendency was nodoubt dimly felt by early man long before it was possible for him tofollow it. 

CHAPTER VINATIONAL RELIGION

We now leave behind us the beliefs and practices of savage andbarbarous tribes, and turn to those of mighty empires. The gulf whichlies between these two parts of our subject is obviously a wide one;and in many instances there is no bridge by which the student canpass from one to the other. Often it is a matter of inference ratherthan of direct proof that the great systems are built out of thematerials accumulated, as we have seen, in the prehistoric period. But the inference is sufficiently strong to rest upon; in some caseswe are able to see quite clearly how the religion of the empire aroseby an uninterrupted growth out of that of the tribe; and in the caseswhere this cannot be so fully made out, we yet judge that the resultcame about in a similar way. We pause therefore at this point to askwhat is the nature of the transition at which we have arrived, or, inother words, what constitutes the difference between the primitiveand the later religions? The difference is probably not one ofmagnitude only; it consists not merely in the fact that the religionof the empire is that of a much larger number of people than that ofthe tribe; there is a difference in character as well as indimensions. With a view to the examination of this point it will befound convenient to consider some of the proposed classifications ofreligions, as most of these, though for different reasons, place thereligions of the early world in a different category from those knownto us historically. 

The old-fashioned Classification of Religions was that of the trueand the false. This our principle forbids us to accept, since weregard the various faiths of the world as stages in the developmentof religion, and therefore all relatively true. 

Another division which has done good service is that into natural andrevealed religion. By natural religion has generally been understoodsuch religion as human reason could attain to without supernaturalaid. But this description does not apply to any religious system thatever prevailed largely in any country; the actual religions have allbeen the work of custom and age-long tradition, not of the deliberateoperation of reason. Natural religion therefore is a term which is ofno use to us in classification; since none of the actual religionswhich we have to study answers to that title. Nor is revealedreligion a term we can conveniently use in such a work as this. Manyreligions claim to be the result of revelation, but few make it atthe outset of their career. The title tells us nothing about theoriginal character of a religion, but only that at some period in itscareer the claim was made for it that its origin was supernatural. Ifwe grouped the revealed religions together we might find that themembers of the group had no similarity to each other beyond theaccidental circumstance that the claim of revelation had been madefor them. Besides, science cannot possibly take the revealedcharacter of any religion for granted, but must examine each suchfaith to see if its growth cannot be accounted for without thatassumption. 

The term "natural" religion has, however, other meanings than thatjust mentioned, and some of these we may find to be of more service. It is proposed to divide religions into "natural" and "positive, " orinto those which have grown up and those which have been founded. Theearlier religions were not due to the personal action of outstandingindividuals (at least if they were, as surely they must have been inpart, the individuals and their struggles are unrecorded), but werethe work of unconscious growth, and were produced by forces, which, as they were at work in every part of the early world, may be callednatural. These religions do not appeal to the authority of anyfounder, but are borne forward by custom and tradition. Some of thelater systems, on the contrary, bear the names of their founders, andare said to have been introduced into the world at a certain time andplace. Their beginning is fixed, and they have a body of beliefs andpractices which belong to their original constitution, and possessauthority for all subsequent generations of believers. 

This classification promises well at first, but it is difficult toapply it; some religions pass imperceptibly from the stage of customto that of statute, and in many religions both elements are solargely present that it is difficult to strike the balance betweenthem. We are led to the conclusion that the real difference betweenthe earlier and the later religions is a more vital one than any ofthese classifications would indicate. The authority and the positivecharacter of the later systems is a symptom of the change which hasproduced them, but the change itself lies deeper. The higher form ofreligion is due to a great step which has been taken in civilisation;it is one of the features of the advance of society to a new stage. 

Rise of National Religion. --It is an immense step in human progresswhen a set of barbarous tribes unite to form a nation. Under thestrong hand of some chief or under the pressure of some greatnecessity, they give up the isolation which is both the weakness andthe strength of the tribal state of society, they choose some strongplace for their centre, they submit to a common government, and whilestill remembering their separate tribal traditions and usages, theylearn to act as members of a greater community than the tribe. Thisis the beginning of civilisation proper. Law takes the place ofcustom; the state undertakes to punish crime, and private vengeanceis discouraged; the state also undertakes the protection of the weak, so that humane sentiment appears, and a security is engendered inwhich the arts and sciences can spring up and flourish. 

When this takes place a new type of religion also makes itsappearance. While each of the tribes may long retain its own gods, and its peculiar rites, some one god, perhaps the god of thestrongest tribe, assumes a higher position than the rest; his worshipbecomes the central religion of the community, round which the otherworships arrange themselves by degrees, until there comes to be asystem embracing them all, but itself possessing a new character. Inthis way a national religion comes into existence. The details ofthis process are in every case beyond our observation. It is notperhaps for centuries after the national religion has come intooperation, that reflection is turned towards it; not till the art ofwriting has come to some perfection is it described and formulatedand made statutory; and by that time all accurate memory of itsbeginnings has faded away, and its origin is explained instead by aset of legends. But though its beginnings, like all beginnings, areobscure, the national religion is there. It has its history; thegreat man who brought the tribes together, or who first devised forthem a higher form of worship, is remembered as its founder; thefoundation is ascribed to the inspiration of the chief god himself;its sacred forms are written down and obtain the force of divinelaws, the will of the deity is a thing clearly known and expressed inpositive terms. 

It is not asserted that this description will apply to the origin ofall the national religions; the character and the circumstances ofone nation differ from those of another, and it need not be supposedthat they all reached their state worships in the same way. Somereligions have become national by conquest rather than growth; whilesome which may truly be called national never attained to anynational organisation. The process we have described, however, may beregarded as the typical one for the rise of a national out of tribalreligions, and indicates to us what we may regard as the real andsubstantial difference between the stage with which we have beenoccupied and that to which we are now to turn. All other differencesbetween the prehistoric and the historical religions may be traced tothis one. Before the religion of a nation has systematised itsdoctrine and its ritual so as to merit the name of positive, beforeit has provided itself with a detailed ritual or a fixed creed, or aregular priesthood, or a set of sacred books, the momentous step hasalready been taken, the new form of religious consciousness hasappeared. Men have begun to believe not only in the tribal but in thenational god or gods, and a national religion has come intoexistence. 

The advance from tribal to national worship is one of the mostmomentous in the whole history of religion. The nature of the changeinvolved in it may be summed up as follows. 

1. Men obtain a Greater God than they had before. Formerly a manbelieved in the god of his tribe, one deity among many, as his tribewas one among many, each having its own god; but now he comes to knowa god who is higher than the other tribal gods, as the king whom thetribes have united to obey is greater than the tribal chiefs. The godstands at a greater distance than before from the worshipper;familiarity is lessened, and religion becomes capable of a deeperreverence and adoration. Although the worship of the tribal god isstill kept up, yet if the new-born national consciousness is strong, the national form of religion rather than the tribal will determinethe religious sentiment of the individual. 

2. New Social Bond. --The nature of the social force exerted byreligion is altogether changed. In tribal religion the tie of theworshippers both to their god and to each other is that of blood; thegod is their common lineal ancestor, whose blood is in the veins ofall the tribesmen. The social bond supplied by such a religion islimited to the members of the tribe; a man's fellow-tribesmen are hisbrothers, but all other men are his enemies; with them he is at waras his god is. Social duty is a matter of blood relationship, andextends only to the kindred. When a national religion is arrived at, a social obligation of a new kind will evidently make its appearance. The national god is related by blood to only one of the tribescomposing the nation; the bond between him and the other tribes mustbe of another nature. He has conquered their gods or they havevoluntarily accepted him as their chief god; in any case it is notthe tie of blood that binds them to him, but some more ideal tie, like that between a king and his subjects, or between a patron andhis clients. And they now have a religious connection also with menwho are not their kindred. The national worship is inconsistent withthe gross materialism of the system of kinship, and places instead ofit the belief in a god further above the world, and therefore morespiritual, and obligations to men which, as they are not derived froma common blood, are somewhat more purely moral. 

3. A Better God. --The new god of the nation as he is higher above theworld is a being of higher and better character. He belongs to allthe tribes, and is not the mere partisan of any; like the king, he isabove tribal jealousies, and is interested in checking the violenceof all, and securing justice to all. He may be appealed to by thosewho have suffered violence and who have no earthly helper; and thushe tends to become an ideal of justice and fatherly kindness, and toreflect in the world above the sentiments springing up in the worldbelow, in favour of the repression of violence and the administrationof even-handed justice. 

In these directions the religion of the nation tends to rise abovethat of the tribe. The tribal worships may continue almost as theywere, the tribal gods may still be worshipped, the tribal jealousiesand conflicts still be carried on in spite of the new union, and allthe superstitions of early religion may long survive; yet a newreligious force has appeared which will in time produce a completenew system. The true principle of classification, therefore, must bedrawn from the difference between tribal and national religion, asthis is the most vital difference, and that from which all the otherswhich we mentioned may be derived. 

The transition thus sketched took place at widely different periodsin different parts of the world; it began early and has taken placeeven in modern times, while very many tribes in various parts of theglobe have not yet arrived at it. It is a transition of which it ismanifestly impossible to exhibit the detail; in most cases the detailis not known, and it were a profitless task to trace how primitivereligions met, united or remained apart, and how their crossings inone case led to a national religion, and in many others led to nosuch result. Much, no doubt, is to be found on such points in specialworks, and much still remains to be discovered. Various instances ofthe formation of national religions will meet us in our subsequentchapters. 

The Inca Religion. --We give, however, at this point an example of thetransition we have described, drawn from a quarter remote from thegreat movements of history, and in which the facts are plain anduncontested. Of the two great civilised communities of the New World, discovered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, Mexico presentsa worship compounded of many elements, which, along with high andlofty morality and great magnificence of ritual, yet retains anextraordinary amount of cruelty and savage horror. In Peru, however, we find a state religion which superseded savage cults stillremembered in the country, and from the _Royal Commentaries of theIncas_, written by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in the beginning ofthe seventeenth century, [1] we are able to describe the religion ofPeru both before and after the Inca reformation. 

[Footnote 1: Printed by the Hakluyt Society. ]

"Before the Incas, " this writer tells us, "each province, eachnation, and each house had its own gods, different from one another, for they thought that a stranger's god could not attend to them butonly their own. " They worshipped all manner of deities; of these arementioned herbs, plants, flowers, all kinds of trees, high hills, great rocks, and the chinks in them; caves, pebbles, emeralds. Theyalso worshipped animals; the tiger, the lion, and the bear for theirfierceness, and the monkey for his cunning; these they did not kill, but went down on the ground to worship them and would even sufferthemselves to be devoured by them, since they regarded these animalsas their own ancestors. All kinds of animals they treated in thisway; there was not an animal, how filthy and vile soever, so thequaint words tell us, they did not look on as a god. Other Indians, again, worshipped things from which they derived benefit, such asgreat fountains and rivers; some worshipped the earth, and called itmother, because it yielded their fruits; some the sea, calling itMamacocha; and a great number of other objects of adoration arementioned. They sacrificed animals and maize, but also men and women, and these not only captives taken in war but also their own children, smearing the idol with the blood. (In other quarters of the globethis is a symbolic act showing that the idol and the worshippers allpartake in the same life. ) Some tribes were fiercer than others, andpractised cannibalism more extensively. They were also well providedwith sorcerers and witches. 

All this the Incas altered. They were a princely family, regardingwhose origin and accession to power various legends are told; the godthey worshipped was the sun, and they considered and calledthemselves the children of the sun. Their father the sun, they said, had sent their forefathers to teach the tribes various things theyvery much needed to learn; to cultivate the fields, to breed flocks, to live in peace, to respect the wives and daughters of others, andto have no more than one wife. The Incas knew better, it was said, than the rest how to choose a god, and they declared that men shouldworship the sun, who gave light and heat and made things grow; theyshould be grateful for his benefits, and he would reward them if theywere obedient. The Indians accordingly took the sun for their god"without father or brothers"; they considered the moon to be hissister and wife, but did not worship her. Besides this, we hear theIncas sought a supreme god, and called him "Pachacamac, " that is"soul of the world. " This being gave life to the world and supportedit, but they did not build temples to him or offer him any sacrifice;they worshipped him in their hearts as an unknown god. 

The practice of the Inca religion as described to us by severalSpanish writers falls a good deal short of this doctrine. Many beingswere worshipped besides the sun; a number of prayers were addressedto the Creator and the sun and thunder. Many sacred objects also wereadored, such as embalmed bodies of ancestors and various idols. Theypractised all kinds of magic, and, worst of all, many boys and girlswere offered in sacrifice, even before the Incas and on great publicoccasions. The reformation of the Incas is evidently not complete; ifit had not been arrested by the arrival of the Spaniards it may bethat the purifying agency of the new religion would have found muchstill to do. Enough, however, is seen to afford strong confirmationof the principle that religion gains infinitely in elevation when anational worship appears. The Incas were no doubt the heads of atribe which had conquered others, and imposed its religion on them. The lesser conquered worships do not die out at once, but continuealong with the central one. But the latter expresses the nationalspirit and aspirations; and, as settled life fosters the growth ofintelligence and of public spirit, the central worship must more andmore supersede the others, while itself casting off its superstitiousand backward elements and becoming reasonable and elevating. 

It will be convenient to indicate at this stage the further line ofstudy to be followed in this volume. As it is our aim to trace, however inadequately, the growth of the religion of the world as awhole, it is necessary that we should confine ourselves to thoseparts of religious history which lie in the line of that growth, orwhich serve in a conspicuous manner to illustrate the principlesaccording to which it has taken place. It is by no means our purposeto give an account of all the religions of the world, nor do we seekto form a complete magazine of the curious phenomena with which thisvast field of study is in every part so well supplied. If we haveinterposed the foregoing brief account of the religion of the Incas, it is not because of its own intrinsic importance, but because itsupplies within so brief a compass such an apt example of thatprocess which occurs so often in the growth of religion, by which theunorganised rites of a multitude of clans and families give way whenthe nation comes into being, to the higher and better religion of thestate. In the same way the great religions of which we must nextspeak have, no doubt, only a loose connection with the central lineof the world's religious progress. No work professing to deal ever socursorily with our subject could omit to deal with the religion ofChina nor with that of Egypt; yet neither of these faiths perhaps haspermanently enriched the religious consciousness of mankind. Thereligion of Babylonia, with which each of these is connected, wasalso of isolated and independent growth, and is far away from us bothin time and in historical connection. Like great and solitarymountains of ancient formation, each on a continent distant fromours, these faiths attract us not because we depend on them, butbecause they are interesting in themselves. It was out of the samejungle of primitive beliefs and rites, out of which our own religionhas at length grown, that each of these lifted its head to suchheights as it attained. 

After disposing of these great systems we come to the developments, much later in point of time, which have led to the highest religionyet attained. And here two great races or groups of peoples have tobe considered, each in its own way singularly gifted and eachcontributing in a distinctive manner to the growth of religion. Theseare the Semitic and the Indo-European families. Under each of theseheads we find several well-marked religions; and the nature of thecase itself points out our further procedure. Taking up first theSemitic group, --including Islam, --since this part of the subject liesat a greater distance from ourselves, we shall inquire whether thereis any common element in the various religions it comprises, or, inother words, if there is a Semitic religion which may be regarded asthe origin from which the Semitic religions alike sprang, and whichgave them a common character; and we shall then proceed to discussthe Semitic religions each by itself. We shall then discuss thecommon belief of the Aryans, and go on to the religions of the moreimportant Aryan nations. Our last chapters will deal withChristianity and will point out the nature of development which ourstudy as a whole may have taught us to recognise in the religion ofmankind. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

On the classification of Religions see Tiele's article on "Religion"in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, Ninth Edition. 

Alb. Reville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion asillustrated by the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru. _HibbertLectures_, 1884. 

De la Saussaye, Third Edition, pp. 5-16, gives a good conspectus ofthe various classifications which have been proposed. 

PART IIISOLATED NATIONAL RELIGIONS

CHAPTER VIIBABYLON AND ASSYRIA

The religion of Babylonia, of which that of Assyria is a late form, as the Assyrians appropriated all they could of the religion and theliterature of this southern empire which they conquered, cannot beclassed along with any other without some inconvenience. In point ofremoteness in time it takes precedence even of the religions of Chinaand of Egypt; like these great faiths it also is, in its earlierstage, a growth by itself in a land and people of its own, whereapparently it grew up independently from rude beginnings. It isundoubtedly one of the Semitic religions; but it had a character ofits own which other Semitic religions did not share, and of thesimple and early Semitic religious attitude which will be set forthin another chapter it retained but little. It had an immenseinfluence. Its ideas entered the religion of the Old Testament byseveral roads. Abram came to Canaan through Haran from Ur of theChaldees; and in Canaan the religious ideas, myths, and legends ofBabylon must have been well known. The discovery of this code ofHammurabi has shown that many of the laws of Moses were laws ofBabylonia long before Moses. In a later period the tread ofBabylonian soldiery was heard in Palestine many a time before thegreat captivity, in which Israel sat down and wept remembering Zionby the waters of Babylon. In Greece also we find that ideas whichcame from Babylon had become known, by way of Phenicia, at a veryearly period. Recent discoveries, however, seems to make itimpossible to assign to the religion of Mesopotamia any other placethan the first among the great faiths of the world. The ancientconnection between Mesopotamia and Egypt, surmised till now ratherthan known, is coming to light, and it appears, at least, possiblethat the first of these countries may have to be regarded as thesource of all the civilisations of antiquity. The pantheon of Egypthas striking similarities to that of Babylonia, and some of theEgyptian temples show traces of derivation from the lands of theTigris and Euphrates. The similarities in the case of China are notso marked, but they are substantial. In Babylonia, therefore, we maybe dealing not with one of three isolated religions, but with themother of the other two. If, as Mr. Lockyer holds, [1] Egypt borrowedastronomy from Babylon in connection with temple-building, more than5000 years B. C. , the religion of Babylon must indeed be carried farinto the past. 

[Footnote 1: _Dawn of Astronomy_, 1894. ]

People and Literature. --Certain parts of Babylonian religion are muchruder and more superstitious than the exalted star-worship which isits central feature, and these have been ascribed to peoples whodwelt in Babylonia before the supposed Semitic conquest, viz. TheAccadians in the north and the Sumerians to the south, peoples notrelated to the Semites in blood or in language, but generally calledTuranian, and thought to be perhaps akin to the Chinese. Thecuneiform writing which remained in use for millenniums after theSemitic immigration as the sacred literary form, was supposed to havebeen the invention of these peoples, who had also made some progressin plastic art. 

There is, however, no direct evidence of the alleged early Semiticinvasion, and the Sumerian hypothesis of which it is a feature is nowregarded by some with less confidence. It is based on linguisticphenomena. Hammurabi, 2250 B. C. , reigned over a realm whose subjectswere of different tongues, and entrusted his records to two methodsof writing. The old Sumerian language, which cannot, in the opinionof the best scholars, be shown to have affinity with any language ofthe ancient world, came to be confined to matters of religion andmagic, and was superseded by the Assyro-Babylonian, which wasSemitic. But the feeble ray of the Sumerian hypothesis can bedispensed with in the light which is shining on ancient Babyloniafrom other quarters. For its information about that ancient land theworld was formerly dependent on the scanty notices of Greek and Latinwriters, but within the last half-century astonishing new sources ofinformation have been opened up. Explorations carried on by scholarsof many lands have made us acquainted with Babylonian and Assyriantemples and palaces, and with many a great royal inscription. Greatlibraries, made of brick tablets, have been discovered buried underthe ruins of the cities, and the gradual decipherment and arrangementof this old literature is proceeding as fast as able and devotedworkers can overtake it. Those who know the subject best declare thatno complete history of Babylonian religion can yet be written. Thetexts now in our possession embody many documents of much more remoteage, yet the information is as yet too fragmentary and often of toodoubtful interpretation, while the proportion it bears to the wholeof Babylonian life is too little known to supply a solid foundationfor history. With this caution we proceed to state the results whichare considered likely to prove well founded. As we saw, severalfeatures remain in the religion in later times which appear to throwlight back upon its early condition, and it may be best to begin withthese before describing the noble structure presented on the whole bythis religion. 

1. Worship of Spirits. --The Babylonians, like the Chinese, believedthe world to be thickly peopled with spirits of all kinds; and saw ineach movement in nature the action of a "zi" or spirit. These spiritscould be to some extent controlled; though their character was notknown, yet certain charms and incantations were believed to havepower over them, and communication with the unseen world took, therefore, the form of magic. The earliest portions of the sacredliterature consist of spells or charms believed to possess thisvirtue, and these were never displaced from the collection; on thecontrary, new spells were written even after higher spiritual beingswere known and more ethical forms of addressing them had beendevised. Especially were all pains and diseases ascribed to theagency of spirits or of sorcerers and witches, their human allies, and the sick person naturally sent for an exorcist to expel thespirit which was tormenting him. Some spirits were more powerful thanothers, and the stronger spirit was invoked to rebuke and drive outthe weaker. The spirit of heaven and the spirit of earth were adjuredto conjure the plague-demon, the demon who was afflicting the eye, the heart, the head, or any other part of the body. Assertions arenot wanting in the cuneiform literature that beliefs and practices ofthis kind formed no part of the true religion of Babylonia, and somescholars regard it as a late degeneration. The analogy of similarcases points, however, to the conclusion that magic is everywhere anearly form of religion which is only overshadowed, not killed, when agreat religion arises, and which tends to reappear. It may be saidthat there is no evidence of any break in Babylonian religion; if theSumerians yielded to the Semites, this led to no religiousrevolution; the religion is Semitic from first to last. 

2. Animals. --A step above this trafficking with spirits is theworship of animals, which Mr. Sayce considers to have been an earlyform of Babylonian religion, and to afford an explanation of variousfeatures in it. Like the gods of Egypt and those of Greece, many ofthe gods of Babylon have animal emblems; this appears both in therepresentations of them and in their legends. The winged bulls andeagle-headed men of Babylonian art represent the same rise of thegods which we know to have taken place in Egypt, from the animal tothe semi-human, and then to the fully human form. An intermediatestage in Babylonia is that the god stands on the back of the animalwith which presumably he was formerly identified. We have an AssyrianDagon whose head and shoulders are covered with a fish's skin; wehave gods and goddesses who are human figures with the exception oftheir wings; we have winged dragons; we have the great bulls withhuman head and wings which stood as guardian deities to ward off evilspirits at the portal of a palace. The following animals were alsoconnected with gods: the antelope, the serpent, which came to be theembodiment of cunning and wickedness, the goat, the pig, the vulture. We thus see that the rise from zoomorphism to anthropomorphism whichthe Greeks afterwards carried to the highest point attainable by theresources of art, began in Babylonia. 

Like all early religions, that of Babylonia is broken up into amultiplicity of local worships. There is no common system, but eachplace has its own god or gods and its own sacred rites. In Egypt weshall find reason to believe that this state of matters had itsorigin in an early totemistic arrangement of society; whether thesame was the case in Babylonia or not, it is vain to speculate. Babylonian religion as we see it has risen far above the directworship of animals. Each god comes before us in a certain localconnection and with a special character, but they tend to grow likeeach other, and their worship is organised on the same plan. The godsof Babylonia undoubtedly belonged to different towns, and thoughattempts were made in later times to bring them all together in animperial Babylonian religion, and to settle their relations to eachother, these attempts led to no system which was finally accepted. The number of the recognised great gods varied, and there was alwaysa large number of minor gods. Each god has his own early history;here as everywhere it is the case that the individual gods areearlier than the system which seeks to connect them together. 

The Great Gods. --The great gods of Babylonia belong to the elementsand to the heavenly bodies. When we first see them, they are not, like the gods of the western Semites, lords and masters, characterstaken from human families; they are not husbands and fathers butcreators and universal powers. Another mark about them is that theyhave originally no wives. When they come to have wives, these aresimply doubles of themselves with no special character. A consort isgiven to the god by adding a feminine termination to his name, thusBel receives Belit, Anu has Anat. Finally Babylonian religion is moreand more directed to the heavenly bodies. It is Astral religioncarried to its furthest point. This fixed the arrangement of itstemples, the occupations of its priests. 

We rapidly pass in review the principal Gods. One of the oldest is Eaof Eridu, a town which stood in old times at the head of the PersianGulf. He is a god of the deep, whether it was that he was consideredto have come over the water from another land, or whether he isconnected with the belief which was held in Babylonia as elsewhere, that all things originally arose out of the abyss. In later forms ofthe legend his name appears as Oannes, and he is an amphibious being, half-fish, half-man, who rises from the deep and instructs men inarts and sciences. Works were preserved bearing his name, for he wasan author. He continues, even when little direct worship is addressedto him, one of the greatest of the gods. Ana the sky, is the god ofErech on the lower Euphrates. Like the Chinese, the men of Erechregarded the sky itself as the highest god, and the maker and rulerof all things. In Babylonia, however, the notion became spiritualisedmore than in China; at first we hear that his dwelling became therefuge of the gods during the Deluge, but in later times he isregarded as a being quite above heaven and all created beings, andeven all the gods. A third great god is Bel of Nippur, not the laterBel of Babylon, but an older one, identical with the AccadianMullilla, the lord of the under-world. The earliest gods of thisreligion are those of the sea, the earth, and the sky. As they belongto different districts of the country, they can scarcely be called atrinity. A better approach to a trinity is formed by Ea of Eridu, Davkina his wife who is the earth, and the sun-god Dumuzi, theiroffspring. The son of Ea, also named Miri-Dugga or Merodach (Marduk), is identified with the Egyptian Osiris; they have the same symbol, each is a sun-god, and each has a sister who is also his wife, Merodach has Istar, and Osiris, Isis. In Sergul the principal deitywas the fire-god, sometimes called Savul; in Cutha they worshippedNergal the god of death, the "strong one" who had his throne beneath. Cutha was a favourite place of sepulture with the Babylonians. Rimmonwas a god of wind, Matu of storms. There is a dragon Tiamat, withwhom the great gods have to contend. 

The sun and the moon were worshipped everywhere; each city had itsown sun-god and its own moon-god. The preference generally shown bynomads for the moon, since their journeys are made by night, is keptup in early Babylonia, where the moon-god is regarded as the fatherof the sun-god, and as the greater being. In Ur of the Chaldees themoon was the principal deity. There were also towns such as Larsa andSippara, where the sun was the chief god; and many of the great godsof later times were originally sun-gods. The Chaldeans, moreover, were proverbially star-watchers, and a "zigurrath" or observatory, abuilding of seven spheres corresponding to those of the planets asthey pass through the signs of the zodiac, and like them rising up tothe seat of God at the North Star, was a regular part of the laterBabylonian temple. To Babylonia is due the practice of theorientation of temples; that is to say, the arrangement of thebuilding in such a way that its principal axis shall point exactly ina desired direction. Some of the Babylonian temples were oriented sothat the sun should shine to the western end of them on the day ofthe spring equinox when the inundation of the rivers began on whichthe prosperity of the country so much depended. The temple was thusan astronomical instrument of a high degree of accuracy, and thepriests who directed its building and served in it when built weremen of science and learning. A religion which is connected with theheavenly bodies, though it does not fully supply the needs of thelower orders and has too little energy to cope with superstition, tends to produce a priesthood who form centres of enlightenment andcivilisation throughout the country. This was in the highest degreethe case in Babylonia. To these old astronomers the world owes thesigns of the zodiac, which were fixed not later than in the fifthmillennium B. C. , and in which we see how early man beheld in thenightly heavens the creatures which on earth he regarded as divine, so that he worshipped them in both regions. The institution of theSabbath is also Babylonian; whether it was connected with the changesof the moon, or with a week of days named after the seven planets, isnot certain. Seven is a sacred number in Babylonia, as we find inmany a connection. 

Mythology. --We come lastly, in our attempt to enumerate those partsof Babylonian religion which have entered deeply into human thought, to the myths. The heroic legends and romances are the mostinteresting and the best-known portions of the newly-recoveredliterature. We have already noticed some fragments of mythology, suchas the story of the fish-god who comes up daily from the sea, themoon being the father of the sun, and the family history of Ea andDavkina, with the sun their child. The two latter are evidentlyinconsistent with each other. But the story about the son of Ea andDavkina has an important further development. His name is Duzu orDumuzu, and he is the Tammuz of whom we hear in the Bible (Ezekielviii. 14), who is adored by women raising lamentations for him. He issaid to be the sun-god of spring, to whom the heat of summer isfatal, and who dies in June. It is when moisture is failing from theground that he is bemoaned. His home is in Eden, for Eden belongs toBabylonian legend, which places it near Eridu. There grows the greatworld-tree which the gods love; it rises from the centre of theworld, and is nourished from springs which Ea himself replenishes. Itis a cedar (Yggdrasil, the ash-tree, we shall find, occupies the sameposition with the Northern Teutons); it is sometimes found in ahighly conventional form with the figure of a cherub at each side ofit, each of whom holds in his hand a fruit. In this tree scholarsrecognise both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge with whichwe are familiar. The knowledge of the priests in Babylonia was notfor every one, but was jealously guarded, and kept for the initiatedalone. 

From Tammuz we naturally pass to Istar, one of the few goddesses ofold Babylonia, and by far the most famous of them. Istar wasoriginally the goddess of the earth, and both mother and sister ofthe sun-god, for we are led to believe that she is at first the sameas Davkina. The great myth of the descent of Istar describes how shegoes down to the kingdom of the shades to seek the waters that shallgive life again to her bridegroom Tammuz. The poem in which thenarrative is preserved gives a description of the "house of darkness, where they behold no light, " and then tells how, at the orders ofNinkigal or Allat, queen of Hades, Istar is deprived, successively, in spite of her remonstrances, of all her ornaments, and how theplague-demon Namtar is bidden to strike her with all manner ofdiseases. The result of Istar's disappearance under the earth is thatall love and courtship cease both among men and the lower animals, and Ea himself is appealed to, to bring to an end so unnatural astate of affairs. A messenger is sent to the lower regions to causethe release of Istar and the reascent of Tammuz. This goddess, however, is known not only from this legend; she has many forms, andpassed through various fortunes. The Istar of Erech herself luresTammuz to his destruction. In early times Istar is also the eveningstar, the bright companion of the moon. Her leading character, however, seems to be that of a goddess of love. Fertility depends onher; she goes under the earth to find her lover. In this charactershe attracted in Babylonia a worship noted for impurity, which underthe name of Ashtoreth is found also in Phenicia and in Syria. Thereis also, however, a warlike Istar, a strict goddess served byAmazons, and capable of identification with the Greek Artemis, as theIstar of love is identified with Aphrodite. 

Much more primitive than the legend of Istar are some parts of theBabylonian accounts of the creation. There are several of theseaccounts, some newly discovered. In one the old god Ea peoples theoriginal chaos with a variety of strange monsters. In another thebirth of the gods is narrated as well as that of the world; we findalso that chaos is itself conceived as a female monster, a dragon ofevil, and the god has to do battle with this power of darkness andevil, and to bring light and the habitable world up from its realm. It is certainly true that the Babylonian legends of the creation arecrude and inconsistent with each other, and that the account inGenesis belongs to a much higher order of thought. The Babylonianaccount of the deluge and the ark is more closely parallel to theBible narrative; the two cannot possibly be independent of eachother, and there may be no impropriety in holding that the Hebrewwriters were acquainted with myths of general diffusion in the worldthey lived in. 

The State Religion. --The Babylonian and Assyrian religion of which wehear in the Bible (_cf. _ Isa. Xl. -lxvi. ) is the splendid worship ofmighty empires; it has forgotten its humble beginnings, and under theguidance of large priestly and learned corporations has grown much indepth and purity. Of its outward magnificence the monuments furnishample proof. The temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was a wonder ofthe world. Being the god of the prevailing city of the empire, Merodach was the greatest of all the gods, and was reverenced andextolled as befitted the friend and patron of the greatest ofmonarchs. His son Nebo was a prophet and a god of wisdom. WhatMerodach was to Babylon, Assur was to Assyria; in fact, he was theonly god peculiar to Assyria. The rule that as religion grows inoutward splendour it also gains in inward strength and spiritualityis strikingly exemplified in the case before us. The gods have cometo be moral powers, who really care for men, not only for the king, their earthly representative, but for their worshippers in general. Merodach is praised for his mercy; he not only accompanies the kingin his wars, of which the inscriptions give us so many a wearisomecatalogue, but he heals the sick, he brings relief to him who ismourning for his transgressions, and he brings life out of death andreceives the soul committed to his mercy to a blessed dwelling above. Perhaps we pass here somewhat beyond the early period of the religionand touch on its ultimate phase. The penitential hymns of the laterliterature form a strong contrast to the magical incantations, whichfill so much space in the Babylonian sacred literature. Theconfessions they contain are not very spiritual; the supplicantbewails his sufferings rather than his sins. Indeed, he rather infersfrom his sufferings that he has sinned, trodden, it may be, where heought not to have trodden, or eaten what he should not have eaten, than confesses that he deserved to suffer for sins of which he isaware. What is implored is outward redress or ease, not inward peace. The removal of outward ills is taken as forgiveness. There can be nocomparison between these hymns and those of the Bible. But what theydo show is the rise in Babylonia of a religion for the individual. The gods are sought not only officially by the state or for stateends, but by the individual. They are believed to have regard toindividual sufferings; and the friends of a dying person believe thatthe gods care for and will receive his soul. 

Our knowledge of the religion of these lands is too imperfect toadmit of wide conclusions being drawn from it. We know what thehigher religion of Babylonia was; and we also see that the higherworship never entirely prevailed in this land; the god, like Bel orAssur, who bore the character of a human over-lord, never drove outthe old set of spirits, nor brought the service of them to an end. Asin the case of Egypt, so here the attempts made in the direction of apure and spiritual worship met with no ultimate success. Babylon andAssyria never came so near to Monotheism as did Egypt threemillenniums before Christ. Nabonidos, the last king of Babylon, collected all the gods together in his capital, and endeavoured toorganise them in a system under Merodach as their head; but this ledto religious discord rather than to peace, since the minor deitiesvehemently resented the removal of their images from their accustomedshrines, and were understood to refuse their aid to the state on thenew conditions. The religion of Babylon was too much broken up intoindependent local cults to admit of such a unification. The highestthat was reached was that one great god was adored in one city, another in another, with some depth and spirituality. To nationswhich had attained a higher faith, that of Babylon appeared to be anidolatrous worship of many gods. That is a harsh judgment. Thisreligion also had life in it and advanced from a lower to a higherstage; from a timid trafficking with spirits to a service of gods whowere ideal heads of human communities, and friends of individual men. It was not a mere system, as the world has been accustomed to think, of astrology and of divination of other kinds. But when Babylon andAssyria ceased to be independent powers, and became provinces ofPersia, Bel bowed down and Nebo stooped, not to rise again. The worldof that day had no need of them. It had already attained in more thanone country to a higher religion than that of these deities. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The Histories of Antiquity, viz. --

Maspéro, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_. 

Duncker, _The History of Antiquity_, from the German, by EvelynAbbott. 

Rawlinson, _The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World:Chaldea, Assyria, Babylonia, Media, and Persia_. 

Ed. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, 1884. The first volumeembraces the History of the East to the foundation of the PersianEmpire. 

Schrader, _Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament_, 1903. 

Hilprecht, _Old Babylonian Inscriptions_ chiefly from Nippur, 1893. 

_Records of the Past_, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11. 

Sayce's _Hibbert Lectures_, 1887. 

Tiele, _Egyptische en Mesopotamische Godsdiensten_. 

Jastrow, _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, 1898. The mostcomplete account of the whole subject. 

Jastrow, "Religion of Babylonia, " in _Dictionary of the Bible_, vol. V. 

Jastrow, "On the Religion of the Semites, " in _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. I. P. 225, _sqq. _

F. Jeremias in De la Saussaye, pp. 246-347. 

Bezold, _Niniva and Babylon_, 1903. 

E. H. W. Johns, _The Oldest Code of Laws in the World_, 1903. 

"On the Code of Hammurabi. " E. H. W. Johns, in _Dictionary of theBible_, vol. V. 

CHAPTER VIIICHINA

The Chinese have always been a world in themselves, remote from otherraces of men; yet they developed a civilisation which is in manyrespects worthy to be compared with that of India or of the West. Thepeople who made gunpowder and paper and who printed books, longbefore any of these things were done in Europe, might naturally thinkthemselves the foremost nation of the earth. Their civilisation, however, has exercised no influence on the world outside of China, nor has it advanced to the higher achievements of the human mind. Astheir great wall secludes them from other nations, so do their mentalhabits prevent them from a free interchange of ideas with foreigners. The Mongolian race, indeed, from which, like the Hungarians and theFinns, they are descended, is so different from other races in manyrespects that some anthropologists suppose it to have a separateorigin. Phlegmatic and matter-of-fact by nature, exact and careful inpractical matters, and to a high degree imitative and industrious, the Chinese are singularly devoid of imagination and indisposed tophilosophy. Their monosyllabic and uninflected language, belonging toone of the earliest strata of human speech, and ill fitted to expressabstract or poetical ideas, is an index to their whole nature. If anawakening, as various signs appear to indicate, is now at hand forthem, no one can tell how fast it will proceed, or what the finalissue of it may be. 

China has at present three religions, all recognised by the state andrepresented in every part of the country--viz. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. For our purpose the first of these is very much themost important, as Taoism, originally a philosophy, quicklydegenerated into a system of magic, and Buddhism is imported intoChina, and has to be spoken of elsewhere. Confucianism, being thedirect descendant of the old state religion of China, is the nativegrowth of the mind of the nation. Like the Chinese language, thestate religion belongs to a very early formation, and presents thesymptoms of a development which was rapid at first but was earlyarrested. 

History of China. --Legend goes back to very remote antiquity andtells in a shadowy way of the arrival of the Chinese from the West(which scholars are agreed in regarding as a fact), and of earlypotentates, patterns to all their successors, who treated the peopleas their children, and invented for them the arts on which life inChina most depends. History proper begins about 2000 B. C. , though theChinese had the art of writing a thousand years before that. Researches, however, which are now being made by several scholars, seem likely to lead to the conclusion that China received at leastthe seeds of civilisation and some religious ideas from Mesopotamia. That Chinese religion resembles in some respects that of Babyloniawas mentioned in the last chapter. In a work like this and in thepresent state of knowledge it is necessary to deal with the religionof China as an isolated one. When the history of the country opens, the character, manners, and institutions of the people are alreadyfixed. They are already civilised and have an organised religion, though how all this came about we cannot tell. The early kings aremen of piety, inventors of arts, and authors of fundamental maxims ofpolicy; but as time went on the kings grew worse and lost theaffections of their people. In the twelfth century B. C. The Chowdynasty came into power and gave China some of its best rulers, butit also soon fell off; the country broke up into a number of separatefeudal principalities over which the central government lost allcontrol, and in the sixth century Confucius is found wandering fromone independent state to another. This confusion led in the thirdcentury B. C. To the displacement of the Chow by the Tsin dynasty. Shi-Hoang-Ti, fourth ruler of this line, one of the strongest rulersChina ever had, assumed the title of Universal Emperor. He beat backthe enemies of China beyond the frontier, began the building of thegreat wall, and broke down the power of the feudal rulers. It wasfound, however, that the feudal system still lived in the affectionsof the people, and as it was the religious books which mainly keptthe past in veneration, the emperor ordered their destruction andenforced the edict with great rigour. The House of Han, however, which replaced that of Tsin in 206 B. C. , recovered the ancientliterature of the country from the hiding-places where copies of thebooks had been preserved, and established in accordance with them thevery conservative constitution which has lasted to this day. 

Sources. --The books thus condemned and thus recovered supply us withour knowledge of ancient China and of its religion. They arepolitical rather than religious in their nature. China has no Bible, no book guarded by the ministers of religion as the basis of thesystem they conduct; the religious teachers of China, if there areany, are the literati, the books they preserve and study are theClassics. These are connected with the name of Confucius, whocollected or edited them, and himself wrote one of them. They are notthought to be inspired, but are revered because of their immemorialantiquity. No people was ever more completely under the influence ofa book, or set of books, than the Chinese. The learned class, whoconstitute the only nobility of China, receive their whole educationfrom the books ascribed to Confucius; which, like other authoritativeliteratures, contain matter of various kinds. 

The Chinese collection consists of the five Classics (King) and thefour books (Shu). The former were edited by Confucius; the latter areby the disciples of that sage or by Mencius, a distinguished teacherin his school about a century after him. The five Classics are themost sacred of all. They are as follows:--

I. --1. The _Yih-king_, or Book of Changes. This is a divining book;it consists of a set of interpretations by princes of the twelfthcentury B. C. , of a set of lineal figures. The system is in itself ofchildlike simplicity, but use and age have collected mysteries aboutit. It was exempted from the proscription of Shi-Hoang-Ti. 

2. The _Shu-king_, or Book of History, contains speeches anddocuments of the early princes from the twenty-fourth to the eighthcentury B. C. 

3. The _Shi-king_, or Book of Poetry, consists of a collection of 300songs, selected by Confucius from a mass ten times as great. Some ofthese pieces are extremely old. 

4. The _Le ke_, or Record of Rites. This book is said to have beencomposed by the duke of Chow in the twelfth century B. C. , and is theprincipal source of information about the ancient state religion ofChina. It contains precepts not only for religious ceremonies, butalso for social and domestic duties, and is the Chinaman's manual ofconduct to the present day. 

5. _Chun Tsew_, Spring and Autumn, contains the annals of theprincipality of Loo, of which Confucius was a native, from 721-480B. C. They are extremely dry; and if we could understand the statementof Mencius that Confucius by writing them (for they are his own work)produced a great effect on the minds of his contemporaries, manythings about Chinese religion and manners would be clearer to us thanthey unfortunately are. 

To these five Classics is sometimes added, as a sixth, the_Hsiao-king_, or Book of Filial Piety, a conversation on that subjectbetween Confucius and a disciple. 

It is impossible to tell how much Confucius did for these old books. Some hold that he did not change them much, nor put into them much ofhis own, and that, in fact, he was himself indebted to these booksfor all he is reported to have taught. On the other hand, it isdeclared that he made the ancient books teach his own doctrine, andleft out all that did not suit him; and, in confirmation of thisview, the fact is pointed out that while these books as we have themteach pure Confucianism, another religion of a different spirit wasgrowing up in China in Confucius's own day, which must have had somesupport in the old system. It may be that Confucius did not care toreport to us all the features of the old religion, but only those ofwhich he approved. But the information given us about that oldreligion is admittedly correct so far as it goes; and there is littledoubt that what Confucius thought best in it, and what passed throughhim into the subsequent religion of China, was its mostcharacteristic and most important part. 

II. --The Classics of the second order comprise four books:--

1. The _Lun Yu_, or Digested Conversations of the Master; or, as Dr. Legge calls it, _The Confucian Analects_. It is from this book thatwe derive our information about the sage; it was compiled probably bythe disciples of his disciples. 

2. The _Ta-Heo_, or Great Learning, and

3. The _Chung Yung_, or Doctrine of the Mean, are smaller works, giving a more literary form to the doctrine of the sage. 

4. The _Mang-tsze_ contains the teachings of Mencius. 

The State Religion of Ancient China. --Confucius never imaginedhimself to be a reformer of the religion of his country. The religionof China is in the main the same to this day[1] as it was before heappeared, and what is called Confucianism is simply that old system. That the worship of Confucius himself has been added to it does notinvolve any change of its structure. It is already well developedwhen we first see it, and what is very peculiar, it has alreadyparted with all savage and irrational elements. There is nomythology; the universal legend of the marriage of heaven and earthis dimly recognisable, but there is no set of primitive stories aboutthe gods. Of human sacrifice there is only one ancient instance;there are no rites with anything savage or cruel about them. Everything is proper, dignified, and well arranged. The deities arebeings worthy to be worshipped, and they exact no meaninglessservices. There is nothing in any part of the religion to disturb thepropriety of the worshipper or to suggest any doubts to his mind. Inno other religion of the world do we find everything in suchexcellent order. 

[Footnote 1: The working religion of the present day is fullydescribed by Prof. De Groot in De la Saussaye, _Lehrbuch_, Thirdedition. ]

On the other hand, it is not a highly-developed religion. Its beliefsare those of extremely early times, and represent a stage of thoughtat which no other national religion stood still. The organisationcommon to developed systems is entirely wanting; there is no idol, nopriestly class, no Bible, no theology; the most important doctrinesare left so vague and undetermined that scholars interpret them inopposite ways. It is a religion in which, just as in the primitivestage, outward acts are everything, the doctrine nothing, and whichis not regulated by an organised code but by custom and precedent. All these marks point to a formation in very early times, and to avery early arrest of growth, before the ordinary developments ofmythology and doctrine, priesthood, ritual, and sacred literature hadtime to take place. They also point to the operation of some powerfulcause, which, when the religion had developed its main features, wasable to suppress older beliefs and practices, and lead the nation todevote itself altogether to the newer faith. How this took place wecan only conjecture, but certainly it could never have been doneunless the new faith and the national character had fitted each otherperfectly. The classical religion may, as Prof. De Groot says, havecome into existence along with the classical constitution set up bythe Han dynasty 2000 years ago. But it must have been ready to enterinto this position. 

The objects of worship in the Chinese religion arrange themselves inthree classes. The Chinaman of old worshipped and his descendant ofto-day worships still--

 1. Heaven. 2. Spirits of various kinds, other than human. 3. The spirits of dead ancestors. 

1. Heaven (Thian) is the principal Chinese deity; in strictness wemust say the sole deity, for there is no family of upper gods; heavenreceives all the worship that is directed aloft. It is the clearvault, the friendly ever-present and all-seeing blue that is meant, not the windy nor the rainy sky, but that which is above allagitations, and which all beings of the air or of the earth look upto and serve. It is conceived as living. It is not a separablespirit, not a power behind, that is worshipped, but heavenitself, --the living heaven of that early thought, which has not yetcome to distinguish between matter and spirit, --the living heavenwhich is over all, knows all, orders and governs all. 

To this heaven other names are given, even in the oldestwritings--Ti, Ruler; or Shang-ti, Supreme Ruler. Did the Chineseconceive this ruler as identical with heaven, or as a personalitydwelling in it or above it? It has been held that the two beliefs arenot the same; that the Chinese of the earliest times worshipped theSupreme Ruler, _i. E. _ the one God, Ti, and afterwards fell away fromthat position of pure monotheism and declined to the worship of thematerial object, heaven. The early Catholic missionaries argued thatthe Chinese Shang-ti was equivalent to the Christian "God, " andsignified a being other than the sky, the Supreme Power of theuniverse. The Chinese, however, generally denied that they made anysuch distinction, [2] and even declared that they could not understandit. The names Heaven and Supreme Ruler are used by themindiscriminately: one notices that Confucius does not use thepersonal form, but only speaks of heaven; "heaven, " he says, whenfeeling distressed, "is destroying me. " We have here, therefore, anearly form of nature-worship. 

[Footnote 2: Dr. Legge, while admitting that the Chinese originallyworshipped the vault of heaven itself, maintains that they got pastthe early mode of thought which considers every natural object asanimated, before the dawn of history, and became pure theists, believers in a supreme spiritual being. Confucius he considers tohave held a lower religious position than his countrymen had alreadyattained to. He also regards the worship of spirits and of ancestorsas a later perversion and degradation of the original religion of onegod. In these positions he is followed by Professor Giles, _OxfordProceedings_, vol. I. P. 105, _sqq. _]

The Supreme Power directs all things, and is an ever-present governorboth in the natural and in the moral sphere. These two spheres indeedare not regarded as distinct. Nature reveals in all its changes themind of its ruler, and human conduct is regarded as an outward thing, as a phenomenon on the same plane with the movements of nature; thetwo are supposed to be part of one system and to act directly on eachother. As Heaven both governs the weather and looks after men'sactions, for "every day heaven witnesses our actions and is presentin the places where we are, " these two aspects of providence areclosely blended and are in fact the same. Heaven makes its will knownin a natural way. It is one of the most peculiar features of Chinesereligion that it knows no revelation, no miracles, no divineinterferences. It has a belief in destiny, Ming; every one has hisMing, but it is only known when it is accomplished. "Does Heavenplainly declare its Ming?" Confucius is asked; and he replies, "No, heaven speaks not; by the order of events its will is known, nototherwise. " Man learns by the external occurrences how Heaven isdisposed towards him. When there is excessive rain or long drought, this shows that the harmony between Heaven and the earth isdisturbed. It belongs to the emperor to put this right. He alone isentitled to offer sacrifice to Heaven; he stands in the closestrelation to Heaven, who is the ancestor of his house; and when Heavenis seen to be displeased, the emperor must restore the harmony bygoverning his subjects better or by sacrifices. In an extreme case, when the emperor is seen to have fallen under the displeasure ofHeaven, the conclusion is drawn that he must no longer be emperor. The people then are entitled to depose him and to set up a new ruler, through whom the necessary transactions with Heaven can be carriedon. The belief has always been held in China, at least theoretically, and is operative to this day, that it can be known when Heaven hasrejected a ruler, and that it belongs to the people to carry out thatsentence. 

2. The Spirits. --The worship "of the spirits" is a primary religiousduty for the Chinaman. The spirits, however, are an ill-defined setof beings; they are generally spoken of in the plural number, andsacrifice was offered to them as a body, no particular spirits beingnamed. The spirits are connected with natural objects, every part ofnature has its spirit. The sun, the moon, the five planets, clouds, rain, wind, the five great mountains, but also every smallermountain, the rivers, each district, and a thousand other things, allhave their spirits. [3] The spirits are not flitting aboutcapriciously, but have been collected together and organised in ahierarchy, and this has loosened their connection with naturalobjects. They are spoken of as a set of beings who may be addressedas a body. A prince alone may sacrifice to the spirit of the earth, and to those of the mountains and rivers of his territory. But to thespirits in general all may and should pray; they assist those who paythem reverence and sacrifice to them. It will be seen that theworship of heaven and that of the spirits are kept separate. Theformer is the imperial worship; the emperor alone is competent toattend to it. The latter is the official worship of minor states. Norare the two sets of deities wrought into a homogeneous system; wehear that the spirits, while subordinate to Shang-ti, are not hismessengers. The surmise is not to be avoided that these two worshipscame originally from different circles of ideas, and have not beenperfectly blended. The worship of heaven belongs to the highernature-worship, that of the spirits to the lower; the latter isanimistic, it is a worship of detached spirits, while the former is aworship of the natural object itself. The spirits are all good; thereare scarcely any bad spirits in Chinese belief. 

[Footnote 3: The Japanese official religion, "Shin-to" (=way of thegods, as distinguished from Butsudo, way of Buddha, _i. E. _ JapaneseBuddhism), an easy worship of numberless spirits, without sacrificesand without any moral doctrine, is allied to this branch of thereligion of China; as also is the religion of Corea. Shin-to is notancestral worship, and recognises no life after death. ]

3. Ancestors. --The worship of ancestors is that which is assigned tothe private individual. He does not approach Shang-ti any more thanhe would address the emperor on earth; his working religion isdirected to his ancestors. The Chinese believed in the continuance ofthe soul after death, and addressed solemn invitations to it toreturn to the body it had forsaken. Their belief can scarcely bedescribed as that in personal immortality; it is the continuance ofthe family rather than of the person that is thought of. Theindividual does not look forward to his own future life or allow thatto influence him; there is little trace of any belief in futurerewards and punishments. China has no heaven and no hell. It is thepast, not the future, that influences the present; the departedmembers of the family are believed to be still attached to it, and tohave become its tutelary spirits. In every house there is a hall ofancestors, where worship and sacrifice is offered to them, and manyeven of the details of this worship remind us strongly of the way inwhich the Romans served their family heroes. Tablets belonging to theancestors are placed in this hall; and to these they are supposed tocome when properly invoked, so as to be present with the family. Atevery important family event they are summoned to attend. Thisworship has to be rendered by husband and wife jointly, so thatmarriage is necessary for its performance, and an early marriage is areligious duty. 

The family sacrifice, like all sacrifices in China, is of the natureof a banquet, at which the living members of the family, and thespirits who have been summoned, eat and drink together. To heightenthe illusion, the grandson was sometimes dressed in the clothes ofthe departed head of the house and made the principal figure of thecelebration--

 The dead cannot in form be here, But there are those their part who bear; We lead them to the highest seat And beg that they will drink and eat: So shall our sires our service own, And deign our happiness to crown With blessings still more bright. [4]

[Footnote 4: _Shi-king_, II. Vi. 5. ]

It is not only in the family that ancestors are adored. The emperorsacrifices in a public capacity to all the ancestors of his own line, and also to all his predecessors on the throne; a magistrate to allwho have occupied his office before him. Ancient China possessed anelaborate ritual, and occasions of sacrifice were frequent. Everychange of season, every portent of nature, every important stepeither in public or in private life, required its consecration. It isin accordance with the genius of the people that the sacrifices arenot of the nature of propitiation, but expressions of gratitude anddevotion merely. Asceticism has no place in this religion; everythingin it is bright and sensible. He who is to offer a sacrifice prepareshimself by prayer and retirement to do so worthily; but beyond thisreasonable measure there is no afflicting of the soul, and in theprayers belonging to the occasion self-humiliation and confessionhave no place, but only thanksgivings and petitions. The petitionsare for worldly benefits and furtherance; the sacrifices are means ofprocuring these from the heavenly powers. They consist chiefly ofanimal victims, but fruits are also used, and with the importance ofthe occasion the variety and costliness of the offerings increase. Elaborate music also accompanies great sacrifices, and is thought tobe very acceptable to the heavenly powers. Religion is not separatedfrom life in China. There is no special class to take care of it;every one has to attend himself to those sacrifices which areincumbent on him; this is a natural, matter-of-course part of a man'sduty. As there is no Bible, there is no religious instruction, andthe doctrine is quite vague and undefined. The ritual, however, isfixed by tradition in every detail, and if a man attends to it hedoes his duty; religion is a set of acts properly and exactly done, the proper person sacrificing always to the proper object in theproper way. 

Confucius was not a man who tried to change the religion of hiscountry; indeed, he disliked to talk of religious subjects, and hepractised reverently the religion which had long prevailed in China. His conversation was chiefly about what we should call worldlymatters, and it is hard to see why the religion of China, the sameafter him as it had been before him, should be called by his name. What led to the connection was: (1) That he taught in a clear andsimple way, as had never been done before, the theory of governmentand morals which lies at the root of Chinese religion, and thus didsomething, though unconsciously, to provide that religion with adoctrine. And (2) that he collected and edited the books which arethe only literary documents the religion has, and which have formedever since the study of the ruling classes in China. Receiving thesebooks at his hands, they have naturally looked to him as the prophetof their faith. 

His Life. --Kung-fu-tsze (_i. E. _ Master Kong; the name was Latinisedby the Jesuits) is better known to us than most other religiousfounders. He lived to the age of seventy-three, surrounded byadmiring disciples, who remembered what they saw in him and heardfrom his lips; and this tradition is preserved in the _Lun Yu_, Digested Conversations, [5] a work compiled, as we observed, bydisciples of the second generation. The supernatural element which inother cases gathered so quickly round a venerated figure, is hereentirely absent; in China such growths do not take place. There maybe some tendency to idealise the moral greatness of the sage, butthere are also passages in which this tendency evidently has not beenat work; both in its candour and in the homeliness of much that isreported, the book invites confidence as a genuine record. We see thesage as the diligence of students in the present generation enablesus to see Kant or Wordsworth; we hear his opinions on a great varietyof subjects; we see how he behaved on occasions of state and at hismeals in private, towards princes and towards common men; we laugh athis jokes and sigh with him at his privations. 

[Footnote 5: Dr. Legge, _Confucian Analects_. ]

He was born in 551 B. C. In a good rank of society, but was brought upin poverty, and owed all his success to his own merits. The bent ofhis mind showed itself early; as a child he amused himself withplaying at ceremonies; at thirteen, he tells us, he bent his mind tolearning, the subject of his studies being history and poetry, theceremonies and the music of the empire. He early arrived at the viewshe always afterwards held as to the proper way to govern a people, and he believed with all the faith of an enthusiast that a vastimprovement of society would follow the adoption of his method. Itwas to public employment that he aspired from an early period oflife; but he did not readily find it in the unquiet times in whichhis lot was cast. He did enjoy office for certain brief periods, andmarvellous things are told of the reformation of manners which atonce attended his efforts as a governor. All got their due; there wasno thieving, and there was no occasion to put the penal laws inexecution, for no offenders showed themselves. What was the methodwhich was held to have had such results? In the counsels which hegave to various rulers who applied to him this is set forth. Hebelieved the power of example to be capable of effecting all that aruler should desire. Punishments might be dispensed with, andexcessive pains need not be bestowed on the machinery of government, but a prince who has "rectified" himself will soon have his people"rectified" too. The first task of a ruler is to "rectify names";_i. E. _ there is good government when the prince is really a princeand the minister a minister, when the father is a real father and theson a real son. The perfect order consists of the due observance byeach rank of the duties belonging to it; there is to be awell-regulated hierarchy in which each understands his function andacts it out. The people are naturally good and docile, he held, andif they are well governed they will not do wrong even though rewardsbe offered for it. Thus by docile respect to tradition and authority, which all men are willing to pay if properly guided towards it, thepillars of the state are established. 

His Doctrine. --This is the truth which Confucius preached mostearnestly. He spoke of heaven but seldom, and of the spirits heprofessed no certain knowledge; he declared towards the end of hislife that he had not prayed for many years. He was a diligentfrequenter of all religious ceremonies and a strong upholder of theold order, but his interest in these things was not speculative ormystical, but entirely practical. He regarded himself as a teacher ofvirtue, not of religious doctrine; his watchword was "propriety, " thedutiful observance of all right and customary rules of conduct. Yetthere is not wanting an ideal element in his doctrine. He enouncesthe theory, of which the whole of Chinese religion is the outwardexpression, that the universe in all its parts, in nature and in man, is an order; that that order is declared to man alike in theordinances of outward nature, in the constitution of society with itsvarious ranks and classes, and in the ritual of religion; and that itis the whole duty of man to know that order and to conform himself toit. The theory is one in which the state is all, the individualnothing, and in which the present is entirely crushed under the deadhand of the past, and all originality and progress condemned evenbefore they appear. If religion has been delivered from all that isunseemly and irrational, it has also, at least to Western eyes, lostmuch of its interest; the enthusiasms and excitements of its earlystages have departed, and no new enthusiasm has come in their place;no great god-wrought deliverance thrills the memory of posterity, nolocal cults excite exceptional devotion, no divine historical figureattracts to itself personal affection. Religion has cast off fear buthas not yet risen to the inspiration of love. The domestic worshipcame nearest to this, for the other worships are cold and distantindeed; but that worship was a powerful influence for the preventionof progress. The Christian text which hallows individual daring andinnovation, by bidding a man put his convictions above his father andmother, would be a shocking impiety to Chinese ears. 

A temple was built to Confucius after his death and his worship wasadded to the state religion. The attempt made by the emperorShi-Hoang-Ti in the third century after his death to suppress hismemory and the books connected with his name, was, though conductedwith great vigour, unsuccessful. The teaching of Mencius (371-288B. C. ), the most distinguished of his disciples, added no new elementto that of Confucius. Two movements, however, have to be noticed, which in different ways aimed at giving something richer and deeperthan Confucianism, and to which China owes the two additionalreligions of Taoism and Buddhism. 

Taoism looks to Lao-tsze as its founder; but it has no personalfounder and is composed of older elements. Lao was a philosopher wholived at the same time with Confucius, though half a century older;Confucius met him, as we hear in the _Analects_, and spoke of himwith great respect. His work, the _Tao-te-king_, has been preserved, and though few profess to understand it, a general idea of histhought may be gathered from it. Lao, like Confucius, founds on theexisting system; he quotes largely from older works, and there aresayings common to both the sages. Metaphysical thought, however, which with Confucius was implied rather than reasoned out, herestands in the forefront. Lao's system is a philosophy appliedpractically. Tao, the ruling idea of the system, from which both itand the religion which followed it are named, is variously renderedReason, Nature, the Way; the last is the nearest, though by no meansa full rendering of it. By the manifold operations attributed to it, it reminds us of the Indian Brahma, and the riddle of Lao's obscurityhas been proposed to be solved by the supposition that he was dealingwith a doctrine imported from India which Chinese forms of speechcould but imperfectly express. [6] Tao is not personal, but somethingthat precedes all persons, all particular beings. It was there beforeheaven was; all things are from it and return to it at last. It isthe principle at the root and the beginning of all things, by whichthey move, without haste or struggle, ambition or confusion. Existingfirst absolute and undeveloped, it has now been expressed; men canknow it, and the secret of all goodness, all success both for theindividual and for the state, is to know Tao and live in it. Thismakes a man superior to all rules and conventions; at home withhimself he is superior to the world; he does not dissipate hisenergies in learning a great number of outward things, but actsspontaneously from an inner impulse. In this way the philosopherlooked for a return of society to simpler manners; he even imaginedthat men might consent to put away the material arts of which theythought so much, and content themselves with living according towisdom and being governed by the wisest. 

[Footnote 6: "Lao-Tzeu et le Brahmanisme, " by E. Guimet in the_Verhandlungen_ of the Basal Conference, 1904. ]

The moral precepts of Lao are often of singular beauty and show amuch deeper insight than the cold teaching of Confucius. Lao taughtthe golden rule: "Recompense injury, " he said, "with kindness. "Confucius, on being asked about this, did not agree with Lao, butdeclared that kindness ought to be recompensed with kindness, butinjury with justice, as if private morality ought not to rise higherthan public policy. "Resent it not when you are reviled, " Laoteaches; and "He who overcomes others is strong; he who overcomeshimself is mighty. " "He who knows when he has enough is rich. " "Theweakest things in the world subjugate the strongest. " The _Book ofRecompenses_, which is the practical manual of Taoists and isuniversally read in China, sets up a high ideal of goodness, andclaims to be studied with devotion and earnestness. The task ofself-discipline is represented as one requiring faith and courage, the continuous efforts of a lifetime, and unceasing watchfulness. Ifwe judge Taoism either by its philosophy or by its morals, we mustassign it a high rank among the efforts which have been made to guidemen in the way of wisdom. As a religion, however, it is a dismalfailure, and shows how little philosophy and morals can do without ahistorical religious framework to support them. Taoism was not atfirst a religion, and was not fitted to become one, as it neitheroffered any sacred objects of its own for pious sentiment to clingto, nor, like Confucianism, leant upon the state system. The religionwhich looks to Lao as its chief figure is not based on his teaching;at most it is connected with some of his less important doctrines. Itdid not take a place in the world till five centuries after thephilosopher's death, and its rise was due partly to the emperor namedabove, who was opposed to Confucius, and partly to teachers whobrought forward isolated doctrines of Lao's system which admitted ofa popular application. When the religion appears it is a system notof philosophy but of magic. Lao had spoken of immortality as theportion of those who lived according to Tao; under the Chin dynasty(220 B. C. ) Taoism is engaged in a search for the fairy islands, wherethe herb of immortality is to be found; in the first century of ourera the head of Taoism is devising a pill which shall renew hisyouth. When Buddhism enters China, in the same century Taoism borrowsfrom it the apparatus of religion, temples, monasteries, andliturgies, and sets out on its career as a church. 

It was not without reason that Buddhism was sent for, if we are trulyinformed, by the rulers of China, or that it spread over the country, in the first century of our era. Neither Confucianism nor Taoism is areligion, in the full sense of the term, as supplying by intercoursewith higher beings an inspiration for life. The former is regulativeand no more; the latter is a mere set of devices for obtainingbenefits from mysterious powers. Buddhism, on the contrary, appeals, as we shall see when we consider it in connection with India, tounselfish motives, and insists on the solemn responsibilities ofindividual life in such a way as to raise the value of the humanperson. As it appeared in China it is richer than we shall find it inIndia; it has a god, unknown to southern Buddhism, and it has agoddess Kouan Yin, "the being who hears the cries of men, " sometimesrepresented with a child on her knee, just like a Western Madonna. While still essentially monastic, it offers salvation and a way oflife to all. To faith in Buddha the merciful one is also added abelief in the paradise in which he receives believers. Thus a popularworship is provided, which neither of the older beliefs supplied. 

It remains true that China has no religion worthy of the name. Thephenomenon may there be witnessed, which is seen with certaindifferences also in Japan, that several religions exist side by side, all of which are supported by the state and live together withoutrivalry, and to all of which a man may belong at the same time. Thiscould not be the case if any of the three appealed strongly topatriotic sentiment, or gave full expression to the ideals of thenation. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

In the Sacred Books of the East, vols. Iii. , xvi. , xxvii. , andxxviii. Contain translations of Chinese Classics, by Dr. Legge. Thesame writer has published three convenient volumes of his own, containing: 1. The Life and Teachings of Confucius, 2. The Life andWorks of Mencius, 3. The Shi-King. 

Dr. Legge has also written a popular work, _The Religions of China_, 1880. Also _The Notions of the Chinese concerning God and Spirits_, 1852. 

The best account of the old State Religion is that of J. H. Plath, _Die Religion und der Cultus der alten Chinesen_, 1862. 

Réville, _La Religion chinoise_ (1889). The third volume of hisHistory. 

R. K. Douglas, _Confucianism and Taoism_, 1876. S. P. C. K. 

De Groot, in De la Saussaye. 

De Groot, _The Religious System of China_, vols. I. -iv. , 1892-1901. Also a small book, _The Religion of the Chinese_, 1910. 

Beal, _Buddhism in China_, 1884. 

Murray's _Guide to Japan_. 

J. Edkins' _Religion in China_, 1878, the account of a modernmissionary, may be consulted. 

On Taoism, Pfizmaier, _Die Lösung der Leichname und Schwerter_, 1870;and _Die Tao-lehre von dem wahren Menschen und den Unsterblichen_, 1870. Julius Grill, _Lao-tsze's Buch vom höchsten Wesen und vomhöchsten gut_. _Tao-te-King_, 1910. Vols. Xxxix. -xl. Of the _S. B. E. _give Taoist Texts. 

Revon, _Le Shintoisme_, 1907. 

CHAPTER IXTHE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT

Egypt is a land of still more ancient civilisation than China, andits civilisation is of more interest to us, since from it the nationsof the West obtained in part the seeds of their arts and sciences. Even to antiquity everything Egyptian appeared venerable andmysterious, and the air of mystery is not yet removed from thecountry of the Nile. We have discovered the sources of the river andhave learned to read the writing on Egyptian monuments; but thesphinx has other riddles than these--riddles not yet solved. Who arethe Egyptians, and where did they come from? In ancient times theywere thought to have descended from the interior of Africa; now theopinion gains ground that they were at a very early period connectedwith the ancestors of the Semitic races; their language is thought toshow signs of this remote relationship. How, by whom, and when werethey formed into a nation? No one can tell; they come before us fourthousand years before Christ, a fully-formed nation, with anelaborately organised public service, and with a civilisation bothbroad and rich. And lastly, What is the religion of Egypt? What arethe earliest gods of the land, and in what relation do the variousgods which were worshipped in it stand to each other? That questioncannot at the present time be fully answered. Even should it beproved, as it appears likely to be, that Egyptian civilisation wasderived originally from Mesopotamia, much will still be dark andenigmatical. The foremost scholars in Egyptology confess that nohistory of Egyptian religion can as yet be written. Those who havetried to sketch it differ from each other as widely as possible, somealleging monotheism as its starting-point, and some the worship ofanimals. The religion also comes into view at the early period wehave mentioned as a fully-formed and stately public system, whoseyouthful struggles, if it had any, are long past. What is mostpeculiar in that religion is, that it embraces elements which appearat first sight to have nothing whatever in common, nay, to be quiteirreconcilable with each other. We shall do well not to attempt anyconstruction of Egyptian religion as a whole, but to contentourselves with examining one after another the various elements, almost amounting to different religions, which are found in it sideby side. We shall no doubt learn something of the relations in whichthey stood to each other, but it may prove that we shall findourselves unable to adopt any of the theological theories by whichEgyptian priests or Greek philosophers sought to combine them in onesystem. 

History and Literature. --The principal thing to be remembered, inorder to understand the history of ancient Egypt, is that the countrywas divided into a number of provinces or nomes, which, there isevery reason to think, were originally independent of each other. Ofthese nomes there were about twenty in Upper Egypt--that is, in thelong gorge of the Nile from Elephantine in the south to Memphis inthe north; and about the same number in Lower Egypt--that is, in theflatter country from Memphis to the sea. King Mena or Menes, founderof the first dynasty, whose date, if he was a historical character atall, and not a mythic founder like Minos of Crete, Manu of India, orMannus of Germany, cannot be later than 3200 B. C. , is said to haveunited for the first time the two crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. But though they became united under one ruler, the nomes never forgottheir independence, nor did they cease to maintain their separateexistence as states within the empire, each having its own army, itsown ruler, its own system of taxation, its own worship. The supremepower resided now in one nome and now in another. The first twodynasties belonged to that of Abydos; the succeeding dynasties, towhich the earliest monuments belong, so that Egypt here begins itsreal history, had their seat at Memphis. The twelfth dynasty, whichis known to us, but is both preceded and followed by a gap of half amillennium in Egyptian history, made Thebes the capital. Thebes wasalso the seat of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which cameafter the foreign domination of the shepherd kings, and under whichEgypt was at the summit of its power. Ramses II. And his successors, the Pharaohs of the book of Genesis, belong to the nineteenthdynasty. 

How splendid the Imperial Court of Egypt was at various periods, themonuments tell us; these palaces, temples, and tombs are inproportion to a power which considered itself to have the world atits feet, and to be the manifestation of the greatest gods. Literature is at the same high level of development with the otherarts, and writing is used for every branch of the public service. This, the most ancient of the literatures of the world, is spreadover the immense surfaces of ancient temples and tombs, and stored upin masses of papyrus rolls, much of which is still to be explored. Our knowledge of ancient Egypt and its religion is still in itsinfancy. The story of the decipherment of the various characters andof the recovery of the early language of Egypt is one of the mostwonderful triumphs of scholarship. Only one remark, however, do wenow make in connection with Egyptian writing, namely, that itillustrates in a singular manner the conservatism of the Egyptianpeople, a feature of their character which is strikingly manifestedin their religion also. The ancient Egyptian did not cast away an oldusage when a new one, even a very superior one, had been introduced. Long after metals had come into use, he still employed for variouspurposes, especially those connected with religion, implements ofstone. The flint knives found in mummy-cases are connected with thework of embalming, and show the retention of an archaic usage. Thesame is true of the matter of writing. The earliest Egyptian writingwas that which is called hieroglyphic, or picture-writing. In thissystem what is written down does not represent the sounds of wordsthe writer uses, but the ideas in his mind; it is writing withoutwords; a clumsy system we should say, and presenting the greatestpossible difficulties to the reader. At a very early time, however, what is called hieratic writing was invented, in which the symbolsused represent not things but sounds, though the symbols used areadapted from those of the earlier picture-writing. It is in thishieratic character that the great mass of Egyptian literature ispreserved to us; but here again we find that the new system did notbanish the old one from use. Especially in religious inscriptions anddocuments, the matter is given both in the newer writing and in theolder; the piece is written twice, first in hieroglyphic, the old andsacred form, and then in hieratic, the new form, which could beeasily read. In the matter of different objects of worship, too, itmay perhaps be found that the same aversion to discard anything oldand sacred manifests itself, the same disposition rather to carry onthe old and the new together. 

I. ANIMAL WORSHIP

We begin with that element in Egyptian religion which is to our eyesleast rational. In the ages before and after the Christian era, whena number of Greek and Latin writers tell us about Egypt, we find thatthe religion of the country is described as consisting mainly in theworship of animals. This excited the wonder of these writers in nosmall degree. Herodotus asserts that the Egyptians counted allanimals sacred, and gives a list of those which were speciallyworshipped. The hippopotamus, he says, is sacred at Papremis, thecrocodile at Thebes; and some animals are sacred all over thecountry. He has much to tell of the manner in which the sacredanimals are fed and tended, and of the honours paid to them at theirdeath. Lucian says: "In Egypt the temple is a building of great sizeand splendour, adorned with precious stones and decorated with goldand with inscriptions; but if you go in and look for the god, youfind an ape or an ibis or a goat or a cat. " The same statement ismade by Clement of Alexandria; and Celsus, the early Roman assailantof Christianity, speaks to the same effect. Thus the popular religionof Egypt, before and after the Christian era, had animals for itsprincipal objects. A representative of the sacred species sat orcrawled or hopped in the temple, and in that nome that animal was noteaten. In the nome in which the cat was sacred all cats wereinviolable; any insult offered to a cat roused the whole populationto frenzy, and one who killed a cat, even though he was a stranger inthe place and unacquainted with its manners, forfeited his own life. In the next nome the cat was not sacred but some other animal; andthese local differences of religion might occasion war between onenome and another. Juvenal gives in his fifteenth satire an account ofa religious war of old standing between two neighbouring nomes, eachof which hated and insulted the animal which was worshipped in theother. This may explain why it was impossible for the Israelites tooffer sacrifice to Jehovah in Egypt. They had to go out into thewilderness, off Egyptian soil, before they could sacrifice animalsEgypt held sacred. 

The worship of a sacred animal in its own nome, a member of thespecies dwelling in the temple and the others enjoying respect andprotection throughout that nome, this is the normal state of affairs. Sometimes an individual animal acquires sacredness for Egyptgenerally, as the bull Apis of Memphis, the bull Mnevis ofHeliopolis, or the goat of Mendes. These, though originally localdeities, might obtain a wider reverence if the nome they belonged torose to greater power. Animals of every size and kind were worshippedin Egypt. Besides the large animals we have mentioned, the ape, thedog, the little shrew-mouse, each had its local sacredness; alsosnakes, frogs, and various kinds of fishes. The beetle (_scarab_) canby no means be left without mention; and a number of trees and shrubswere also sacred, [1] but, very curiously, not the palm. 

[Footnote 1: A very complete list of the sacred animals and treeswill be found in Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, vol. Iii. P. 258, _sqq. _]

It will be observed that our account of Egyptian animal worship isdrawn from very late sources and applies to a late period of thereligion. The religion of the earlier ages of Egypt is of quite adifferent kind; the kings and priests who wrote the inscriptions ofthe monuments tell us nothing about animal worship. Is that becausesuch worship did not flourish in their day? Not necessarily. Perhapsthey knew it well, but were not interested in it, or did not wish toencourage it. The Egyptians certainly did not believe the worship ofanimals to have been a late innovation. Manetho, an Egyptian priestwho wrote in the third century B. C. , says that the worship of animalswas introduced under the second king of the second dynasty. That isas if we should say that an old custom of which we did not know theorigin was introduced into Britain in the days of King Arthur. Thepriests of Manetho's day wished animal worship to be considered acorruption of the original religion of their country, but they couldnot specify the time at which it had come in, and placed its originin the mythical period of history. The story of Manetho thereforegoes to prove that the origin of animal worship is anterior towritten records. 

But we have other evidence to the same effect. The earliestrepresentations of the deities of Egypt on the monuments testify in away which can scarcely be mistaken that these great beings hadoriginally some connection with members of the animal kingdom. Thegreat gods of Egypt are designated on the monuments in three ways. Their ultimate form is human, the god is a man or woman, and as thehuman figures of all the deities are drawn after one conventionalmale and one conventional female pattern, a symbol is added to thehead to show which god or goddess is meant. Hathor is a woman with acow's horns on her head, Seb has a duck on his head, and so on. Butan earlier form of the written symbols of the deities is that whichrepresents them partly in human and partly in animal form. Horusappears as a man with the head of a hawk, Hathor as a woman with thehead and horns of a cow, Bast is a woman with the head of a cat, Osiris has the head of a bull or of an ibis, Chnum of a ram, Amon hasthe head now of a ram now of a hawk. Deities also occur with humanbodies and the heads of mythical animals such as the phoenix. Butalong with these semi-human, semi-animal figures there are foundstill simpler symbols for the deities; they are drawn as animals. Itis only about the twelfth dynasty that the change to the higher formtakes place, but even after the step was made of representing thegods as half-human, the older pictures of them were not discarded, but placed side by side with the new ones. Thus we find on the samestone two representations of Horus, one of which gives him as a manwith a hawk's head, while the other makes him simply a hawk; andsimilar double representations of the other gods occur. If the godsof Egypt were thus conceived and represented in the earliest times, then the animal worship described by the Greek and Roman writers wasnot the invention of a late age of decadence, but had its roots atleast far back in the past. The early gods of Egypt were animals, whatever else, whatever more they were. It may be that the animalworship of the later and weaker Egyptian periods was a revival, suchas takes place in weak periods, of a style of worship which inearlier centuries had to a large extent disappeared in favour of amore spiritual faith. [2] Of this only an Egyptologist can judge, butat any rate animal worship was not a new thing in Egypt, but a veryold thing. 

[Footnote 2: This is held by Le Page Renouf, in his Hibbert Lectures, _On the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religionof Ancient Egypt_. ]

Theories Accounting for Animal Worship. --What did this worship mean?and how are we to account for it? The Egyptians themselves, and theancient writers who turned their attention to Egypt, accounted for itby a variety of theories; and various theories are still held on thesubject. We can only enumerate the principal ones. (1) The beastswere worshipped for their qualities, as is said to have been the casein Peru before the Incas (chapter vi. ); each was reverenced for thatdivine excellence or virtue which appeared to be manifestly residentin it. Thus the dog was worshipped for his watchfulness andfaithfulness; the hawk for its darting flight through the upper air, like the flashing of the sunlight or of the sun-god himself; the cowas a great kind mother; the beetle for that wonderful procedure inthe reproduction of his kind, in which he so strikingly brings lifeout of decay. (2) The beasts are not worshipped themselves; they areonly the emblems of the deities with whom they are connected, and itis the deity who is worshipped, not the animal. This may be quitetrue of later practice, but is by no means a satisfactory explanationof its origin; for how was it arranged, and who was it that ordainedat first, that the jackal should be the emblem of Anubis, the cat ofBast, the crocodile of Sebak, and so on? (3) Various mythological andquasi-historical accounts of the origin of the practice are given, such as that men long ago chose different animals for their standardsin war, or that some early king, wishing to keep his subjectsdisunited, ordered that each nome should serve a different animal. Itis also told as a story of early times that the gods when they walkedon earth assumed the forms of various animals; thus the gods arestill in the animals. The gods hid in the beasts in order to be nearmen and see how they did. But men found them out and worshipped themin the disguise they had assumed. (4) The gods cannot be present inthe world and cannot be satisfactorily worshipped unless they havebodies to dwell in--that is involved in Egyptian psychology; and asthe gods would be too much alike if they all occupied human bodies, they chose the bodies of different animals. 

These theories of animal worship are evidently later inventions, toaccount for a state of matters the real origin of which was notknown. Philosophical priests could not accommodate themselves to theanimal worship of the temples without a doctrine to justify it totheir minds. But those who resorted to such theories about animalworship could have nothing to do with calling the system intoexistence. We may be sure that a refined and cultivated people didnot take up animal worship and cling to it, in spite of its repulsivefeatures, with such tenacity as the Egyptians did, because of aspeculative idea of the likeness of certain beasts to certain gods, or to express pantheistic views of the emanations of deity in animalforms. The system, in fact, cannot have sprung up after the Egyptiansbecame civilised, and could not continue to exist among a civilisedpeople, if it was not hallowed by an immemorial antiquity. Only as amystery, a thing of which the origin was not known, could such aworship continue among such a people. 

A new explanation of Egyptian animal worship has been put forward inrecent times by the Anthropological school of students ofreligion, [3] and is rapidly gaining ground. The religiouscircumstances of Egypt as narrated by Juvenal and Diodorus have thestrongest resemblance to the totemistic state of society describedabove (chapter iv. ). Here, as in Peru before the Incas, or among theNorth American Indians of to-day, we have a number of communitieseach with its special sacred animal, which it does not eat, butreverences and defends. Other traces of totemistic arrangements maybe suspected here and there in Egyptian observances, but even did theanalogy extend no further than to the facts just mentioned, therewould be a case for considering whether the nomes were not firstpeopled by a set of totemistic clans, who, even after they wereunited in one people, preserved their early separate traditions. Thesacred animals of the nomes would then be "the totems of the clanswhich first settled in these localities. " Later developments ofreligion never displaced these venerable emblems, if this be so, oftribal life. [4]

[Footnote 3: See A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, SecondEdition. Frazer's _Totemism_. Most of the modern Egyptologistsincline to the theory that animal worship, though not the only, wasone of the chief sources of Egyptian religion. Pietschmann first tookup this ground. ]

[Footnote 4: Compare the worship of animals in Babylonia, chaptervii. ]

II. THE GREAT GODS

A very different set of gods are those made known to us by themonuments and books. It is the principal problem of this religion toexplain how, along with the sacred animal, the cat or ibis orcrocodile, there was worshipped in the Egyptian temple the celestialbeing, the god of heaven or of the sun, whose nature is light, who isrighteous and good, and who more and more fills the mind of theworshipper with noble adoration, and leads him towards the hightruths of theism. These high gods of Egypt were represented, as wehave seen, from the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, under animal forms. As far back as we can see, Hathor is a cow, andHorus a hawk, and Anubis a jackal. Did beast worship spring by aprocess of degradation from the worship of the high gods? We haveseen how difficult it is to maintain such a view. Did the higherworship then spring by a process of development out of the lower?That also would be hard to prove, for the high gods of Egypt are notbeasts, however magnified and spiritualised, but beings of adifferent order; they are the sky, the sun, the moon, the dawn. Andas in our opening chapters we saw reason to believe that the worshipof the great powers of nature is an original thing with early man, and explains itself without being derived from lower forms ofreligion, so we must judge with regard to Egypt too. Even if some ofthe great gods came from Mesopotamia, that helps us but little tounderstand their history after they arrived in Egypt. In this fieldalso we are driven to recognise two religions, different in natureand of independent origin, existing side by side, and seeking to cometo terms with each other; and the combination of the two is a processin Egyptian religion which took place before the period of which wehave knowledge. It is prehistoric. 

It was formerly considered that the nature-gods of Egypt had verylittle mythology connected with them; only one considerable story oftheir doings was known; most of them had no history beyond the fewphrases applied by primitive thought to the great natural phenomenato qualify them to be regarded as living and active beings. But asmore inscriptions are read, more divine myths are coming to light, and further discoveries of the same kind may be still in store forus. These different myths, however, are formed after the samepattern. The great gods of Egypt are simple beings and easy tounderstand, and they were never formed into an organised system likethe gods of Greece, but remain in separate dynasties or families, andare very like each other. Many of them are sun-gods, or gods of themorning and evening, and their stories cannot differ very widely fromeach other, but they belong to different districts of the country;that is what constitutes their difference from each other, and keepsthem separate. 

The Great Gods also are Local. --The nature-god as well as theanimal-god was worshipped in his own nome, where he dwelt in themidst of his own community of worshippers; he was not recognised inother nomes unless there were special reasons for it. But at theearliest period of our knowledge of Egypt this simple earlyarrangement has already undergone many modifications. Each nome hasits own special deity. Set is the god of Oxyrhynchus, Neith of Sais, but more gods than one are worshipped in each nome. Generally thereare three; in many places there is an ennead, a nine of gods, but thenine is a round number; there might be one or two less or more. Thegod of a nome which had risen to a commanding position extended hisinfluence beyond his own nome, and came to share the temples of othergods, so that he was at home in a number of places. Ra is said tohave fourteen persons--that is, fourteen views of his person havebeen developed in so many different districts. But if one god couldthus be divided into several, the converse also took place; two ormore gods were combined, by the simple addition of their namestogether, to form a new god. We have Ra-harmachis, Amon-ra, Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, and some even more elaborately compounded deities. 

Thus there was a constant tendency to the production of new deities;even the attempts to combine existing deities only add to the number. No attempt in the direction of a system of gods had any success;local deities could not be suppressed; the nomes retained theirseparate deities and religious establishments to the end. There neverwas a religious organisation of Egypt generally; a priest could insome cases pass from the religion of one nome to that of another, butthere was never a high priest of Egypt as a whole, however much aking might wish to organise all the worships of the country in onesystem. This local character of the Egyptian high gods was a sourceof weakness in these great beings, and never ceased to check theirupward movement. 

The temple of a nome had, as a rule, three gods, and these formed afamily, the chief god having his consort and the third being theirson. Of these triads we may mention some:--

 Amen-Mut-Chonsu are the triad of Thebes. Ptah-Sechet-Imhotep " Memphis. Osiris-Isis-Horus " Abydos (Philæ). Sebak-Hathor-Chonsu " Ombos. Har-hat-Hathor-Har-sem-ta " Edfu. 

The son is the successor of his father, and it is his destiny in turnto marry his mother and so to reproduce himself, that is his ownsuccessor; and so though constantly dying he is ever renewed. Themother, not being a sun-god, does not die. If we remember that thegods have to do with the sun these things need not shock us, nor needwe wonder at the statement which is very frequently met with, that agod is self-begotten, or that he produces his own members. 

Mythology. --A few words may be said about Egyptian mythology ingeneral before we speak of some of the principal gods. The usualstories of the beginning of things are not wanting, as when theprincipal god is said to have been born from a primeval egg, or awhole family of gods to be the children of Seb and Nut; Seb, theearth, being in Egypt the male, and Nut, heaven, the female, of theseearliest parents of all things. More than one god, moreover, is heldto have been an earthly king, and to be the founder of the royalhouse which now pays him homage. "The days of Ra, " for example, arespoken of as a golden age in which perfect justice and happinessprevailed. Many stories too may be found which profess to furnish anexplanation of some feature of nature or some institution of society, to account for the names of places or of animals, or for the presenceof the five days which were added to the twelve lunar months in Egyptto produce a satisfactory solar year. Many old stories of the godshave magical efficacy when told in certain situations; one is goodagainst poison, but must be told in a certain way to produce theeffect. After these stories of the gods' early reign of peace, comethose relating to less happy periods, when the old god grew weak andbegan to have enemies, when gods and men became disobedient to him, when a war broke out among the gods, which is not yet brought to anend but breaks out ever afresh; or when the old god succumbed to hisenemies, and his successor had to set out to avenge him. In some ofthese stories very primitive and savage traits appear, which showthat they originated in a rude state of society. But they are aboutmen, not about beasts, as we might have expected of Egyptianmythology, and the men are undoubtedly solar heroes; it is thefortunes of the daily (not the yearly) sun, his splendid andbeneficent reign, his decline, his conflict with the powers ofdarkness, his decease and his resurrection, or the vengeance exactedon his behalf by his successor, that are spoken of, in connection nowwith one god and now with another. 

Dynasties of Gods. --In the history of Egyptian religion one set ofsuch gods succeeds another as the prevailing dynasty, according asthe seat of empire in the country shifts to a new nome. Thesereligious changes could take place without great convulsions. It wasonly the attempt to extinguish old established worships that wasfiercely resisted, not the addition of a new god, even as superior tothose already seated in the temple. In the earliest times known to usRa of Heliopolis is the chief god of Egypt; Osiris of Thinis (Abydos)is also a great god, but the most characteristic development ofOsiris-worship belongs to a later period. Ptah of Memphis comes tothe front in the earliest dynasties. Much later is the rise of Amonto the first place, which he held when the Greeks and Romans had todo with Egypt. A very short account only can be given of the sets ofgods of which these are the heads. 

Ra. --Ra means "sun"; his seat is Heliopolis or "On, " where Joseph'smaster Potiphera, or "Priest of Ra, " lived. Heliopolis is the "houseof the obelisk, " the obelisk being a representation of the sun. Firsta kindly old king, he is later a warrior; he has to contend with theserpent Apep, the dragon of darkness who appears pierced by theshafts of Ra. But as Ra sinks in the conflict he is comforted byHathor, the goddess of the western sky, and avenged by Horus, theever young and ever victorious winged sun. [5] But Ra is a god of theunder as well as the upper world. King Pi'anchi, of the twenty-seconddynasty, entered into the great temple of Ra at Heliopolis andpenetrated to the inmost chamber of it, afterwards sealing it upagain. We are told what he saw there. [6] He looked upon "his fatherRa, " and saw the two boats intended for the daily journey of the god. Ra travels in his boat through the sky, but also at night through theunder-world, of which also he is lord. The progress of the god oflight through the world of darkness is a theme which was worked outlater in much detail in connection with Osiris; but it forms part ofthe earliest known religious conceptions of the Egyptians, and Ra'svoyage through the "Am Duat" or under-world, is described inconsiderable detail. Many figures accompany him in this voyage, andmany are the obstacles to be overcome during the successive hours ofnight before he reaches again the gates of day. The souls of men whohave died are also led by him through those nether spaces; by ahidden knowledge, if they have been at pains to possess themselves ofit, they are able to keep close to Ra on the perilous journey. Hegives them fields to cultivate in the plains beneath, and they aremade glad by his appearance at the appointed hour in the nights thatfollow. 

[Footnote 5: There are in Egyptian religion several gods calledHorus; this, the oldest one, is fused with Ra, the first sun-god, inthe double name Ra-Harmachis, a being to whom the highest attributesare given. The symbol of this god is a recumbent lion with a man'shead, the figure in which also the kings of Egypt are represented. ]

[Footnote 6: See the inscription in _Records of the Past_, ii. 98. ]

Osiris, the sun-god of Abydos, is also reported to have been a humanbeing who was exalted to divine honours. (The god of the under-worldand judge of the dead, who bears the same name, is a differentfigure; of him we shall speak afterwards. ) He is the most interestingand the best known of the gods of Egypt; his myth is found at lengthin Plutarch, with the mystical interpretations proposed for it inancient times; he is also the god in whom the affinity of Egyptianwith Babylonian religion appears most clearly: cf. Chapter vii. Born, according to the myth we mentioned above, at one birth with fourother gods, of the venerable parents Seb and Nut (see above), he fromthe first has Isis for his wife and sister, and his brother Set isalso born along with him, with whom he lives in perpetual hostility. Neither can quite overcome the other, and many are the incidents oftheir warfare. As a rule the gods of Egypt are serene and goodbeings; here only dualism shows itself. Osiris is the good power bothmorally and in the sphere of outward nature, while Set is theembodiment of all that the Egyptian regards as evil, --darkness, thedesert, the hot south wind, sickness, and red hair. It is not thecase that Set was an imported god and belonged to Semitic invaders, but these invaders found him more suited to their notions of deitythan any other god of Egypt, and sought to make him supreme, inwhich, however, they could not succeed. The story of thedismemberment of Osiris and of the search of Isis for his lovedremains, which she buried in fourteen different places where shefound them, is one which is found connected with other names in otherlands. Horus is the avenger of his father. Here we have this deity inthree stages--Horus the child in his mother's arms, Horus theavenger, and Horus the successor of his father, the complete sun-god. 

This family of gods is more human and living to us than that of Ra orthan any other set of Egyptian deities. It was also more taken up inother lands, when the gods of older peoples began to find acceptancein the West. We see with special clearness in this case the operationof the principle according to which the contrast of light anddarkness when represented in the gods passes into that of moral goodand evil, so that the god of light becomes the great upholder ofrighteousness and dispenser of beneficence. The good god of Egyptianreligion, moreover, is accompanied by a goddess who is somewhat morethan the pale reflection of the male god, as most Egyptian goddessesare. The incidents of the legend also lend to the divine characters atragic depth in which the prosperous and happy gods of Egypt do notgenerally share. 

Ptah is the god of Memphis, and adjoining his temple is the chapel ofthe bull Apis, who is called the "second life of Ptah. " If these tworesided side by side, some theory of their relationship was needed, and the bull became the earthly representative of the unseen deity. Each had a worship of prehistoric antiquity, and it is vain totheorise on their original relation to each other. As for Ptah, hisname means "he who forms, " and the Greeks called him by the name oftheir own Hephaistos, the artificer. In later times he came to beidentified with the sun, and was called the "honourable, " "golden, ""beautiful, " and "of comely face"; but earlier he seems rather tohave to do with the hidden source of the world's heat, the elementalwarmth which is at the beginning of all life. He also is, like Ra andOsiris, a god of the under-world to which men go after death. He issaid to open the mouth of the dead--that is to say, that he hearsthem and judges them. But in the upper-world too he has to do withjustice; he is called the "Lord of the Ell, " a title connecting himwith measurements and boundaries, matters of the greatest importancein Egypt. His son is Imhotep, he who comes in peace; the Greeksregarded this god as a physician, and called him Asclepios. Thegoddess of the triad is Sechet, who was also worshipped at Bubastisunder the name of Bast, and whose symbol is a cat. Ptah, it will beseen, is a less distinct figure than either Osiris or Ra, and he veryreadily passes into combinations with other gods. Ptah-Sokari andPtah-Sokar-Osiris are found much more frequently than Ptah alone. 

These are the chief gods of the old kingdom--that is to say, of thefirst six dynasties. When we come to the great twelfth dynasty, afterthe gap in the monuments which extends from 2500-2000 B. C. , we findthat these gods have become faint and new gods have become supreme, namely, the local gods of Thebes, and of the adjoining nomes. Ofthese, Amon, god of Thebes, has the most distinguished history, though Chem, the agricultural god of Coptos, and Munt of Hermonthiswere originally as important. Amon, the hidden, _i. E. _ the hiddenforce of nature, like Ptah, is seldom found alone; he is generallycombined with some other god, especially with Ra. The gods ofagriculture bow their heads by degrees before the sun-gods who tendto draw to themselves all Egyptian worship; rude countryrepresentations connected with the idea of fertility beingdiscredited before the religion of the royal temples which wasdirected mainly to the god of light. 

Was the Earliest Religion Monotheistic?--We have mentioned only someof the chief gods of Egypt, out of a countless number. These are thegods favoured by kings and city priesthoods, who, we cannot doubt, desired the religious elevation of the people. The gods they praisedwere of a nature to promote that end. It will be granted that theworship of the light-gods of Egyptian religion was fitted to lead theminds of the Egyptians to theism. In illustration of this statementextracts may be here given from hymns, which date as we have themfrom the eighteenth dynasty 1590 B. C. , but which are probably mucholder. 

TO HORUS

The gods recognise the universal lord.... He judges the worldaccording to his will; heaven and earth are in subjection to him. Hegiveth his commands to men, to the generations present, past, andfuture; to Egyptians and to strangers. The circuit of the solar orbis under his direction; the winds, the waters, the wood of theplants, and all vegetables. A god of seeds, he giveth all herbs andthe abundance of the soil. He affordeth plentifulness, and giveth itto all the earth. All men are in ecstasy, all hearts in sweetness, all bosoms in joy, every one in adoration. Every one glorifieth hisgoodness, his tenderness encircles our hearts, great is his love inall bosoms. 

TO TEHUTI OR PTAH

To him is due the work of the hands, the walking of the feet, thesight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the breathing of thenostrils, the courage of the heart, the vigour of the hand, activityin body and in mouth of all the gods and men, and of all livinganimals; intelligence and speech, whatever is in the heart andwhatever is on the tongue. 

TO PTAH-TANEN

O let us give glory to the god who hath raised up the sky and whocauseth his disk to float over the bosom of Nut, who hath made thegods and men and all their generations, who hath made all lands andcountries and the great sea, in his name of "Let-the-earth-be. "

TO AMON-RA

Hail to thee, maker of all beings, lord of law, father of the gods;maker of men, creator of beasts; lord of grains, making food for thebeast of the field.... The one without a second.... King alone, single among the gods; of many names, unknown is their number. 

There is a beautiful hymn addressed to the Nile, who is alsoconceived as the chief deity and the ruler, nourisher, and comforterof all creatures. From these hymns and others like them, importantconclusions have been drawn as to the nature of the earliest Egyptianreligion; namely, that those who wrote such pieces must have beenacquainted with the one true god and addressed him under thesevarious names, so that the true origin of Egyptian religion would bea primitive monotheism. 

There are some texts indeed which seem to point even more stronglythan those cited to the conclusion that Egyptian religion startedfrom the belief in one supreme deity. Mr. Le Page Renouf quotes alongwith the passages above, one from a Turin papyrus, in which words areput into the mouth of the Almighty God, the self-existent, who madeheaven and earth, the waters, the breaths of life, fire, the gods, men, animals, cattle, reptiles, birds, etc. This being speaks asfollows:--

 I am the maker of the heaven and the earth.... It is I who have given to all the gods the soul which is within them. When I open my eyes there is light, when I close them there is darkness. I am Chepera in the morning, Ra at noon, Tum in the evening. 

M. De la Rougé maintains that Egyptian religion, monotheistic atfirst, with a noble belief in the unity of the Supreme God and in Hisattributes as the Creator and Law-giver of man, fell away from thatposition and grew more and more polytheistic. "It is more than 5000years since in the valley of the Nile the hymn began to the unity ofGod and the immortality of the soul, and we find Egypt arrived in thelast ages at the most unbridled Polytheism. "

The sublimer part of Egyptian religion is demonstrably ancient, asMr. Le Page Renouf says; yet we are not shut up to the conclusionthat Egyptian religion as a whole is nothing but a backsliding and afailure. If we were obliged to regard that monotheism which Egypt hadat first but failed to maintain, as a gift conferred from above, which human powers proved unequal to conserve, then the opening ofthe history of this religion would be indeed most melancholy. Butthough monotheism appeared in Egypt so early, there is no necessityto think that it was not attained by human powers. For all we know, it was not an early but a mature product of thought, and was reachedafter a long development. It is not impossible for the human mind, starting from the works of God, to rise by its own efforts to thebelief in His invisible power and Godhead. The beginnings of thisrise of thought may be witnessed among savages, and the Egyptians intheir secluded valley had an opportunity such as no other nation had, to work out, as their civilisation grew up from rude beginnings toits unequalled splendour, a noble view of the Deity whose works theyadored. The god ruling from his heaven of light over the great empireof a monarch who knew no equal in the world, possessing for hisearthly abode a temple of unsurpassed magnificence, uniting perhapsunder his sway districts long at war and extending his influence overremote continents as the armies of Egypt prospered, such a being drewto himself from his worshipping retinue of priests and nobles, thehighest praise and adoration, was exalted far above all other powersin heaven and earth, and extolled even as the Creator and Ruler ofall. 

Monotheism is thus approached in thought, but only in a prophetic andanticipatory way; the circumstances of the country forbade itsrealisation as a general belief or as a working system. Even in thehighest flights of those early thinkers, when they seem to bespeaking of a god quite universal and supreme, it is a local deitythat lies at the basis of their speculations, a being who has histemple in a certain place, who is symbolised in a certain animal, whohas a local legend and a limited popular worship. These are the factsthat clog the wings of Egyptian monotheistic speculation and bring itto the earth again. Pure monotheism accordingly, the belief in a godbeside whom no other god exists, it might be hard to find in Egypt atall. The last extract given above comes nearest to it; but the lastline of that extract cannot be called monotheistic. 

An attempted religious reformation at the end of the eighteenthdynasty may be mentioned here, as it appears to have aimed atconcentrating all the worship of Egypt on a single object. The objectchosen, however, was a material one, --the sun's disk, Aten, --andthough all Egyptian gods tended to become sun-gods, some sun-gods, nodoubt, were better than others, and Aten was not the finest of them. King Chut-en-Aten, or Glory of the Sun-disk, the royal fanatic whomade this attempt at unity, went great lengths to accomplish hisobject, but the attempt was a failure, and was abandoned after hisdeath even by the members of his own family. What Chut-en-Aten triedto introduce perhaps came nearer true monotheism than anything thatever existed in Egypt. He made war on other gods and wished toestablish one only god in the land, but this exclusiveness theEgyptians could not understand. The Egyptian believed in many gods, and while worshipping one god with fervour, by no means denied theexistence or the power of others in other places. Even foreigndeities were in his eyes real and potent beings, each in his ownterritory. It is henotheism, not monotheism, that we see in this mostreligious land; the worship of one god at a time while other gods arealso believed to exist and act. The one god who is before the mind ofthe worshipper is exalted above the rest, and spoken of as if noother god required to be considered; but the worshipper does notdream as yet of questioning the existence of other gods, or feelhimself debarred from worshipping them if he should visit theircountry. 

Syncretism. --The hymns contain several other speculative positionsabout the gods (chapter iv. ), and we may briefly mention these. Syncretism, as we saw, is very largely represented in Egyptianthought, and enters, indeed, into its very bone and marrow. In theennead of a city the great gods may be arranged together after thefashion of a court where one or two rule over the rest; but innumberless passages we find the relations of gods adjusted in anotherway, by making them one. Ra "comes as" Tum, the god is known hereunder one name or aspect and there under another. The names of twodeities being added together, a new deity is produced; and in latertimes these gods with double, treble, or multiple names are among themost important. Raharmachis and Amonra are national gods, and haveleft much evidence of themselves. 

It is a little step from syncretism to pantheism. Let the gods oncelose the individual character that keeps them separate from eachother, and it is possible for one god, who grows strong and greatenough, to swallow up all the rest, till they appear only as hisforms. In the position which they occupied in Egypt the various godscould not disappear, their local connections kept them alive; butthey were so like one another that one of them could be regarded as aform of another, and a multitude of them as forms of one. The god whodid most in the way of swallowing up the rest was Ra, the greatsun-god of Thebes. The Litany of Ra[7] represents that god as eternaland self-begotten, and sings in seventy-five successive versesseventy-five forms which he assumes; they are the forms of the godsand of all the great elements and parts of the world. The separategods are reduced from the rank of independent potentates to shapes ofRa, and thus a kind of unity is set up in the populous EgyptianPantheon. But Ra is not strong enough to get the better of theseshapes, and to rule a sole monarch by his own right, in his own way. He is the god, but he is not an independent god; it is pantheism, nottheism, to which he owes his exaltation. The one in Egypt cannotgovern the many; the pure exaltation of Ra as a supreme and absolutegod does not prevent the worship of a different being in eachdifferent town. The one sole god is for the priests alone, not forthe people; and this belief in him does not even lead to attempts toroot out the worship of animals, or to concentrate the service of thetemples on him alone. And in the absence of such attempts we read thesentence condemning a religion which produced most noble fruits ofthought, to grow worse and not better as time went on, and to passaway without bringing any permanent contribution to the developmentof the religion of the world. 

[Footnote 7: _Records of the Past_, viii. 105. ]

Worship. --The Egyptian temple was constructed rather to afford thegod a splendid residence among his people than to accommodate a largecongregation at an act of worship. The temple was the public place ofthe community, its point of meeting (for the Egyptian town has nomarket-place), and its fortress when attacked (for the town is notfortified). But while the courts of the temple were open to thepeople, there was a holy place which only the priests might enter, where the sacred ark, the symbol of the god, remained, and wheresacrifices were offered. The images about the temple were not placedthere to be worshipped, but were votive offerings meant to providethe god with a body which he might enter when he chose. The obeliskis such a symbol or incorporation of the sun. On certain days thesacred objects and animals were taken in procession through thetemple grounds, or made voyages on the lake belonging to the temple, or were even taken through the nome among the fields and dwellings oftheir people; and on these occasions representations took placesymbolising the principal events in the history of the god. It wasthus that the private individual came to know the god; it was a greatfestival and an occasion of the utmost joy when the divine protectorsand benefactors of the nome, who generally remained in their splendidretirement, came forth to mingle for a brief space with the faithfulcommunity. The worship of the gods was in Egypt, as in every nationof the ancient world, a matter of state, not of individual concern. It is the chief branch of the public service; the state is under thedirect rule of the gods; never was there a more absolute theocracy. The king is a child of the god, --a conception often treated in themost material way, --and being thus of more than human race, becomeshimself the object of worship, and even offers sacrifice to himself. It is one of the king's chief cares to provide a stately dwelling forthe god; the king himself offers sacrifice on the most importantoccasions. The god in his sacred ark goes with his people when theyare at war and fights along with them, so that every war is a holywar. The priests are public officials, and often exercise immenseinfluence. The king institutes them into their functions; they areexempt, as we may read in Genesis, from public burdens; everyfunction involving learning or art is in their hands. Framed in suchinstitutions religion is not likely to have any free growth; the timeis far distant here when men will form voluntary associations oftheir own for spiritual ends. Yet, no doubt, the lay Egyptian had aprivate religion of his own as well as his share in the great publicacts he witnessed. Though the gods of Egypt are nearly all good, theevil power Set was much worshipped, and would be approached inprivate as well as in the public acts depicted on the monuments, byall who had anything to fear from him--that is to say, by all. Everyone had to treat with kindness and respect the animal species sacredin his nome, and other sacred animals. The belief in magic wasstrong; hidden powers had to be reckoned with on manifold occasions;sickness was imputed to the agency of evil spirits, and treated byexorcism, by persons duly trained and learned in such arts. Lucky andunlucky days, and days suitable or unsuitable for particularundertakings, filled the calendar; the belief in amulets and charmswas universal. Such things we expect to find among the people, evenwhere religious thought has risen highest. 

THE DOCTRINE OF THE OTHER LIFE

Most of our knowledge about ancient Egypt is drawn from the tombs. Noother nation ever bestowed so much care on the dead as the Egyptiansdid, nor thought of the other world so much. The living had toprepare for his further existence after death, and the dead claimedfrom his successors on earth elaborate offices of piety. It is inthis part of the religion that there is most growth, and this part ofit in its ultimate form is best known. 

1. Treatment of the Dead. --The doctrine of the other world takes itsrise with the Egyptians in the belief common to all early races, which was described above (chapter iii. ). The spirit still lives whenthe body dies, and it comes back to the body, and is affected by thetreatment the body receives. To care for the dead is the first dutyof the living, and a man must marry in order to have offspring whowill pay him the necessary attention after his death. Various thingsare buried with the corpse for the use of the spirit, and offeringsare made to it from time to time afterwards. This is no more than thecommon primitive belief, but the Egyptians carried it out more fullyin practice than any other people. They sought to make the bodyincorruptible, embalming it and restoring to it all its organs, sothat the spirit should be able to discharge every function of life. They placed the mummy if possible in such a situation that it shouldnever be disturbed to the end of time; the grave they called aneternal dwelling. They even instituted endowments to secure dueofferings to the dead in all coming time. 

Cultivated as this part of religion was in Egypt, it could not failto assume a special character. For one thing, there is a variety ofnames for what survives of man after death; we hear of his heart, hissoul, his shade, his luminosity; and in the later doctrine these areall combined and made parts of one theory; all the different parts ofthe man have to come together again after their dispersion at deathbefore his person is complete. The principal term, however, is the"ka, " image, or, as we say, genius, of the man, a non-substantialdouble of him which has journeys and adventures to make, and to whichthe offerings are addressed. The "ka" needs food, and regular giftsare made to it of all it can require; it needs guidance andinstruction, and these can be conveyed to it by pictures and writingson the walls of the tomb or in the mummy-case; even its amusement andits need of society and of ministration can be to some extent met inthis way. It is not peculiar to Egypt that the advantages of wealthand rank are continued after death, and that the rich can do muchmore, or cause much more to be done for his eternal welfare, than thepoor. The king's mummy lies in a pyramid, where it will never bemoved; that of the noble in a rock-tomb or a stately edifice or"mastaba"; the poor man has to be content with an inferior kind ofembalming, and a tomb of tiles if he gets any at all; and no priestcan be retained to pray for him. 

2. The Spirit in the Under-world. --Before history opens, this commonbelief and practice in regard to the dead had come to be combined inEgypt with the worship of a solar deity; a step of immenseimportance, which added immeasurably to the pathos and the moralpower of this kind of religion. 

Milton says in _Lycidas_--

 So sinks the daystar in the ocean bed; And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky; So Lycidas sank low, but mounted high. 

But what to Milton was a poetic imagination was to the early Egyptiana serious belief. If the sun was his god, he did not say likeWordsworth in his early period--

 Our fate how different from thine, blest star, in this, That no to-morrow shall our beams restore, but he was convinced that the history of his god, who sank under theWestern horizon, and after a period of darkness came back again tolight and triumph, was an undoubted indication of what he himself hadto look for after death. The mummy was carried across the Nile anddeposited in the west land, which is also the under-world, to sharein the repose and in the further progress of the dead. As the jackalpervades that region, the dead is left to the care of Anubis, thejackal-headed deity, who opens paths to him for further travel, andleads him into the presence of the gods. The under-world iselaborately portioned out into various parts and scenes, and manifoldare the shapes of evil and mischief with which it is peopled. On theother hand, it contains abundance of blessings, which the departedmay secure if the proper means have been taken by himself and by hisfriends surviving him. The earthly life is there repeated with allits occupations and enjoyments, but free from fear and from decay. 

The doctrine of the dead accompanying the sun-god to the under-world, and living under his protection, is very old in Egypt; we saw it inan early form in connection with the god Ra. It was in connectionwith Osiris, however, that it attained its widest diffusion; to thewhole Egyptian people Osiris was the lord of the world below, withwhom the departed were. The identification of the departed withOsiris was thorough and complete; he becomes Osiris, takes the nameof the deity, and is known in the inscriptions as "Osiris N. N. " Isisis his sister, Horus his defender, Anubis his herald and guide, andhaving shared the god's eclipse, he is also to share his triumph andrevival. 

3. The Book of the Dead, the most famous relic of Egyptianliterature, is a collection of pieces many of which are very ancient, bearing on the passage of the soul through the under-world. The bookhas also been called the _Funeral Ritual_; a better translation ofthe title is, "Book of Coming out from the Day. " The earthly life isthe day from which the deceased comes forth into the larger existenceof the world beyond. The book (or such parts of it as may be used ineach case) is the soul's _vade mecum_ for the under-world, andcontains the forms the soul must have at command in order to ward offall the dangers of that region, and to secure an easy and happypassage through it. How the person is to be reconstructed, thedifferent parts coming back to be built up again in one, how he is toknow the spirits he meets, how he is to get the gates opened forhim, --such are the subjects of various chapters; and the soul'ssuccess in its passage depends on its knowledge of these. The wordsthey contain are not merely information, they have magic power tosmooth away obstacles and to open doors. Hence it is important for aman to have learned them when alive, and, to assist his memory, a fewchapters are written on papyrus or linen, and the rolls placed withthe mummy in its case, or they are written on the walls of the tomb. No other Egyptian work, in consequence, has been preserved in so manycopies, but one roll or set of inscriptions contains one set ofchapters and another another set. 

Does the fate of the individual after death depend then entirely onmagic; is it a question of how many of these formulæ he is able toremember, or how many his relatives have got written out for him? Dono doubts intrude on his mind lest, even if he has all the requisiteknowledge at command, he himself should be found unworthy to livewith the immortals? For the most part the _Book of the Dead_ standson the earlier position at which man never thinks of doubting thefavour of his god, and trusts to overcome what is hostile by havinghis magic ready, not by having his heart pure. But in severalchapters a deeper tone is heard. There is a form for having the stainrubbed away from the heart of the Osiris, and if there are abundantdirections for outward purification, there are also directions forhaving his sins forgiven. In the great 125th chapter the deceasedenters the Hall of the two Truths, and is separated from his sinsafter he has seen the faces of the gods. Here he stands beforeforty-two judges (compare the number of the nomes of Egypt) styledLords of Truth, each of whom is there to judge of a particular sin, and to each he has to profess that he did not when on earth committhat sin. I have not stolen, he has to say; I have not played thehypocrite, I have not stolen the things of the gods, I have not madeconspiracies, I have not blasphemed, I have not clipped the skins ofthe sacred beasts, I have not injured the gods, I have notcalumniated the slave to his master; and so on. The line is not yetclearly drawn between moral and ritual or conventional offences; andmoral duty is expressed in a negative form, and appears as a shackle, not as an inspiration. Yet the very great advance has been made here, that divine law watches not only over specially religious matters butover social life, and even over the thoughts of the individual heart. The gods enjoin on a man not only to offer sacrifice and to respectthe sacred beasts, but also to do his duty as a citizen and as aneighbour, and to keep his own lips unpolluted and his own heartpure. It is to the same effect when we find that a man'sjustification depends on the state of his heart at death. His heartis weighed against the truth, and if it is found defective, he cannotlive again; if it turns out well, then he is justified and goes tothe fields of Aalu, the place of the blessed of Osiris. 

CONCLUSION

This doctrine of the life to come, like the theistic doctrine theEgyptians at one time attained, might have seemed destined to lead toa pure spiritual faith, from which superstition should havedisappeared. But in neither case is that result attained. The laterhistory of Egyptian religion is that of the increase of magic, and ofthe rise of a priestly class absorbing to itself, as the olderpriests who were closely connected with the civil life of the nationhad never done, all the functions of religion. Doctrine grows morepantheistic and more recondite, mysteries and symbols are multiplied, all to the increase of the influence of the priesthood, and to theinfinite exercise of ingenuity in coming times. Popular religion, onthe other hand, comes to be more taken up with such matters as charmsand amulets and horoscopes; and while morals did not decline from thehigh level they had gained from the reign of the gods of light, thespirit of the nation lost vigour under the growth of religiosity atthe expense of patriotism, and healthy reform grew more and moreimpossible. What of the religion of Egypt lived on in other landswhich felt her influence, it is hard to say. The religious art ofEgypt, and with it no doubt some tincture of the ideas it embodied, undoubtedly went northwards to Phenicia; and Greece owed to Phenicia, as we shall see, many a suggestion in religious matters. Long beforeIsis and Serapis were introduced in Rome in their own persons, thelegend of Osiris had flourished in Greece under new names, and theGreek doctrine of the life to come, taught in the mysteries, hassuggested to some scholars an Egyptian origin. To the Greeks andRomans this religion afforded an infinity of puzzles and mysteries;to the modern world it affords the greatest example of a religion theearly promise of which was not fulfilled, the splendid moralaspirations of which were stifled amid the superstitions they weretoo weak to conquer. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

For general information Wilkinson's _Egyptians_. 

E. A. W. Budge, _History of Egypt_, vols. I. -viii. , 1902-03. 

E. A. W. Budge, _The Mummy_; chapters on Egyptian funeral archæology, Cambridge, 1893. 

E. A. W. Budge, _The Book of the Dead_, English Translation of theTheban Recension, 3 vols. , 1910. 

Flinders Petrie, _A History of Egypt_. 

Flinders Petrie, in _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. I. P. 184, _sqq. _

The Histories of Antiquity of Duncker, Maspero, and especially Ed. Meyer. 

Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_, 1894. 

Maspero, _Manual of Egyptian Archæology_, Second Edition, 1895. 

Renouf's _Hibbert Lectures_. 

Tiele, _History of the Egyptian Religion_, translated by Ballingal. 

Wiedemann, _Ägyptische Geschichte_, 1884-88; "Die Religion der altenAegyptier, " 1890; also "Egyptian Religion, " in Hastings' _BibleDictionary_, vol. V. 

A. O. Lange, "Die Ägypter" in De la Saussaye. _Records of the Past_, First Series (1873-81), vols. Ii. , iv. , vi. , viii. , x. , xii. SecondSeries, 1888-92, vols. Ii. -vi. 

Benson and Gourlay, _The Temple of Mut in Asher_, 1899. 

Naville, _The Old Egyptian Faith_, translated by Colin Campbell, 1909. 

Colin Campbell, _Two Theban Queens_, 1909. A study of theinscriptions in two royal tombs. 

PART IIITHE SEMITIC GROUP

CHAPTER XTHE SEMITIC RELIGION

As used by the modern scholar, the term Semites or Semitic racesincludes the Arabs, the Hebrews, the Canaanites and Phenicians, theSyrians or Arameans, the Babylonians and the Assyrians. Thisenumeration differs from that of the tenth chapter of Genesis, wherethe children of Shem include Elam, or the dwellers in Susiana, andLud or the Lydians, while the tribes who dwelt in Canaan before theHebrews are placed in another and a lower division of the humanfamily. The principle of the enumeration in Genesis is probably thatof geographical neighbourhood; the modern principle is that oflinguistic affinity. The peoples mentioned above spoke, or stillspeak, languages which belong to the same family of human speech. Theinference from affinity of language to affinity of blood is in thiscase a strong one, so that the peoples using the Semitic tongues areconsidered to be of the same race. To the question, where the cradleof the Semitic race is to be sought, most scholars now answer that wemust seek it in Arabia. From this isolated land the Semiticdispersion spread in every direction, till Semitic language andcustoms filled the earth from the south of Arabia to the north ofSyria, and from the mountains of Iran to the Mediterranean, and faralong the northern shores of Africa; of Babylonia and Assyria, whereSemitic culture and religion assumed at the dawn of human history avery special and peculiar form, we have already spoken. We have nowto speak of Semitic religion as found in the lands bordering on theeastern Mediterranean in a more original form. The Semitic peoplesoutside of Babylonia founded no lasting empires, and showed no greataptitude for art or for literary style; but, in point of religion, they communicated to the world impulses of immeasurable force, whichwill act powerfully on the world as long as the Prophet is named orChrist preached. 

It is possible to define to a certain extent the typical religion ofthe Semites. The Burnett lectures of the late lamented ProfessorRobertson Smith[1] profess to do this; a book in which great learningand bold speculation are remarkably combined, and which forms one ofthe most important contributions to the early history, not of Semiticreligion only, but of early religion in general. The writer waskeenly interested in the study of prehistoric man and of primitiveinstitutions, and much of his book refers to an earlier period in thegrowth of religion than that of the formation of the Semitic type. Onthe question of the specific character of Semitic as distinguishedfrom other religions, it is one of our principal authorities. 

[Footnote 1: _Lectures on the Religion of the Semites_. First Series. The Fundamental Institutions, 1889. ]

The Semitic races differ from the Indo-European, with whom alone weneed compare them, in their greater intensity of disposition and acorresponding poverty of imagination. The Semite has a smaller rangeof ideas, but he applies them more practically and more thoroughly. He has, indeed, an intensely practical turn, and does not touchphilosophy except under an irresistible pressure of great practicalideas; while for plastic art he has no native inclination. From thisit follows that the religious views he entertains appear to him lessas ideas than as facts, which must be reckoned with to their fullextent as other common facts of life must, and from which there is noescape. His religious convictions, therefore, are apt to be carriedout to their utmost extent, even at the cost of great and painfulsacrifices. Religion admits with the Semite of less compromise, andis less affected by fancy, than with the Aryan; it is, in fact, amore practical matter. The result proves to be that the Semitic mindbrings religious ideas to bear on life and conduct with the greatestpossible force; the substance is more, the form less, than is thecase elsewhere. 

When we ask for the common type of working Semitic religion, whereare we to look for it? Not in Babylonia; the characteristicBabylonian religion is Semitic, but late Semitic; it has received theimpress of high civilisation and of empire. Nor need we look for itin the town life of Phenicia. It is in the seclusion of the Arabianpeninsula that we find it, in the district, as we saw, now regardedas the cradle of the Semitic race, where life continues to this daylittle changed from what it was before the days of Abraham. There thetype of society still exists with which scholars like Wellhausen andSmith consider the earliest Semitic religion to be connected. It is asociety of nomad clans, which own no allegiance to any centralauthority, which have no king and do not yet form a nation. This is astage of social growth which in every ancient people precedes therise of the nation and of monarchy. The Hebrews are rising out ofthis stage when we first see them. Their neighbours the Moabites andCanaanites have already passed beyond it. But all these peoples alikehave their root in a state of society when there was no large andorderly community, but only a multitude of small and restless tribes, when there was no written law, but only custom, and when there was nocentral authority to execute justice, but it was left to a man'sfellow-clansmen to avenge his murder. 

Now the religion of the clan, the ideas of which determine thecharacter of later Semitic systems, may be briefly described asfollows. Each clan has its own god, perhaps he was originally ananimal, at any rate he is the father or ancestor of the clan, he isof the same blood with them, he belongs to them and to no other clan. So far the assertion that the Semites are naturally monotheists istrue; but the same is true of all totemistic or clannish communities. A man is born into a community with such a divine head, and theworship of that god is the only one possible to him. Should he beexpelled from his clan he is driven away from his god, and he cannotobtain access into another clan except by a formal adoption as astranger client. The link, on the other hand between the god and hisclansmen is of the strongest. He joins in all their enterprises, after being consulted on the subject, and having a sacrifice offeredto him, which renews the union of the clansmen to him and to eachother. Their wars are his wars; when any of them is injured or slainhe joins in their necessary acts of retaliation; it is a religiousduty for each of them to be faithful to the others, and to keep upthe tribal customs, of which the god approves. 

Thus the Semites have as many gods as they have clans; and these godsdo not greatly differ from each other. As long, moreover, as theclans are at constant feud, no single god can grow very great. It isonly when one clan conquers others, that a king-god can arise to ruleover all alike as a monarch rules over his nobles and theirprovinces. But in this type of deity the genius of Semitic religionis already expressed. The god of the Semite is not a nature-power whobears the same aspect to all men, but a member of a particular clan, a person to whom the clansman occupies the same position of naturalsubordination as he does to his father or his chief. The god takeshis name not from a part of nature but from a human relationship. Heis "Baal, " master or owner, he is "Adon, " lord; in latercircumstances he is "Melech, " king. "El, " mighty one, hero, is a moregeneric term; like our "God, " it is applied to any divine being. These deities, it will be noticed, are all masculine; but it is notto be supposed that the Semites had no goddesses. Not to speak of thegoddesses of Babylonia, mere doubles of the gods whose names theybore (chapter vii. ), the earliest Semites are believed by severalgreat scholars to have had a goddess but no god. The matriarchalstate of society, in which the mother alone ruled the family, camebefore the patriarchal, and so the reign of the goddess came beforethat of the god. Each community has its own Al-lat, "The Lady, " asshe is called in Arabia, a strict and exacting lady, not to beconfounded with the licentious goddesses of later times; and in allSemitic lands traces of her early prevalence are found. [2] As themale god came to the front, the female became a less definite figure, till she was generally a mere counterpart of the male god, withlittle character of her own. With gods of this type there is littlescope for mythology. The history of the god is that of the tribe; thegods are too little independent of their human clients to form asociety by themselves, or to give rise to stories about their doings. 

[Footnote 2: See Robertson Smith's _Kinship and Marriage in EarlyArabia_. ]

This is one side of the natural history of the Semitic gods; but thathistory has another side. The lands in which the Semites dwelt werefull from the first of sacred spots; and we have to notice that thegod of a clan is also the god of a certain piece of earth where he issupposed to dwell, which is regarded as his property, and thefertility of which is ascribed to his beneficence. In the Bible weread of sacred trees, of sacred wells, of sacred stones or mounds, and of stones or pillars which were connected with sacrifice. Invarious Semitic lands there are also sacred streams and sacred caves. The Semites in fact had their share of the inheritance the wholeworld has derived from the earliest times, of prehistoric religioussites and objects. A spirit spoke in the rustling of the branches ofthe tree, counsel could be procured at the spring; wherever thereappeared to be something mysterious in nature, a spirit was believedto dwell; and especially in woods and fertile spots, where wildbeasts originally had their lair, a spirit was thought to reside, which was approached with fear. Many of these superstitions thevarious branches of the Semites long continued to hold;[3] but therace superseded in the main this world of spirits by a set of gods, and the magic addressed to spirits by religious observances addressedto gods. The genius or jinn haunting the thicket, who had no regularworshippers, but was an object of fear to all, and had to bepropitiated or controlled by mysterious arts, gave way to the god ofa clan, who took up his residence there, and received the regularworship of his clansmen; the stone became the symbol of a deity whohad been asked and had consented to become identified with it for thepurpose of the stated rites of the clan. In this way the clan godsbecame localised as the clans tended to acquire fixed settlements, and each sacred spot was occupied by the deity of the clan who dweltaround it. The view was held that each god was to be found at thespot where, on some marked occasion, he had given evidence of hispower, and he who wished to enquire of that god had to go there. Itmight happen that the god manifested his power at another spot to oneof his dependents on a journey, as Jehovah did to Jacob at Bethel(Genesis xxviii. ). Then that spot also was recognised as a holy onewhere communication could be had with the deity, and the apparatus ofworship was erected there so that the intercourse might be suitablycarried on, as Jacob is reported to have done. In time also it cameto be thought that each god had his land which belonged to him, onwhich alone his worship was possible, and so the earth was parcelledout among a number of deities; and Naaman, who wishes to worshipJehovah in his Syrian home, carries off two mules' burden ofJehovah's soil, to make in the midst of Syria a little piece of theland of the God of Israel (2 Kings v. ). 

[Footnote 3: The late Professor Ives Curtius in a paper read to theBasel Congress (1905, _Verhandlungen_, p. 154), on "Traces of EarlySemitic Religion in Syria, " gives details of local sanctuaries stillresorted to in that country. ]

One circumstance remains to be mentioned which constitutes a markeddifference between the Semitic and the Aryan religions. Aryanreligion has its centre in the household; the hearth is its altar, and the gods of the domestic cult are the departed ancestors of thefamily. Semitic religion is without this cult; the hearth is not analtar; the religious community is not the family but the clan. Theworship of ancestors, if, as there is reason to believe, it had oncebeen practised by the Semites (the Arabs tied a camel to the grave ofthe dead chief), lost at a very early period all practicalimportance. While the early Semites believed in the continuedexistence of the departed, they thought of them as beings quitedestitute of energy, as "shades laid in the ground, " and did notworship them. The other world occupied, therefore, a very small spacein Semitic thought. Religion confined itself to this life; afterdeath, it was held, even religion came to an end. A man must enjoythe society of his god in this life; after death he could take partin no sacrifice, and could render to his god no thanks nor service. 

From what has been said the character of sacrifice among the Semitesis readily understood. Sacrifice is not domestic but takes place atthe spot where the god is thought to reside, or where the symbolstands which represents him. Usually this was an upright monolith, such as is found in every part of the world, and the central act ofthe sacrifice consisted in applying the blood of the new-slain victimto this stone. The blood was thus brought near to the god, theclansmen also may have touched the blood at the same time; and theact meant that the god and the tribesmen, all coming into contactwith the blood, which originally perhaps was that of the animal totemof the clan, declared that they were of the same blood, and renewedthe bond which connected them with each other. A further feature ofearly Semitic sacrifice is also that the slaughter and the bloodceremony are succeeded by a banquet, at which the god is thought tosit at table with his clients, his share being exposed for him on thestone or altar. When he came to be believed to dwell aloft, his sharewas burned with fire so that the smell or finer essence of it mightascend to him. Many examples may be collected in the early historicalbooks of the Old Testament of sacrifices which are at the same timesocial and festive occasions; in fact, in early Israel every act ofslaughter was a sacrifice, and every sacrifice a banquet. The peopledance and make merry before their god, of whose favour they have justbecome assured once more by the act of communion they have observed. The undertaking they have on hand is hallowed by his approval, sothat they can boldly advance to it; the corporate spirit of the tribeis quickened by renewed contact with its head; all thoughts of careare far away; the religious act makes the worshippers simply andunaffectedly happy, if it does not even fill them with an orgiasticecstasy. 

This careless happiness, in connection with religious acts, is foundalso in Babylonian sacrifice. It is not, however, peculiar to theSemites, but is characteristic of the religion of the early world ingeneral. Nor is it peculiar to this race that religion does notaddress the individual as such, but only as a member of his tribe, and that it provides small comfort for private sorrows or longings. The sad face is out of place in the presence of the god. Religion isessentially a happy thing; sin is not yet thought of, and if thingsgo wrong, the tribe never entertains any doubt but that with propersacrifices and promises the god will show them his favour again andrenew their prosperity. All this is not specially Semitic, but simplyearly religion. What is specially Semitic is, to repeat that withwhich we set out, that gods are worshipped whose relations to theirworshippers are borrowed from existing forms of society. The god isthe father or the master or the champion, of the circle ofworshippers; he is of their kindred, he is their greatest andstrongest clansman, he belongs to them and to none but them. This, whether it is derived--as Professor Robertson Smith thinks--from theideas of totemism or not, leads to a religion which is exclusive andintense, and cannot be trifled with. The god who is a man's master, and the head of his clan, stands in a more imperative positiontowards him than the god of the sky, or than a departed ancestor. Hedoes not change with the seasons or the weather, nor is there anydoubt as to his intentions and demands. Semitic religion, even atthis stage, is a very real thing, and may easily, in favouringcircumstances, become a force of overmastering energy. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

Hommel, _Die Semitischen Völker und Sprachen_. 

"Semites, " by McCurdy, in Hastings' _Bible Dictionary_, vol. V. 

Cumont, _Les Religions orientales dans la Paganisme Romain_, 1907. 

CHAPTER XICANAANITES AND PHENICIANS

When the Children of Israel crossed the Jordan and settled inPalestine, they found that country inhabited by a race of men whospoke the same language as themselves, and who were much furtheradvanced than they in civilisation. The letters of El-Amarna whichbelong to this period show Syria to have been full of smalltheocratic states, all pervaded, though now under the power of Egypt, by Babylonian culture, each with a god and a settled worship of itsown. The Israelites of a later time regarded the Canaanites with suchdisdain that they reckoned them (Genesis x. 6, 15) as belonging to aninferior race; but the two peoples belonged to the same race, and hadmany common ideas and practices. In religion they resembled eachother, or Israel could never have been tempted so strongly, and forso long a period, to adopt the rites of the people they conquered. 

The Israelites were not the only people who invaded the land of theCanaanites and stayed in it. Three such invasions took place: thoseof the Phenicians, of the Philistines, and of the Hebrews--the firstand third being Semitic peoples, and perhaps the second also. ThePhilistines, settling on the south-eastern corner of theMediterranean, had a Semitic religion, of which the fish-god Dagon, the Fly-Baal of Ekron, and the Ashtoreth, probably of Ascalon, areknown figures. The Philistines, however, lost ultimately theirseparate character, and ceased to exist as an independent people. Itwill not be necessary for us to mention them again. The Phenicians, settling on the northern sea-board of Syria, where great trade routesto East and West converged, and where good harbours could be made, became a nation of merchants, and kept up active communication withthe great kingdoms of the East, with Egypt, and with the islands andthe distant shores of Western Europe. The carriers of the ancientworld, they transmitted to Europe not only the spices and the fabricsbut also the ideas and the practices of Asia, and rendered to theworld the inestimable service of awaking the slumbering energies ofthe Aryan peoples to new life. 

A short chapter may be devoted to the religion of the Canaanites andto that of the Phenicians, not because these were important inthemselves, for in neither was there anything original or anythingdestined to survive, but because of the light they throw on otherreligions which were to have a great career. It was in conflict withthe Canaanite religion that the faith of Israel first realised itstrue nature and was led to organise itself in a manner befitting itscharacter. And from Phenicia both Israel and Greece accepted many asuggestion, both in external matters connected with worship and inmatters of a deeper nature. 

The religion of the Canaanites is well known to us from the OldTestament. It is such a system as we found that of the Semites to be, with certain peculiar developments, of which we have already seensomething in our chapter on Babylonia. A local community recognisesan invisible head, with whom it meets at the sacred spot, whom itregards as overlord or master, of whose favour it is in no doubt, andwhom it serves with sacrifices and with lively manifestations of joyat certain fixed periods. The god is called Baal. This, however, isnot a proper name but a title; it means lord, master, and the Baalmay have a name of his own in addition: we hear of Baal Peor, thelord of Peor, and of many another. Baals are spoken of in the plural;we read in Judges ii. 11 and in other passages that the Israelitesfollowed the Baals, that is the gods of the Canaanites. Each placehas its own Baal, who is worshipped at the local sanctuary. Thesanctuary is at an elevated spot outside the town or village, eitheron a natural eminence or on a mound artificially made for thepurpose; these are the "high places" of the Old Testament; originallyCanaanite places of worship, they drew to themselves also the worshipof Israel. The apparatus of worship at these shrines is of a verysimple nature. An upright stone represents the god; it is not astatue of him, being unhewn and having no resemblance to the humanfigure. He was supposed to come to the stone when meeting with hisworshippers; and in the earliest times of Semitic religion this stoneserved the purpose of an altar: the gifts, which were not originallyburned, were laid upon it, or the blood of the victim was applied toit. But besides the altar and the upright stone or _massebah_ theCanaanite shrine had another piece of furniture. A massivetree-trunk, fixed in the ground and with some of its branches perhapsstill remaining, represented the female deity who is the invariablecompanion of the Baal. This is the Ashera of Canaan, a word which inthe Authorised Version is translated "grove, " after an error of theVulgate, but which in the Revised Version is rightly leftuntranslated. (Judges iii. 7, vi. 25; 2 Kings xxiii. 6, there is onein the Temple at Jerusalem; etc. ) The word Ashera is in such passagesthe designation of the tree which stood to represent the goddess;whether it is ever the proper name of the goddess herself isdoubtful. At any rate Ashera, like Baal, is not the name of onehistoric deity, but a name applied to the goddess of each place allover the country. 

The character of Canaanite religion is clearly revealed in itsapparatus of worship. We saw that the Babylonians added to many ofthe gods of their country a female counterpart, turning the name ofthe god into a feminine form (chapter vii. , also chapter x. ). InCanaan we find that Semitic worship is addressed to pairs of deities;there is a god and a goddess at each shrine. While it would be wrongto regard this as the general type of Semitic religion, --our chapteron that subject points to a different conclusion, and the great godsof Phenicia, of Moab, and of Israel are solitary beings, --we mustrecognise that the worship of god and goddess was widespread inSemitic peoples. In Canaan it is not difficult to understand it. Wehave here the worship of an agricultural community; and as the Baalis the lord of the soil and the author of its fertility, who isentitled to receive the first-fruits, so the Ashera is the fertilematron who represents the principle of increase. The Old Testamentleaves us in no doubt as to the kind of worship which was carried onat these shrines. The festivals were those of the farmer's calendar;the Baal is presented with the first-fruits of corn and wine and oil, in the midst of general feasting and boisterous merry-making. Hisconsort, on the other hand, is served with rites applying in the mostdirect manner the principle she represents. The shrine has a staff offemale attendants for this part of the service of religion. Therustic worship of Palestine thus shows us a side of the religion ofWestern Asia which we know from other sources to have been widelydiffused. A female deity like the Babylonian Ishtar (chapter vii. ), is served with impure rites in great cities as well as in countrydistricts, and her worship spread westwards with other Easternproducts. She is found as Baalit, as Mylitta, [1] as Astarte; theGreeks call her Aphrodite, and her horrid worship found entrance invarious Greek cities. 

[Footnote 1: Herod. I. 199. ]

To the Israelites the worship of Canaan proved a great temptation(Numbers xxv. ), but they gradually rose above it. The Phenicians alsocame to have gods of a much higher character, and of these also wemust speak. The Phenicians were not original in their religion anymore than in their art; their religion began with the ordinarySemitic notions as these had been applied by the older population inSyria, and they improved it by borrowing from various parts of theworld with which they trafficked. So various were their borrowingsthat it is impossible to draw up a consistent system of their gods. One town has one set of gods, another town another, and the samedeity wears different and even opposite characters in differentplaces. All that can be done is to single out a few features which wecan see to have been on the whole characteristic of Phenicianreligion, and to have enabled it to influence the worship of otherpeoples. 

The Phenicians were very much in earnest about the maintenance ofstate and of religion. In their successive city-states of Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage, we see them exhibiting an intense devotion to thecommonwealth, and very much under the influence of their priesthood. Semitic religion tends to grow more sombre and intense as itdevelops; and the Phenicians, while still holding the principle of agod and goddess, concentrate their worship more and more on a singledivine figure, and come to regard that figure from a greater distanceand with greater awe. The liberal and easy-going Baals and Asheras ofagricultural life are not suited to the temple of a great commercialcity; a figure of more dignity is wanted. And thus above the crowd ofBaals there appears the Moloch or king, a much greater being andrequiring a much statelier service. Moloch also is not originally aproper name; there are various Molochs or king-gods who rise abovethe Baals, and the individuals have special designations, asMelcarth, "king of the city. " This type of deity occurs not with thePhenicians only, but with several other Syrian peoples about the sametime. The Moloch of Sidon and Tyre is a being of the same characteras the chief gods of Moab, Ammon, and Israel. He has to do not onlywith the blessings of agricultural life, but with state andgovernment. He is the founder of a state; he is the inventor ofnavigation and of purple; he is the first king; when a colony is sentout, it goes with his approval, and he himself leads the expedition;he is the dread ruler whom none must disobey; the majesty, the power, and the enterprise of the state are all embodied in him. And as theking-god is far above the landlord-god in power, he is infinitelyremoved from him in character also. The chief gods of Sidon and Tyrehave nothing luxurious or effeminate about them. They are strict andawful beings, and must not be incautiously approached. They retaintheir primitive character as sources of life, but they are destroyersof life as well. Pure and holy themselves, they require purity andholiness in all who draw near to them. Their priests are celibates, their priestesses virgins. They require sacrifices of a verydifferent nature from those of the Baals, more costly and moredreadful. Human sacrifices appear to have been a regular feature oftheir worship: when the Israelites turn to the worship of Pheniciangods, or when they copy Phenician practices, we hear of their "makingtheir children pass through the fire"--that is, offering them up asburnt-sacrifices. The Moloch requires what is most costly as asacrifice, or what will cause the strongest thrill of terror in hisworship. Even the first-born child is not to be kept back from him (2Kings xxiii. 10, Jerem. Vii. 31, cf. Micah vi. 7). 

So far the origin of the Phenician gods is simple. They are purelySemitic deities, formed on the pattern of human rulers and derivingtheir attributes from that character. When a state becomes highlyorganised before it is quite civilised in other respects, itsreligion is apt to be stern and cruel; of this various instances maybe found in the history of religion, and the present is one of them. The Phenician gods were of such a character as to favour the survivalof savage practices; the Semite, as we saw, is extremelymatter-of-fact and practical in his religion, and a god who was aking would receive the same kind of offerings as the king of Sidon orof Tyre was accustomed to. A strict and dreadful religion thussurvives beyond the savage state; pleasure is taken in trampling onnatural feelings and in setting forth shocking spectacles at thebidding of the deity. 

Astral Deities of Phenicia. --It is not possible to arrange in asystem the remaining phenomena of Phenician religion. In thehistorical period the gods have another character besides that ofbeing heads and rulers of communities. They are connected with theheavenly bodies. The chief god, whatever name he bears, El, Baal, Moloch, Rimmon, or Adonis, is always the sun. A sun-god may have comefrom Egypt or Babylon, but there is no reason why the Phenicians maynot have had a sun-god from the first, whose character spread totheir other deities. And in accordance with the tendency above spokenof, the sun-god has a consort. Sometimes his consort is the earth;and then we have a sensuous and immoral worship such as that of theCanaanites. Sometimes it is the moon; her name is Astarte orAshtoreth, and she is a very different being from the Ashera ofCanaan; the names are not the same, and the characters are opposite. Ashtoreth, like the primitive Semitic goddess (chapter x. ), is achaste matron; she is represented robed and in stately attitude, andis a fit companion for the strict Moloch of the cities. Her worshipis described to us by Jeremiah, in whose time the matrons ofJerusalem made cakes for her and poured out drink-offerings andburned incense to her as the "queen of heaven"; all this was donewith the knowledge and co-operation of their husbands, so that theworship had nothing immoral about it. This strict goddess is not tobe identified with Istar of Babylonia, although the names are alike. Istar is not a moon-goddess like Ashtoreth; in Babylonia, in fact, the moon is masculine, and the characters of the two goddesses areopposite. The Sidonian Astarte and the Canaanite Ashera represent twoopposing types of female deity, both of which may possibly have theirreflections in Greece--the latter in the lower forms of the worshipof Aphrodite, and the former in the figures of such strict maidengoddesses as Artemis and Athene. 

Another worship which prevailed in Phenicia should not be leftunnoticed--that of the Cabiri. There were temples of the Cabiri inseveral of the towns; their worship, however, was secret, and littlewas known of it even in antiquity. We know at all events that theCabiri were seven in number, and the number is thought to beconnected, not with the seven planets, but with the seven heavenlyspheres of early astronomy. They have a head called Eshmun, who isthe god of the eighth or highest sphere. The Cabiri are beings of amoral character; they are not only mighty ones and creators, but theyare the children of Sydyk--that is, of Righteousness; and they givecounsel. It is here that the tendency to speculative exaltation ofthe deity appears in Phenicia; but there is little of it, and neitherin this direction nor in that of morals was the religion destined tohave any remarkable growth. The service of the gods was so closelyidentified with the service of the state, --for either the priest andthe king were one, as in Israel after the exile, or nothing could bedone without the priesthood, --that no independent religiousdevelopment was possible. In a theocracy religion cannot grow, atleast it cannot be openly acknowledged to do so; and the prophet andreformer finds every influence arrayed against him. 

How greatly Israel was indebted to Phenician art is known to all. Itwas by artificers from Tyre that Solomon's royal buildings wereplanned and executed, when he had married a daughter of Egypt and wascompelled to aim at some magnificence. A royal temple formed part ofthese buildings, and was necessarily erected according to the ideaswhich prevailed in the more advanced neighbouring kingdoms. It wasfrom the same source that the Greeks a century or two later drewsuggestions for their sacred architecture; and thus we find that theground-plan of Solomon's temple and that of the Greek temple areclosely similar. Both are to be traced ultimately to the modelderived by the Phenicians from Egypt. And those who borrowed fromPhenicia the form of their temple, borrowed many other things too. Inthe porch of Solomon's temple stood two great pillars of bronze, which were called Jachin and Boaz; they were simply the symbols whichstood at the entrance to every Phenician temple of the sun-godworshipped there. The priests of Israel were dressed like those ofTyre and Sidon; they offered the same animals as sacrifices, theyreceived the same dues for their maintenance. When so much apparatuswas borrowed, it is no wonder that the gods of Phenicia were at timesworshipped at Jerusalem. We see from this whole chapter that thereligion of Israel was not so much apart from that of the otherSyrian peoples as we have been wont to imagine. Even in his religionIsrael owed something to his neighbours; his religion came to bebetter than theirs, but it was the result of a movement in which theyalso had taken part. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The Histories of Antiquity. E. Meyer, Duncker (see p. 101). 

Tiele's _Egyptische en Mesopotamische Godsdiensten_. Book II. :Phenicia and Israel. 

The Histories of Israel, especially Kuenen, _The Religion of Israel_. 

F. Jeremias, in De la Saussaye, vol. I. Pp. 348-383. 

E. Meyer, "Phenicia, " in _Encyclopædia Biblica_. 

CHAPTER XIIISRAEL

It is a circumstance of the greatest value for the science ofreligion that the Old Testament is so well known. That book is themost valuable literary storehouse we possess of the facts and ideasconnected with the early religion of mankind; it is the besttext-book of the earlier portion of our subject. In our chapters onprimitive worship, as well as in that on the Semites, we have drawnlargely from this source, and for the earlier stages of the religionof Israel we may refer to these chapters. We have now, however, todeal specially with the religion of the Old Testament, and toendeavour to show, as has been done in other cases, what was itsspecific character, and how its character determined its history. Thestory to be told in this chapter is, even apart from our specialinterest in it, as fascinating as any in this volume; it was througha mental movement of unparalleled grandeur, as well as through anoutward history of tragic and entrancing interest, that the Jews cameto possess the religion which was the desire of all nations, and thechief preparation for Christianity. 

We have to begin, however, with repeating in this case what has beenand will be the burden of our opening paragraphs in many chapters ofthis book, namely that the traditional ideas about the nature of thisreligion require to be corrected, and that its sacred books as theynow stand do not accurately represent its history. The Old Testamentliterature has suffered in a high degree what seems to be thepredestined fate of every set of sacred books. Old materials and neware mixed up together in it; many works have been revised by latereditors, and so much changed, that laborious critical processes arenecessary before they can be used by the historian. In forming hisfirst impressions as to the relations the books bear to each other, and as to the purport of the whole, the reader is naturally guided bythe order in which he finds them; but the order in which the sacredbooks of the Jews stand in the Old Testament was fixed from apeculiar point of view at a late age in Jewish history, and is inmany respects quite unnatural and misleading. To come to particulars;the Old Testament as it stands suggests that the Law was the earliestproduct of Jewish literature, and that all the details of ritual, aswell as of moral and social duty, were fixed for the Jews at the veryoutset of their history; and it suggests that the books of theprophets were written last. This, till quite recently, was generallybelieved to be the case, but by the labours of a series ofillustrious scholars of the Old Testament the conclusion has beenreached, which is now less and less disputed, that the earlierprophetic books come first in chronological order, and that the law, which is not all of one piece, but contains a number of codes ofdifferent periods, together with a collection of legends andtraditions drawn from various quarters and subjected to editorialtreatment, did not assume the form in which we have it till after theexile. The historical books, in which no doubt various ancient piecesare embodied, were written under the inspiration of prophetic ideas;and the latest books of all are those which stand in the centre ofthe Old Testament in the English Bible; the Psalter, which had beengrowing during a long period before it came to contain its presentnumber of pieces, the books of morals and philosophy, and the book ofJob. Daniel belongs to the period of the Maccabees. The historian, therefore, starts from the age of the prophets of the eighth centuryB. C. The writings of these great men afford a graphic picture oftheir time, and an entirely trustworthy account of the mentalfurniture Israel then possessed. From this fixed point the student isable to infer what happened to Israel in earlier times, and to judgeof the spirit in which the early history of the people was afterwardswritten and edited. The history of Israel which the student arrivesat after these critical processes differs, it is true, in veryimportant respects from that which appears at first sight on the faceof the Bible. But the same thing has occurred in the case of othernations. The sacred books of Persia also have to be turned outside inbefore they furnish the historian with an account he can accept. Evenof the speeches of Mohammed the same is true. Those who undertake thetask of codifying sacred literatures have to consider the purpose towhich the books are to be put in the community, and to arrange themso as best to serve that purpose; they do not ask, How must they bearranged so as to exhibit the true sequence of the history?--thatinterest only arises much later--but, How will they best serve theneeds of the community? The order of books in sacred collections is, therefore, fixed by practical considerations, now of one kind and nowof another, and not according to the requirements of the student ofhistory. We now proceed to give the outline of the history of thereligion of Israel as it appears in the light of recent criticalinvestigation. 

Israel consisted originally of a group of tribes, bound together bythe memory of a great deliverance they had experienced in common, andof battles in which they had fought side by side. Accustomed to thefree life of shepherds, they had been enslaved in Egypt and held tointolerable tasks; but they had made their escape in a wonderfulmanner under a leader who had known how to kindle them to heroicefforts by reminding them of their religious traditions. Under hisleadership they had visited the Sinaitic peninsula after leavingEgypt, and had wandered in the regions to the north of Sinai, till atlast they conquered territory to the east of Jordan, on which some ofthem settled, while others crossed the Jordan, and took up theirabodes among the Canaanite tribes whom they found there. 

The nation and the religion came into the world at the same time. Although the tribes retained their separate gods and religiousobservances, and families among them also had their own family cults, the bond by which they had been formed into a people and made capableof common action was stronger than these earlier ties; the God whomMoses proclaimed as their head inspired in them an enthusiasm andvigour unknown before. His name was Yahweh, and is said to have ametaphysical meaning, and to designate the god as more reallyexisting than any other. This is doubted; what is certain is thatMoses declared that Yahweh promised to be with the tribes, and thatthey took him for their God. Jehovah, to use the more familiar formof the name, was perhaps the God of the most powerful of the tribes;he was probably a nature-god, and connected with storms and thunder, and he had his seat at Mount Sinai. Thither the tribes repaired tohold a solemn meeting with him; from there he was afterwardsrepresented as coming forth when about to do any mighty act for hispeople. He is thought of as a being who cannot be seen, since hedwells in clouds and darkness. He utters his voice in thunder andstorm; he is possessed of irresistible energy which he unfolds inbattle, and in which he causes his people to share when he goesbefore them to war. But he is also a god of counsel, and takes thegreatest interest in the moral and social life of his people. Hishuman representatives, aided by his spirit, settle disputes which arelaid before them, and pronounce authoritative counsels on difficultmatters. This kind of guidance is constantly going on, so thatJehovah is felt to be watching over the conduct of his people, and tobe an effective helper and guide in their domestic concerns, whichnot every god attends to, as well as in their meetings with theirenemies. 

The Early Ritual was Simple. --In all this we have a very apt exampleof the advance which, as we saw in a former chapter, religion makeswhen it becomes national instead of merely tribal; when the great godof the nation takes his place above the gods of the tribes. InIsrael, however, it is not the case that the national religion, whenit appears, at once develops a higher style of worship, and drawsattention to itself by greater pomp and deeper solemnity of form. Thepriestly legislation of Exodus and Leviticus, indeed, represents thisas having been the case. Here the tribes have scarcely adopted theservice of Jehovah, when an army of thousands of priests is calledinto being, for whose maintenance elaborate provision is made, and asplendid and highly-organised worship is arranged. This directory ofworship, however, most scholars are agreed, never was in operationtill after the exile: we see in it the worship which Ezra and hisfellow-scribes aimed at introducing in the second temple atJerusalem. The worship of the wilderness and of the early period ofIsrael in Canaan was of a very different nature. The leading featuresand principles of it differed little from what we have described informer parts of this book (chapter v. , chapter x. ). It was conductedaccording to custom rather than statute, and its leadingcharacteristic was that it was a common meal at which the god waspresent along with his worshippers, and assurances were given thatthe good understanding still continued which bound the tribesmen totheir god and each other. It was by the person of his god rather thanby a more elaborate worship, or a more numerous priesthood, thatIsrael was distinguished from Moab and Ammon. 

Contact with Canaanite Religion. --After being delivered out of Egyptby the power of Jehovah, and entering Canaan, Israel was placed in aposition in which it is wonderful, indeed, that the nationalcharacter and the national religion were not merged in those of thesurrounding population. Bringing with them the few ideas and thescanty appliances of the wilderness, they found themselves dwellingamid a people whose civilisation was fully formed, and who possesseda comparatively elaborate worship. The tribes of Canaan spoke thesame language, and were of the same race with themselves, but hadadvanced to the higher life of agriculture and of cities. Theirworship was the same in principle as that of Israel, but it had ahigher organisation. The land was studded with sacred places, thesanctity of which Israel could not deny, and which formed centres ofpilgrimage and worship. The worship of the Canaanites was describedin last chapter (chapter xi. ); the reader will remember the uprightstone (masseba) representing the Baal, and the tree-trunk (ashera), if there was no living tree, representing the goddess. If all this ormost of it was new to the Israelites, so was the sacred year whichfixed the seasons of worship in Canaan. Minor festivals were fixed bythe appearance of the new moon, or by the regular return of theseventh day (it is doubtful if the Sabbath was observed in thewilderness, it is connected with agriculture, and is scarcelycompatible with pastoral life); greater ones by the epochs of theyear, such as harvest and vintage. The worship connected withagriculture in the early world is of a noisy and frantic order; andwhere gods are worshipped who are connected with fertility, it isapt, as we saw, to be marked by sexual features. 

Danger of Fusion. --The Israelites were naturally prompted to adoptwhat they could of the religion of the Canaanites. The old sacredplaces of the land, whether connected with their own ancestraltraditions or not, they could not help adopting; it would have beenstrange, indeed, if, when they became agriculturists, they had notadopted the agricultural festivals; and if, as was natural, theyregarded the Baal of the Canaanite as the lord of the land and thegiver of its fertility, their thanks for the harvest would beaddressed to him (Hosea ii. 8). Their worship of Jehovah could not beleft poorer than that which their neighbours addressed to Baal; forit also they erected asheras and made use of standing stones, and ofJehovah also they had images. One of these, which was destroyed byHezekiah, was in the form of a serpent: in other places Jehovah wasworshipped under the form of a bull. Where an image of him was kept, he could be consulted by means of lots or in other ways. The ark orchest which was kept at one of the more important shrines, represented him most fully; it was carried into battle, and he wasthought to go with it. 

Religious Conflict. --But the more developed worship thus paid toJehovah after the settlement in Canaan, as it had not grown out ofthe religion of Jehovah, did not truly express its spirit, and wasfelt by those who believed most thoroughly in the national god, to bea wrong way of serving him. If, moreover, the Israelites, who livedscattered and far apart from each other among the older inhabitants, went so far in adopting Canaanite practices, there was a danger thatIsrael would forget the faith which had made him a nation, and thuspart entirely with his character and nationality. A contest thusarose, which continued during the whole of Israelite history down tothe exile, between the few who cared for Jehovah only, and desired tosee the principles of his religion carried out purely and withoutreserve, and the many who, while also professing to follow Jehovah, saw no harm in worshipping him as other gods were worshipped, or evenin addressing other gods as well as him. This struggle is representedin the histories as if Israel had from time to time become entirelyapostate from its own faith. But it is clear that Israel never forgotJehovah so far as to be incapable of being called back to him. Thecall was generally a call to war. The people, having forgotten thetrue source of their strength, and so lost spirit and became a preyto their enemies, were summoned by one in whom the spirit of Jehovahwas burning freshly, to follow him to battle against their enemies. The spirit of Jehovah, thus applied anew to the hearts of his people, did not fail of its effect. The wave of courage and of martial ardourspread from place to place, from tribe to tribe, and soon an armystood in the field which struck with the old vigour, and soon shookoff the yoke of the oppressor. Jehovah thus proved himself to beJehovah Sebaoth, _i. E. _, in the most probable rendering of thephrase, the God of the armies of his people. A religion which proveditself in this way could never cease to be a power in the heart ofthe nation; even if the tribes, dispersing again after a victory, soon seemed to lose touch of each other, and to be sinking deeperthan ever in the surrounding tide of Canaanite life, yet the faith, which was associated with all the highest moments of their pasthistory, and was the secret of all their victories, could not die. 

The Monarchy. --It was a great advance, however, in the history of thereligion of Israel, when the judges or heroes who appeared, atdistant intervals of time and in different parts of the country, tosummon Israel to fight for freedom in the name of Jehovah, weresucceeded by the monarchy. This was a step which those most zealousfor the national faith warmly approved, and, indeed, themselvesbrought about; the monarchy was founded, in the case of the first twokings, on religious enthusiasm. The religion of Jehovah at oncebecame the state religion, and a more satisfactory worship was formedat the court. The permanent union of the tribes under the monarchysoon showed Israel to be possessed of much greater force than couldhave been imagined, and within a century the people of Jehovah formeda considerable power, which was heard of in all ends of the earth. Instead of a set of scattered tribes they were now a homogeneouspeople, conscious of a great past and looking forward to a stillgreater future. As they passed rapidly from barbarism tocivilisation, Jehovah shared their rise. His energy had always beenundoubted, but he now put on in addition all the settled attributesof kingly power--he was a great god, and a great king, a just judge, a liberal friend--all his doings were wonderful. He had chosen Israelfor his people, and by a series of mighty acts had guided andpreserved them, and made them great. His people stood in a peculiarposition in the world; with such a god they must rise higher still, there could be no limit to what he could do for them. 

Religion not Centralised. --We must not, however, suppose that therise of Jehovah to a great position, and the institution of hisworship at the court, made any great or sudden change in thereligious arrangements of the people at large. While the worship ofthe monarch went on at Gibeon or at Jerusalem, the great shrines atBethel, at Dan, and at Beersheba were still frequented, and thesacred places throughout the land remained in honour. Stories indeedwere told to show that they had been founded by the patriarchs forthe worship of their god, so that there need be no scruple infrequenting them. The worship of Baal and that of Jehovah went on atthese places side by side, and neither could fail to be influenced bythe other. Sacrifice was guided by more than one principle: on theone hand it was a common meal with the deity; and as Jehovah wasthought to have his dwelling in Heaven, his part of the banquet wasburned, so that it might ascend to him in the column of smoke. Thesacrifice of agriculturists, however, naturally turns to the idea ofpresenting to the god, with joy and thankfulness, a part of thegifts, or the first or best part of the gifts, which, as lord of thesoil, he has bestowed. The idea of propitiation or atonement does notenter into the ordinary sacrifices at this time. Jehovah in hissterner moods may demand more awful offerings. As we see from thestory of Abraham offering up Isaac, it was thought that Jehovah mightdemand human sacrifice, and instances of such sacrifice actuallyoccur in the records. Jephthah dedicates his daughter; after a warthe best of the booty is offered to Jehovah, and Samuel hews Agag inpieces before him. But such occurrences lie quite apart from ordinaryworship, which is of a joyful character and is accompanied bymerry-making of various kinds. No fixed ritual prevailed throughoutthe country; the attempt to introduce uniformity came much later. Every one knew how to sacrifice, as the stories of Manoah and ofGideon show; it was by no means necessary that a priest should bepresent. The functions of the priest indeed were often connected withother matters than sacrifice, and might be of a humble description. Eli with a few attendants was the guardian of the ark which was thesymbol of the presence of Jehovah. A young priest was engaged byMicah for ten pieces of silver yearly to take charge of hiscollection of idols. But the most important duty of the priesthood, and that on which their influence mainly depended, was that ofconsulting Jehovah and ascertaining his will. This was done by somesacred object in the charge of the priest, and various objects arenamed (Ephod and Teraphim are images of deities; Urim and Thummim arethe lots used on such occasions) which possessed this virtue. Thepriest also acted as a judge in matters brought to him for decision, and thus was in a position to form the unwritten law of the people, and to set up principles of conduct which came in course of time tobe regarded as sacred. The priests' "torah" or law is the beginningof the Jewish legislation, and we see from the humane and kindlyprovisions of the earliest codes that this important function wasdischarged in no unworthy way. It was thus that Jehovah acted as theliving lawgiver of his people, long before any written law existed. With his character as a warrior, a mighty lord, and a giver of richgifts, he combines from the first that of one who watches over theconduct of his people, checks their excesses, and is willing and ableto lead them on to better living. This fact will be of muchimportance when the mind of the people expands and seeks tounderstand more clearly his being and character. 

The Prophets. --Israel, like other nations of antiquity, had, inaddition to the priests who were professionally connected withreligion, a class of men who were organs of the deity not on accountof their position but by a special personal gift. The inspiration ofJehovah appeared in early times in somewhat crude forms. Bands offervid devotees were seen, who produced in themselves by dance andsong an ecstatic enthusiasm, in which they were thought to become theorgans of the deity. These men lived in societies or guilds, whichwere found in Israel for several centuries. There were such prophetsof Baal as well as of Jehovah, so that the phenomenon is notspecifically Israelite. What we hear of them does not always give usa lofty idea of their character. They are found practising magicaltricks, and when they prophesy they all say the same thing; sometimesthey are willing to prophesy what a king wishes to hear. 

The greater prophecy of Israel arose out of such beginnings as these. Israel was accustomed to expect to hear the will of Jehovah declaredby a speaker of whom the spirit had laid hold, and among those whocame forward to meet this expectation there appeared from time totime men of commanding insight and of great intensity of character. The name "seer" indicates the nature of this kind of prophecy. Theseer is one to whom Jehovah communicates his intentions personally, perhaps without any steps having been taken on his part to placehimself in the way of the god. He sees visions while awake and in hisordinary frame of mind, he also hears what others do not hear; andthe vision and the message have reference to the future. Things areintimated which are shortly to come to pass, and they are thingsconcerning the state or the monarchy: the fate of Israel is theburden of the prophet's intimation. Samuel's seeing led him toinstitute the monarchy under Saul. The prophet Abijah declared forthe division of the kingdom into two; and his prophecy was not vain. Elijah foretold the downfall of the house of Omri, and Elisha saw tothe accomplishment of that prediction. The prophets we see were agreat power in public affairs, and were able in important crises todetermine the course of the nation's history. Often the prophetstands quite alone, and in opposition to the court and apparently tothe nation, and yet his words have a tendency to get themselvesfulfilled; Jehovah's word does not return to him void. At other timesthe prophet seems to have many sympathisers among the nation, and tospeak as the mouthpiece of the most earnest section of the community, the section most devoted to Jehovah; and in these cases it is lesswonderful that his words come true. When, however, we speak of theprophets as a whole, the expression is a loose one; the prophets arenot a party that always acts together, nor a school in which theleader is always sure of a following. A great voice sounds, perhapsonce in a century or a half-century; and these voices represent thetrue tradition of Israelite religion, and develop it further. In thetime of Elijah we notice that there is a puritan movement in Israel;a number of men are agreed together in detestation of the foreignworships which are practised at court, and are heartily agreed inwishing to bring back the good old ways and the pure worship ofJehovah only. And when Elijah speaks, he gives voice to thistendency; he claims that everything should be determined by religion;no considerations of state should for a moment stand in the way ofthe pure faith of Jehovah, by which everything should be decided; andwhatever stands in the way of this policy is dedicated todestruction. This, broadly speaking, is the keynote of Hebrewprophecy. 

When we come to the canonical prophets, however, we feel that thereis a great deal more in their teaching than the bare demand thateverything must give way to the requirements of religion. A greatchange has taken place in their world of thought. It is no less thanthat a new god and a new religion have announced themselves in thethinking of these men. They do not say so; they are not aware of it, and yet it is so. 

The Old Religion National. --The religion of Israel during themonarchy is, in the full sense of the term, a national one. From acluster of tribes Israel has become a nation, and has begun to thinkof itself as a unity. It has its national history, its nationalrulers, as other nations have. In their nationality it cannot bedenied that the Israelites had much to be proud of; nor did theirrapid growth in wealth and power, which gave them several centuriesof prosperity, tend to lesson that pride. Now as they have their ownking, they have also their own god. Jehovah is the god of Israel;Israel is the people of Jehovah, on this they were all agreed. ThatJehovah was their god did not prevent them from believing in theexistence of other gods: Chemosh was the god of Moab, a being notvery unlike Jehovah, the Baals were the old gods of Canaan. Jehovah, of course, was the greatest and strongest, and an Israelite shouldworship him, in Canaan at least; but there was no great harm if heworshipped other gods too, when it came in his way to do so. He mightjoin in the worship of Baal in country places; and the king might, without doing any harm, set up the images of the gods of his wivesbeside the images of Jehovah in the capital, and if many of hissubjects joined in these other worships, it was but natural. In thisway a great variety of gods was in some reigns brought together fromdifferent countries. 

Jehovah, however, was the special god of Israel, there could be nodoubt of that; Israel was specially pledged to him; and he on hisside was pledged to Israel, who was entitled to look to him for helpin every emergency. Jehovah had no other people; he was entirelybound up with Israel, he must, if only for his own honour, come tothe aid of his own people when they needed him. He never could permitIsrael to suffer any fatal injury, such as deportation to a foreigncountry. Religious faith forbade the thought that such a thing waspossible; if Israel was destroyed, where would Israel's religion be?It was utter impiety, therefore, to doubt that Israel was safe, thatJehovah watched over his own land and his own people, or that hewould guard them from any fatal harm. If, on the other hand, as wastoo often the case, Israel had to submit to injury and insult fromother peoples, there could be no doubt that Jehovah took notice ofthe fact, and that in due time he would set things right. It might besome time before his attention was sufficiently directed to the case;he might be waiting till more of the same kind of occurrences tookplace before he finally interposed; but the time would come, the "Dayof the Lord" would arrive in due season, when the spoilers andinsulters of Israel would be dealt with according to their deserts, and Israel set on high in full deliverance and peace. 

Criticism of the Old Religion by the Prophets. --The prophets, impressed more deeply than the people by the moral character ofJehovah, and under the pressure of great national dangers andcalamities, attained to views of God and of his ways so differentfrom those current at the time as to appear, when first produced, most unpatriotic and even impious. In their character of seers theyforesaw with clearness the terrible catastrophes which were about toburst upon their people. Amos prophesies that Israel will be carriedaway captive out of his land; Isaiah announces the same thing in thesouthern kingdom, and declares that only a remnant shall return. These men are in no doubt as to the impending political annihilationof Israel, and they set themselves to find some reason for anoccurrence so portentous, so impossible to harmonise with ordinaryreligious faith. They account for it by a view of the nature ofJehovah far exalted above that of their people. He is punishing themfor their iniquities, they say, he is so righteous that he mustpunish sin, and he must punish the sin of Israel his beloved peoplenot less strictly, but more strictly than that of other peoples. As ahusband whose wife has gone astray must subject her to disciplinebefore he can receive her again to his favour, so Hosea, made aprophet by such a domestic affliction, contends that Jehovah cannotbut deal strictly with Israel. This theory of the meaning of theimpending calamities is supported by the prophets by thosedenunciations of the national sins which give so gloomy a complexionto their works. Among the national delinquencies the disorganisationand apparent wilfulness shown in worship have a prominent place. Worship is not what the service of Jehovah ought to be. Other beingsthan he are sought after; heathenish festivals are kept, the indecentpractices of heathen worship are introduced into that of Jehovah:there is no seriousness, no dignity, no worthy order, in the acts ofworship that are done. Any place does for them, and many of theplaces used are quite unfit, from their associations, for the serviceof Jehovah. They are celebrated more as wild orgies than as solemnapproaches to the deity. 

The interests of the prophets, however, do not centre in ritual. Theworship of other gods than Jehovah, or the service of Jehovah inunfitting ways, they could not but denounce, but they have nopositive instructions to give about worship. When the people haveapparently given up the wrong worships, and are applying themselveswith zeal to that of Jehovah, seeking his favour by austerities, orby costly offerings, the prophets are no less severe on this line ofconduct. Every one is familiar with the passages in which theyapparently denounce sacrifice altogether as a thing God has neverasked, and by which Israel cannot hope to win his favour. Thesepassages do not prove that the prophets desired the entirediscontinuance of sacrifice; they merely compare sacrifice withanother line of duty which is said to be vastly more important. Notsacrifice but mercy, not sacrifice but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God, --is the burden of these utterances. Evenmore than by the irregularities of worship, the prophets are shockedby the more directly moral shortcomings of their people. The peopleare accused of all the acts that are forbidden in the decalogue ofExodus xx. , and of many offences not there named. Especially are theprophets indignant at the hardheartedness of the rich towards thepoor, and at the frequent disregard of faith and truth; oppressionand bribery, gluttony and other luxurious excesses, are frequentlytheir mark. These most of all are the sins which have called down thedivine judgments; these are the transgressions which make itimpossible for Jehovah to turn away the punishment of Israel and ofJudah. He is, above all things, a righteous god, who loves judgmentand mercy, and a people which so manifestly fails to practice justiceand mercy cannot continue to be his people; he must destroy them. 

The prophets therefore declare that Jehovah has decided on therejection of his people. This shows that they have advanced to a newconception of what Jehovah is. To them he is something more than themere national deity indissolubly linked to the fortunes of hispeople, pledged to advance them in the world, and doomed when theyfall to fall himself along with them. He is first of all a moralruler; the maintenance and promotion of righteousness is far more tohim than the prosperity of any single people, even of Israel. Heloves Israel it is true; Israel is his son, whom he loves, the wifeof his youth, the people of his covenant. But that makes it the moreand not the less necessary that Israel should not be allowed to go onin iniquity. Jehovah can be no partisan of a people that does notwalk according to his laws. Thus the prophets have arrived at a newconception of Jehovah's character, which necessarily unfits him, though they do not yet see this, for the _rôle_ of a national god. They have identified him with the ideal of righteousness and mercy, and in so doing they have made the great step, at least in principle, from national to universal religion, from the religion that is boundup with the history of one particular people, and cannot pass beyondthem, to the religion which is capable of being understood by allmen, and fit to be preached to all men of whatever race. 

Appearance of Universalism. --To the deeper view which they havegained of the character of Jehovah the prophets add a wider andhigher view of his relation to the world, and to the various nationsin it. They frankly state that Jehovah has relations to other nationsthan Israel. He might if he had chosen have taken some other race tobe his people; they were all at his disposal and he regarded none ofthem as hostile. He is not dependent on Israel, and the inference isclear, that if he could have done without Israel at first, he coulddo without Israel still, were he driven to that. Israel is notindispensable to the continuance of the true religion. Jehovah indeedhas a position far above that which Israelite national thoughtascribed to him. He is lord not of one nation only, but of all thenations. He can use any of them as his instrument when and as hechooses. It is he who has brought each of them to its present seat, it is he who is directing their movements now. And for what end doeshe wield this mighty rule? He is governing the world not in theinterests of one nation only, but in the interests of righteousness. He is guiding the destinies of nations so as to bring about an endwhich he has fixed, namely the establishment of a world-wide kingdomof truth. The day is indeed coming as the Israelites believed when hewould hold a judgment over the world, only let Israel beware lestthat day should be darkness and not light to them; it will bringabout the punishment of sinners of whatever race. An end is to bemade of sin both in Israel and in other nations, that a new world maybegin. The position thus given to Jehovah is clearly one which liftshim high above the rank of a national deity. The prophets understandwith growing clearness that Jehovah is the creator of the world, andthe author of all the glories, both of the celestial and of theterrestrial frame. The Maker of the ends of the earth, and theGovernor of all the nations, though he has chosen to reveal himselfto one particular race, cannot be limited to them. The position ofMonotheism has been attained. The earlier prophets speak of the godsof other nations as if they really existed, though for Israel Jehovahis the only god, but by degrees the advance is made to the positionthat these beings do not exist at all, and are simply "vanities" or"nothings. " Instead of saying that Jehovah is the greatest among thegods, and that there is none like him, these preachers say thatJehovah alone is god, and that he is the author of all that existsand of all that takes place in the universe. A god has been unveiledwhom all beings exist to glorify, and whom all the nations of theearth can confidently be summoned to praise. 

Ethical Monotheism. --These results were reached gradually: there is agreat difference between the teaching of Amos and that of Jeremiah. And it must be remembered that they were attained not as othermonotheisms have been, by philosophical speculation, but by purelymoral ways. It is because Jehovah is supremely just and holy, that hegrows so great. The justice and holiness which are seen in him arethe strongest of all; the world exists for nothing else but torealise them, and everything that stands opposed to them, whether inIsrael or in any other nation, must go down before them. It is inthis way that the conclusion is reached that Jehovah is the only God. The moral ideal must be one. The whole of the religion of theprophets is governed by moral considerations. God asks from mannothing but goodness; the true sacrifices are those of the heart andconduct. Man's intercourse with God is to be kept up as that of anaffectionate human relationship, into which no motives either offorce or of commerce enter. Although God is so just and holy, he isperfectly placable, and ready to greet the approaches which are madeto him. It is absurd to spend so much money and toil on sacrifice, when the happiest relations with God can be attained so much moresimply. God forgives without any sacrifice; his love and his desireto meet with love surpass all that human relationships can show; hisconstancy is like that of the returning seasons, or of the stars. Heyearns over Israel as a father over a wayward son, and will leavenothing undone that he can do to bring his son back to him. He willalter all his former plans to bring about that result. He will changeman's nature, and give him a new heart, if nothing short of that willsuffice; or he will change his own procedure entirely, and deal withman not by way of commandments, but by way of inspiration, placinghis law in man's inward part, writing it in his heart, so that thegreat union of God and man may be attained, which he desires. 

Individualism of the Prophetic Teaching. --Here we must pause tonotice another great advance which the prophets have been led to makein religious knowledge. Their view of Jehovah as a purely moralbeing, and of man's relation to him as a moral relation, like thatbetween two human beings who have to live together, such as a husbandand wife or a father and son, makes religion less a matter for thepeople as a body, more a matter for the individual. When religion iscarried on by public sacrifices and stately festivals and ceremonies, then it is the people as a whole that transacts with God, and theindividual need feel no great weight of responsibility in the matter. But if God asks for love, if he says he does not care for sacrifice, but insists on love and devotion, and rather than not have it willwork a miracle on man's nature, then the individual is addressed. Every one who has any love to offer feels himself appealed to. Onlyin his own heart can any one know whether or not God's desire is met;every one, therefore, who understands the appeal becomes personallyresponsible for the answer, and religion becomes a matter, not onlybetween God and the people, but between God and the individual aswell. Personal religion, therefore, makes its appearance among theJews at this time. Jeremiah carries on dialogues with God; prayer ismet with, as the outpouring, not of public needs alone, but ofprivate feeling; the soul has learned that it is called to a life ofits own with God, and not merely to a share in the life of the nationwith him. 

We have dwelt at some length on the ideas of the prophets; not atsuch length, indeed, as to satisfy any of those who love theirwritings, for we have thrown together in one view what belongshistorically to different centuries, while to the personalities ofthe prophets, to their sublime certainty and their stupendouscourage, we have given no attention. We have stated the outlines alsoof the great movement of thought in which advances of suchtranscendent importance were made in religion. They are advanceswhich have not been lost, but which we still enjoy. If it is the giftof the Semitic race to bring the thought of God to bear on life withsuch direct practical force as Aryan religion never by itselfexerted, we must look with profound veneration on those Semiticthinkers who applied this great force in the service of a God, whohas no other nature and property but that of justice and love. Religion thus became to them and to all they influenced an engine forthe direct promotion of justice and love among men; and we do notthink the less of the prophets that the harvest of which they sowedthe seed could not be reaped in their day. 

Prophecy leads to no Immediate Reform. --The message of the prophetsseems at first sight to have been delivered long before the world wasready for it. Even the practical measures which can be traced totheir influence are far from being in accordance with their ideas. The causes of this we have already to some extent seen. The prophetswere not practical reformers. The amendment they called for was oneto be realised in individual lives rather than in public policy, andthey do not bring forward schemes of reform which they urge thepeople as a whole to adopt; they rather fling great ideas upon themind of their nation, and leave it to others to find out howpractical effect may be given to their teaching. To the very end ofthe Jewish state the prophets and their sympathisers appear to be ina small minority of their nation. The people as a whole isunconverted, the worship of idols goes on, and so does the worship ofother gods, even in the temple at Jerusalem. It has seemed to somegreat scholars that Israel, as a whole, was a heathen people up tothe time of the exile, and still needed to be converted to thereligion of Jehovah. Kuenen shows[1] in a convincing way that this isan exaggeration, and that people and prophets alike held the religionof Jehovah to be the true religion of Israel; but up to the exilethat religion was not reformed in the way the prophets desired. 

[Footnote 1: _Hibbert Lectures_, ii. ]

The Reforms. --Yet the word of Jehovah had not returned to him voideven during this period. A considerable series of reforms arenarrated in the histories, and attested by successive codes of lawnow embodied in the Pentateuch. These show that the prophetic ideashad gained for themselves a strong party among the people, and thatin several reigns the court was under their influence. These reformsshow progress in two directions. There is a growing desire to makethe worship of Jehovah correspond to the exalted new conceptions ofhis character as a being of incomparable majesty and holiness; andthere is, on the other hand, a rapid growth of moral sentiment;justice and kindness to others are placed more and more in theforefront of the divine requirements. We can do little more than namethe passages where the details of these matters may be found. Thereforms of Hezekiah (1 Kings xviii. ) did not last long. He destroyeda celebrated image of Jehovah, a fate which other images may haveshared, and he remodelled the worship of the holy places throughoutJudah, so as to remove its more heathenish features, and concentrateit on Jehovah alone. Manasseh, Hezekiah's successor, pursued theopposite policy. In his reign a large collection of strange cults, some of them perhaps those of the individual tribes, were broughtback into use; even the barbarous rite of human sacrifice wasestablished at Jerusalem, and the worship of Jehovah became moreintense and darker. The shadow of the Assyrian is upon Israel, and asgenerally happens in times of public anxiety, rites long disused areimagined to have a specially national character and a peculiarpotency, and are fetched back from oblivion. The reform of Josiah (2Kings xxii. , xxiii. ) was more thorough-going than that of Hezekiah. He made an end of all the unseemly worships his predecessor hadencouraged at Jerusalem, so that nothing but the direct worship ofJehovah was left. The strongest step he took, however, was that heattempted to put an end altogether to the shrines at which localworship had hitherto been conducted, thus making a clean sweep of theidolatry of the rural districts. All this was done, we are told, inaccordance with a law-book which had been found in the temple bycertain high officials, and which, after duly consulting a prophetessabout the matter, Josiah brought into operation, and solemnly pledgedhimself and his people to observe. We are in no doubt as to thenature of this book. The book of Deuteronomy prescribes just suchreforms as Josiah carried out, and is generally allowed to have beenthe written law which was promulgated on this occasion. NowDeuteronomy, while incorporating no doubt many old laws, is in spiritand effect a work of the prophetic school. Its moral teaching and itsexhortations to love Jehovah, and to be true to him alone, are quitein the manner of Jeremiah, who was living in the reign of Josiah. Andthe principal reform of Josiah, namely, the suppression of the localworships, and the concentration of all worship at the temple ofJerusalem alone, stands in the forefront of the special laws inDeuteronomy. Those who aimed at the reform of religion, according tothe ideas of the prophets, had thought this out. The worship of theone supreme God should take place, they had concluded, at one placeonly, and should be national in its character; the whole peopleshould worship the one God at its capital. Provision was made thatthis should not imply the deprivation of the dwellers in countrydistricts of the use of flesh meat. Formerly, every act of slaughterwas a sacrifice, and it was only in connection with a sacrifice thatthis food could be enjoyed. But in future, animals may be slaughteredat a distance from Jerusalem for food only, apart from any connectionwith sacrifice. The promulgation of Deuteronomy is an important epochin the religion of Israel. That work is the first sacred book ofIsrael; from this time forward Israel knows the will of Jehovah, notonly from the prophet's living voice, but from a book which isregarded as having divine authority. This principle once introducedcould not fail to develop; to Deuteronomy other books were afterwardsadded as part of the same law, though in reality they superseded it, and it thus proved the nucleus of the whole Jewish canon. 

Earlier Codes. --Deuteronomy was not the earliest law drawn up underprophetic influence. Leviticus xvii. -xxvi. Is recognised as being acode by itself, and is an earlier attempt in the same direction asDeuteronomy. The decalogue contained in Deuteronomy v. , identical inthe main with that of Exodus xx. , is of earlier origin thanDeuteronomy itself, but is also a prophetical work. It deals withritual only to the extent of removing certain obstacles to a rightworship of God, and places the chief weight of his requirements inthe fulfilment of the natural duties. An earlier decalogue whichdeals principally with ritual, and which contains an early propheticattempt to free the worship of Jehovah from heathen abuses, is foundin Exodus xxxiv. 10-26. The oldest legislation of all is the codefound in Exodus xx. 22 to xxiii. 33, which goes by the name of theBook of the Covenant. It is true that in form and in many of itsprecepts it is identical with the Code of Hammurabi (2250 B. C. ), andso bears strong testimony to Babylonian influence. It is, however, much more humane than that old code, and in many particulars isindependent of it. As it appears in Exodus it belongs to the times ofthe early canonical prophets, and as it scarcely deals with ritual atall, it shows the just and humane spirit cultivated by the religionof Jehovah in an agricultural community. 

The Exile. --The reformation of Josiah was quickly undone by hissuccessor on the throne, and there was no further opportunity for areform while the people remained in Palestine. But the exile did notcause the friends of reform to abandon their ideas. The prophets hadforetold the exile, and had maintained that the religion of Israelwould not be destroyed but rather would be saved by it, and the eventproved that they were right in this point also. The exile cured thepeople definitely of idolatry, and gave them a strong grasp of theidea that they were a peculiar people, called to a work which noother people could accomplish or indeed understand, namely to holdaloft in the world, and for the benefit of the world, the truereligion. This conviction forms the burden of the prophecy of theUnknown prophet of the exile (Isaiah xl. -lxvi. ). He exalts still morehighly than his predecessors the name and power of Jehovah. He is theCreator of the ends of the earth, to whom the nations, including eventhat great Babylon, are as a drop of the bucket, to be flung whitherone will; it is he who has chosen Israel for his people and who nowcomforts Israel for the sorrows of the exile. In the great drama heis unfolding in the earth Israel has a principal part to play. Israelis called to make known to the nations who do not know him, the trueGod. It had been prophesied before that the heathen nations wouldcome to Mount Zion to ask counsel of the God of Judah, and thatJehovah should become law-giver and judge over them. The Unknownenlarges on this theme with splendid imagery, and strives to persuadethe people to make this cause their own, and to rise to theresponsibility it involves. Israel is to be a prince, a leader andcommander, of the peoples. The Gentiles are to come from far bringingtheir treasures and doing homage to the people of the true faith. IfIsrael as a whole is not fit as yet to discharge this duty for theworld, yet there is an inner Israel, a faithful elect of the peoplewho sympathise entirely with Jehovah's purposes and are entirelydevoted to his will. This "Servant of Jehovah, " at least, has risento the height of his calling; Jehovah's spirit is in him. He will notfail nor be discouraged till the true religion is established in theearth. At another part of the prophecy the fate of the Servant isseen in darker colours. He is subject to ill-treatment andmisrepresentation of all sorts; even when he is suffering for thesake of others he is derided and despised; nay, more, --he is calledto suffer martyrdom, and die for sins not his own. But even so, theServant will conquer in the end. He will know that his sufferingshave not been in vain; he will be the means of leading many torighteousness and will be the instrument of Jehovah to bring in thetrue religion. 

The Return. The Reform of Ezra. --Such utterances could not fail ofeffect on the nation to whom they were addressed, and when the Jewscame back to Palestine they were undoubtedly inspired with a newsense of their peculiar national mission. They at once proceeded toshow that they were to be a people apart from others, by separatingthemselves rigorously and even cruelly from entanglements with thesurrounding population. They also at once set up the worship ofJehovah as the sole God who had his one shrine at Jerusalem. Theirearly experiences in Palestine were not encouraging. For a centurythey remained a struggling and poor community, and it might seemdoubtful if they would prove strong enough to maintain their separateposition, and to hold up their special testimony to the world. But atthat time the Jews who had remained in Babylon came to their aid. These men had never ceased to labour along with their brethren inPalestine for the advancement of their nation; and in particular theyhad laboured earnestly at the problem of worship, and the result oftheir labours was a religious constitution so rigid in its ideas, sologically worked out in detail, and so skilfully incorporating andappropriating to itself all the past traditions and usages of therace, that it might almost be said to be strong enough to stand byitself, and would certainly afford to the people, if they adopted it, the support and the discipline they needed. This constitution wasintroduced by Ezra, the priest and scribe, in the year 444 B. C. , [2]when he read in the ears of the people at Jerusalem (Nehemiah viii. , ix. ) the new law he had brought with him from Babylon fourteen yearsbefore, and had waited all that time to promulgate. The new law ofthis period was what is called the Priestly Code; it occupies thelatter part of Exodus and a large part of Leviticus and Numbers; andthe older writings are skilfully interwoven with it, but in generalit may easily be distinguished by its tone from the work of earlierperiods. Deuteronomy, the earliest law-book, is simply tacked on toit as if it were a part of the same code, though in reality it isoften inconsistent with the latter law. The result is the Torah orlaw, or, as we call it, the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses(Moses being regarded by a convenient fiction as the source of allJewish laws). This was thenceforward the law of the Jews. 

[Footnote 2: This date and many features of the story of Ezra and thereturn have of late been much questioned. See "Ezra" in _EncyclopædiaBiblica_. The account given above follows Wellhausen. ]

The Jewish religion, of which this is the code, is generallydistinguished from the religion of Israel which prevailed down to theexile; and several important new principles undoubtedly make theirappearance at this point. This chapter may fittingly conclude with anenumeration first of the features of Jewish religious life connectedwith the law or the priestly system, and then of those features of itwhich lie outside that system. 

1. The priestly religion is founded on a sentiment which forms butlittle part of the faith of early peoples, namely the sense of sin. The prophetic denunciations of Israel's backslidings have at lastfound entrance, and the people is found submitting to a system whichimplies that the whole of its past history was sinful and mistaken, and that there is a constant need for supplicating forgiveness. Everyprayer begins with a long confession of national sin, in which thepresent generation also shares. "We have sinned with our fathers, "they say. This view is spread over the historical books in thesweeping judgments passed on individual monarchs, on periods of thenational life, and especially on the whole of the Northern Kingdom(cf. Nehemiah ix. ). The old confidence in the presence of Jehovahwith his people has now departed. The earlier Israelites neverdoubted that Jehovah was in the midst of them; that could be takenfor granted except when events proved the contrary. But now Jehovahhas grown greater and more awful, while the people have becomepainfully aware of their deficiencies and cannot assume that he iswith them, but must take steps to secure his presence. This is nodoubt connected with the growing sense of an individual position andresponsibility in religion. To the nation or the tribe it is naturalto feel that its cause is just and that its God is with it; but theindividual, thrown upon his own inner world for his alliances, isless apt to feel that confidence. Now the religion preached by theprophets is essentially one for the individual. Ezekiel especiallyfelt himself responsible for the fate of individuals, and laboured toawaken his fellow-countrymen one by one to a sense of their dangerand responsibility; he taught that each man had to see to his ownsalvation, that each man would receive the fruit of his own acts. Allthis tends to a deeper feeling and a more anxious mood in religion, and helps to explain how the sense of sin, on which religiousprogress at its higher stages depends so much, was fixed so stronglyin the Jewish mind. That the Jews underwent a radical change in theirdisposition is proved by the fact that they submitted to the yoke ofthe law: for it may be questioned if any people ever sacrificed theirnatural liberty for the sake of their religion to such an extent asthis people did. 

2. The divine will is now received by the people in the shape of asacred book. They cease to look for the living voice of prophecy, andcome to think that God has given them in the Torah a perfect andcomplete revelation. The book takes the place of the prophet, and intime also to some extent of conscience. A man ceases to think forhimself what is right and good, and only asks, What does the law say?It is true that a great part of the book is taken up with ritual, with which the ordinary individual has not much to do, but he alsobelieves that the whole of his own duty is to be found there in it, as is no doubt the case. We see from the 119th Psalm how beautiful aform religion may assume even under these terms, when the book inquestion is felt to be a spiritual treasure, and to speak the wordsof a living God; but the system of a book-religion has in it thegerms of very different fruits. The sacred book is believed to be anexhaustive directory of conduct; but to make it apply to the variouscases that arise in practical life it has to be interpreted, anddeductions have to be drawn from it. It thus comes to give many adirection which does not appear on the surface. The secondary law, or"tradition, " is thus founded, a system which calls for the servicesof a special class of students. The scribes, who interpret the lawand apply it to life, obtain great influence and become the virtualrulers of the nation. While no doubt guided in the main by the noblespirit of their religion, they are led by their system into manyabsurdities, and their casuistry even becomes at times immoral. Theyafford the classical example of the results which flow from thedoctrine of verbal inspiration, thoroughly worked out; and the lifeof the Jews under them becomes highly unnatural and artificial, andtends to occupy itself with the husk instead of the kernel ofreligion. 

3. The principal part of the divine will, as expressed in the law, isthat connected with sacrifice. Sacrifice occupies the central placein the book, and in the history it records. In this book the templeservice, thinly disguised as the service of the tabernacle in thewilderness, is set forth as the great end and aim for which Godcreated the world, settled the nations in it, and called Israel to bea people. The ritual which was observed from the exile to thedestruction of Jerusalem may be studied in Exodus and Leviticus. Weread of orders and companies of priests who offer daily and othersacrifices according to a rule in which the smallest details arecarefully arranged, sacrifices in which little of the old cheerfulcommon meal now lingers, but which are mostly of a purificatory orpiacular character. The ritual of sacrifice would not appear to anoutward observer to differ very much from that in use among theGreeks or Romans; the Jews certainly conducted it on a larger scale. What end precisely was aimed at in it, the Jew would have found itperhaps hard to say. It was done, he would say, because the law soordered it, and the law must be obeyed even if one did not quiteunderstand what was enjoined. The daily sacrifice removed theimpurity of the temple staff, and enabled the people to be sure thatthe favour of the deity continued with them. Many sacrifices aimed atthe removal of particular sins; thankfulness also was expressed inthem, and other feelings may also have ascended with the smoke fromthe altar. To Jews living at a distance the sacrifice, which could beoffered nowhere but at Jerusalem, was the chief symbol, the greatmystery, of their faith. 

4. The notion of holiness is closely connected with worship. Thingsand persons are holy which belong to Jehovah, and are withdrawn fromcommon use. These it is dangerous to touch unwarily. Jehovah is anunapproachable being; the high priest may come into the innermostpart of the temple, but only once a year, and no one else may comethere; the priests may enter the Holy Place, but not the people. Tospeak lightly of the temple was a crime the Jews could not forgive. The Sabbath was the Lord's day; man must not attend on it to his ownworldly concerns. The deity is surrounded with dread to anunparalleled extent; all that belongs to him is to be regarded withawe. Connected with the notion of holiness is that of purity. In thelater Persian religion the distinction has always to be anxiouslyremembered by the believer between what belongs to the good spiritand what has fallen under the power of the evil spirit. The Jew, also, who is called to be holy and separate from other men, lives inconstant dread lest he should touch something unclean, and so forfeithis own purity. There are clean animals, and unclean ones which hemust not eat; various washings of the hands and of domestic utensilsare needed in order to keep up the state of purity; many tradesinvolve contact with substances which make purity almost impossible. Above all, it is defiling to eat what a heathen has cooked, or to sitat the same table with heathens. Thus the Jew was confirmed in thebelief of his own superiority to men of other races; and wasprevented by many barriers from mingling with them, or even regardingthem as brethren. His circumcision, his Sabbath, his laws of purity, his peculiarities of diet, the absolute impossibility of his eatingalong with Gentiles, kept him separate, and helped to nourish in himthe spirit of haughtiness and exclusiveness. The accepted worshipperof Jehovah is, with the early prophets, the man who is morally sound, who has curbed his passions and his selfish impulses; with the laterJew that may still be the case, but there are also a number ofindispensable preliminaries of which the prophets certainly did notdream. The man who would go up to the hill of Jehovah must be one whohas not eaten shell-fish or pork, nor opened his shop on the Sabbath, nor touched a dead body, nor used a spoon handed to him by a Gentilewithout washing it. How all this unfitted the Jewish people to be amissionary of the pure religion, and how adverse the whole Leviticalsystem was to the earnest apprehension of that religion no less thanto its diffusion, the New Testament amply shows. But it kept thepeople separate from the world and constant to their faith amid eventhe greatest temptations and the severest persecutions, and soenabled them to preserve the precious treasure committed to them tillthe time should come when the world was to receive it from theirhands. 

Heathenish Elements of Judaism. --In the system we have sketched, inwhich the prophetic teaching was hardened into a ritual and a law, there are various elements which do not belong to an advanced stageof religious progress. While the sacrificial ritual, not outwardlyexalted above heathenism, is to some extent redeemed by the motiveswhich enter into it, the great system of clean and unclean rests onno rational basis, and resembles the set of taboos, which no one canexplain, of a savage tribe; and the reduction of daily life under aset of minute and troublesome rules, shows the devotion more than theenlightenment of those who submitted to it. There was a necessitythat the vessel should be so narrow and so hard which was to keep thewine of Jewish religion from being mixed with other liquids, but thevessel itself belongs to the rude and early world. In the Jewishreligion of this time there are far different elements, which pointforward and not backward, and in which the future course of religiousprogress is clearly anticipated. If his temple ritual was crude, andif his law pursued him into every one of his actions, the thoughts ofthe Jew were free; the truths which were unfolding their riches inhis mind were sufficient compensation for much outward restraint, andthe fair world of imagination was open to him in which the pastclothed itself with legend and the future with splendid hopes. 

Spiritual Elements. --The period after the exile is that of thecomposition of the Psalms. Many of these poems may have been writtenearlier; many were undoubtedly written at this time, and the beliefgains ground that the Psalmist came after the prophet, and adoptedfor popular use the prophet's ideas. In the Psalter we hear thethrill of joy and triumph as the great truths of theism come to begrasped as certainties. The congregation now utters in song what, when the prophet first announced it, so few had courage to believe, that Jehovah is king, that he rules over the nations, that he is farabove all the gods, nay, that there is no other God than he. The joyof having embraced this thought, of having escaped from all confusionwith regard to the powers that rule the world, and of seeing allthings in this splendid light, finds manifold expression. Thebelievers delight themselves anew in the worship of Jehovah, and seefresh beauties in his courts, and in the service of him there; theydelight in his word in connection with every part of theirexperience. They understand the world as they never did before, sinceit is his work, and praise the Creator as they follow the wholeprocess of creation. New lights open to them on the history of theirrace, new solutions occur to them of the moral difficulties they havefelt, as they saw the wicked prosper and the good cast down. There isvery little about ritual in the Psalms; it is regarded chiefly as anoffering of thanks and praise to Jehovah for his wonderful works, andfor his mercies; and it is viewed ideally as an act of homage inwhich not only the immediate worshippers, but all nations on theearth may be conceived as taking part. On the other hand, theobservance of Jehovah's moral requirements, and implicit trust in himwhile one seeks to do his will, is insisted on again and again, asthe true method to please him, and to obtain his protection againstall dangers. There are few moods of the religious life that are notrepresented in the Psalms: penitence, intellectual perplexity, domestic sorrow, feebleness, loneliness, the approach of death, theexcitement of great events, the agony of persecution, quietcontemplation of nature, each has its word. The imprecations of someof the Psalms show a trait of the national character without whichthe picture would be incomplete. It may be in part extenuated by theconsideration that in these Psalms it is the community that speaks, and that the enemy of the good cause deserves less forbearance thanthe private adversary. Whether the Psalms in general are to beconceived as uttered by the community rather than as privateoutpourings, is a question not yet decided. In either sense thePsalms have been used and are still used as the hymn-book ofChristendom, as well as of the Jews; and it will always be awonderful feature in the religion of Israel, that so soon after thetruth of the one God was discovered by the prophets, it received aform of expression which has proved fitted for the use of everynation in the world. 

The Jews after the exile are in possession of a new form of religiousassociation which belongs to a high stage of growth. The templeworship is one in which the ordinary layman has no part, or only anoccasional part to play. The priest does everything in it; even thesinging of Psalms is done by choirs of priests. And the dweller inthe country might rarely be a witness of these great solemnities. Butwe know that in the Maccabean period the country was covered withsynagogues: with buildings, that is to say, where the surroundingpopulation met on the Sabbath, and perhaps on other days as well, tojoin in common prayer, and to hear lessons of Scripture andexhortations. Some local religious meeting was necessary; an earnestpeople could not do without it, and the local sacrifices were now ofthe past. But the synagogue service marks a great advance in thereligious position of the Jews. They can now meet without any act orsacrament which they have to do in common, to engage in purelyintellectual religious exercises. The same advance, as we shall see, took place in Greece about the same time; what moral or religiousfurtherance they wanted, the earnest there began to seek from thelectures of philosophers. The synagogue, however, was a territorialinstitution; all the Jews in the neighbourhood came to its services. It kept them acquainted with the law which otherwise they might haveforgotten, and also with the writings of the prophets, which wereregularly read, and thus strengthened the bonds which held all Jewstogether, in the past history and in the growing hopes of their race. 

The National Hopes. --Judaism becomes more and more, as befits a faithof which prophets are the principal exponents, a religion of hope. Debarred by their subjection under successive heathen powers frompolitical activity, and keenly aware of their outward humiliation, the Jews turn to an ideal world in which they are free. The prophetshad spoken of a judgment in which Jehovah would judge the wholeworld, of a happy time when Israel would be at peace from all hisenemies, and God and people would dwell together in full communion;and when the land of Israel would become the religious capital of theworld. They had added to their picture features even more ideal, andhad declared that the conflicts of external nature would cease, thewild animals would grow tame and friendly, all physical as well asall moral evil would disappear. It was in this world, not in a remoteregion or in the land beyond death, that all this was to be realised. Jerusalem is the centre of the picture and the Jewish nation standsin the foreground of it as the chosen people of the God of all theworld. Now these predictions, which with the prophets are vague andidealised, were taken by the Jews always more seriously and workedout in detail. After the prophet comes the apocalyptic writer, suchas Daniel (the Apocalypse of the New Testament belongs to the sameclass of literature), who is able to give the exact course of thehistory which is to lead up to the final judgment, to fix its precisedate, and to give many details of the ultimate state of affairs. These "revelations, " which were written generally to comfort the Jewsin their trials and to encourage them to steadfastness inpersecution, were very popular. It is true that they nourished thenational pride, and enabled the Jew to feel himself superior to aworld in which he occupied outwardly no great position; but on theother hand the hopes they fed were not necessarily unspiritual; atthe Christian era we find it to be a mark of the most genuine pietythat one should be "waiting for the redemption of Israel. " At thisperiod the national hope was occupied with the figure of a Messiah, aGod-sent Deliverer, whose coming was to be the prelude to theestablishment of the divine kingdom. We learn from the Gospels whatvarious ideas were entertained by the Jews of the first century aboutthis "coming one, " and how little Jesus Christ was felt to answer tothe common expectation. 

A few words must be said of Jewish beliefs concerning the otherworld. While there are traces of an old ancestor-worship in theearlier parts of Jewish history, no belief of the kind had muchimportance in Israel. The Jews shared the general belief of the earlyworld that the dead continued in a shadowy existence without anypower for action. They have an under-world, Sheol, where the deadare; Isaiah has a magnificent description of the dead kings sittingon thrones together in Sheol and rising up to greet a newcomer whowas a great potentate on earth, with the words "Art thou also becomeweak as we? Art thou become like unto us?" The dead are conceived ascontinuing in a weak and unsubstantial reflection of their formerselves. They can be fetched up to the earth by magic arts to tell thefuture, but this was strictly forbidden at a very early time. ThePsalms and other later books contain many plain denials that man hasany continuance to look for after death. The religion of the OldTestament, as has often been said, is for this life. God's rewardsare to be looked for before death; once gone to the grave one can nomore enjoy God's bounty or give him thanks. God's kingdom of thefuture is also a kingdom of this world; Jerusalem is its capital, andnature is to be transformed for it. In the later period of Jewishhistory, however, the hope of the future which has been so entirelyabandoned, which Job, for example, in an early chapter puts soperemptorily away from him, creates itself afresh in a new form. Inthe time of Christ the Jews believe, as a matter of course, that menwill rise again. It has been contended that the Jews derived theirlater doctrine of a future life from their contact with Persia, butit is not necessary to account for it in this way. It arose naturallyamong the Jews in more ways than one. The individual believer likeJob, entirely sure of his own innocence, and feeling that he wasdoomed to die of his disease without any vindication in this life, claimed that an opportunity should be found beyond the grave topronounce the sentence which a just God could not omit to give. InDaniel xii. It is foretold that men of conspicuous virtue and men ofconspicuous wickedness will have a resurrection--the former to sharethe glories of the kingdom from which as teachers and martyrs theycould not be wanting, the latter to receive their punishment. And asprophets who have been long dead are expected to return to the earth, the gate of death is not so firmly closed as formerly and the beliefin a future life easily became current. 

Thus Judaism comes to be a religion full of contradictions, and couldnot as a whole pass to other nations. The temple and the synagoguerepresent opposite principles of worship. The Jew feels himself to beentrusted with a world-religion, and yet shuts himself up in suchexclusiveness as to draw upon himself the hatred of all peoples, andto be charged in turn with hatred of the human race. A religion offaith and love consorts with a religion of rules and limitations. Ifthe faith of Israel was to fulfil its mission to the world it wasnecessary that some one should come who could purge thisthreshing-floor, burning the chaff and gathering up the wheat to bethe seed of the progress of mankind. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The Books of the Old Testament, including the Apocrypha, in theRevised Version. 

The Histories of Israel; Ewald, Kuenen, Wellhausen, Stade. 

Robertson Smith's _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, andarticles in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. 

Smend's _Alttestamentliche Religionsgeschichte_. 

Stade, _Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments_, 1905. 

For a criticism of the critical historians the reader may consult_The Early Religion of Israel_, by Prof. James Robertson. 

Prof. Valeton, _Die Israeliten_, in De la Saussaye. 

Schürer, _History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ_, 1885-90. 

Kantzsch, "Religion of Israel, " in _Dictionary of the Bible_, vol. V. 

E. J. Foakes-Jackson, _The Biblical History of the Hebrews_, SecondEdition. 

CHAPTER XIIIISLAM

In chronological order Islam stands last of all the great religions;it appeared six centuries after Christianity, and Christian ideasenter into it. It is, however, so essentially Semitic that it canonly be understood aright if studied in connection with the group nowoccupying our attention. In Islam Semitic religion opens its arms toembrace mankind, and accomplishes, in a fashion, the destiny to whichJudaism was invited, but which Judaism failed to realise till it wastransformed in Christianity. In Islam Semitic religion is nottransformed, but enters in its own stern and uncompromising characterinto the position of a universal faith. 

This religion sprang up and entered on its career of conquest withstartling suddenness and even, some scholars hold, without anynatural preparation for its coming in the country of its birth. TheArabs called the period before Islam the "time of ignorance"; in thatperiod they considered their race had no history; the new religion, when it arose, had made a clean sweep of all that had gone before, and had caused a new world to begin. The labours of Arabic scholarshave, however, done something to dispel the mists which hung overearly Arabia, and it is possible both to give a much moresatisfactory sketch than formerly of the earlier religion of theArabs, and to discern to some extent the processes which hadunconsciously been preparing for the advent of a higher and strongerfaith. 

Arabia before Mahomet. --The Arabs of the central peninsula in thetimes before Mahomet were not a nation but a set of tribes--mostlynomadic, but some of them settled in cities, who, while united bylanguage, custom, and traditions, had no central government ororganisation. The desert which they inhabited, as it admitted nocultivation, kept human life uniform and unprogressive; externalinfluences penetrated slowly into this corner of the world, andsociety was still arranged as it had been for thousands of years. Thestrongest tie was that of blood. A man's fellow-tribesmen were boundto avenge his murder; and so one slaughter led to another, and fromgeneration to generation the land was filled with a perpetual seriesof blood-feuds. Twice a year, however, a cessation of these feudstook place; a month came round in which there was a universal truce. Men who were enemies then made the same pilgrimage to a distantshrine; at such a time trade caravans could set out and travel insafety; and the great markets or festivals then took place, which, while based at first on religious ideas, had in most part ceased tohave any religious character. Some of these markets were, at the timeof Mahomet, national occasions: men of every tribe met and came toknow each other there; the poetry which had been composed during thepreceding months was publicly recited, so that the rise of a new poetwas known to all Arabia; the news of all the tribes circulated, andforeign ideas and doctrines were also to be heard. In proportion asthe face of nature was hard and forbidding, social life was brightand gay; wine, women, wit, and war provided the themes of poets andthe ordinary aims of life. 

The Old Religion. --It has generally been said that the Arabs beforeIslam were irreligious. They themselves contrasted the sternness ofthe new period with the gaiety of the old one. The truth is, asWellhausen has admirably shown, [1] that the working religion of thecountry had become before the period of Islam entirely effete. Arabreligion was based on the ideas and usages which have been describedin chap. X. Of this book; it is mainly from Arabia, indeed, that theoriginal character of Semitic religion is known to us. Each tribe hadits god, whom it regarded as a magnified master or ruler, and withwhom it held communion by sacrifice, the blood being brought incontact with the god and the victim devoured by the tribesmen. Thegod is represented sometimes by a tree, generally by a stone; a pieceof fertile land belongs to him, within which the plants and animalsare sacred; the religious meeting can be held in no other spot. Hencethe Arabs are said to be stone worshippers; but the phrase is anawkward one: what they worshipped was not the stone but a godconnected with it. And the early gods of Arabia are a motley company;it is only in their relations to their worshippers and in the orderof the worship paid them that they have some uniformity. The greatestand oldest deity of the Arabs is Allat or Alilat, "the Lady. " Likethe female deity found in all primitive Semitic religions, she is astately and commanding lady. She is not the wife of a god, nor areunseemly ideas connected with her. She belongs to the early world inwhich motherhood was synonymous with rule, since the family had nomale head; she has a character but no history: mythology has notgathered round her. Arabia has also certain nature-gods. The stellardeities are mostly female; there is a male sun-god Dusares. Heaven isworshipped by some, not the blue but the rainy heaven, which is asource of blessings. There are no gods belonging to the region underthe earth. The serpent is the only animal that receives worship. 

[Footnote 1: _Reste Arabischen Heidenthums_, p. 188. ]

But the gods of Arabia belong mostly to another class than that ofnature-gods; or at least if they ever were connected with nature, they have parted with such associations. They are uncouth figures, with vague legends and miscellaneous attributes. One set of them issaid to have been worshipped by the contemporaries of Noah; they arebig men, and it is their property to drink milk. Hubal was the chiefgod of Mecca. It was his property to bring rain. Vadd was a greatman, with two garments, and a sword and spear, bow and quiver. Jaghuth, "the Helper, " was a portable god, not a stone probably, since he was carried into battle by his tribe, as the ark was by theIsraelites. Another god is called "the Burner, " no doubt from thesacrifices offered to him. Each tribe has its god or set of gods, andcertain sacred objects connected with its gods. One god is found bythose who kiss or rub a certain black stone, another in connectionwith a white stone, another with a tree. And of many of them thereare images; the stone has some work done on it, or there is a woodenblock roughly hewn. The "Caaba" is originally a black stone which iskissed or rubbed at Mecca. The name was given, however, to thecube-shaped building, in one of the walls of which the black stonehad been fixed. In this building there stood in old days images ofAbraham and Ishmael, each with divining arrows in his hand. Of suchidols a large number existed in Mahomet's time, and were destroyed byhim. In some cases the image had a house, and a person was needed toguard it; this functionary also kept some simple apparatus forcasting lots or otherwise obtaining counsel from the deity, and oathsand vows were made before him, to which the deity became a witness. 

To these beliefs of early Arabia must be added a lively belief injinns, spirits who are not gods, since the gods are above the earth, but the jinn is compelled to haunt some part of the earth's surface. The jinns can assume any form they choose, and are often met with inthe shape of serpents. Wellhausen surmises that the seraphs of theJews are to be traced to some such origin. They infest desert places, and are nocturnal in their habits. What they do is often not observedtill afterwards. They spy upon the gods, and may bring informationfrom above to men whom they haunt or with whom they are in league. Ofthe magic of Arabia, the signs and omens drawn from birds, fromdreams, and other occurrences, it is not necessary to speak; and weneed only say, in concluding this rough sketch of the ideas of theearly Arabs, that the belief in a life beyond was very faint; theyset out food for the dead, whom they professed to think of as stillexisting, but the belief, if they entertained it, was perfunctory andhad no influence. 

Confusion of Worship. --At the period of Islam the worship of Arabiahad fallen into great confusion. The gods were stationary, but thetribes wandered; and the consequence was that the wandering tribeleft its shrine behind it to be cared for by its successors in thatpiece of country, and itself also, when it gained a new seat, succeeded to the guardianship of a new god. Thus, on the one hand, the worship of each shrine was constantly gathering new associations, as each tribe which had been there left behind it some new legend orpractice; and on the other hand, pilgrimage became universal, sinceeach tribe had to pay periodical visits to its gods whom it had leftbehind. At Mecca we read of hundreds of idols; a hundred tribes haveleft there something of their own. Thus Mecca became a sacred placefor tribes far and near, and rose into national importance; and thesame was the case to a less degree in other places also. But as thisprocess went on, it inevitably led to the weakening of religion. Thetie of blood, which was felt always, was a far stronger thing thanthe tie of a common worship for which the tribe had to go to anotherpart of the country, and to come in contact with a multitude of othercults. Worship therefore became more and more a superstition: athing, that is to say, whose real sacredness was in the past, andwhich was only kept up from pious habit; it did not supply theinspiration of ordinary life nor guide the more active minds amongthe people. 

We have not yet spoken of Allah, who is understood to be the god _parexcellence_ of Arabia. But for this there is a good reason. Allah isnot, like the other beings we have spoken of, a historical god, witha legend, a shrine, a tribe all to himself. He is not a historicalpersonage, but an idea consolidated, no doubt at an early period, into a god. Wellhausen traces the rise of Allah for us in a mostinteresting way. The name, he shows, is not a proper name thatbelonged to one particular figure in the pantheon of Arabia; it isthe title which the Arab conferred on his god, whatever the propername of that being might be. Whatever god he worshipped, he calledhim Allah, Lord; and thus every Arabic god was Allah, as every headof a household has the name of "father" and every monarch that of"king. " And as every tribal god was Allah, the thought arose, nodoubt in very early times, of one god who was common to the tribes. Language paved the way for thought; while the tribal gods were stillbelieved in and adored, this figure rose above them--a being who hasno special worship of his own, who does not ask for it nor need it, but who yet fills, as none of the lesser beings does, the characterof deity. Allah was the god of all the tribes; and as his figure grewin the mind of the country, it was inevitable that the worship of thehistorical gods should still further lose its importance, till onlythe women and children really cared for it. A monotheism of a graveand earnest kind thus made its way beside the old belief in manygods. Mahomet found that his fellow-countrymen did not really believein the minor gods; when they were in danger or in urgent need of anyblessing, it was to Allah that they called. The fall of the idols, when it came about, took place very easily; they were no longerneeded. The Arabs had come to believe in a god who dwelt in heavenand was the creator of the world, who ordained man's life with anirreversible decree, by whom the bitter and the sweet, both thehitting of the mark and the missing it, were alike fixed. The moralcharacter of Allah was not markedly in advance of that of his people. What a man gains by robbery he calls the gift of Allah, while what isgained by industry is called by another name. Yet Allah is also feltby some to keep them back from robbery; he powerfully upholds themoral standards which have been reached. He is the defender ofstrangers, the avenger of treason. His moral influence is negative, however, rather than positive. He does not inspire with ideals ofgoodness; but he holds back from evil. He is not a being who is everlikely to enter, like the God of the Jews, into intimate andaffectionate relations with men; he is too abstract and has toolittle history to be capable of such unbending; his religion, when itcomes to be fully formed, will be one of puritans and fanatics ratherthan of the meek and lowly. He is the one great instance of a godwithout any natural basis who has come to exercise rule. He is a godof whom reason can thoroughly approve--no absurd legends cling tohim; he is from the first great, mighty, and moral; and he rules theworld in righteousness by inflexible standards. This religion iscoming to the surface even in the "time of ignorance. "

Judaism and Christianity in Arabia. --The question has been muchdiscussed whether the new religion of Arabia was due to contact withJudaism or with Christianity. Both of these faiths were known inArabia before the time of the Prophet. There was a large Jewishpopulation at Medina, and synagogues existed in many other places;and there were Christians in Arabia, though their Christianity wasthat only of small sects and of lonely ascetics, and had failed toconvert the country as a whole. To the Arabs the Jews were "thepeople of the Book, " the book in the traditions of which they alsohad some share. Ignorant themselves for the most part of the arts ofreading and writing, and divided among a multitude of petty worshipswhich they were ceasing to respect, they looked up with envy to thosewhose faith had been fixed for so many ages in a literary standard. But while the Jews were respected in Arabia, they were far frompopular. The qualities which have drawn down on them the bitterhatred of modern peoples among whom they dwell, acted there in thesame way; their pride and exclusiveness, their keenness in business, their profession as money-lenders, made them detested in Arabia as inmodern Germany. On the other hand, the ascetic view of life which theChristians represented had attractions even for some of the higherminds among the Arabs. A set of men called "Hanyfs" were well knownin Mahomet's time, who were seeking for a better religion than theArab worships afforded, and a better life than that of eternal feud. The meaning of the name is controverted; those to whom it was appliedhad not attached themselves to Judaism nor to Christianity; they werepeople in earnest about religion who had not reached any definiteposition. Even where, as with Mahomet himself, the facts of Judaismand of Christianity were most inaccurately known, the view of Godheld in these religions and the moral standard they set up could notfail to exercise much influence. If in Arab thought itself a god likeAllah was rising to definite personal character and to a position ofgreat superiority over the old gods, then the inner movement was inthe same direction as the influence of older religions from without, and the time was ripe for a new faith. It was not to be expected thata people like the Arabs should accept a religion which had its originin another country, or which threatened like Christianity to bring toan end the old tribal system; a new growth from within was needed, and this was ready to appear. 

The beginnings of most religions are wrapt in obscurity; but the riseof Islam is known to us with perfect certainty and in considerabledetail. The only difficulties in the way of understanding it are of apsychological nature; we have to account for the foundation of areligion which spread with lightning speed over many lands, and whichstill continues to spread, by one whose character was in somerespects far from noble, and who was capable of stooping tocompromise and to the darkest treachery in order to gain his ends. How a religion fitted for many races and many generations of mencould be founded by a barbarian and by the aid of barbarousmeans--that is the problem of this religion. The materials forsolving it lie open before us. The Koran is undoubtedly the authenticwork of Mahomet himself: the suras or chapters are arranged in awrong order, and if they are read as they stand do not tell anyintelligible story; but when placed, as has now been done byscholars, [2] in the true historical order, they show the history ofMahomet's mind with great clearness. After the Koran came thetraditions. From the immense volume of these the industry of thescholars of Islam as well as others has succeeded in sifting out whatis most to be relied on. In no other case is the separation of themythical from the historical element in the early traditions soeasily made, and the religion comes into view in the full light ofday. 

[Footnote 2: S. Lane-Poole, _The Speeches of Mohammad_, 1882; themost important parts of the Koran chronologically arranged with avery useful introduction. ]

Mahomet. Early Life. --Mahomet was born about 570 A. D. , of a familybelonging to the Mecca branch of the Coreish, a powerful tribe, whocarried on a large caravan trade with Syria, and who were theguardians of the sanctuary which was the central point of Arabianreligion. He entered therefore from his birth into the centre of thefaith of his country. He was early left an orphan, and was brought upby relatives, who were kind to him but who were very poor. He had tomake his living at an early age by herding sheep, an occupation whichconduced in his case, as it has done in others, to contemplation andthought. In early manhood he entered the service of Khadija, a richwidow; and he made journeys in her affairs to Syria and Palestine, where he may have seen places famous in Jewish history and may alsohave come in contact with Christianity. At the age of twenty-five hemarried Khadija, who was fifteen years older than himself; themarriage was a happy one, and there were several children. He isdescribed as a man of middle height, with a fair skin, a pleasantcountenance, and pleasing manners; and he had proved his ability inbusiness. Some years after his marriage he began to think deeplyabout religious subjects. He came into connection apparently withsome of those Hanyfs or penitents, mentioned above, who, withoutbeing formed into a sect, were at one in seeking for a moresatisfactory religious position. The religion to which they werefeeling their way was a monotheism, a service of the one God ofAbraham, but not that of Judaism with its exaltation of the Jewishrace, nor that of Christianity, in which God had a Son for hiscompanion. Submission to the one God was to them the essence ofreligion. "Islam" means submission, and the "Moslem" is the personwho thus submits himself to the one sole God, whether he be Jew orChristian or neither. The Hanyfs also held the belief of theChristians in a coming judgment; and the effect of their beliefs ontheir lives was that they practised austerities and often retiredfrom the world. 

His Religious Impressions. --Mahomet at this part of his life beganalso to withdraw himself, and to go apart to lonely spots formeditation. What he meditated we see from his sayings and doingsafterwards. The contrast between the pure religion of Allah, as heldby the Hanyfs, and the popular religion of Mecca with which his birthconnected him, with its trade associations, its idols, itsunintelligible rites, was certainly a tremendous one; and if ajudgment was impending over all but the believers in Allah, it was aterrible prospect. For many years, however, Mahomet was simply aHanyf. He was one who had surrendered himself, with a tender andimpressionable soul, to the divine will and guidance, and was filledwith the sense of Allah's presence and power, and of his ownaccountability to him in the great and tremendous realities of life. In addition to this, however, we have to mention a circumstance whichis generally thought to have had a determining influence in Mahomet'sproduction of Islam. He had a peculiar temperament; mental excitementled in him to inner catastrophes which, whether they are classedunder epilepsy or hysteria, caused him to see visions and to believethat certain words had been addressed to him by heavenly visitants. The new religious movement in Arabia had secured an adherent in whomits teachings would be felt with tremendous intensity, and wouldpossibly break forth with irresistible force. 

The Revelations. --Mahomet was forty years of age when the thoughtswhich had long been working within him burst into open expression. This took place by means of a vision. An angel appeared to him as heslept on Mount Hira on one of his nightly wanderings, and held ascroll before him which he bade him read. He had not learned to read, but the angel insisted, and so he read; and what he read was theearliest revealed piece of the Koran (sura 96):--

 Read, [3] in the name of thy Lord who created, created man from a drop. Read, for thy Lord is the Most High, who hath taught by the pen, hath taught to man what he knew not. Nay, truly man walketh in delusion when he deemeth that he sufficeth for himself; to thy Lord they must all return. 

All men, _i. E. _, however they may think, as the Arabs were givento think, that they need no help but that of their own right arm, must come before Allah's judgment and render an account to him:this is the doctrine by which Mahomet first appealed to hisfellow-countrymen. It is a revelation. Allah teaches it by sendingdown a copy of what is written in the Book in heaven, the "mother ofthe Book" from which all revelations, Jewish, Christian, or Mahomet'sown, are alike derived. Mahomet has thus begun to prophesy. The firstoutburst of revelation threw him into great agitation; he thought hewas possessed by a jinn; and it tended to his further distress thatan interval of two or three years elapsed before another vision tookplace. Then the vision came again. "Rise up and warn!" it said tohim; "and thy Lord magnify, and thy garments purify, and abominationshun, and grant not favours to gain increase; and wait for thy Lord. "The revelations now began to come in rapid succession, and Mahometnow believed in his own inspiration. In this conviction he neverwavered afterwards; and there can be no doubt that the earlierrevelations were felt by him as if they came from without and weredictated by a power he could not resist. His fellow-countrymennaturally took another view; like other prophets, Mahomet was said tobe mad and to be possessed by a spirit; and these accusations stunghim, because he himself had at first apprehended something of thekind. The later pieces were of a different character; he had thepower afterwards of producing a revelation to suit any situationwhich arose; but the contents of the earlier ones were not unworthyof being revelations, and such he felt them to be. 

[Footnote 3: Or, Preach!--loud reading or repetition being the modeof claiming attention for the divine word. ]

His Preaching. --He preached the new truth at first to those with whomhe was intimate. It was not new but old; it was the religion ofAbraham that he preached, that of the Book of which both Jews andChristians had counterparts; he did not think of founding a newreligion. He called his own household and his relatives to submitthemselves to Allah, the supreme Lord and the righteous Judge, beforewhose judgment they must soon stand. They were to put away heathenvices and to practise the duty of regular prayer, of giving almswithout hoping for any advantage from it, and of temperance. After atime he is encouraged by new suras to preach publicly, and does so. The Meccans, however, do not listen to him. The prophet's preachingacquires by this opposition a sternness it did not possess at first, and he proceeds to attack the popular worship in a way fitted to stirup against him the bitterest hostility. The Meccans hear from himthat the religion to which all Arabia flocks together, and withoutwhich they would do little trade, is not only a vanity but a thingabhorrent to Allah, and undoubtedly drawing down damnation on all whopartake in it; and that their forefathers are unquestionably in hell. Such preaching could not be tolerated; Mahomet's friends are appealedto to stop his mouth, but in vain, and his fellow-tribesmen, thoughthey do not believe in him, yet protect him, as the laws of kindredrequire. 

Persecution. --Mahomet suffers as other prophets have done; he isridiculed, misjudged, threatened. On the other hand he has hisconsolations; when depressed he receives encouraging messages fromabove. His enemies will perish; his cause will succeed; the day willcome when men will flock to his doctrine in crowds. Persecution, however, is not without effect on him: on one occasion he attemptedto compromise matters with idolatry; in a sura recited at the Caabahe allowed himself to use certain complimentary expressions about thethree daughters of Allah, in whom the Meccans put their trust. TheMeccans were much pleased with this, but Mahomet had to suffer thereproaches of the angel Gabriel after he went home, and theconcession was erelong withdrawn. If, as appears likely, thecompromise had been deliberately planned, a strange light is thrownon the nature of the revelations at a time not long after they hadbegun to flow. But there is no approach to compromise after this. Theposition of the prophet naturally grew worse after this display ofweakness, and the persecution of the townsmen more embittered; fortwo years Mahomet and his followers were rigorously cut off fromintercourse with their fellow-citizens. On the other hand theprophet's tone became harder and more sombre as he saw that noturning back was possible. Never were the terrors of hell preachedwith more intensity; it makes one's blood run cold to read thedenunciations of the Mecca unbelievers, men personally known to theprophet, and to hear him forecast the words with which they will bebidden to take their place for ever in the fire. Personal irritationgives edge to the denunciations of fanaticism. Examples are sought inJewish history of those who rejected prophets, Moses or Noah, andsuffered a prompt and terrible judgment for so doing. The Meccanswere little moved by such threats; they had no real belief in afuture life, and scoffed at the idea of a resurrection of the body;and for this scepticism also parallels are found by the prophet inhistory, which show what fate the doubters may expect. 

From reading the Koran we should judge Mahomet to have been adisagreeable fanatic; but he also possessed very different qualities. Those who knew him best were most devoted to him. His followersadhered to him with a faith which was proof against all persecutions;we find him even ordaining that slaves who are converts may dissembletheir connection with him in order to avoid the cruel treatment itdrew down on them. Such attachment could only have been inspired by anoble nature; his followers felt him to be indeed a teacher sent byAllah, and were enthusiastically convinced of the truth of hisdoctrine. 

Trials. He decides to leave Mecca. --In spite of this his position wasa precarious and trying one. His wife Khadija, to whom he had beenmost faithful, died; so did his most powerful protector. The cause, moreover, was not advancing at Mecca, and was not likely to do so;and Mahomet began to consider the propriety of transferring it to newground. The first attempt to do so was not successful; at Taif, wherehe asked to be received and to be allowed to preach, he was rudelyrepulsed, so that he came back to Mecca in deep dejection. The newopening which he sought was, however, about to present itself inanother quarter. Among the visitors to one of the feasts he met acompany of pilgrims from Medina, who both addressed him with respectand showed that they understood his doctrines. Medina was wellacquainted with Jewish ideas, and presented a more favourable soilfor the prophet to work on; it is even suggested that the Arabs ofMedina, having heard of the Jewish expectation of a Messiah, considered that it would be an advantage for them if the Messiahshould be of their own race, and that Mahomet might possibly be He. The transference of the cause to Medina was, however, brought aboutwith great deliberation. Those who wished Mahomet to come preachedhis doctrine at Medina for a year, and with encouraging success. Pledges were given and repeated by his friends there, that they wouldhave no god but Allah, that they would withhold their hands from whatwas not their own, that they would flee fornication, that they wouldnot kill new-born infants, that they would shun slander, and thatthey would obey God's messenger as far as was reasonable:--these arethe practical reforms which Islam at this time demanded. The resultof these proceedings was that Mahomet advised his followers to go toMedina. He himself waited till nearly all had gone, and did not setout till a plot had been laid by his enemies the Coreish toassassinate him. The Hegira or flight took place on 16th June 622A. D. The flight, not the birth of the prophet, forms the era ofMohammedan chronology, since it was from the moment of the flightthat Islam entered on its victorious career. 

Mahomet at Medina. --From this point onwards the prophet is seen in adifferent position and a different character. At Mecca he is apersecuted, struggling, and unsuccessful preacher, but at Medina herapidly becomes the most powerful person in the commonwealth. Heorganises the service of religion, but he also gives new life to thecommunity in other ways, terminating its feuds, uniting all itsforces in the service of Allah, and by his decisions in the caseswhich are brought to him laying the foundation of a newjurisprudence. A pure theocracy was set up at Medina, and he as theprophet was its sole organ and administrator. In this capacity hedisplayed consummate ability. Alike in religious and in civil mattershe showed the most perfect comprehension of his countrymen. Heresorted freely to compromise in order to make his religion andpolicy suitable to the masses of his people and to secure theiradhesion. In this way he soon secured for himself an absoluteauthority. 

The new religion thus became the cement by which a strongcommonwealth was formed out of elements formerly at variance. Mahomet's first care on reaching Medina was to organise the serviceof the faith. A place was built where the congregation could meet forprayer and exhortation; the prophet's house beside it, or rather theapartments of his wives, for he now had two, and was soon to havemore. The mosque, which all over the world is the local habitation ofIslam, may have been derived from the synagogue or the Christianchurch. The service which takes place in it is not a sacrifice, butconsists of intellectual exercises which nourish in the hearers thespirit of the religion. In the Mosque of Medina Mahomet taught hisconverts the practices and duties which were required of them. Hetaught this with great precision, and himself set an example how eachexercise was to be done; so that, as Wellhausen says, the mosquebecame the exercise ground where the people were drilled in therequirements of the new faith. "There the Moslems acquired the_esprit de corps_ and the rigid discipline which distinguish theirarmies. "

New Religious Union. --A new bond of union thus took the place of theold tie of blood, which had been by far the strongest in Arabia. Every Moslem regarded every other Moslem as his brother, even thoughbelonging to a different tribe. The claims of religion came tosupersede all others; all natural tastes, all family affections, weretaught to yield to them. Within a few years of his coming to MedinaMahomet had forbidden the use of wine and the pursuit of art, and hadimposed on all women who adhered to him the use of the veil. In everyway the community was taught to regard itself as separated from theformer life of the country and from all who did not share the newfaith. It was represented as the duty of believers to fight againstall unbelievers: in this way the universal prevalence of the religionwas to be brought about. The courage of the faithful was stimulatedby the promise of rich booty and by the assurance that those who fellin battle would go straight to the joys of Paradise; and the warsthey waged acquired in consequence a relentless character which wasnew in Arabia. They were allowed to fight in the sacred month, inwhich ancient custom ordained a universal truce. They fought with agloomy determination, and used their victories with a relentlesscruelty, which excited the consternation and horror of all witnesses. They did not scruple, as other Arabs did, to fight against theirkinsmen. "Islam has rent all bonds asunder, Islam has blotted out alltreaties, " they said, when reproached with their disregard of oldunderstandings. The prophet himself was foremost in this unrelentingpolicy. Captives taken in battle were slaughtered; a whole tribe wasmassacred which had joined the enemy, and had surrendered after asiege in the hope of merciful treatment. 

Breach with Judaism and Christianity. --As Mahomet thus freed himself, in spreading the faith of "the most merciful God, " from allconsiderations of mercy and of honour, he also shook off, as hisposition grew strong, relations which might have proved embarrassingwith other religions. In his earlier teaching he speaks of his ownreligion as being substantially the same as Judaism and Christianity. All three have "the Book"; the Koran is a continuation and supplementof the Jewish and Christian revelations, and he is only the lastfigure in the great line of prophets who had appeared in thesereligions. Like other founders, he did not at first intend to found anew religion, but only to bring to light again and restore toauthority the original truths of these faiths, which had becomeobscured. His attitude at first, therefore, was friendly to both Jewsand Christians, and his friendly feelings for the former were likelyto be strengthened by the circumstances of his coming to Medina. Notlong after his arrival, however, his attitude towards the Jews waschanged. His followers had at first prayed with their faces turned inthe direction of Jerusalem; but the prophet ordained that this shouldbe altered, and that they should pray with their faces turned nottowards Jerusalem but towards Mecca. This setting of a new "kiblah"as it is called, declared that Islam was a different religion fromJudaism, and had an Arab not a Jewish centre. The hostility to theJews, of which this was a symptom, grew more intense; quarrels weresought with them which ended in the utter annihilation of the Jewishpower at Medina. From Christianity also Mahomet was careful todistinguish his religion. The Christians of Arabia were lesstenacious of their faith than were the Jews, and easily acceptedIslam, so that the hostility was not in this case so intense. Thedoctrines of the Trinity and of the Incarnation were of coursedenounced as intolerable blasphemies against the sole deity of Allah. 

Domestic. --The history of Mahomet during the Medina period is takenup to some extent with the various marriages into which he entered, and with the scandals of his household. On several occasions heproduced revelations to warrant a step in this connection which hefelt to require justification, and the modern reader is forced towonder how his credit survived some of those proceedings. While it isundoubtedly the case that he did much to improve the position ofwomen in Arabia, the absence of any high ideal in this matter is veryapparent. 

Conquest of Mecca. --In giving his followers a new kiblah and biddingthem turn their faces towards Mecca at their prayers, Mahometdeclared that city to be the religious capital of Arabia. Though hehad left Mecca in anger, he could not forget or ignore the city whichheld this place in his eyes. At first his thoughts of Mecca werethose of vengeance; he had a score to settle with the Coreish, whohad scorned and persecuted him, and had driven him forth. For severalyears there was war between Medina and the Coreish; the Moslemsplundered the rich caravans of Mecca; in the great battle of Bedr(A. D. 623) Mahomet defeated his enemies and compelled them to respectand fear him; and they afterwards attacked and besieged him atMedina, with no decisive result. The next step was that Mahomet madeuse of the sacred month to attempt a pilgrimage to Mecca, from whichhe had been absent for six years (628); and though he was preventedfrom performing his devotions at the Caaba on this occasion, theCoreish found it good to make a treaty with him, thus recognising himas a potentate, and to promise that he should be allowed to make thepilgrimage on a future occasion. That pilgrimage took place; and soquickly was Mahomet's power increasing in the rest of Arabia that theMeccans began to feel that they could not long resist him. In theyear 630 he moved against Mecca with a large army, and met with butfaint opposition. Mecca fell into his hands. He used his victorynobly: only four persons were put to death. It was at once shown thatno injury was to be done to the city. The old worship and its variousceremonies were preserved. All idols, of course, were destroyed, boththose about the Caaba, of which there are said to have been one foreach day in the year, and those in private houses. 

Mecca made the Capital of Islam. --In fact Mecca gained new importancefrom this conquest. It was constituted by the irresistible power ofMahomet the central sanctuary of the true religion. A year after thevictory Mahomet again visited Mecca, and performed the pilgrimagewith all its rites in his own person, setting the correct pattern inevery detail, which all pilgrims were to observe in all time coming. Those who wish to know what the rites of Mecca are, will find themgraphically and minutely described in Captain Burton's _Pilgrimage toEl-Medinah and Mecca_; that gallant officer was one of the threeEuropeans who, during the nineteenth century, assumed the disguise ofpilgrims and took part in the observances. The kissing of the sacredblack stone in the wall of the Caaba, the sevenfold circuit of thebuilding, the drinking of the water of the well Zem-zem, the racefrom one hill-top to another in the neighbourhood of Mecca, thethrowing of seven stones at a certain spot, and the sacrifice of ananimal in a certain valley--these form a collection of rites each ofwhich had probably a separate origin, and of some of which theoriginal meaning can scarcely be made out. [4] This "block ofheathenism" Mahomet made part of his religion. He could not haveabolished it, and by adopting it in an improved form as a part of hisown system he served himself heir to the national religioustraditions, and acquired for his own religion the authority of anational faith. "This day have I appointed your religion unto you, "are his words after fixing the forms of the pilgrimage, "and appliedIslam for you to be your religion. " Islam adopts the Mecca rites, andthereby becomes the national religion of Arabia. Hubal, the chief godof the Caaba, disappears; Allah becomes the sole god of the shrine. The legend that Abraham founded it is put in circulation, and it isthus connected with the supposed earliest Arabian religion, thereligion before idolatry, the Islam before Islam. As Paul appeals tothe faith of Abraham as being a Christianity before Christ, soMahomet claims the Caaba for the pure worship of Allah in primevaltimes. It is sacred henceforth to him alone. The rule was set up thatno idolater should be admitted to the pilgrimage, and it thus lostits character as a heathen, and became instead a Moslem, institution. 

[Footnote 4: See for this Wellhausen's _Reste arabischenHeidenthums_, pp. 64-98. ]

Spread of Islam. --Mecca once converted, the rest of Arabia could notlong remain outside. There was reluctance in various places to makethe change which Mahomet now required of all his countrymen. But thepenalty of refusing it was the prophet's wrath, with its terribleattendants, war and rapine, and none of the Arabs cared enough fortheir old gods to brave such terrors for their sake. The inhabitantsof Taif endeavoured to make terms, so that the change might be lessabrupt. Their ambassadors urged that fornication, usury, and the useof wine might be allowed them, but this could not be granted; theTaifites must accept the deprivations to which all the Moslems hadagreed. Then they asked that their Rabba, their goddess, might bespared to them for three years, and as this was refused, for twoyears, a year, a month. But the only concession they could obtain wasthat they should not be obliged to destroy their goddess with theirown hands. The ancient paganism, it will be seen, fell easily andwithout any tragedy. 

Mahomet did not long survive the national acceptance of his religion;he died on 8th June 632. But he did not die without having opened upto his followers very wide views for the future of his cause, andstarted them on a career of religious war and conquest which was notsoon to be arrested. From a comparatively early period of his careerhe had considered that Islam was destined to prevail not only inArabia but in other lands. Starting with the idea that his revelationwas only a later stage of that which had taken place in Judaism andChristianity, he had advanced to the position that these were falsereligions, and his own the only true one. Wherever he looked in theworld he could see no true religion but his own; it must thereforetake the place of all others. Accordingly he sent embassies fromMedina to Heraclius the emperor of the East, to the king of Persia, to the governor of Egypt, and to other potentates, announcing himselfto be the "Prophet of God, " and calling upon them to give up theiridolatrous worships and return to the religion of the one true God. These embassies had small effect; but Mahomet was prepared to takemuch more forcible measures in order to spread the faith. War againstinfidels being one of the standing duties of the faithful, variousregulations were laid down for the treatment of captives and thedisposal of booty in such wars. God, who is said in every verse to beforgiving and merciful, encourages the faithful in such passages toslay and rob, and to make concubines of women taken in sacred wars. At the moment of his death an expedition, not the first, was ready tostart against the Greek power. It is in this guise that Islam assumesthe _rôle_ of a universal religion. 

The Duties of the Moslem. --The missionary of Islam requires of hisconverts nothing very difficult either in the way of belief or in theway of action. His demands are brief and precise. They consist of thefollowing five points:--1. The profession of belief in the unity ofGod and the mission of Mahomet. The formula runs: "There is no Godbut Allah, and Mahomet is the prophet of Allah. " 2. Prayer. Thisconsists of the repetition of a certain form of words at fiveseparate times each day, the worshipper standing up with his facetowards Mecca. The mosques are always open for prayer, and there is aspecial service on Friday, the day of the week chosen by Mahomet incontradistinction to the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. 3. Almsgiving. This is done on a fixed scale, and the contributionswere, in Mahomet's time, devoted to the support of war againstinfidels. 4. Fasting. This takes place during the month of Ramadan, and the fast is very strictly observed. 5. The Hagg or pilgrimage toMecca. 

The Koran is the sacred book of Islam. The name means "reading"; seeabove in this chapter. Like other sacred books, the Koran is arrangedin such an order that he who reads it as it stands finds it veryconfused, and fails to grasp its historical meaning. The claim todivine inspiration is made in every chapter and every line of it; Godhimself is the speaker. But the divine oracles refer to very variousmatters. All sorts of legal decisions, military orders, injunctionsabout religious affairs, legends and speculations, have a place init. Of prediction of the future, indeed, there is but one instance;the prophet disclaimed the power to work miracles, and held that nowonders beyond those of the splendid order of the universe arenecessary to faith; and similarly he does not pose as a foreteller, but as an organ of the divine will for the present. As the ruler of atheocracy, the leader of armies, the judge in many a civil case, theguardian of the manners of the people, the officiating minister inpublic worship, and, let it also be mentioned, the head of a verypeculiar domestic establishment, he has a hundred matters ofimmediate concern to attend to; and when he has formed his decisionon any of these matters, it takes its place in the Koran. The bookthus produced is far from being an attractive one; even in thetranslation of Professor Palmer[5] it can afford pleasure to noreader. The translation, it is true, loses the poetry and music ofthe original, which are highly spoken of; but the main obstacle toreading the Koran is its want of arrangement. The earliest suras(chapters; literally courses of bricks) stand mostly towards the endof the collection; the long ones in the beginning and middle arelater, and many of them are composite: two or several chapters havebeen joined into one. When read in their historical order, the surascan be read with pleasure by the student as showing the growth of theprophet's ideas and of his cause. The earliest ones are short, poetical, and intense. These are the suras which threw the prophetinto such excitement and distress that his hair turned white. Theyare full of the wonders of God in nature and in history, of fierydenunciation of idolatry, and of fearful threatenings. In laterpieces we come to long legends taken chiefly from the Jewish Haggadahand the Christian Apocrypha, in which the prophet displays muchignorance of the commonest facts of the Bible history; and as hispower increases and his functions multiply, we come to themiscellaneous matters spoken of above. The style, at first poetic andexalted, becomes afterwards prosaic and diffuse; it is not theinspired seer who speaks, but the statesman or the judge; and theplacing of these later utterances in the mouth of God could notdeceive the original hearers. The Koran, like the Vedas and theGathas and the Jewish Scriptures, was exalted in later stages of thereligion to the highest conceivable honours; and one of the greatestcontroversies of Islam raged round the question whether it hadexisted from eternity and was uncreated. 

[Footnote 5: _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. Vi. And xi. ]

Islam a Universal Religion. --What is most remarkable about Islam isthe rapidity of its growth. Mahomet begins life a poor and lowlyherdsman, and at his death bequeaths to his successors a kingdomwhich he has formed, and which is shortly to prevail over all itsneighbours. In the same way his doctrine, confined at first to asmall circle and bitterly opposed, becomes within half a century thefaith of his nation, and not only of his nation, but of many otherlands. Within that brief space it has entered on the career of anational religion, and has also passed beyond the national into theuniversal stage, at which only two other religions have arrived atall. The progress which Christianity took centuries to accomplish, Islam accomplished in so many decades. The title of a universalreligion cannot be denied to it. The truth which it declared--thedoctrine of the unity and the omnipotence of God, and of theresponsibility of every human being to his Creator and Judge--is onewhich does not belong to any particular race of men, but to all men. The attitude of soul which is called Islam--that of implicitsurrender to the great God, of entire acquiescence in his decrees andentire obedience to his will--is good for all. All should be calledto take an earnest view of their life and to realise their deepresponsibilities; and the idea expressed by the title given to God onevery page of the Koran, "The Merciful and Compassionate, " that Godsympathises with the aspirations and efforts of his servants, andthat they may look up to him with love as well as fear, is one whichall can understand and feel helpful. Especially at the stage when theworld is given up to idolatry, Islam may well rank as a universalreligion; when each place has its idol, each nation its greateridols, religion divides instead of uniting, and the frivolous andsenseless service of such petty deities prevents men from realisingtheir solemn obligations to the great God before whom they are allalike, since he is the Governor and Judge of all. Islam is anadmirable corrective of heathenism; it brings the scattered andbewildered worshippers of idols together in one lofty faith and onesimple rule. 

The weakness of Islam is that it is not progressive. Its ideas arebald and poor; it grew too fast; its doctrines and forms werestereotyped at the very outset of its career, and do not admit ofchange. Its morality is that of the stage at which men emerge fromidolatry, and does not advance beyond that stage, so that itperpetuates institutions and customs which are a drag oncivilisation. Mahomet's Paradise, in which the warrior is to beministered to by beauteous houris (the number of whom is notmentioned), may not have been an immoral conception in his day; butit is so now, and apparently cannot be left behind. An admirableinstrument for the discipline of populations at a low stage ofculture, and well fitted to teach them a certain measure ofself-restraint and piety, Islam cannot carry them on to the higherdevelopment of human life and thought. It is repressive of freedom, and the reason is that its doctrine is after all no more thannegative. Allah is but a negation of other gods; there is no store ofpositive riches in his character, he does not sympathise with themanifold growth of human activity; the inspiration he affords is anegative inspiration, an impulse of hostility to what is over againsthim, not an impulse to strive after high and fair ideals. He remainseternally apart upon a frosty throne; his voice is heard, but hecannot condescend. He does not enter into humanity, and thereforecannot render to humanity the highest services. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

_The Life of Mahomet_, by Sir W. Muir, 1858. 

_Mohammed_, by Wellhausen, and "The Koran, " by Nöldeke, in_Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. Xvi. 

The Preliminary Discourse prefixed to Sale's _Koran_; and ProfessorPalmer's Introduction in _S. B. E. _, vol. Vi. 

_Islam_, by J. W. H. Stobart, in the "Non-Christian ReligiousSystems" Series of the S. P. C. K. 

_Der Islam_, by Houtsma, in De la Saussaye. 

Hughes, _A Dictionary of Islam_ (1885, 1896). 

Sell, _The Faith of Islam_, Second Edition, 1896. 

Stanley Lane-Poole, _The Speeches and Table-talk of Mohammad_, 1882;the most important parts of the Koran, chronologically arranged, witha very useful introduction. 

Margoliouth. _Mohammed and the Rise of Islam_, 1905. 

PART IVTHE ARYAN GROUP

CHAPTER XIVTHE ARYAN RELIGION

The science of language has placed it beyond dispute that thelanguages of the leading European peoples are genealogically relatedto each other, and that the languages of India and of Persia alsobelong to the same family of speech. The Indo-European languages, those, namely, of the higher race in India, and of the Persians, andthose of the Greeks, Italians, Celts, Germans, Slavs, Letts, andAlbanians, approach each other always more nearly as they are tracedupwards. Sanscrit is not the source of these tongues but an oldersister of the group; the mother language, which the facts prove tohave at one time existed, was a highly-inflected speech, and isperhaps more nearly represented by Lettic than by Sanscrit; but itcan now be known only by a study of the common features of itssurviving children. 

The fact that the peoples named above are related to each other inpoint of language led at once, when it was discovered, to theconclusion that they were also of the same race, and must have comeoriginally from the same quarter of the world. Where, then, was theearly home of the undivided Aryan[1] race, from which the swarmsfirst issued which were to conquer and rule the various lands? Atfirst it was found in the East; the fact that Indian civilisation wasmuch earlier in time than that of any other Aryan people, naturallysuggested this. Professor Max Müller described in a very poetical wayhow the European as well as the Indian must find in the East thecradle of his race. From the high tableland of Asia, it was held, thesuperior races came who were to rule nearly the whole of Europe, while another migration descended towards Persia and the plains ofIndia. 

[Footnote 1: "Aryan" was the name of the conquering race of India. The title "Indo-European" tells us that the race now dwells in Indiaand in Europe. "Indo-Germanic" describes the group by its Eastern, and what is supposed to be its principal Western, member. ]

The theory, however, which placed the home of the Aryans on theinhospitable steppes, the "high Pamere, " of Asia, did not longcommand assent; and attempts were made to place that home elsewhere, in the valley of the Danube, on the south shores of the Baltic, oreven in the Scandinavian peninsula. The conquest, it is argued, cannot have come from the East; it is much more probable that Aryanspeech and custom originated in the West, where it has the largernumber of representatives, and that it spread eastward. The moreextreme step has also been taken of denying that the Aryans arerelated to each other at all in point of race. Unity of language, itis argued, is no proof of unity of race--a glance over the BritishEmpire or even the British Islands is enough to show this. It ismaintained, therefore, that the relationship of the Aryan peoples isnot one of race but only of language and of culture; the word Aryandenotes no more than a certain type of speech, and of accompanyingcivilisation, which spread over all the peoples in question at a veryearly time. Aryan language and civilisation laid hold of a number ofraces not otherwise related to each other. 

The view, however, still prevails that the various lands where Aryanspeech and culture prevail were settled from one centre. When societywas in the nomadic stage, it may naturally be presumed that asuperior civilisation which had established itself in any one quarterof the world would be carried by wandering hordes in variousdirections, and that the bearers of the new civilisation would becomethe conquerors and masters of the countries to which their wanderingsled them. And there is now some agreement on the part of leadingauthorities as to the quarter of the world from which the migrationsof the Aryans proceeded. In the Southern Steppes of Russia, in thegreat plains north of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Sea ofAral, there dwelt, we are told, in times far before the dawn ofhistory, hordes rather than tribes of men, who, though they hadoriginally spoken the same language, were coming to differ from eachother in speech and culture. These hordes were peoples in the processof formation. It was natural to them to wander, and as each wanderedfarther from the centre, it came to differ more markedly from thecommon type. Some of these went southwards and eastwards to Persiaand India; others went westward, to conquer and possess the countriesof Europe. [2]

[Footnote 2: _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_; Schraderand Jevons (Griffin, 1890). This is the English of Schrader's_Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte_. Compare Dr. E. Meyer's_History of Antiquity_, vol. I. Book vi. Dr. Isaac Taylor's _Originof the Aryans_ gives a compendious account of the question, concluding against the unity of the Aryans in point of race. ]

The Aryan question lies at the threshold of the history of each ofthe Aryan peoples, and has to be met in the study of each of thereligions. It must be confessed that the world now knows less on thispoint than it thought it did a generation ago. The difference betweenthe Semitic and the Aryan spirit is real and substantial, as willappear from the study of the Aryan religions, but it is moreimportant as well as more possible to know these well in theirindividual character than to have a correct theory of theirhistorical relation to each other. The student ought, however, to beinformed as to the course of a deeply interesting enquiry. 

The civilisation of the Aryans was primitive enough. The following isfrom Dr. Taylor:--

 The undivided Aryans were a pastoral people, who wandered with their herds as the Hebrew patriarchs wandered in Canaan. Dogs, cattle, and sheep had been domesticated, but not the pig, the horse, the goat, or the ass; and domestic poultry were unknown. The fibres of certain plants were plaited into mats, but wool was not woven, and the skins of beasts were scraped with stone knives, and sewed together into garments with sinews by the aid of needles of bone, wood, or stone. 

 Their food consisted of flesh and milk, which was not yet made into cheese or butter. Mead, prepared from the honey of wild bees, was the only intoxicating drink, both beer and wine being unknown. Salt was unknown to the Asiatic branch of the Aryans, but its use had spread rapidly among the European branches of the race. In winter they lived in pits dug in the earth and roofed over with poles covered with turf, or plastered with cow dung. In summer they lived in rude waggons or in huts made of the branches of trees. Of metals, native copper may have been beaten into ornaments, but tools and weapons were mostly of stone. Bows were made of the wood of the yew, ... Trees were hollowed out for canoes by stone axes, aided by the use of fire. 

 According to Hehn, the old or sick were killed, wives were obtained by purchase or capture, infants were exposed or killed. After a time, with tillage, came the possession of property, and established custom grew slowly into law. Their religious ideas were based on magic and superstitious terrors, the powers of nature had as yet assumed no anthropomorphic forms, the great name of Dyaus, which afterwards came to mean God, signified only the bright sky. They counted on their fingers, but they had not attained to the idea of any number higher than one hundred. [3]

[Footnote 3: _Origin of the Aryans_, p. 188. ]

These sketches of the early Aryan certainly attest more vigour thanrefinement; and it takes some effort to realise that those who livedin this way had already made much progress, and that these early artsand institutions were full of promise. Savage as the early Aryan is, he is better than his neighbours, and has made a good start in theway of civilisation. His family arrangements, especially, are fittedto survive and to develop. The early domestic architecture of theAryan countries, while it belongs to a much later period, yet givesgood evidence that the patriarchal ideal of the family was part ofthe common inheritance. In every country they conquered the Aryanslived in large patriarchal households. The sons, with their wives andchildren, remained under their father's roof, the father being judgeand priest of this domestic community. We can specify other featuresof the society connected with this type of household. As the familyincreases and becomes too large to dwell under one roof, anotherhouse is built, in which son or grandson, with his wife, founds a newfamily. Thus a group of families arises, all related to each other byblood, and in a position of equality, but looking to the originalhouse as their centre. This type of society must have been carried toIndia by the Aryan invaders, who there set up patriarchalestablishments in houses which are similar in arrangement to those ofNorth Holland, of Iceland, or of early England. The men who lived inthis way were not agriculturists, they were shepherds and huntsmen, and when they settled in a district they were wont to force theformer dwellers in it to till the land for them as theirinferiors. [4]

[Footnote 4: See two recent works by Mr. G. L. Gomme, _The VillageCommunity_ and _Ethnology in Folklore_; also Hearn's _AryanHousehold_. ]

It is this type of civilisation which overspread the lands in earlytimes, and by its coming created in most instances a new world. Someof the Aryan peoples made more rapid progress than others. Theypassed early into the age of metals, and appear before us at the dawnof history with fully-formed institutions, which bear the impress ofpatriarchal ideas. Others remained longer in the stone age, and onlyin historic times received the impulse which caused them to advanceto the rank of nations. The arts and inventions which are found inmany or in all of them are not necessarily a common inheritance fromthe undivided Aryan age. Many of them may have come into being ineach of the lands independently, or one Aryan people may haveborrowed them from another at a later time. Starting from the commonstock of civilisation, the various races worked it out each in a wayof its own, and often, as we shall see, with wonderful similarities. 

Is it possible to give any description of the religion the Aryans hadin common before they developed it in different ways in their variouslands? We can no longer, following Mr. Max Müller, look to India totell us what was the common Aryan religion. Indian religion, when wefirst become acquainted with it, has already grown into an elaboratepriestly system, and is evidently at a much later stage of Aryandevelopment than the rustic cults, with which we have a good deal ofacquaintance, in various European lands. If, however, we cannotfollow the great German scholar in this, we gladly use his words onanother aspect of the subject, when he is showing the etymologicalidentity of the chief god of the Aryan peoples. 

In his _Lectures on the Science of Language_, vol. Ii. P. 468, hetells us that "Zeus, the most sacred name in Greek mythology, is thesame word as Dyaus in Sanscrit, Jovis or Ju in Jupiter in Latin, Tiwin Anglo-Saxon, preserved in Tiwsdæg, Tuesday, the day of the Eddicgod Tyr; Zio in old High-German. 

"This word was framed, " he says, "once and once only; it was notborrowed by the Greeks from the Hindus, nor by the Romans and Germansfrom the Greeks. It must have existed before the ancestors of thoseprimeval races became separate in language and religion; before theyleft their common pastures to migrate to the right hand and to theleft.... Here, then, in this venerable word, we may look for some ofthe earliest religious thoughts of our race. "[5]

[Footnote 5: See also Mr. Müller's _Hibbert Lectures_, and his_Biographies of Words_. ]

In this instance etymology admittedly points out one of the principalfeatures of the common Aryan religions. But if we hope that etymologywill reveal to us many further instances of the same kind, andintroduce us to the whole Pantheon of the Aryans, we shall bedisappointed. There are one or two more cases of etymologicalagreement between the gods of India and those of Europe, [6] but theagreement is in some of these cases no more than etymological. TheTiw or Tyr of the Teutonic mythology does not correspond in office orcharacter with Zeus or Jupiter, though the names are etymologicallyakin. The agreement does not extend to all the religions in question, nor does it extend in any two religions to all their gods; most ofthe gods of Europe have no parallels in India. The evidence ofetymology, therefore, tells us but little of that early religion ofwhich we are in search. But if we consider the views and habits ofthe barbarous shepherd-huntsman, who is now seen to be the typicalfigure of common Aryanism, we need not seek long before we findsomething that was common to all the Aryan faiths. The patriarchalhousehold has a religion which belongs to itself, and which is theworking bond of union of its members. The hearth is its altar, because the forefathers of the house lie buried under it, or foranother reason. These forefathers certainly are its gods. Thishearth-cult has for its priest the father of the family; he in histurn will be gathered to his fathers if he has a legitimate son to dothe last rites for him. No one but members of the family can partakein the domestic worship, all unconnected with the family by bloodmust be kept at a distance from these rites. This is not a religionin which the individual counts anything for his own sake, any morethan totemistic religion is; in both it is the community alone thatserves the deity, in the one case, those acknowledging the sametotem, in the second, those united by blood in the same family. Intotemism the individual sacrifices himself to the tribe; here he isnothing apart from his family. Aryan piety is family religion pureand simple. It fosters sentiments which have been the strength ofAryan society in all lands. It makes family life a sacred thing, lends to all domestic ties the highest sanction, and causes the meremention of "hearth and home" to be the strongest incentive to valourand self-denial. Even in the wild-beast ferocity with which earlymen defend their homes against the intrusion of strangers, thegerms of lofty domestic and patriotic virtues may be seen. Thusancestor-worship, which is a part of the very beginnings of humanreligion, is a more effective force among the Aryans than anywhereelse. In Egypt and China that worship is a highly artificial thing, and has lost much of its original force. In Egypt it is the fortunesof the dead that are most thought of; in China the cult has beensmoothed down and deprived, according to the character of the people, of its intenser motives. Among the Aryans it combines actively withstrong family feeling, causing them to cling with an extreme tenacityto their own gods and their own worship. [7]

[Footnote 6: The principal are the following:--

 1. Dyaus, god of the sky, see above. 

 2. Sans. Ushas, goddess of dawn; Gr. [Greek: hêôs]; Lat. Aurora; Lith. Auszra; A. -S. Eostra. 

 3. Sans. Agni, fire, god of fire; Lat. Ignis; Lith. Ugnis; O. -S. Ogni. 

 4. Sans. Surya, sun; Lat. Sol; Gr. [Greek: helios], also [Greek: Seirios]; Cymr. Seul. 

 5. Sans. Mâs, moon; Gr. [Greek: mênê]; Lat. Mena; Lith. Menu. 

 Mars=Maruts, Manu=Minos=Mannus, Varuna=Ouranos, and other equations formerly brought forward, are not now relied on by etymologists. ]

[Footnote 7: The comparative absence of ancestor-worship among theGreeks leads Dr. Schrader to doubt whether their religion is Aryan. The Semites and the Greeks occupy the same position in this respect(see chapter x. , chapter xvi. ). ]

But those of whom we are speaking worshipped other gods besides thoseof the household. The second great characteristic of Aryan religionis its adoration of gods who are neither local nor tribal, butuniversal. Dyaus, the sky, the heaven-god, can be worshippedanywhere; so can the earth, so can the heavenly twins, who wereobjects of early Aryan religion, so can the sun and moon. Not thatthe Aryans always remembered that these beings were not local ortribal. The god of heaven could be the god of a particular place too, having a special name there; or he could be appropriated by a tribewho gave him a title as their own particular patron. Each familycould have its own heaven-god as well as its own hearth-god. Nor arewe to think that when they worshipped beings who could be found inevery place, the Aryans overlooked the sacred places, and the sacredobjects worshipped formerly. They had themselves risen out ofsavagery, and still held many of the ideas of savages. Though theyhad a few great gods they could still believe in a large number ofsmaller ones. The tree, the stream, still had its spirit for them, the cave or the dark fissure its bad demon. And many a piece of magicdid they practise, such as the rain-charm which would cause even thehighest god to send what was needed. The world was well peopled withgods, and to keep on good terms with them all was, no doubt, a matterthat required much attention and skill. 

Other features which have been stated to be characteristic of Aryanreligion are its non-priestly character, and the fact that its godsare generally arranged in a monarchical pantheon. But neither ofthese constitutes a specific difference of the kind we are in searchof. All primitive religions are non-priestly; a religion becomespriestly at a certain stage of its growth, when it is organisedseparately from the state. The monarchical pantheon, too, such asthat of Homer and of the Eddas, is an indication, not of the geniusof a religion, but of its having reached the systematising stage, andof the political ideas according to which the system is drawn up. TheAryan religions, it is true, arrange their gods when the time comesto do so, after the pattern of an Aryan patriarchal establishment, the father at the head, his sons and daughters near him, the servantsin attendance, the unorganised host of spirits, nymphs and elves, outside. But to know the original character of the religion it isless important to ask how the pantheon is arranged, than what godsare worshipped, and how they are related to man. And the point whichstands out clearly is that while Semitic religion is purely tribaland local, there is an element in Aryan religion which naturallytranscends these limits. On Semitic ground the body with whom the godtransacts is the tribe, the link is that of blood which connects allthe members of the tribe with their divine head or ancestor. In Aryanreligion also blood counts for much. The family altar is the seat ofworship, and he who has been cast out of his own family cannotworship anywhere. The family gods are most thought of, no doubt, andexercise immense power in the ways we have mentioned. But the worshipof which blood is the tie is not to the Aryan, as to the Semite, thewhole of religion. There are beings aloft as well as beings on theearth and under the earth, and the worship of these beings is widerthan the family. The family may address Heaven by a special privatename, or at a particular spot, but Heaven itself was above all thesetitles and places. The spirits of the household made, as all theSemitic gods do, for separation, but the gods above made for union, and as any community grew, the upper gods, who were worshipped by allits members alike, became more lofty and more important. Thus we mayagree with Mr. Gomme when he speaks (_Ethnology of Folklore_, p. 68)of the emancipation of the Aryans from the principle of localworship, and says that the rise of the conception of gods who couldand did accompany the tribes wheresoever they travelled, was "thegreatest triumph of the Aryan race. "

Farther than this it may be dangerous to go in a field so full ofuncertainty. In all Aryan worships there are sacrifices of variouskinds and degrees of importance. The horse sacrifice appears inseveral of the nations as one of distinction, but human sacrifice wasmost important of all, though in each of the Aryan lands commutationsare made for it at a very early stage. The strife of Aryan withnon-Aryan religions gave rise to many superstitions; after theconquest the gods of the latter often became the bad gods or demonsof the former, the ministers of the defeated cult were regarded assorcerers or witches, the dethroned gods made many an attempt to comeback to their seats, and to revive disused practices. But a religionbased, as we have seen the Aryan to be, in the family affections isdestined to rise as civilisation advances. It will be found that theAryan draws a less absolute distinction than the Semite between thehuman and the divine. To the Semite God is, broadly speaking, amaster, or Lord, whose word is a command, in regard to whom man is asubject, a slave. To the Aryan the relation is a freer one. His godis more human, and art and imagination can do more in his service. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

E. Siecke, _Die religion d. Indogermanen_, 1897. 

C. F. Keary, _Outlines of Primitive Belief among the Indo-EuropeanRaces_, 1882. 

CHAPTER XVTHE TEUTONS

The Aryans in Europe. --There is more than one European people whichbefore it was touched by Roman civilisation had remained for anindefinite period--a period to be measured probably rather bymillenniums than by centuries--in the state of society described inlast chapter (see above) as occurring when the Aryans dwelt amongthose whom they had conquered. In various lands alike we meet withthe combination of the patriarchal household with the village, thecombination of agricultural with pastoral life, to which the Aryansearly settled down among non-Aryan populations. This type of society, which is the basis of feudalism, is recognised alike in India and inGermany. It stretches far back into the past, and may even berecognised in some quarters at the present day. 

As with civilisation so with religion. The early faith of the Slavs, the Celts, and the Teutons is now generally regarded as bestrepresenting that of the Aryans. It was a religion in which rite andbelief were indefinite and variable compared with those of the laterAryan faiths of India and of Southern Europe, there being neither aregular priesthood nor the use of writing to impart fixity toreligious forms. The river, the fountain, and the aged oak, each hadits legend and its observance of unknown antiquity. The pre-Aryan andthe Aryan elements of religion acted and reacted on each other, theAryan, no doubt, being the element of progress, but blending with theother in indistinguishable mixture. The spirits of ancestors lived inthe belief and the practice of posterity; a thousand unseen agents inthe sky, and in the earth, and under the earth were believed in andtreated according to tradition, fed or flouted, bribed or exorcised, as occasion suggested. New gods appeared, or old ones were combinedinto new, or a god migrated from one province to another. Here alsomyths and rituals were formed by various processes. But a moreconstant growth of belief took place in connection with some gods aslarger social organisms came into existence, village communitiescombining into tribes, tribes into nations. The great gods of heaven, whatever the history of their early growth, proved specially fittedto unite together clans and peoples. These beings received differentnames in different countries. Their early history, no doubt, was notthe same in all, yet in each mythology there were figures and storieswhich occurred also in others, whether in consequence of parallelgrowth out of similar circumstances in each land, or from a processof borrowing at a later time, or from both, we need not try todecide. 

We give a short account of the religion of the Germans. That of theCelts, which may be studied in the Hibbert Lectures of ProfessorRhys, [1] or that of the Slavs (of which there is an excellent shortsummary by Mr. W. R. Morfill in _Religious Systems of the World_), would have equally well served the purpose of exhibiting an Aryanreligion at a low stage of development, and held by a people notthoroughly compacted into a nation. The religion of the Teutons hasthe advantage for our study over these others, that it remainedlonger unsuppressed by Christianity, and in its Scandinavian branchput forth a vigorous original growth in comparatively recent times. The latest paganism which flourished in Europe, it is also thereligion of our ancestors, on which the Christianity of the Northernlands was grafted, and many a survival of which may still berecognised in our own land. It therefore possesses for us even initself considerable interest. 

[Footnote 1: _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion asillustrated by Celtic Heathendom_, 1886. ]

Of the ancient Germans, of the dwellers in the basins of the Rhineand the Danube, we have accounts by Cæsar and by Tacitus. [2] Afterthis there is a dearth of information; the Christian missionaries tothe Germans thought it their duty to cover the former beliefs andrites of their converts in oblivion, and abstained from givinginformation about them. What we know is drawn from Church writers. The Eddas belong to a much more developed stage of Teutonic life;they tell their own tale, which will be noticed in its turn. 

[Footnote 2: Cæsar, _B. Gall. _ vi. 21. Tacitus, _Germania_. ]

The early Germans dwelt in scattered settlements surrounded by thegreat forests and marshes which then covered Central Europe. Everyone has read the description of the brave and warlike people of whomthe Romans justly stood so much in awe, and knows about their fierceblue eyes and their fair hair, their tall stature, their battle-criesand charges, their hardy habits and strict morals. As the Romanwriters describe them, they are by no means savages. They do not livein towns, but migrate from one spot to another, the communitycultivating the land it takes possession of, on a system of commonownership with rotation of occupants. The women did the hard work, Tacitus says; the men spent their time in the chase and in fighting. They had an organisation beyond that of the village, being arrangedin what we may call hundreds and shires, each district having tofurnish so many men for war, electing its own heads and holdingmeetings for various purposes. Amidst these local and tribaldivisions they did not forget that they were a nation different fromother nations, and invasion found them a united people. The religiousexpression of this is to be found in the legend which represents thethree great divisions of the nation as descended alike from the godMannus, son of the earth-born Tuisco; hymns were sung to the latteras the father of the German race. It was by hymns that this peopleremembered things which were important. 

The Early German Gods. --There is a national god, then; and other godsof whom Tacitus tells us are national too, not local or tribal. Thetribes to the south of the Baltic worship Herthus, which, Tacitussays, is their name for Terra Mater, Mother Earth. The other gods hementions are called by Roman names. They worship Mercury, he says, astheir principal god; on certain days they worship him with humansacrifices. They also worship Mars and Hercules with animal victims;and a particular tribe, the Suevi, worship Isis. Cæsar says theGermans worship the sun, and Vulcan, and the moon. Tacitus mentionsother German gods; the two statements are both true. Tacitus givesthe German gods Roman names according to a common practice ofantiquity, which has been the source of much confusion; we shall seeafterwards how the Romans identified the gods of Greece also withthose of Rome. 

The equation which Tacitus gives of the German gods with Latin onesis still in daily use in the names of the days of the week. TheRomans applied the names of the planets, which were the names oftheir own gods, to the days of the week as early as the firstChristian century; and in Germany the days were called after theGerman gods supposed to answer to the Roman gods in question. HalfEurope to this day calls the days of the week after the Roman, andthe other half after the German gods. We give the Latin names withthe modern French and over against them the English, in which thenames of the German gods appear more clearly than in modern German:--

 Dies Solis, the Sun's day=Sunday. (The French _Dimanche_ is from _Dominicus_, the Lord's Day. )

 Dies Lunæ (Lundi)=Monday or Moon's day. 

 Dies Martis (Mardi)=Tuesday, the day of Tiw or Ziu. 

 Dies Mercurii (Mercredi)=Wednesday, the day of Wodan. 

 Dies Jovis (Jeudi)=Thursday, the day of Thor. In German this is _Donnerstag_, the day of Donar=Thor. 

 Dies Veneris (Vendredi)=Friday, the day of Freya. 

 Dies Saturni retains the Latin god's name in our Saturday. (The French _Samedi_ is derived from Sabbath. )

These Teutonic names for the days of the week are common to all thebranches of Teutonic speech, and must have a high antiquity. Theytell us what gods the Germans had in early times, and to what Romangods these were believed to correspond; but it would be a vainendeavour to attempt to deduce from this, or indeed from any earlyinformation we possess on the subject, the origin and nature of thesegods. From Grimm's laborious study of the question (_GermanMythology_, vol. I. ) we gather that it is a matter mainly ofspeculation what it was in Wodan that led the Romans to identify himwith their Mercury. Thor, who is identified with Jupiter, wasprobably a sky-god, while Tiw or Ziu (whom etymology identifies withZeus, not Mars) was a god of war, and Freya, like Venus, had to dowith female beauty. We come to know more of these gods when we findthem in the Eddas, but it is scarcely legitimate to fill in the SouthGerman gods of the first century from the North German gods of thesame names of the eleventh or twelfth. We reserve, therefore, ourdescription of the German gods till we come to the Northernmythology. 

The Roman writers do not furnish any accurate idea of the workingreligion of the Germans of their day. Cæsar says they were not somuch under the guidance of priests as the Gauls were, and that theywere not greatly addicted to sacrifice; neither statement can bereceived without scrutiny. Tacitus idealises the untutored savage asRousseau does, in order to rebuke the vices of a luxuriouscivilisation; but his statements of actual facts may be trusted. Knowledge recently acquired of early forest-cults disposes us totrust him when he speaks, as he does more than once, of the peculiarsacredness the Germans attached to woods and groves. He is idealisingwhen he says, "They did not confine their gods in walls nor representthem under the likeness of men, being led thereto by considering thegreatness of the heavenly beings. " A few centuries later at least wefind Christian bishops busy destroying temples of German heathenismand burning images found in them. Undoubtedly, however, the greatsanctuary of a district was frequently, as he represents, in therecesses of a wood. Under a mighty tree a tribe would hold itsmeetings and sit in judgment and in council; and there were sacredgroves in which no human foot might stray, where the god was supposedto dwell, where great sacrifices both of animal and of human victimstook place, where the boughs were hung with the bones of formersacrifices which in war were carried forth at the head of the tribeas its sacred standards. This was done by the priests, whoaccompanied the host to battle, and were charged at such a time withthe infliction of all necessary punishments, since they representedthe god who was supposed to be personally present as commander. Thepriests had to work the auguries when consulted on matters of state;on private matters the paterfamilias might do this himself. Thepriests also had charge of the sacred white horses, by whose neighingthe will of the deity became known. Several women are also mentionedas having enjoyed the reputation of sacred personages; and "even intheir wives they considered that there was a certain holiness andinspiration. "

To judge from Tacitus and from other writers of the first Christiancenturies, there was little system in the religion of Germany inthose days; the gods were not organised in a divine family, thepriests were not a caste like the Druids of France and Britain, andreligious practice was loose and variable. It must also be rememberedthat what foreign writers reported on the subject was connectedrather with national and official cults than with popular localobservances. Of the latter there was an abundant growth; adistinguished foreign writer might not know about it, but theevidence of it survives in various forms which are only now beingseriously studied. To know the practical religion of early Germany wehave to consult the village festival and legend (as has been done byMannhardt in his _Wald- und Feld-kulte_ and Mr. Frazer in _The GoldenBough_, and many a student of folklore), which, though now apparentlymeaningless, were once the serious religious observance and doctrineof the peasantry. The peasant carried his wishes and prayers to thefamiliar wishing-well, and presented offerings to the spirit of thewell by throwing them into the water or hanging them on thesurrounding trees. The fairy rather than far-off Wodan was looked tofor good fortune; the rite of the fabulous village hero, with itsquaint immemorial usages, roused more enthusiasm than the statelypublic ceremonial. Another side of the mind of early Germany is to begathered from the heroic legends and the fairy tales, many of theelements of which, we are assured, were even then in existence. Werethese legends formed by a process of degradation; did they begin withtelling about the gods, and were they afterwards applied to heroesand princes and common men? Or was the process in the oppositedirection from this; were the stories, first of all, those of humanwarriors, their wars and loves, and did they then become mixed upwith solar and celestial ideas? Were the fairy tales originallystories of the gods, and did they by popular and familiar treatmentfall below the dignity of their original themes till they came to bea debased and broken-down mythology? or were they at first storiesabout beasts and about clever tricks, such as savages love to tell, and did they rise to something more dignified, till in some of themwe may trace the stories of the gods? It is not necessary that weshould answer these questions, which carry us back to an earlier timethan that with which we are concerned; but any one who knows thetales, and will try to realise the state of mind of those whoreceived them not as fancy but as serious fact, will know somethingof the religion of early Germany; of the strange beings, fairies, dwarfs, magicians, talking animals, animated sun and moon and winds, by which the German believed himself to be surrounded. 

Later German Religion. --In Southern Germany the introduction ofChristianity early put an end to any development of Teutonic religionwhich might have taken place there. The old faith, however, stillmaintained itself in more Northern latitudes. It was brought toBritain by the German invaders, continued there till the seventhcentury, and was brought in again in a more Northern form by theNorsemen, who in their turn "gradually deserted Thor and Odin for thewhite Christ. "[3] Bede tells hardly anything of the paganism whichhad been the religion of England a century before he wrote; in thishe is like other Christian teachers who might have told but did not. But though it came to an end in England, Teutonic religion continuedto prevail in the countries from which the invaders had come. InFrisia in the eighth century we hear of a goddess Hulda, a kindgoddess, as her name implies, who sends increase to plants and is apatroness of fishing. A god called Fosete, or Forsete (Forseti inmodern Icelandic=chairman), identified both with Odin and withBalder, was worshipped in Heligoland; he had a sacred well there, from which water had to be drawn in silence. There are temples, oftenin the middle of a wood, with priestly incumbents, and richendowments, both of lands and treasure; and human sacrifice invarious forms is said to have been in use. Idols are mentioned, even(at Upsala in Sweden) a trinity of idols; but this is what Churchwriters would naturally impute to heathens, and the statement isdiscredited. No Teutonic idol has survived; the loss to art may notbe great, but such a relic would have settled the controversy. 

[Footnote 3: Kingsley's _Hereward the Wake_. ]

Iceland. --Teutonic paganism reached its highest development inIceland. Of this branch of it alone is there a literature, for manyof the sagas are the fruit of a literary movement in Iceland anteriorto the establishment of Christianity; and the historian Ari, whowrote within a century after that event, gives careful information ofthe earlier state of affairs. The reader of _Burnt Njal_ sees thatamong the Icelanders life was short and precarious. With the spiritof adventure, which led them to be constantly setting out on warlikeand piratical expeditions, they combined a strong tendency to localquarrels, which filled up their life at home with a constant seriesof blood-feuds. These latter are gone about in a methodical andbusiness-like way; custom sanctions them, the meetings of the popularassembly do not seek to suppress or punish them if only they areconducted according to the rules. No public authority had as yetarisen to carry out the law between one household and another; theavenger has his recognised place and duty. Society is patriarchal asin other Aryan communities; each family is a community ofblood-kindred for mutual defence and also for worship. The leadingcult of Icelandic religion was the domestic worship of ancestors, conducted by the head of the household. The dead were buried inknolls or burrows near the dwelling, and their spirits were thoughtto inhabit these places; they are said to "die into the hill. " Altarsare erected and sacrifices offered there; the blood of the victimpoured out upon the ground is supposed to be enjoyed by them. Theseknolls became the sacred places of their district, and many a beliefexisted about these quiet neighbours and the help they afforded tothe living. "Elves" they were called, and they were thought of as acleanly and kindly race. The spirits of bad men, on the contrary, lived an uneasy life, as demons, and were the workers of mischief. 

Along with this belief in the spirits of the dead as inhabiting theburial hill of the household, there is another conception, namely, that the dead go to a distant region of the unseen world. In Homeralso these two conceptions are combined. The Icelandic burial ritesare founded on the latter view. The "departed" is going on a longjourney, and his friends escort him as far as they can; shoes arebound on his feet, the Hel-shoes, for Hel is the name of the regionof the dead. Gifts are given to him; horses, male and femaleattendants, hawks and hounds, are burned with him on the pyre, andhis wife voluntarily accompanies him; all these he is to have withhim in the country beyond. 

In addition to the domestic cult we have that of local objects; holywells, waterfalls, groves, stones are worshipped. Mother Earth iscalled on, so is Thunder, so is Heaven. But besides these minorworships there is the public one, connected with a large tribe orwith a king's court. A temple on the same plan as a largedwelling-house forms a place of meeting and of sacrifice, an asylum, and a place of oaths and covenants. On a table in front of the highseat stands the bowl which, filled with blood and along with certainsticks, forms a means of divination. A gold ring also lies there, which a man puts on when he is about to swear an oath, and which thepriest puts on at meetings. 

The priest has the duty of keeping up the building and property ofthe temple and of maintaining the sacrifices. At the latter variousrites are done with the blood of victims, and those present feast onthe flesh and drink toasts. The first cup is for Wodan, various othergods are celebrated, and there is a cup of remembrance for thedeparted. Sacrifices are offered for the crops, for victory, for anygreat object on which the community is bent. In this ritual there isno evidence of any idols. Though the Icelanders are not without art, the great gods have not yet perhaps assumed to their minds suchdefinite figures as to be thus set forth: no Homer has placed themclear before the inward eye. The rites are bloody, the altar has everanew to be made to shine with the blood of victims. Human sacrificesare only resorted to in times of great common danger, as a terriblelast resort; the god to whom the human victim is devoted is moved bythe bloodshed to avert his anger, or to make greater exertions forhis people. Bloodshed forms the strongest of all bonds. To linkthemselves together in an indissoluble brotherhood, two friendsmingle their blood on the ground and then each of them treads on it. The shedding of human blood at the launching of a ship or at thelaying of the foundation of a building is also known. Savage andcruel as this religion is, there are signs that it is softening, andthat some of its darker rites are beginning to admit of commutation. When Christianity approaches, the Icelanders feel that it must make agreat change, and that some of the cruelties which they regard as thegood old customs, will have to be laid aside. We hear of thestipulation being made that if they receive baptism they shall not berequired to give up the removal of unpromising children nor theeating of horseflesh. 

The Eddas, in which Scandinavian mythology reaches its ultimate form, seem to belong to a higher plane of human life than the religion wehave described, and it has appeared to many scholars of late yearsthat they cannot be regarded as a pure product of paganism, but arein great part influenced by Christianity both in matter and insentiment. The older Edda, written in verse, is said to have beencollected by Sæmund Sigfusson the learned, one of the early Christianpriests of Iceland, who lived about the eleventh century. The otherEdda is in prose; it is a collection made about two centuries later. The form given to the myths in these collections is due to theSkalds, who flourished in Iceland in the early Middle Ages; but thelegends themselves are older. Nothing is known precisely about theirorigin or early diffusion. 

The Eddas may be compared in many respects with the Homeric poems. Asin the latter, the gods form a family, the members of which cometogether to a certain place for meetings, while individually theyhave their own adventures, their loves, their jealousies, theirjokes, their tricks. In the Eddas too we find that the gods are not, strictly speaking, eternal; they succeeded an older race of gods, andtheir turn too may come to pass away. They are called Æsir, which isthe plural of As. The etymology of this is uncertain; compare theSanscrit Asura, said to mean the living or breathing one. The Æsirare spoken of in later times, not in the Eddas, as if they had been arace of warriors; they are said to have come in to Scandinavia andgot the better of those who lived there before, because theyworshipped a superior set of gods. [4] An historic reminiscence maylurk here. Before the Æsir there were giants, and the earth with allits parts is made of the body of one of these giants, [5] whom the newrace superseded as governors of the world. But the giants are stillthere and their spirit is unchanged; there is a danger of theirinterfering to subvert the rule of their successors. 

[Footnote 4: See a similar statement about the Incas, chapter vi. ]

[Footnote 5: Compare "Purusha" in the _Rigveda_. ]

There are other cosmogonic myths besides that of the division of thegiant Ymir. One is on this wise. Ere this world began, there was onone side Niflheim, the land of mist and cold, on the other sideMuspelheim, the region of fire; between these two lay Ginnungagap, the north side of it frozen, the south side glowing hot, and lifeoriginated by the meeting, in one way or another, of the heat andcold. There are very primitive myths of the shaping of man out of twopieces of wood, of Night and Day as drivers of chariots and horses, of the sun and moon fleeing from wolves, and so on. A more poeticconception is the division of the world into Asgard, the garden ofthe Æsir; Midgard, the world of man; and Utgard, the world outside. In the first Odin has his seat Hlidskjalf; when he sits in it he cansee and understand whatever is happening in any part of the broadworld (is he the sun, then?). The third region is generally calledJötunheim, the home of the giants, an icy region at the extreme partof the habitable world. A bridge exists from the dwelling of men tothat of the gods; it is called Bifröst, and is the rainbow. 

The gods have various places of meeting; but their principal seat isunder a great tree, the ash. Yggdrasil[6] is a tree worthy of thegods; it is a world-tree; its roots extend to all the worlds; itsbranches spread even over heaven. Under it is the fountain Mimir, spring of wisdom, from which Odin drinks daily. Near it is thedwelling of the Norns, fates or weird sisters, who establish laws anduphold them by their judgments, and allot to every man his span oflife. They are named Urd the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuldthe future. Daily do they water the ash from the spring to keep itsleaves fresh, and help it to contend with its numerous foes, for agreat serpent is continually gnawing at its root, and it has alsoother troubles. This myth of Yggdrasil is the apotheosis of Teutonictree-worship, and is richly suggestive. [7]

[Footnote 6: Yggdrasil=Odin's horse=the gallows. Is it the cross?]

[Footnote 7: Carlyle in his _Heroes_, p. 18, draws out the spiritualsignificance of it and of Norse mythology generally. ]

The Gods of the Eddas. --We now come to the gods of the system. Odinis in the Eddas the founder of the world as now constituted. He hasdisplaced the old formless race of gods, and is the leader of a newand vigorous race now ruling in their stead. The old scholarsrationalised Odin into a chief who had led a migration from Asia toNorway in early times. He is the inventor of the art of writing byrunes and the founder of poetry; thus he has the aspect of aculture-hero; that is to say, of a man of advanced views who, for thebenefits he conferred on his people, was exalted first to a hero andthen to a god. But the worship of Odin or Wodan is one of theearliest things we know about the German race. He is the god of theSouth-Germans from the very first. His earliest character is that ofa storm-god. Whether his name is connected with the German _wüthen_, rage (Scot. _wud_) or with the Vedic Vata, who is a god of storm, heis from the first an impetuous being. The early myth of him isscarcely dead at this day; the peasant hears him rushing through thewoods at night. That is the "wild hunt of Wodan, " he says; the god isout with his followers, and woe to him who gets in his way! The earlyGermans thought of him as a kind being who fulfilled the wishes ofmen, and it was probably this side of his character that caused himto be identified with Mercury. In the Eddic theology he is a patronof war, as becomes the chief god of a warlike people. He arrangesbattle and dispenses victory; the heroes who fall in battle hereceives into his heavenly army; they live with him in Valhalla orValhöll, the hall of choice. Odin chooses those who are to go there;he is assisted in this by the Valkyries or choice-maidens. Life inValhalla is a constant round of fighting, the wounds of which arehealed at once, and feasting, the materials for which are everrenewed. Odin, like other great gods, bears traces of lowsurroundings, as if he had once lived among savages. He can turnhimself into an eagle or other animal to gain his object, and he hasengaged in disreputable adventures. But he tends to improve, and theEddas show him at his best. Here he is called the All-father, theRuler of all, who gave man a soul that shall never perish; and wehear that he needs no food and takes no share himself in the feastsof the heroes. All the righteous shall be with him in Vingolf (thesame as Valhalla), but the wicked shall go to Hel, the kingdom of Helor Hela, the goddess of the under-world. 

Thor or Donar, Thunder, is said to be the mightiest of the gods; heis identified, as we saw, with Jove, but he is a rougher and moreprimitive deity. He drives in a chariot drawn by two goats, and ispossessed of three things which have wonderful properties. The firstis the hammer Mjölnir, which the Frost- and Mountain-giants cannotresist when he throws it; the second is the belt of strength, whichmakes him twice as strong when he puts it on; and the third a pair ofgauntlets with which he grasps his mallet. Many stories are told ofhis prowess, of his conflicts with the giants, who, however, give hima good deal of trouble with their cunning; and of his catching theMidgard serpent which surrounds the world at the bottom of the sea. Being a god of storm, he forms a connection with agriculture, andthus gains a more sedate aspect; he has also to do with marriage, anda hammer is used symbolically at Icelandic weddings. Thor is onlyhalf-brother to the other sons of Odin; his mother was Fiörgyn, theearth; the worships of Odin and Thor, originally distinct, seem tohave been united at an early period. 

The god Tyr, son of Odin by a giantess, is the Eddic figure of theGerman Tiw or Ziu, etymologically equivalent to Zeus or Jupiter, butidentified by the Romans with Mars. His greatness belongs to earlytimes; he was then a sword-god, and had an extensive worship invarious parts of Europe. In the Eddas he has scarcely any character, and seldom takes a prominent part in the legend. Loki, by etymology afire-god (Germ. _Löhe_, Scot. _Lowe_), [8] is in one account thebrother of Odin, in another his son by a giantess. His character isfitful; sometimes he acts a brotherly part by the gods and helps themout of their difficulties by clever devices, and sometimes heprovides entertainment for them; but for the most part he is anembodiment of cunning and mischief; his course is downwards, he tendsto become a being purely evil, setting himself heartlessly againstthe wishes of the other gods, and acting so as to imperil them andtheir world till they are obliged to cast him out of heaven. He isthus a kind of Lucifer or Satan, and like the Christian devil, hisultimate fate is to be bound till the end of the world shall arrive. Baldur, the son of Odin and Frigga, is the best and brightest of thegods. Like Apollo, he has to do with light, and no pollution can comenear him; he has also to do with the administration of justice, andpronounces sentences which can never be reversed. Heimdall also is alight and gracious god; he is the warder of the Æsir, and stays nearthe bridge Bifröst. Of him it is told that he wants less sleep than abird, sees a hundred miles off by night or day, and hears the grassgrow on the ground and the wool on the sheep's back. Bragi is the godof poetry and eloquence, the best of all skalds. 

[Footnote 8: The etymology is not perhaps correct, but it suggesteditself and influenced the view taken of this god, in very earlytimes. ]

Of the goddesses, Frigga, wife of Odin, stands first, an augustmatron of mysterious knowledge, whom even gods consult, and by whommen swear; she has also to do with marriage, and the childless appealto her. Etymologically she is scarcely to be distinguished fromFreya, wife of Odur, who, however, is lighter in character, and israther a goddess of love. The goddesses in the Eddas are more shadowyfigures than the gods; there are others, and an attempt is made toreckon up twelve of them to answer to the twelve chief gods, buttheir names are taken from the qualities they represent, and theyhave little reality. 

The story of the death of Baldur, brought about by the evil mind ofLoki in defiance of the whole divine family, sounds the note oftragedy in the divine family of the Eddas. The gods themselvessuffer, and are unable to retrieve the misfortune which has come uponthem. With one accord they try to get Baldur brought back from theunder-world, but they are foiled by the same agency of evil whichcarried him off. With the death of Baldur the gods feel that theirrule, which, we saw, had a beginning, and with it the world theygovern, for the two are inseparably bound up with each other, iscoming to an end. The gods perish in the ruin of the world; and thisis well, for sin cleaves to them and to their house, and they are notfit to endure. Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, comes on; theuniverse is burnt up in a mighty conflagration, and while there areabodes of bliss and abodes of misery where some survive, the universeas a whole is entirely changed, and a milder race of gods will ruleover a better world. 

If this mythology were found to be of native Scandinavian growth, itwould prove that Teutonic religion was capable of lofty development, and would throw back an interesting light upon its previous history. Here, it has been maintained, we see the Teutonic faith rising tomonotheism. Odin has among his other titles that of All-father; he isrising above the other gods to a position of supremacy, which willfit him, if the process were allowed, as it was not, to advancesomewhat further, to represent pure deity and to attract to himselfan undivided reverence. Here also we find a religion which wasformerly a rude intercourse between barbarous men and savage gods, clothing itself with an ideal element. As the Greeks found religionin beauty and the Romans in utility, so did the Germans find it atlast in pathos. They attain to the conception of suffering deity; inBaldur a god falls victim to malice and wickedness, and the sorrow ofhis fall takes possession of the whole of heaven. Thus pain andsacrifice are hallowed, for man by the history of the gods, and hisintercourse with them leads him into heights and depths unknownbefore. 

But the conviction is now establishing itself that this phase ofTeutonic religion is borrowed from Christianity, which was thenseriously menacing the existence of the old faith, and that it is theshadow of their approaching extinction by the new religion, whichoccasions among the Northern gods this feeling of sadness. They feelthemselves falling from their position; they are to be gods nolonger, but are to yield to the world-order, based on a deeper lawthan theirs, which called them into being and now is preparing theirdismissal. Distinctly Christian ideas enter the old world of gods;the ideas of sin, of sacrifice, of a final judgment, of a good godwho dies, of an evil spirit who, after prevailing for a time, ischained up to await his doom. That a sense of guilt rests on the godsshows that they are abandoning their rule, and they acknowledge thattheir successors will be better than they have been. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

Grimm's _German Mythology_, translated by Stallybrass, 4 vols. 

Grimm's _Fairy Tales_. Mr. Lang writes an Introduction to the Englishtranslation in Bell's edition. 

Mannhardt, _Germanische Mythen_, 1858, and _Wald- und Feld-kulte_, 1875, 77. 

For the later Northern section, Vigfusson and Powell's _CorpusPoeticum Boreale_, especially the Excursus on Religion, i. 401. 

Dasent, _Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the end of the tenthcentury_. 

Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_. 

Thorpe, _Northern Mythology_. 

De la Saussaye, _The Religion of the Teutons_, 1902, the mostcomprehensive statement of the whole subject. 

Ralston, _Songs of Russian People_, and _Russian Folk Tales_. 

Simrock, _Handb. Der deutschen Mythologie_. 

R. M. Meyer, _Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte_, 1910. 

Sir John Rhys, _Oxford Proceedings_, p. 201, _sqq. _

CHAPTER XVIGREECE

The history of Europe begins in Greece. It is there that the Aryansin Europe first feel the touch of the arts and civilisation of theEast, and are stirred up to new activities; and the life thusquickened in Greece transmitted its spark to Italy, and so to thewhole of Europe. 

People and Land. --There is no direct evidence that the Greeks came totheir country from elsewhere; and the theory of a Græco-Italicperiod, in which the future inhabitants of Greece and Italy livedtogether somewhere to the north of both these countries and madecommon advances in civilisation, is now abandoned. There are, however, faint indications that the Greeks spread over their countryfrom the north southwards. What people dwelt in it before them it isimpossible to say; the Pelasgi and Leleges, whom they themselvesconceived to have preceded them, left behind them no other trace thanthat belief. When first we descry this land in the faint dawn ofhistory, it is tenanted by the people whose name it bears, touchedonly by the Thracians to the north, and the Illyrians to the west, these also being Aryan races. Though the Greeks are on both sides ofthe Egean, which seems from the earliest times to have connectedrather than divided them, their centre of gravity is in the mainlandof Hellas, including the Peloponnesus. In this country many amigration no doubt took place before the people was finally arrangedin it; and some of these migrations are faintly known to history. When once the settlement had been accomplished, the nature of thecountry did much to fix the institutions of the people and the mutualrelations of their various communities. Large tribes coming into thenarrow valleys and sequestered coasts of Greece necessarily broke upinto small cantons, each of which, though not cut off fromintercourse with its neighbours, was free to develop by itself. Thecountry is said by travellers to be the most beautiful in the world. The branch of the Aryans which settled in it may have brought scantyacquirements with them, but they brought great capacities. The Greekshad an unrivalled talent for doing what they saw others do, in a muchbetter way, and so making it their own. They had an inborndisposition to what is reasonable. That they had a deep-seatedinclination to what is harmonious and beautiful is proved by theirfirst great work of art, their language. Of that language there wereseveral dialects in the earliest times; the principal ones being thebroad Doric of the peninsula and the colonies, and the softer Ionicof which the classical language is a branch. But the Greeks of alldialects could understand each other, and regarded as barbariansthose without who spoke other tongues. Thus from the first thispeople was much divided, but was also held together by strong bonds. 

Earliest Religion--Functional Deities. --The religion the Greeksbrought with them to their country was undoubtedly that which we havediscussed in our chapter on the Aryans. The primitive elements ofAryan religion all reappear in Greece; the combination of many smallhousehold worships with the supra-family worship of a great god orgods, the few great gods who are surrounded by a multitude ofspirits, some of these also growing into gods, the recognition ofspiritual presences in many a natural object, living or dead. Allthis we find in early Greece. The whole nation believes in Zeus; toall he is the Lord of heaven, the giver of rain, the fertiliser ofmother earth, the supreme ruler in earth as well as in heaven, thefather of the gods as well as of men. This is the first bond of unityin Greek religion. But every family, every village, every town hasits own peculiar worship which is to be found nowhere else. Thatworship may be addressed to Zeus with a local title; each circle ofmen has its own particular Zeus, who is their protector and ruler;and thus Zeus has many forms and names. In each community there isalso the worship of the goddess of the hearth (Hestia); eachhousehold has its own Hestia, and carries on the worship which inother Aryan peoples is connected with the memory of departedancestors. But the family or the township has also other objects ofworship. There are other gods besides Zeus who are connected withheaven, such as Apollo and Heracles. There are gods connected witheach activity of the people. Artemis is goddess of hunting, Aphroditeof the peaceful life of nature and of gardens, and also of love. Poseidon, the sea-god, was also worshipped inland, and was perhapsoriginally a god of horses and oxen; Hephæstus was the god of workersin metal, Ares the god of battle. These are in their origin what arecalled functional deities, that is to say, gods who are present inthe function with which they are associated, and of which theyconstitute the ideal or sacred side, and who have no existence apartfrom it. 

The gods of Greece in fact had their origin in that view of nature asanimated in every part, which the Greeks shared with other branchesof the Aryans, and with early man generally. Like the Latins, theGreeks at first saw a mystery, a spirit, in every part of life; eachfountain had its nymph, each forest glade its dryad; and they feltthe gods to be returning to fresh life when spring came with itsflowers. Each of their own activities also had its unseen genius. Each enclosure for flocks had its Apollo, "him of the sheepfold, " whoprotected the flock and the shepherd; and each boundary stone itsHermes, "him of the boundary, " who also watched over flocks and tookcharge of marches and of paths. 

Growth of Greek Gods. --Such beings, however, are something less thangods; and the Greeks, long before we know them, had made the stepwhich the Romans scarcely made at all, from the spirit to the god, from the vague unseen power behind an object or an act, to the freebeing conceived with human attributes and feelings, who can be thepatron of a community, and afford help in all its concerns. Not allthe spirits rise into gods; it depends on circumstances which of themare selected for that advance; but the choice once made, their risewas rapid. As the gods grew into personality and definite character, though the function out of which they first sprang was not forgotten, other functions were added to them; and as a god grew in power andconsideration, his worship was set up in new places, where othertitles and attributes awaited him. The local god might be identifiedwith the great god from a distance. The god of a powerful community, as Athene ("she of Athens"), might be adopted wherever the influenceof that community extended; thus new gods arose and old ones tooklocal form. When a change took place in the habits of the people, itwas followed by a corresponding change in the character of theirgods. When agriculture comes in, the gods have to take notice of it, the pastoral god turns agricultural, and even the huntress Artemisbecomes an encourager of fertility. When navigation rises inimportance, a number of the gods, Poseidon at their head, becomesea-gods. 

Stones, Animals, Trees. --In Greece the worship of the gods soonsuperseded that of objects not possessing any human character. Tracesof such lower worships survive, it is true, in the later religion ingreat abundance, but they have no influence in its development; theyonly tell their story of the otherwise forgotten past. Stones wereworshipped in early Greece. Not to speak of the cromlechs anddolmens, which are found there as in all parts of Asia and Europe, and the meaning of which is so little understood, stones werepreserved as sacred objects in various places, even to late times, and had no doubt originally been worshipped. The god Hermes wasrepresented in every period by a slab of stone set upright, a humanhead and other human features being indicated on it. Even in laterGreece, boards or blocks of wood were in some places exhibited onrare occasions, which were the oldest images of the Artemis or theAphrodite there adored. Though for the public eye splendid statueshad taken the place of the goddess, the original image was stillthought to have a sanctity all its own. We also notice that the godsof Greece are associated with animals. Zeus is a bull in Crete; hehas also other transformations: Pan is a goat; Artemis is a bear insome provinces, elsewhere a doe. The Athene of the Acropolis is aserpent. Apollo is sometimes connected with the mouse. Along withthese identifications of the gods with animals we may mention theanimal emblems with which they are generally represented. The eagleis the bird of Zeus, the owl of Athene, the peacock of Hera, the doveof Aphrodite. In this connection we cannot help thinking of thesacred animals of the Egyptian nomes; and the question may be askedwhether such animals must be taken to be in Greece also the signs ofa primitive totemism?

Of the tree-worship of Greece much has been written of late. The oakwas the sacred tree of Zeus; he must have been conceived as living init; he gave oracles at Dodona by the rustling of the branches of thetree. Athene has the olive, Apollo the palm, and also the laurel. After the introduction of agriculture rustic cults arose, in whichthe inhabitants of a village followed in sympathetic rites thefortunes of the gods who live in the life of the plants in summer anddie with them in autumn. The god of the Semites is generally achangeless being, who himself conducts and orders the changes of theseasons, but in Greece we find gods whom man can accompany in thetragedy of their fall and the triumph of their rise. We shall seeafterwards that the rustic worships of Demeter and Proserpine werebrought forward at a critical period in Greek religion, to supply anelement which was much required in it. These worships, similar, asMr. Frazer suggests, [1] to those still kept up by our own peasantry, were doubtless of immemorial antiquity in Greece, though in theearlier period they are little heard of. 

[Footnote 1: _Golden Bough_, vol. I. P. 356. ]

Thus the Greek gods grew up in the period before Greece was awakenedto new thoughts by contact with foreign peoples. Many harsh and cruelrites were no doubt practised; human sacrifice, heard of even inlater times in remote parts of the country, was not unknown, andpractices were connected with the service of stern gods and goddesseswhich, though literature is silent about them, left their mark oncustom. Zeus and one or two other gods are essentially moral, andsome duties were strongly encouraged by religion, such as those ofhospitality and strict regard for boundaries, of faithfulness topledge, of respect for strangers. But many of the gods are tooclosely interwoven with external nature to be very decidedly moralpowers; they are like the plants and animals, neither good nor badbut natural. 

Greek Religion is Local. --What strikes us most strongly about thisearly Greek religion is its entire want of system and its local anddisintegrated character. Every town, every family, has its ownreligion. There is no central authority. New gods are constantlyspringing up; the old ones are constantly receiving new titles andforming new unions with each other or with newer gods. The god of oneplace is in another only a hero; the same god is represented indifferent places in entirely different ways, and entirely differentlegends are attached to his name. Thus the Greeks have from the firsta mythology singularly extensive and inconsistent, and their worshipalso varies in each place. There is no general religion, but only amultitude of local ones. In story and in rite old and new are mixedup together, --what is local and what is imported, what is savage inits nature and origin, and what is on the side of progress. This is astate of matters which lies in every land before the beginning oforganised religion. Rites and legends are everywhere of local growth, and the attempt to frame the various rites and legends into aconsistent ritual and a systematic account of the gods, comes later. In Greece, as Mr. Robertson Smith observes, the earlier state ofmatters continued longer and influenced the national faith moredeeply than elsewhere. As the Greeks never succeeded in forming acentral political system, so they never attained to unity in worship. No national temple arose, the priesthood of which had power to framethe national religion, to lay down rules for sacrifice, or to editsacred texts. The Greeks were less than any other people under thesway of religious authority. While local practice was fixed, andcustom and tradition declared plainly enough what was to be regardedas religious duty, belief was quite free to grow as circumstances orthe growth of culture dictated. A religion in such a position, andamong a people of lively imagination and specially gifted in thedirection of art, must necessarily receive its forms rather from theartist than the priest. 

Artistic Tendency. --Thus we can discern from the first the directionwhich Greek religion must take. The Greeks shaped their gods earlierand more freely than other peoples, and went on shaping them till nofurther advance could be made in that way. Long before Homer they hadbeen making their gods such as free men, and men endowed with a senseof beauty, could worship. They were not content to worship lifelessobjects, but must have living beings. They were not content toworship beings without reason, they must worship reasonable beings. They were not inclined to regard the natural objects they worshippedwith terror or self-prostration, but rather in a spirit of genialfriendliness and sympathy as being something like themselves. And sothey turned their gods into men. The anthropomorphising tendency, present as we have seen in other lands and at much earlier periods, present indeed wherever religion is a growing power, had freer playwith them than with any other people. Thus the spirits of thefountain and the tree, and of every part of nature that wasworshipped, took human form. At first, no doubt, the nymph was in thefountain, the dryad in the oak, but as time went on the human maidencast off her mosses and her bark and leaves, and stood forth toimagination a being wholly human, dwelling beside the fountain or thetree. In the same way heaven becomes a great human father, the sea anearth-shaking potentate drawn by dolphins over the waves, the sun amighty archer, fire a lame craftsman (from the flickering of flame?)whose smithy is underground where the volcanoes are. And the figuresonce arrived at, it was no hard task to spin out their stories andtheir relations with each other, and to connect with them oldertales, as taste or fancy suggested. 

The thorough humanisation of the gods, the clothing of the gods inthe highest types connected with free human society, is the firstgreat contribution made by this gifted race to the progress ofreligion. Receiving from the earlier world the same kind of gods asother nations did, Greece proceeded to treat them in a way of herown, idealised and refined the parts of nature held divine, andascribed to them not only, as all early races do, human motives andhuman passions, but also human beauty and wisdom and goodness. Whatever rude materials she received to work on, either from theearlier dwellers on Greek soil or from foreign lands, she made themher own by transfiguring them into ideal men and women. Thus theGreeks reached the position, which they taught the world first inimmortal poetry and then in immortal plastic art, that man should notbow down to anything that is beneath him, and that nature can onlybecome fit to be worshipped by being idealised and made human. An endwas made to the dark imagination which was so apt to creep over allearly religion, that deity and humanity may be different andopposite; that an object devoid of reason, an object or an animaladmired not for its goodness but for something about it which mancannot understand, may be his god and have a claim to his allegiance. God and man are of the same nature, the Greeks found; to arrive at atrue idea of a god we have to form, on the basis of the naturalobject where he is supposed to dwell, the image of an ideal man orwoman. This was a great step, but in this conception of deity theGreeks also laid up for themselves, as we shall see, manydifficulties. 

Early Eastern Influences. --Our positive knowledge of Greek historybegins about the middle of the second millennium B. C. ; we haveinformation of this period in the ruins of Mycenæ and Tiryns andother places. These remains attest a political condition widelydifferent from that of the patriarchal settlements of the period whenthe Greeks were emerging from Aryan barbarism; very different alsofrom the free city life which came afterwards. The recent excavationshave brought to light the palaces of kings, built, it is evident, according to an Eastern type, and with arrangements for the burialand worship of dead potentates, not unlike those of the pyramids. Theart is rude, but shows large forces to have been at the command ofthose who directed it. We have here, therefore, a state of matterssuch as that described in the Homeric poems, in which petty kingsrule in many of the Greek towns, some of them being personages ofgreat rank and power. The movement in civilisation attested by theseremains is admitted to be due to an impulse from the East; butwhether this impulse was imparted by the voyages of Pheniciandiscoverers and merchants, or whether it came by land along the traderoutes of Asia Minor and across the Egean, is uncertain. It is in anycase traceable to North Syria, where in the early part of the secondmillennium B. C. Babylonian and Egyptian influences met and gave riseto some rude civilisation. Greece was not conquered from the East, but stirred to new life by the communication of Eastern ideas. 

Greek religion was not much assisted, or indeed much modified in anyway, by this movement. The worship of ancestors which went on in thepalaces was not contrary to Greek sentiment, perhaps not even muchmore elaborate than that sentiment required. But this part ofreligion was not a growing thing in Greece; and the royal practicesdid not prevent it from dying gradually away in later times. That anygod was imported into Greece at this time, is not proved. WhereGreeks and Phenicians met, as in some of the islands, a Greek and anEastern god might be identified; the worship of Aphrodite and that ofAstarte were fused in this way in Cyprus, and Aphrodite may thus haveacquired some new characteristics even in Greece. This is notcertain. Perhaps the most important thing to notice in thisconnection is that the new type of society at the royal courts mayhave furnished a model for the arrangement of the heavenly familywhen that arrangement came to be made. The Eastern influence came toan end in time, and the pressure being removed, the monarchiescrumbled away, the court worships were discontinued, and Greece wasleft free, after this awaking to fuller life, to pursue her ownthoughts in her own fashion. 

Homer was regarded by the Greeks who lived after him as the founderof their religion. Herodotus considers (ii. 53) that Homer and Hesiodlived four hundred years before his time, and that it was they whoframed a theogony for the Greeks, gave names to the gods, assigned tothem honours and arts, and declared their several forms. Thesewriters accordingly formed a standard of religious belief; we knowthat their works were the basis of the education of the Greek, andthey thus provided an early bond of national unity. 

The Homeric poems are the outcome, whether we regard them as the workof one singer or of two, or of a whole school, of long processes ofgrowth. The poetic art which makes them the delight of all mankind isnot a first experiment, but the ripe result of an elaborate method. The stories and the wisdom they contain are brought together frommany quarters by long accumulation. And in the same way the accountsthey give of the gods individually and of their relations to eachother are not thrown together at haphazard, but are the result of awork of unconscious art which must have been carried on for centuriesbefore it issued in this form. Homer does not by any means repeat allthe stories he knows about the gods. He passes over many local myths, especially those of the more repulsive order, which were known forcenturies after, and undoubtedly existed in his day; only what is"worthy of a pious bard" does he reproduce. A pious bard, however, had considerable latitude; and the phrase does not represent all thatHomer was. He was an entertainer of the public at royal courts, wherea feast was incomplete without him (_Odyssey_ viii. ); he had toproduce his songs at banquets or in the open air at festivals; whathe gave had to be entertaining. This could not but influence hischoice of materials even when the gods were his theme. He could notdeal in what was most terrible about the gods, nor could he enterinto speculations or mysteries, nor could he make use of a legendwhich, though it had point for the locality it belonged to, was notgenerally interesting. What was powerful and dramatic, what all mencould understand, what was curious and piquant, what met the generalsentiment, that he would be led to adopt and to work up into atelling form; he naturally sought after broad pictures, amusingconversations, simple and true emotions, curious incidents connectedwith well-known characters. Religion, it is plain, could not gain indepth and intensity from the treatment of such poets; many of thethoughts men had about the gods could not find expression in theirlines. But, on the other hand, we have the fact that the Greeksaccepted the Homeric representation of their religion as the standardone; not till it had existed for centuries were voices raised againstit. And this is not strange. Homer took away nothing from thereligion of any Greek; no local worship was in any way infringed uponby him; and on the other side he gave to the Greek world, whosebelief consisted formerly in a multitude of disconnected or eveninconsistent legends, a united system of gods, in which there was atthat stage rest for the mind, and for the imagination aninexhaustible spring of ideal beauty. 

The Homeric Gods. --What, then, is the religion of Homer? The gods area set of beings not very unlike men; they present a curiouscombination of human frailty with superhuman powers and virtues. Tospeak first of the physical side of their nature, the gods are farstronger than men, their frame is huger, their eye keener, theirvoice louder; like the sorcerer of savage times, they can assumeother shapes to gain their ends, they can become invisible, or theycan travel very swiftly through the air. Yet, on the other hand, theycan be wounded when they strive even with men; accidents happen tothem, they require to eat and drink. They eat, it is true, ambrosia, and drink nectar, which give immortality; and they have in theirveins not human blood but divine ichor. It is the fact of theirimmortality that makes them different from men; it has happened thata man obtained immortality and became thereby a god. The line betweengods and men may be crossed; in former times it was crossed morefrequently. The gods entered into relations with mortals; many of theheroes are of divine extraction, and the gods are still interested inthe royal houses they thus founded. But such unions do not take placein the poet's time. The world is growing less divine. 

Homer, however, looks further back than this, and we find in him thebelief, found also in India and in Iceland, that an older and moresavage race of gods once ruled, whom the present dynasty conqueredand dethroned. Of that older set was Kronos, the father of Zeus, andthe Titans, who are now cast down to Tartarus, the nethermost regionof all. The world known to men was apportioned at the beginning ofthe present age to the three sons of Kronos, Zeus obtaining the upperworld, including heaven, which is at the top of Mount Olympus inThessaly; Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under-world, aboveTartarus, to which men go after death. 

Zeus rules in Olympus. He presides there over those gods who are atpresent in power. He summons them to council, he sits at meals withthem. They are a very human set of beings. They are moved by ordinaryhuman motives; love and revenge, jealousy and anger, rule in theirbreasts. They do not act from eternal principles, but as men do, fromsudden impulses or from the desire of temporary advantages forthemselves or for their favourites. They even indulge in looseamours, and are brought into ridiculous situations. They laugh ateach other; the stronger god hurls the weaker out of Olympus to theearth. Taking them together, we do not find the Olympians animpressive set of beings. Taking them, however, one by one, we judgeof them quite differently. The individual gods represent lofty idealsand are not unworthy of worship. Whatever they were once, powers ofnature, fetishes or men, whatever village legends they have broughtwith them from their native place, or whatever traits of savage lifestill cleave to them, to the poet they are the embodiments of variousmoral excellences. Zeus, father of gods and men, combines in hischaracter the attributes of righteousness and of kindness; he is thefounder of social order and the defender of suppliants, he possessesall wisdom. Hera is the matron of fully unfolded beauty and matchlessdignity; Apollo is the faithful son who carries out his father'scounsel; Athene is the warrior-maiden skilled in battle but equippedwith every kind of skill, best counsellor and guide for the mortalwhom she favours; Aphrodite is the goddess of love, in whose girdleare contained all charms; Ares is the impetuous warrior, Hermes thetrusty messenger, of the heavenly circle; Hephæstus, the lame andawkward smith, is the artificer for the gods of all manner of cunningwork in metal. Around and under the Olympians are many other deities;such as Hebe, the budding girl, and Ganymede, the youth born of humanrace but taken up to heaven for his beauty to minister to the gods attheir banquets. Aphrodite is attended by the graces, Apollo by theMuses, and the world is not stripped by Homer of its local deities, although the chief deities now dwell aloft; mountains, rivers, cavesand isles of ocean, all have their immortal occupants. 

Worship in Homer. --The gods being of such a nature, what relationsdoes man keep up with them, and how do they affect his life? Worshipfollows the simple practice of the early world. It is not priestly. There are priests, and they offer sacrifices regularly at the shrinesof which they have charge, but the king can sacrifice, or the head ofthe house; and while one or two temples are mentioned in the _Iliad_, sacrifice may be offered anywhere. Temples first appear in Greecemerely as shelters for images, but in the _Iliad_ the god isgenerally worshipped not by means of an image but as himself directlypresent; the need of temples has not yet arisen. In the _Odyssey_temples of the gods are spoken of as buildings no town could bewithout, but this is less primitive. Sacrifice is a feast in whichthe god's portion of the viands is first offered to him, and theworshippers then eat and drink to their hearts' content. There is adetailed description of the proceedings in _Iliad_ i. 456 _sqq. _ Hereafter the feast there is music; "All day long worshipped they the godwith music, singing the beautiful pæan to the Fardarter (Apollo); andhis heart was glad to hear. " "The gods appear manifest amongst us, "we read in the seventh book of the _Odyssey_, "whensoever we offerglorious hecatombs, and they feast by our side, sitting at the sameboard. " There is nothing of the nature of an expiation about such asacrifice; it is simply the renewal of the bond between the god andthose who look for his aid, when a new enterprise is about to beundertaken or a solemn engagement is entered on. Prayers are verysimple. Thus prays the wounded Diomede to Athene (_Iliad_ v. 115):"Hear me, daughter of ægis-bearing Zeus, unwearied maiden! If ever inkindly mood thou stoodest by my father in the heat of battle, even sobe thou kind to me, Athene! Grant me to slay this man, and bringwithin my spear-cast him that took advantage to shoot me, andboasteth over me!"

As there are no bad gods, good and evil are considered to be sent bythe same beings. Thus there is a great deal of uncertainty in men'srelations to the gods. "All men need the gods, " we read; the Homerichero regards the companionship of a god as proper and necessary forhis enterprises. But some trouble must be taken in order to securetheir favour. They must not be neglected; their signs must beattended to; above all, a man must be reverent and must studiouslypractise moderation in his conduct and in his ways of thinking; elsethe gods may easily be offended or made jealous, and withdraw theircountenance. And if they are to a certain extent capricious, there isanother consideration which impairs confidence in them. They are notall-powerful. There is a point beyond which they cannot give a manany help. Each man has a fate or destiny, which the gods did not fixand with which they cannot interfere. When his hour comes, they mustleave him to his doom; indeed they may even deceive him, and lead himinto folly so that his fate shall overtake him. The punishment ofcrime, both in this world and afterwards, is committed to a specialset of beings, the Erinnyes. The gods who are most worshipped do notexercise that function; they are not immovably identified with themoral order of the world, but frequently deviate from it themselves. In the _Odyssey_, it is true, we meet with a deeper feeling. HereZeus is a kind of providence, in whom a man may trust when he doesright, and to all whose dispensations it behoves him humbly tosubmit. A root of monotheism is present here, as in all the Aryanreligions from the first, and in Greece it is destined to have astately growth. The Homeric pantheon, however, as a whole, showsreligion at a stage in which it is rather an external ornament tolife than an inner inspiration. Perhaps there was never a set of realmen who thought of the gods and addressed them according to thefashion of Homer. If such a religion ever actually existed, it wasnot a strong one. These gods, with their caprices and infirmities andtheir limited power, could never exercise any strong moral influenceor rouse any passion in their worshippers. They are fair-weathergods; the religion is one of children, in whom conscience is not yetawake and the deeper spiritual needs have not yet appeared. What themind of the Greek has done up to this stage is to discover thatnature is not above him; the powers of nature are human to him; theyare divine not because they are essentially different from himself, but because they are matchless ideals of his own qualities. It is areligion of free men. But the Greek has not yet discovered howdifferent he himself is from all that is around him; that element ofhimself which is above nature will when he discovers it make such areligion as the Homeric for ever impossible to him. 

Omens. --As the godhead is never far away from the Homeric Greek, andis an active being who takes an interest in human affairs, signs ofhis presence are not infrequent. The air is the scene of them; in theflight of birds, in sudden noises, the gods send messages; lightningis a sign from Zeus of approaching rain or hail, it may be ofapproaching war. There are rules for the interpretation of signs, which, however, are in many cases of doubtful significance. Dreamsalso are a favourite channel for divine communications, but they alsomay be interpreted wrongly. There are persons who have a special giftfor knowing the divine will; the seer ([Greek: mantis]) isenlightened by the deity not by an outward sign but inwardly; hehears the god's voice, and can declare the divine will directly. Thisgift may reside in a certain family, and may be attached to a certainspot, where a regular oracle is open for consultation. At Dodona weread that the Selloi or Helloi, a band or family of priests ofascetic habits, interpret the rustling of the sacred oak, andAgamemnon consults the Pythia, the Delphic priestess, before theTrojan war. 

The State after Death. --With regard to the state after death, beliefis not uniform in Homer. There are elaborate funeral rites whichpoint to the assumption that the spirit of the hero is livingsomewhere and needs various things. But the life of the departed wasnot mapped out in Greece as it was in Egypt. The ritual of Mycenæ hadlittle influence, for the funeral celebrations in Homer are verysimilar to those of other early Aryan peoples, and undoubtedly werenot imported. What then is thought of the present existence of thehero? He has ceased to exist. The body is the man, the spirit when ithas left the body has but a shadow-life, without any strength orhope; at the most it may revive a little at the taste of blood. Butwhile the worship of the departed is seen from Homer to be decayingamong the Greeks, imagination is seen to be occupied in more than onedirection with the regions where they are, and to be asserting forthem a more real and active existence than the old beliefs allowed. The subterranean kingdom of Hades (the "Invisible") is acquiringclearer shape. The punishments are described which certain greattransgressors, such as Tantalus and Ixion, are there undergoing; andother details are also known. Of a different spirit is the conceptionof the Elysian plains in the far west, whither the hero is taken bythe gods when he dies, and where there is no snow nor storm nor rain. 

Homer was not the only poet who furnished the Greeks with a system oftheir gods; nor was his system everywhere accepted without demur. Hesiod, writing in the latter half of the eighth century B. C. , givesa "theogony" or birth of the gods, which is also a genesis or originof the world, for to the Greek mind the gods and the world came intoexistence together. He complains of those who on this subject havetaught fictions which resemble truths, referring perhaps to Homer. His own system of the world is not a light and airy fabric but alaborious work, due no doubt to professional or priestly industry, inwhich the attempt is made to treat all the divine figures orhalf-figured spirits the Greeks knew, genealogically, and to give acomplete enumeration of them. Myths are given, some of them of ahorrible character, which do not occur in Homer. The battle of thegods with the Titans occupies a large part of the poem, and itconcludes with a collection of stories showing the descent of heroesfrom alliances between gods and mortals. This work, as we saw, wasconsidered, along with the Homeric poems, as a standard authority onthe subject of the gods, and was appealed to even in the earlyChristian centuries as showing what the Greeks believed. 

The Poets and the Working Religion. --The work of these poets provesthat the Greeks in their days were anxious to arrive at clear andharmonious conceptions about the gods. The movement on which Homerand Hesiod set their seal, of fixing the characters and attributes ofthe various deities, must have been long going on; and it led, as wesee, to different results in different places. That labour whenaccomplished endowed Greece with a new religion. The local rite stillwent on, which acknowledged no central authority and presented thespectacle of an infinite diversity. Each city carried on in grave andsolemn fashion the traditional worship of its own gods, on whosefavour its prosperity depended. The other gods of the Pantheon thecity did not need to worship; and moreover local worship wasaddressed to a large extent to the Chthonian or earth-gods, asDemeter and Dionysus, of whom the epic poems know but little. Thepoets were of little assistance therefore to the working religion;but on the other hand the happy and beautiful deities of Homer foundentrance wherever poetry was loved. This was a religion for allGreece; these gods were national; though some of them belongedoriginally to Æolia, they had become national by being enshrined inpoetry which the whole nation regarded as its own. The Homericconception of deity acted therefore on the whole Greek mind; all godsrose in rank by the example, a subject was set before the mind of thepeople, which the closely succeeding development of religious artshows to have been studied in the noblest way. 

Rise of Religious Art. --The seventh century B. C. Was a period ofrapid development and of great prosperity in Greece. It was the ageof colonisation; manufacture and trade were active, and though thePhenicians were not now in the Egean, Greeks sailed to the East andbrought home with them many ideas. It was a time like the sixteenthcentury in Europe, when the world of geography was quickly openingout, and views and sentiments were also widening. Worship could notfail to share in the upward movement of such a period, and it is herethat we find the appearance of the ideas in religious art which havemade Greece the envy of the world. Architecture received a newimpulse from Egypt and Babylon; dwellings were built, not for humanrulers, as in the Mycenæan period, but for the gods. In countrydistricts or small towns the wooden shed might still suffice toshelter the rude image, but in large towns, where the higherconception of the gods and the artistic impulse were both present inmany minds, temples of more durable material were built. This came tobe a universal practice; among the first tasks of a new colony wasalways that of erecting on a commanding site in the rising town, splendid temples to the gods of the mother city. The Greek temple isnot a place to accommodate a large body of worshippers, but adwelling for the god. It is of oblong shape, and is placed on araised platform which is ascended by steps. It is generallysurrounded by pillars, is roofed, and has a low gable at each end. The most important chamber in it is that containing the image of thegod. From his dim chamber the god looks out to the east through thedoorway facing him, which opens on the pillared portico in front. Here the worshipper stands when praying, his face turned westward tothe god. As it was essential that the smoke of the sacrifice shouldascend freely to heaven, the god's real dwelling, the altar stoodoutside. In some cases the roof was partly open, and the altar couldstand under the sky in the _cella_ of the god. 

In the building and adornment of the temples Greek art found itshighest exercise. The architecture of those specimens which can stillbe seen or described is of a dignity and beauty never beforeattained; the beings must have been lofty and reverend indeed forwhom such dwellings were formed. The gable spaces and the flatsurfaces between the tops of the pillars and the roof gaveopportunity for sculpture; and the archæologist traces on thesemetopes (spaces between the beam-ends under the roof) and friezes, the progress of Greek sculpture from a rude stage to that in whichthe sculptor has gained complete mastery over his material, and cangive an imposing representation of a myth, or place on the marble acomplete religious procession of brave men and fair women. The imagesof the gods to be placed in the temples called forth the artist'shighest skill; even when the rude old god was retained, a fine workof art could also find place. It is the ideal gods of poetry that arecoming to be worshipped; the conception of the poet is expressed inmarble. Sculpture, however, came to its highest point in Greecesomewhat later than architecture. And offerings were made to thetemples of just such rare and costly things as men loved then andlove still to store up in their houses, --bowls and cups wroughtcuriously in precious metals, statues and tapestries and all kinds oftreasure. 

Festivals and Games. --The temple for which so much was done, formedthe centre of the city where it stood. In it the town deposited itstreasure and its documents; there oaths and agreements were ratified. There also at certain times, such as the annual festival of the godor the anniversary of some happy event in the history of thetown, --and as time went on such occasions tended to multiply, --thetown kept holiday. Women escaped from their monotonous confinementand joined the procession to the holy place, perhaps carrying a newdress for the deity. A sacrifice was offered, the god received hisshare of the victim or victims, and the worshippers feasted on whatremained. But before this part of the proceedings arrived there was apause, which was filled up with various exercises all connected withthe act of worship, but tending also in a high degree to the delightof those taking part in it. Dancing formed a part of every rite, accompanied of course with music, and consisting not of a carelessexercise of the limbs, but of a measured and carefully trained set ofmovements expressive of the emotions connected with the occasion. This part of the religious act is obviously capable of greatexpansion. We find the art of poetry also making its contributions toreligious art; poems are recited bearing on the history of the god. The sacrifice is followed by contests of various kinds; the singerscompete for a prize, and athletic sports also take place, thecompetitors for which have long been in training for them. Thewinners are crowned with a wreath or branch of the plant sacred tothe god. The games of Greece, which thus arose out of acts ofworship, and some of which became so famous and attracted competitorsfrom every Greek-speaking land, are a notable sign of the spirit ofGreek piety. There is no asceticism in Greek religion; the god isrepresented as a beautiful human person, and his worshippers appearbefore him naked, in the fulness of their youthful beauty and oftheir well-trained vigour, and offer him their strength and skill inhighest exercise;--the whole city, or a crowd much larger than thecity, rejoicing in the spectacle. 

Thus does Greek religion enlist in its service all the arts, andincrease as they increase. At this period irrational manifestationsof piety tend to disappear, human sacrifice and the worship ofanimals are heard of afterwards only in remote quarters. The religionwhich now prevails is a bright and happy self-identification with abeing conceived as a type of human beauty and excellence, by being asfar as possible beautiful oneself, creating beautiful objects, composing beautiful verse, training the body to its highest pitch ofstrength and agility, and displaying its powers in manly contests. This conception of religion, for a short time realised in Greece, still haunts the mind as a vision which once seen can never beforgotten. No one whose eyes have opened to that vision can regardany religious acts in which the effort after harmony and beauty formsno part, as other than degraded and unworthy. 

Zeus and Apollo. --It is impossible here to enter specially on theworship of the individual gods. Two of the gods, however, the samewho even in Homer stand above the level of the rest, still maintainthat superiority. Zeus draws to himself more and more all theattributes of pure deity; his name comes more and more to standsimply for "God, " as if there were no other. He is the father of godsand men; goodness and love are natural to him. He is the supremeRuler and Disposer, whose word is fate and whose ways pious thoughtfeels called to justify; but he is also the Saviour, to whom everyone may appeal. He is the source of all wisdom; all revelations comefrom him. The other god who occupies a marked position is Apollo, thegod of light and the prophet of his father Zeus. His oracle at Delphiwas the most important in Greece; it was held to be the centre of theearth, and was a meeting-place for Greeks from every quarter. Hispriests exercised through the oracle a great influence on Greek life, and as their god required strict purity and truthfulness and was theinspirer of every kind of art and of none but noble purposes, theworship of Apollo is one of the highest forms of Greek religion. 

Change of the Greek Spirit in the Sixth Century B. C. --But the timewas at hand when the worship of the gods of the poets was to prove, in spite of all that art had done for it, inadequate to meet thespiritual needs of Greece. Civilisation advances in the sixth centuryB. C. With immense rapidity; the Greeks, no longer prompted by anyforeign influence, quickly learn to exercise their own powers, and toapply them in new directions. Life grows richer and deeper, new modesof sentiment appear, the nation grows more conscious of its unity, and at the same time the individual learns to value himself morehighly and to assert himself more strongly. On one side thoughtawakes to an independent career and traditional beliefs are subjectedto criticism; on the other spiritual needs are felt which the oldworship does not satisfy, and for which religion has to find newoutlets. 

It is far beyond our scope to deal with the religious movements of apeople thus passing into the self-conscious stage, and unfolding withunparalleled freshness and power all the various activities of thehuman mind. We can only point out a few of the lines of developmentwhich become prominent at this period. And firstly we notice the riseof _rationalism_, that is of the impulse to criticise belief and toask for that element in it which approves itself to the reflectingmind. Reason asserts its right to judge of tradition; the doubtersuggests emendations in the legend; the piously inclined turn theirattention to those parts only which are capable of lofty treatment. This tendency is fatal to polytheism. As reason knows not gods butonly God, the gods can only hold their place on condition that theyare what God must be, and so they all tend to become alike in theircharacter; attention is turned most of all to Zeus, the highest god, and when others are worshipped, it is as his prophets or delegates. The poets of the fifth century reflect the conviction which all thehigher minds of their country were now coming to hold, that the worldis under the rule of one god. From this they are led to take up thequestions of theodicy or of the principles of the divine government. Æschylus and Sophocles, writing perhaps about the same time as theauthor of the Book of Job, are full of problems of this nature. Whyis Prometheus, though the noblest benefactor of the human race, doomed to undergo such sufferings? Why does a curse cleave to acertain house, evil producing evil from generation to generation?What is the relation between the divine laws which are written in thehearts of all men, and human laws which sometimes contradict theseolder ones? Thus to the educated Greeks of the fifth century the oldreligion had in its essence passed away. With unexampled rapidity hadthe journey here been traced which India made more slowly, whichEgypt made at a very early period, but was not able to maintain, andwhich every people starting from polytheism must make if theirreligion is to prosper. 

New Religious Feeling; the Mysteries. --But the conscience as well asthe mind of Greece awakes at this period, and Greek religion becomesinspired with a deeper feeling. The simple objectivity of the Homericspirit is gone in which man could frankly worship beings like himselfand not very far above himself. God at this time is growing greaterand more awful, and man, less certain of himself, is beginning tofeel a new sense of mystery and of shortcoming. Whether it was due tothe anxiety and depression felt in Greece during the century beforethe Persian wars, or to foreign influences, or mainly to the naturalgrowth of the Greek mind itself, religious phenomena of a new kindnow appear. Sacrifices are heard of, which are not merely socialreunions with the deity, but are intended to expiate some guilt or toremove some pollution. The sense of sin has arisen, which the Homericworld knows not, and gives a new colour to man's converse with thedeity. Another new feature is the rise into prominence of cults inwhich man feels himself taken possession of and inspired by his god. Some of these belonged to Asia Minor, the great centre of worshipsaccompanied with ecstasy and frenzy, but some were of native growth. In these the common man found a satisfaction which the statelyceremonial of the temples did not afford. The official religion hadgrown cold and distant; but in the worship of Demeter or Dionysus, asafterwards of the Phrygian Cybele, the "Great Mother" whom the Romansimported, the least educated could feel the joy of enthusiasm and ofself-forgetting under the influence of the god, and could be closelyidentified with the object of worship by performing acts in which theexperience of the god was symbolically repeated. 

The rapid rise of the worships of Demeter and Dionysus thus furnishesan instance of the law that a religion of intellect and of art is aptto be confronted, even when it appears to have overcome allobstacles, by a religion of feeling, in which all the fair progressthat was made appears to be entirely set at naught. When the worshipof Zeus, Apollo, and Athene was coming to its highest splendour, these cults began to spread rapidly. They were originally peasantrites of unknown antiquity in Attica and Boeotia, in which, after themanner of rustic festivals, the coming of spring or the dying of theyear were celebrated amid jest and song, and with certain prescribedactions in which the fortune of the god, corresponding to the season, was dramatically set forth. In spring Demeter, the mother goddess, received her daughter Persephone, who had left her for the winter; orin autumn Dionysus, the god of vegetation, was defeated by hisenemies and driven away or torn in pieces. These worships, whendeveloped and forming a prominent part of Greek religion, were called"mysteries, " not because the knowledge of them was confined to few, but because some parts of them were transacted in deep silence, andwere the objects of such awe and reverence that they were not spokenof. No one, moreover, could assist at these rites without beingsolemnly initiated after a period of probation and purification. Ofthe Eleusinian mysteries at least, which were the most widelydiffused and which formed part of the state religion of Athens, ancient writers agree in their report that the course of trainingbefore admission was powerfully elevating and solemnising, so thatthe period of initiation was the highest point of the religious life. It was a condition that the candidate should be pure in heart and notconscious of any crime. There was apparently no doctrinalinstruction; everything was to be inferred from the spectacle. Themind was kept in a state of intense and devout expectation, knowledgeand insight growing, it was held, as the time of admission came near. Before the final act there came a period of fasting, then a marchfrom Athens to Eleusis along the sacred way, which was studded withshrines; then a search for the lost goddess in the dark of a moonlessnight on the plains of Eleusis, and then at last admission to thebrightly-lighted building. Here all the arts were enlisted to furnisha spectacle of unparalleled magnificence, during which the candidatewas allowed to touch and kiss certain sacred objects of a simplenature, and repeated a solemn formula at his admission. 

By partaking in these rites a man was believed to part with hisformer sins, to form a special union with the deity, in whose naturehe was made to partake, and to be started on a career in which hecould not fail to grow morally better. It is easy to see the immensesuperiority of this worship to the official rites of the temples. Thegreat point is that a new principle of religious association is hereintroduced. The tie which binds the worshipper to his god and to hisfellow-worshippers is no longer that of blood or of common politicalinterests, but the higher one of a common spiritual experience. AllGreeks were eligible for initiation at Eleusis. A man was not borninto this circle, but entered it of his own free will and by means ofvoluntary effort and self-denial. A community of a higher order thusmakes its appearance in Greek history, in which the limits of raceand of locality are overstepped, and each is connected with the rest, because all have turned of their own voluntary motion to the sameideal centre. The analogies between the community formed on themysteries and the Christian Church are too obvious to need to beinsisted on. The adversaries of Christianity asserted that in themysteries all the truths and the whole morality of that religion wereto be found. 

Religion and Philosophy. --But while the mysteries met to some extentthe craving for a closer union with deity, another need which hadlong been growing in the Greek mind was to be satisfied in a verydifferent manner. The Greek religion we have described had verylittle to offer in the way of doctrine. There are no sacred books init, there is no theology, there is no religious instruction. When themind of Greece awoke to intellectual life, and the demand was madefor an explanation of the world, and for a view of the origin ofthings which should explain man to himself, the Greek religion wasmanifestly little fitted to meet such a demand. But man haseverywhere looked to religion to do him this service, and a religionwhich is incapable of rendering it, or which like Buddhism explicitlyrefuses to take up the task, stands in a perilous position. If theshrine has no doctrine enabling man to understand the origin and theconnection of things, he will seek such a doctrine elsewhere, andreligion will have no control over it. Another alternative is that ofBuddhism where in default of such a doctrine man is condemned tosubside into intellectual apathy. 

This, however, could never be the case with the Greeks, and theirfate in this respect proved different from that of any other people. After their intellectual awakening took place, and when they hadbegun to seek in every direction for a first principle of all things, never doubting that the world was a system of reason, but trying onekey after another to unlock its secret, we find that religion itselfbecame aware of the need of the times, and that the attempt was made, late in the day but with deep earnestness and great ability, toconstruct out of the myths a reasoned account of the origin ofthings. This was the aim of the Orphic poets. Orpheus, the mythicalsinger of Thrace, who charmed men and beasts with his songs on earth, had descended into Hades to fetch back his wife, who had been takenfrom him, and had beheld the secrets of the under-world. The schoolwhich was named after him dealt with the deepest problems, and soughtto explain both the nature of the gods and the destiny of the humansoul. It insisted strongly on the power and sole headship of Zeus, inwhom Greek religion had possessed from Homer downwards a figurefitted for a monotheistic position. "Zeus is the head, Zeus themiddle, from Zeus are all things made. He is male and female, he isthe foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven, the breath inall, the strength of fire, the root of the sea, sun, and moon. Zeusis the king, the progenitor of all things. " The god Dionysus also isplaced by the Orphic writers at the head of the whole process ofcreation. The myth of his dismemberment and of the scattering of hisashes over the whole world is made to symbolise the great thought ofthe connection of all things with the same source of life. Descriptions were also given, answering to the growing sense ofpersonal responsibility, of the abodes of Hades and of the fate ofsouls there, and of the metempsychoses through which the soul mustpass. This teaching had an influence which it is difficult tomeasure; it acted on the tragedians in their magnificent attempts toreform the beliefs of their country by making them moral; it is to betraced in Plato, it also found expression in the mysteries. In itsown development it gave rise to a new phenomenon in Greek religion, that of itinerant preachers who went about appealing to individualsto take thought for the salvation of their souls, and also, strangeto say, offering private charms and spells to put them on the rightway of salvation. 

But Greek religion was not thus to be reformed. It was not from thepriests that the growth of the higher faith of Greece was to proceed, but from the philosophers. While much of the teaching of thephilosophers was apparently negative and destructive of faith, --forGreece had her religious sceptics who turned the shafts of ridiculeon existing beliefs, her Agnostics who considered that nothingcertain could be affirmed about the gods, and even her secularistswho held religion to be a mere invention of priests and rulers fortheir own purposes, --the course of Greek philosophy was, on thewhole, constructive, even in matters of faith, and laboured toprovide religion with a stable foundation in thought. In this greatmovement of the human mind the thinkers of Greece--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, to name no more--were working at the same problem whichoccupied the prophets of Israel, and building up the rule of one God, a Being supremely wise and good, source of all beauty, and the workerof all that is wrought in the universe, in place of the many fickleand weak deities who formerly bore sway. In many ways the schools ofGreece were the forerunners of Christianity. As the Jews, carried farfrom their temple, form a new principle of religious association andlearn to meet for the service of God, without any sacrifice, in piousmental exercises, so the Greeks, for whom their temples could do solittle, form little communities of earnest seekers after truth undersome teacher. The philosopher's discourse is held by students of theearly Christianity of the West to be the model on which the Christiansermon was formed. Some of the schools even developed a true pastoralactivity, exercising an oversight of their members, and seeking tomould their moral life and habits according to the dictates of truewisdom. 

Thus there arose on Greek soil, after the temples had grown cold, what may truly be called a second Greek religion. It took possessionof the Roman world, and was, when Christianity appeared, theprevailing form of religion among the more educated. Both in itsoutward forms of association, in its doctrine of God, which wentthrough later developments very similar to those of Judaism, and inits concentration of thought on ethical problems and on the morallife of the individual, it powerfully prepared for Christianity. Itwas not a religion, for it had neither any historical root nor anybelief and practice definite enough for the guidance of the commonpeople. Yet Christianity could not have conquered the world withoutit. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, vol. Ii. , contains the firstattempt to deal with Greek religion in the manner now required. 

The Histories of Greece of Grote, Curtius, Abbott, and Holm. 

Roscher, _Lexikon der griechischen, a Rômischen Mythologie_. 

Dyer, _The Gods of Greece_. 

Gardner and Jevons, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, 1895. 

L. R. Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_, 1896-1907. 

Nägelsbach, _die Homerische Theologie_. 

Williamowitz, _Homerische Untersuchungen_. 

G. Anrich, _das Antike Mysterienwesen_. 

Rohde, _Psyche_, 1891. 

L. Campbell's Gifford Lectures on _Religion in Greek Literature_, 1898. 

E. Caird, _The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, 1904. 

Holwerda, in De la Saussaye, Third Edition. 

Ramsay on "Religion of Greece and Asia Minor" in Hastings' _BibleDictionary_. 

S. Reinach, in _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. Ii. P. 117, _sqq. _

CHAPTER XVIITHE RELIGION OF ROME

The Romans themselves at a certain period in their history identifiedtheir own gods with those of Greece, and borrowed largely both fromGreek ritual and Greek mythology, so that they came to the conclusionthat the Roman and the Greek religions were essentially the same. Tothe early Christian writers the religions of Greece and Rome form onesystem; and the world has retained the impression that there was oneold pagan religion which assumed certain local differences in the twocountries, but was substantially the same in both. 

Roman Religion was different from Greek. --Now the fact is that whileGreek religion conquered Rome, Italy had an older religion of itsown, which was not annihilated by the more brilliant newcomer, butremained beside it and never entered into entire fusion with it. TheRomans were not a thinking so much as an organising race; in politicsthey were far ahead of the rest of the world, but in thought andimagination they were children; and so it happened that they borrowedideas and usages from neighbours on this side and on that, andorganised the whole into a system they could use, the organism beingtheir own, but only little of the contents. 

We must therefore inquire, in the first place, as to the religion theRomans had before they came under the influence of Greek ideas. Theirearliest religion is to be traced in the calendar of their sacredyear, in the lists of gods preserved for us in the writings of thefathers, and in numberless usages and institutions descended fromearly times. 

The sacred year of early Rome is that of an agricultural community. The festivals have to do with sowing and reaping and storing corn, with vintage, with flocks and herds, with wolves, with spirits of thewoods, with boundaries, with fountains, with changes of the sun andof the moon. There are festivals of domestic life, of the householdfire, and of the spirits of the storeroom, of the spirits of thedeparted, and of the household ghosts. There are also festivalsconnected with warlike matters, some connected with the river and theharbour at its mouth, and some having to do with the arts of a simplepopulation. The calendar, taken by itself, would create theimpression that the community using it began with agriculture andadded to it afterwards various other activities; there is nothing init to contradict the supposition that Roman religion had itsbeginnings in the fields and in the woods. 

The earliest gods of Rome also agree with this. They are, however, avery peculiar set of gods. Leaving the great gods in the meantime, wenotice two of the agricultural deities; there is a Saturnus, god ofsowing, and a Terminus, god of boundaries. These are what are calledfunctional deities, such as we met with in Greece, see chapter xvi. ;they take their name from the act or province over which theypreside. Saturnus means one who has to do with sowing; Terminus is aboundary pure and simple. The god then, in these examples, is not agreat being who has come to have these functions placed under him aswell as others. He and the particular function belong together; heowes all his deity to it. Now these are only examples; the same isfound to be the case with all or nearly all the distinctively Romangods; they are, broadly speaking, all functional beings. Each bearsthe name of an object or a process; and on the other hand there is noobject and no act which has not its god. It is astounding to observehow far the principle of the division of labour is carried amongthese beings. Silvanus is the god of the wood, Lympha of the stream, each wood and each stream having its own Silvanus or Lympha. Seia hasto do with the corn before it sprouts, Segetia with corn when shotup, Tutilina with corn stored in the granary, Nodotus has for hiscare the knots in the straw. There is a god Door, a goddess Hinge, agod Threshold. Each act in opening infancy has its god or goddess. The child has Cunina when lying in the cradle, Statina when hestands, Edula when he eats, Locutius when he begins to speak, Adeonawhen he makes for his mother, Abeona when he leaves her; forty-threesuch gods of childhood have been counted. Pilumnus, god of thepestle, and Diverra, goddess of the broom, may close our small sampleof the limitless crowd. 

It is usually said about these multitudinous petty deities that theRoman was very religious, and saw in every act and everything forwhich he had a name, something mysterious and supernatural. TheGreek, it is said, sees things on his own level, and adds to them agod who is human; it is by the human spirit that he interprets them. The Roman, on the contrary, sees things as mysteries and fills themwith gods who are not human. That is true; but the question to beasked about these Roman gods is, to what stage of religiousdevelopment do they belong: do they prove a primitive or an advancedstage of religious thought? It has been observed that these names ofgods are all epithets, or adjectives; and it has been supposed thatthere was originally a noun belonging to them, that they were allepithets of one great deity, or, as some are masculine and somefeminine, of a great male and a great female deity. The noun fell outof use, it is supposed, but was still present to the mind of theRoman, and thus his regiments of divine names are not reallydesignations of different persons, but titles of the same person, supposed to be present alike in all these numberless manifestations. But it is not easy to conceive how, if primitive Italy had reachedthe conception of the unity of deity, that deity became so remarkablysubdivided, nor how his own proper name and character were lost. Itis much more natural to suppose that the petty gods of Rome were allthe deities the early Latins had, and were worshipped for their ownsake. They represent the stage of thought called Animism (see chapteriii. ) when every part of nature is thought to have its spirit, andthe number of invisible beings is liable to be multipliedindefinitely. While other Aryan races had passed beyond this stagewhen we first know them, and advanced to the belief in great godsruling great provinces of nature, the Latins, whose mind wasorganising rather than productive, made this advance more slowly, andinstead of making it organised the spiritual world of animism with athoroughness nowhere else equalled. [1] They had, therefore, no godsproperly so called, but only a host of spirits. Even the beings theypossessed, who afterwards became great gods, were at first no morethan functional spirits. Janus, afterwards one of the chief deitiesof Rome, is originally the "spirit of opening"; an abstractioncapable of great multiplication; a Janus could be invoked for eachact of that kind. Vesta is the spirit of the hearth; each householdhad its Vesta, both in early and in later times. Juno is not one butmany: as each man had his genius, a spiritual self accompanying orguarding him, so each woman had--not her genius, but her Juno. Therewere many Vestas, many Junos; and it is only later that the greatgoddess arises, who may be looked to from every quarter. Others ofthe great gods of later Rome have a similar early history. Mars wasat first the spirit which made the corn grow; Diana was atree-spirit, Jovis or Diovis himself, though his name connects himwith the Greek Zeus and the Sanscrit Dyaus, and though he isafterwards, like these, the god of the sky, was originally in Latin aspirit of wine, and was worshipped, the Jovis of each village or eachfarm, at the wine-feast in April when the first cask was broached. Thus the gods of the Latins are not beings who have an independentexistence and features of their own; they are limited each to theparticular object or process from which he derives his character, andhave no realm beyond it. And the same is true of the family andhouse-gods, whose worship formed perhaps the principal part of theworking religion of the Roman. The Lares represent the departedancestors of the family; they dwell near the spot in the house wherethey were buried, and still preside over the household as they did inlife. They are worshipped daily with prayers and offerings of foodand drink; the family adore in them not so much the dead individuals, though their masks hang on the wall, as the abstraction of its ownfamily continuity. The Penates or spirits of the store-chamber areworshipped along with the Lares, they represent the continuity of thefamily fortune. A more general name for the departed is the Manes, the kind ones; they are thought of as living below the earth; it isnot individuals who are worshipped at their festivals, but the deadin the abstract, the former upholders of the family or of the people. 

[Footnote 1: See on this Mr. Jevons's preface to Plutarch's _RomaneQuestions_ (Nutt, 1892); which deserves to be published in a moreaccessible form. ]

The character of Roman worship is determined by the nature of itsobjects. As each of the gods has his basis in a material object oraction, there can be no need of any images of them; where the objector the act is, there is the god, his character is expressed in it andnot to be expressed otherwise. Nor could such gods require anytemples. And what need of priests for them, when every one who knewtheir names (a great deal depended on that) could place himself incontact with them as soon as he saw the object or took in hand theaction behind which they stood? Nor can many stories be told aboutgods like these, --the Romans have no mythology. The beings theyworship are not persons but abstractions. They have just enoughcharacter to be male or female, but they cannot move about or actindependently of their natural basis; they cannot marry, nor breedscandal, nor make war. Nor can there be any motive for identifyingwith such beings a great man who has died; where there are no truegods, there cannot be any demi-gods or heroes. Only a very limitedpower can possibly be put forth by such beings; all they can do is togive or to withhold prosperity, each in the narrow section of affairshe has to do with. 

The aim of worship where such a set of beings is concerned, is to gethold of the spirit or god connected with the act one has in view, andso to deal with him as to avert his disfavour, which the Roman alwaysapprehended, and gain his concurrence. The house-gods are beingspossessing a stated cult, but outside the house-cult the worshipperhas to face the question at each emergency which god he ought toaddress. He might choose the wrong one, which would make his act ofworship vain. If he names the god correctly he will have a hold onhim; in a case of uncertainty, therefore, he names a number of gods, in the hope that one of them will be the right one; or he invokesthem all. "Whether thou be god or goddess" he will further say, if heis in doubt on that point, "or by whatever name thou desirest to becalled. " Each god has his proper style and title, and it is vain toapproach him without these; lists of the various gods and of theircorrect styles were therefore drawn up in very early times to serveas guides to the subject. The Latin word "indigito, " to point out, from "digitus, " a finger, is the term used of addressing a god; thelists of deities with their proper appellations were called"indigitamenta"; and the gods named in them "Dii indigetes. " The actof worship is grave and formal; it has to be done with precision andin strict accordance with the rules; silence is commanded; thesacrificer repeats the prayer proper for the occasion after some onewho knows it by rote; the worshippers veil their heads. In this theRoman ritual is markedly different from the Greek. Mommsen says theGreek prayed bareheaded, because his prayer was contemplation, looking at and to the gods; and the Roman with head covered, becausehis prayer was an exercise of thought; and in this he sees acharacteristic indication of the difference between the tworeligions. A more modern interpretation of the Roman practice is thatit arose from the fear that the worshipper might see the god whom hehas just summoned by name, which would be dangerous. If any mistakeis made in worship, the act is vain and has to be done over again. 

The Great Gods. --The foregoing is the logic of the system on whichthe Roman religion, as distinguished from the foreign elementsafterwards added to it, was based; the religion, however, does notcome into view historically till it has begun to rise above such aworship of abstractions or of petty spirits, towards a worship ofgods. It was apparently by the growth of larger social organisms thatthe Latin tribes advanced to the worship of greater gods. While thefamily religions continued to the end, the tribe had, as in the caseof other early peoples, a larger religion than the family, and aunion of tribes produced a religion on a still greater scale. Thehistory of early Rome consists of a succession of such fusions oftribes into a larger political whole. When history opens, "Rome is afully-formed and united city"; but Rome is made up of several tribes, which maintain many separate institutions. The religion of aftertimes bears witness to these successive unions. "Deus Fidius, " thegod of good faith, is the sacred impersonation of an alliance. Marsand Quirinus are precisely similar to each other, and each has aflamen, or blower of the sacrificial flame, and a staff of twelvesalii or dancers. Mars is the Roman, Quirinus the Sabine deity; andwe see that the two tribes had, before they were united, very similarworships, which were both kept up after the union. The feriaeLatinae, or Latin festival, celebrated on Mons Albanus, is common tothe Latin tribes and commemorates their union. Jovis rises intoimportance with the growth of city life; he comes to be called fatherJovis, Jupiter; there are many Jupiters, but the Jupiter of the cityof Rome is the greatest and best of all; he bears the title ofOptimus Maximus. He rises above Mars, in earlier times the firstRoman god, after whom the first month of the year was called, beforethe month of Janus and the month of Februus, the purifier, were addedto it. Janus, the great state-god of opening, was the only one ofwhom there was a representation; Mars was represented symbolically bya spear, but Janus was figured as a man with two faces. Vesta, thehearth-goddess of the state, was of course a great deity with a veryimportant worship. 

Here we must mention a side of Roman religion which no doubt has itsroots far back in prehistoric darkness, but which could scarcely beorganised as we find it till the greater gods had risen to somedegree of power. It was believed that the gods were constantly makingsigns to men, especially in occurrences which take place in the air, such as thunder and lightning, and the flight of birds, but also inmany other ways. Some of the signs were simple, so that any one couldtell if they were lucky or the reverse, but some were not to beinterpreted except by men possessing a special knowledge of thesubject. And such men might be asked by an individual or by the statewhen about to enter on any undertaking, to seek a sign from heavenconcerning that business. This became with the Romans a great andimportant act, and those who had it in their hands exercised greatpower. 

Sacred Persons. --The priest in the earliest times was, in thedomestic religion, the paterfamilias, in that of the tribe, which wasbut an extended household, the head of the leading family, and in thecity, which was constituted after the same model, the king. Religionwas the principal part of the service of the state; the king as suchhad to offer sacrifice, to cause the gods to be consulted, toprosecute and judge and punish those who had violated the laws andcame under the anger of the gods. But as the state grew larger, various offices were set up to relieve the king of part of theseduties; when new worships were added to the old ones, the care ofthem was in some cases committed to a special person or college; andthese priesthoods and sacred guilds of early Rome maintained theirplace in the constitution for many centuries, and carried on thispart of the public service long after the words they spoke and theacts they did had become meaningless. Beginning with the sacredpersons attached to special cults, we have, first, three flamens, oneof Mars, one of Quirinus, and one of Jovis (fl. Martialis, Quirinalis, Dialis). Mars and Quirinus have their dancers, as wementioned above. Other flamens of lower rank were afterwardsinstituted for the separate worships of the tribes. Very old are the"fratres arvales, " field-brothers, who served the creative goddess(Dea Dia) in the country in the month of May, with a view to a goodgrowing summer, dancing to her and addressing hymns to her which maybe read now but cannot be understood, and were unintelligible to theRomans themselves. The Luperci (wolf-men) held a shepherd's festivalin the month of February, sacrificing goats and dogs to some rusticdeity, and running naked through the streets afterwards, strikingthose they met with thongs cut from the hides of the victims. The sixvestal virgins are well known, who had charge of keeping up the fireof Vesta, the house-fire of the state. They devoted their whole livesto this office, and enjoyed great respect. These priesthoods andcorporations, instituted to secure the continuance of special cults, are not of a nature to bring the whole of life under the influence ofthe priests and so to foster a priestly type of religion. Nor werethose other religious offices of a nature to do so, which were notattached to special cults but served the more general purpose ofassisting and advising the state in matters connected with religion. First among these comes the office of pontifex, a word which isvariously interpreted, either as "bridge-maker, "--that being a veryimportant and solemn proceeding, --or as leader in a religiousprocession. There were originally five pontifices, and the number wasafterwards raised to fifteen. They exercised a great variety offunctions, and had a general oversight of all religious matters, bothpublic and domestic. They were experts in ritual and in canon law;they advised the state as to the proper sacrifices to be offered forthe public, and, when consulted, would also direct the privateindividual. Funerals, marriages, and other domestic occurrences intowhich religious considerations entered, were under their charge; andon the occurrence of portents and omens it was their duty to indicatethe steps to be taken in order to find out what the gods wished tosignify. They had charge of the calendar, and had to fix what dayswere proper for carrying on the business of the courts (_diesfasti_), and they were the authorities on the forms of legal process. The chief pontiff is called the "judge and arbiter of things divineand human, " and the college had manifestly a very strong position. The same is true of the _augurs_ or experts in signs and omens. Though they did not consult the gods about public undertakings untilthe magistrate or the general asked them to do so, they had power tostop proceedings of which they disapproved; and this at certainperiods of Roman history they very frequently did. In Cicero'streatise on Divination a great deal of interesting matter may befound on this subject. Another sacred college of somewhat later dateis that of the men, at first three in number, afterwards fifteen, whoacted as expounders of the sacred Sibylline books, which King Tarquinpurchased from the old woman or Sibyl, of Cumae. 

Roman Religion Legal rather than Priestly. --While some of thesepriestly colleges exercised large powers, these powers were alwaysregarded not as inherent but deputed. The sacred offices were nothereditary but elective; no course of training was necessary toqualify for them; men were chosen for them by the state as for anyother public office, and those who became priests did not cease to becitizens but continued to sit in the Senate, and, as it might happen, to hold other offices at the same time. The growth of a priestlycaste was thus effectively prevented; religion was precluded fromhaving any free development of its own, and kept in the position ofan instrument for the furtherance of ends of state. There is no greatreligion in which ritual is so much, doctrine and enthusiasm solittle. All these priests and colleges exist for no end but to carryout with strict exactitude the ritual usage which is deemed necessaryto keep on good terms with the gods. They have no doctrine to teach, no fervour to communicate, they do not even tell any stories. Punctiliousness and anxiety attend all their proceedings. To theRoman, Ihne says, "religion turns out to be the fear lest the godsshould punish them for neglect; any unusual occurrence may be a signthat the gods are withdrawing their co-operation from the state, andthis must be looked into, and the due expiations used if judgednecessary. " Ritual must always be carried out with the utmostprecision; it is not the goodwill of the worshipper but hisexactitude that counts. He may even cheat the gods of their due if heis formally correct in his observance. For example, if the auspices(the signs derived from birds) were unfavourable, they could berepeated till a better result was obtained. 

What we have described is the religion of Rome in its original form, before it accepted foreign modifications. Its gods are spirits of thewoods and fields, of the market, of the foray, of the treaty, of allthe aspects, in fact, which life had borne to the tribes of CentralItaly, especially to the Latins and the Sabines who combined to formthe state of Rome. These gods form no family and have no history, they do not, like the gods of Greece, lay hold of the imagination, nor, like those of Germany, of the affections. They are only dimlyknown; but they are powerful, and it is necessary to reckon withthem; and the only relations which can be kept up with such beingsare those of business and of law. It follows that this religion isone of constraint and not of inspiration. In this it agrees with theRoman character, which is much more inclined to order than tofreedom, to law than to art. The word religion has here its origin;its primary meaning is restraint or check, since the chief feelingwith which the Roman regarded his gods was that of anxiety. Not thatthe gods were bad; Vediovis, the bad counterpart of Jovis, is avanishing figure, --but they were ill-known, and might have cause tobe angry. Worship, therefore, the practical cultivation of thefriendship of the gods, swallows up here the other elements ofreligion as a whole. Religion does not free the forces of humannature to realise themselves in spontaneous activity, but enchainsthem to the punctilious service of a nonhuman authority. Everythingexciting is kept at a distance, and men are trained in obedience andscrupulousness and self-denial. They produce no beautiful works ofart, and have hardly any stories to delight in; but they are reverentand conscientious; private feeling is sacrificed with an austeresatisfaction to the public interest, and they accordingly build up agreat power. Living in an atmosphere of magic, where unseen dangerslurk on every side, and there is virtue in words and forms correctlyused to avert these dangers, the Roman develops to perfection oneside of religion. To its inspirations and enthusiasms and hiddenconsolation he is a stranger; but he knows it better than others as aconservative and regulating force, which checks passion, calls forwary and orderly conduct, and causes the individual to subordinatehimself to the community. 

Changes introduced from without. --The Roman religion had, properlyspeaking, no development. What it might have become had it been leftto unfold itself without interference from without, we can onlyguess; but it was early brought under the influence of more highlydeveloped religions, and it proved to have so little power ofresisting innovations that it speedily parted with much of its ownnative character. The Romans were not unconscious that their religionwas an imperfect one; they never claimed, when they were conqueringthe world, that their religion was the only true one, or had anymission to prevail over others. They were tolerant from the first ofthe religions of other peoples. The gods of other peoples they alwaysbelieved to be real beings, with whom it was well for them also to beon good terms. If everything in the world had its spirit, these godsalso were the spirits of their own countries and nations; the verynotion of deity which the Romans entertained prevented them fromhaving any exclusive belief in their own gods or from denying theright of the gods of others. [2] When therefore they came in contactwith foreign religions, they were not protected by any profoundconviction of the truth of their own, and were exposed to the fullforce of the new ideas. The new religions came to them along with theculture of peoples much further advanced in art and in thought thanthey were themselves; at each such contact, therefore, they felt theforeigner to be superior to themselves in intellectual matters; andwherever this happens, the less highly gifted race is likely tochange in its religion as well as in other things. We have to notethe changes which were produced by such external influences. 

[Footnote 2: Cf. Celsus in Origen, _Contra Celsum_, vii. 68. ]

In the first place, Rome borrowed from Etruria. Etruscan religion wasboth more developed and more savage than that of Rome. Humansacrifice was an acknowledged feature of it; divination was carriedto absurd lengths, one great branch of it consisting in theprediction of the future from the appearance of the entrails ofslaughtered animals. Etruria had a hell with regular torments for thedeparted; in Rome the belief in a future life was much less definite. On the other hand, Etruria had deities who were something more thanabstractions; there was a circle of twelve gods, who held meetings onhigh, and regulated the affairs of the world. Above them was a power, little defined, to which the gods were subject, a kind of fate. Greekinfluence, so notably apparent in Etruscan art, is present, too, wesee, in Etruscan religion; it is through this somewhat dark passagethat Greek religious ideas first came to Rome. Under this influencevarious innovations took place at Rome. Before the end of themonarchy the Romans had begun to build houses for their gods, afterbeing for 170 years, we are told, without any such arrangement. TheRoman "templum" was not originally a building, but a space markedoff, according to the rules of augury, for the observation of signs. A part of the sky was also marked off for such "observation" and"contemplation. " On such a holy site, on the Capitoline hill, therewas founded by the earlier Tarquin the temple of Jupiter which alwayscontinued to be the principal site of Roman religion. Itsarchitecture was Tuscan; and it contained not only a cella or holyplace for the image of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but also a cella forJuno and one for Minerva. The latter was both an Etruscan and a Romandeity, the goddess of memory. Art was thus enlisted in the service ofthe gods; the divine figures acquired a reality and distinctnessquite wanting to the earlier divine abstractions; and a new notion ofdeity was presented to the Roman mind. Other temples followed, toJupiter under other names than that which he had in the Capitol, andto other deities. That of Faith was a very early one. It was a rulein temple-building that the image in the cella faced the west, sothat the worshipper, praying towards it, faced the east. Here alsothe Roman custom is a departure from the Greek; for in Greek templesit is the rule that the image faces the east, and the worshipper thewest. The Roman orientation of sacred buildings has passed into thepractice of the Christian Church. From Etruria the Romans alsoderived a great addition to the rules of divination; but the morechildish parts of Etruscan divination were regarded at Rome assuperstitious, though private persons might frequently resort tothem. 

Greek Gods in Rome. --While Greek ideas thus came indirectly from thenorth, the south of the peninsula was becoming more and more Greek, and the gods and temples of Hellas, established first at thesea-ports and colonies, gradually came to Rome. This movement isconnected with the Sibylline books which were acquired by the last ofthe kings. These books were brought to Rome from the Greek town ofCumae; they were written in Greek, and contained oracles which wereascribed to an old Greek prophetess. They were consulted in graveemergencies of state through the officials who had charge of them, and what they generally prescribed was that a god should be sent forfrom Greece, and his worship set up in Rome. Many foreign worshipswere thus imported. First came Apollo, disguised under the Latin nameof Aperta, "opener, " for the books contained many of his oracles; hewas received and worshipped as a god of purification, since the statewas in need of that process at the time, as well as of prophecy. Inthe year 496 B. C. Came in the same way Demeter, Persephone, andDionysus, identified with the old Latin Ceres, Libera, and Liber;and, a century later, Heracles, identified with the Latin Hercules. In the year 291, on the occurrence of a plague, Asclepios, in LatinAesculapius, was brought from Epidauros; and when the crisis of thecontest with Hannibal was at hand (204 B. C. ) Cybele, the great motherof the gods, was fetched from Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of thattown generously handed over to the Roman ambassadors the field-stonewhich was their image of the goddess, and her journey to Rome had thedesired effect, in the expulsion of Hannibal from Italy. The Venus ofMount Eryx in Sicily arrived in Rome about the same time; a goddesscombining the characters of Aphrodite and Astarte, and quitedifferent from the simple old Roman Venus, who was a goddess ofSpring, and presided over gardens. 

The process of which these are the outward landmarks went on duringthe whole period of the Republic, and resulted in the substitution ofwhat may be called with Mommsen the Græco-Roman, for the old Romanreligion. The change was a very profound one. Not only were some newgods added to the old ones, not only did Greek art come to beemployed in Roman temples, not only were new rites introduced, suchas the _lectisternium_, in which couches were arranged, each with theimage of a god and that of a goddess, and tables spread to regale therecumbent deities. The very notion of deity was changed; the Greekgod, represented by an image in human form and moving freely in theupper world, was substituted for the Latin god who was the unseenside of an act or process or quality, from which he had his name, and apart from which he was not. The following is a list of theprincipal Roman gods and of the Greek ones with whom they wereidentified:--Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera), Neptunus (Poseidon), Minerva (Athene), Mars (Ares), Venus (Aphrodite), Diana (Artemis), Vulcanus (Hephaestus), Vesta (Hestia), Mercurius (Hermes), Ceres(Demeter). The identifications are by no means accurate; Jupiter andVesta, as we have seen, are the only two Roman gods who are reallyidentical with Greek gods, the other equations are founded onaccidental resemblances, and are more arbitrary than real. The resultof them was, however, that the Romans forgot to a large extent theirown gods, and got Greek ones instead. With the divine figures theytook over the mythology of Greece, and thus the gods came to be wellknown with all their weaknesses, instead of as before surrounded withmystery and awe. The worship founded on the earlier conception of thedeity, and kept up with unwavering regularity, was inapplicable tothese new gods, and inevitably lost all its reality. This is not theonly cause, but it is one of the chief causes which prepared for thefearful spectacle presented by Roman religion at the end of theRepublic, when men of learning and distinction officiated as theheads of a religion in which they had no belief, and which theyscoffed at in their writings. 

Among the worships which came to Rome from the East there wereseveral which are not of Greek, but of Oriental origin. The worshipof Cybele belongs to Asia Minor, though it had spread over Greece;that of Dionysus also came to Greece from Asia. The practice of boththese cults was accompanied by excitement and self-abandonment on thepart of the worshippers; and they formed a great contrast to thestaid and formal worship of the Romans, the only admissible passionin which was a calm passion for correctness. The worship of Cybelewas carried on by eunuchs, it had noisy processions, and depended onbegging for its support. When the Romans brought it to their city, they ordained that Roman citizens should not fill leading offices init; but it flourished so strongly, among the numerous foreigners inthe capital and among the poor, as to show that it met a great wantthere. The worship of Bacchus had to be suppressed by the state; itwas carried on at nocturnal meetings, which even citizens attended, and it led to all kinds of irregularities. As the subject of thischapter is not the religions of Rome, but the Roman religion, we donot here review the numerous foreign worships which were brought tothe capital from every part of the Empire, and made Rome, towards theclose of the Republic, the residence of the gods of every nation. TheRomans as we saw were not led by any convictions of their own to denythe truth of foreign religions; and their policy as rulers alsoinclined them to tolerate all worships which did not offend againstcivil order. In the provinces it was the rule not to interfere withlocal religion; at Rome the authorities recognised not the importedreligion itself, of which the state did not feel called to judge, butthe association practising it, which received permission to do so. The worship was then protected by the state--it became a _religiolicita_. Amid the meeting of all the gods and the clashing of all thecreeds which were thus brought about at Rome, the Roman religionitself maintained its place, not as a doctrine which any onebelieved, for the very priests and augurs laughed at the rites andceremonies they carried on, but as a ritual which was bound up withthe whole past history of Rome, and believed to be necessary for thewelfare of the state as well as for the satisfaction of the commonpeople. In the atmosphere of discussion and of far-reachingscepticism which then prevailed it was not to be expected that faithcould again find any strong support in the historical religion ofRome. The Emperor Augustus made a serious attempt to reform andrevive religion. He selected the domestic worship of the Lares as themost living part of the old system, and ordained that the two Laresshould be worshipped along with the genius of the Emperor, and thatRome should be divided into districts, each with its temple of thisstrange trinity; while in the provinces each district was to supporta worship of Rome and of the Emperor in addition to its existingcults. Temples were rebuilt at Rome, new ones were raised, sacredoffices were filled which had been vacant, religious games wereinstituted to carry the Roman mind back to the sacred past. Livy andVirgil treated the past from a religious point of view, showing thesacred mission of the Roman race, and exhibiting the valour and pietyof the founders of the state. If the Roman religion could be revivedthese were the proper means to do it. But the religion of the futurewas not to be prepared in this way. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The sections on religion in Mommsen's _History of Rome_. 

Ramsay's _Roman Antiquities_. 

Wissowa, _Religion und Cultur der Römer_. 

Holwerda, in De la Saussaye. 

For the period of the Empire, Boissier's _La Religion Romaine_. 

See also the work of Cumont, cited at the end of chapter x. 

CHAPTER XVIIITHE RELIGIONS OF INDIA

I. _The Vedic Religion_

No contrast could well be greater than that between the Germanreligion and that of India. In the one case we have a people full ofvigour, but not yet civilised; in the other a people of highorganisation and culture, but deficient in vigour; the formerreligion is one of action, the latter one of speculation. From theoriginal Aryan faith, to which that of the Teutons most closelyapproximates, Indian religion is removed by two great steps. First wehave as a variety of Aryan faith the Indo-Iranian religion, that ofthe undivided ancestors of Persians and Indians alike, in the dimperiod antecedent to the Aryan settlement of India. Of this religion, the common mother of those of Persia and of India, we shall give somesketch after we have made acquaintance with the gods of India, at thebeginning of our Persian chapter. Indian religion is a variety ofIndo-Iranian, which is a variety of the Aryan type. Neither itsgenealogy nor its character entitles it to be taken as a typicalexample of the Aryan religions. In literary chronology it is theearliest of them, inasmuch as its books are the oldest sacredliterature of Aryan faith; but in point of development it is not anearly but an advanced product. The absorbing interest it offers tothe student of our science is due to the fact that it presents in anunbroken sequence a growth of religious thought, which, beginningwith simple conceptions and advancing to a great priestly ritual, canbe seen to pass into mysticism and asceticism, and thence to therejection of all gods and rites, and a system of salvation byindividual good conduct. Nowhere else can the progress of religionthrough what we might call its seven ages of life be seen so clearly, nor the logical connection of these ages with each other berecognised so unmistakably. The present chapter deals with theinfancy and lusty youth of the religion as seen in Vedism; the laterstages of Brahmanism and Buddhism will be spoken of in subsequentchapters. 

The Rigveda. --The Vedic religion takes its name from the Rigveda, theoldest portion of Indian literature, and the earliest literarydocument of Aryan religion. Of four vedas or collections of hymns, the Rigveda is the oldest and most interesting. It contains a set ofhymns which, with much more of their early religious literature, theHindus ascribed to direct divine revelation, but which we know tohave been written by men who claimed no special inspiration. Most ofthem date from the time when the Aryans, having made good their entryin India, but without by any means altogether subduing the formerinhabitants, were dwelling in the Punjaub. The religion of the hymnsis a strongly national one. The Aryans appeal to their gods to helpthem against the races, afterwards driven to the south and to the seacoasts, who differ from themselves in colour, in physiognomy, inlanguage, in manners, and in religion. Nor are these conquerors byany means an uncultivated people; they had long been using metals;they built houses, --a number together in a village; they livedprincipally by keeping cattle, but also by tillage, and by hunting. They drank Sura, a kind of brandy, and Soma, a kind of strong ale, ofwhich we shall hear more. They were, as a rule, monogamous, the wifeoccupying a high position in the household, and assisting her husbandin offering the domestic sacrifice. At the head of each state was aking, as among the Greeks of Homer; he was not, however, an absolutemonarch; his people met in council and controlled him. The kinghimself offered sacrifice for his tribe in his own house, --there wereno temples, --but he was frequently assisted by a man or several menof special learning in such rites. 

The hymns of the Rigveda were written for use at sacrifices. Thesacrifice consists of food and drink of which the god who isaddressed is invited to come and partake, or which are conveyed tothe gods seated on their heavenly thrones, by means of fire. Soma, the intoxicating juice of the soma plant, is an invariable feature ofthe banquets in these hymns; the solid part consists of butter, milk, rice or cakes; but animals were also killed, and the horse-sacrificewas a specially important one. The hymn also is an essential part ofthe rite; the sacrifice would have no virtue without it. It consistsof praise and prayer. The deity is extolled for the exploits he hasdone, for his strength, for his beauty, for his wisdom or hisgoodness, he is invoked again and again to partake of what has beenprovided for him, and in return he is asked to send the worshipperfood or cows, guidance or protection, or whatever the latter is inwant of. 

The Vedic Gods. --And who are the gods who receive this worship? Theyare parts of nature or celestial phenomena, more or less personified. Worship is directed now to one divine being, now to another; each hasa story which is dwelt on and a number of functions belonging to him, for the sake of which he is extolled and sought after; each god, thatis to say, has his myth. In this set of gods the myths are so clearthat we can identify with perfect confidence each of the gods withthat part of Nature from which he arose. 

M. Barth classifies the Vedic gods according to the degree in whichthey have become detached from their natural basis. There are twowhich are not so detached at all. Agni, who is one of the chiefdeities of the Rigveda, is fire, and Soma, the deity to whom all thehymns of the ninth book are addressed, is simply the juice of thesoma plant, the liquid part of every sacrifice. Agni is not anyparticular fire, but fire as a cosmic principle, born in heaven, bornalso daily at the sacrifice by the rubbing together of two pieces ofwood, his parents whom he consumes. He is a priest carrying theofferings of men up to the gods, but he was a priest at the firstsacrifice, the primeval heavenly sacrifice, before he had come downto men. He is also the guest and household friend of man, a kindlyand familiar being. But he pervades all nature, and all growth andenergy are due to him. Soma, also inseparably connected with allsacrifice, who strengthens the gods and makes them immortal, islikewise a universal principle; he too came at first from heaven, andhe too is at work all through the world. There are stories of hisfirst production among the gods, and of the first effects of hisappearance; he is the nourisher of plants, he gives inspiration tothe poet and fervour to prayer. Along with Agni he kindled the sunand the stars. 

In other gods there is a nearer approach to a human figure, and thephysical side is not so obtrusive. Indra is most frequently invokedof all the gods, and may be called the national god of this period. He is described as a chieftain standing in a chariot drawn by twohorses. He waged a great battle, but still wages it constantly, against the monsters of heat and drought, Vrittra, the coverer, andAhi the dragon, for the deliverance of the cows, the heavenly waters, kept by them in captivity. The contest between the god and the demongoes on for ever. Indra is also the giver of good things of everykind, he keeps the heavenly bodies in their places, he is the authorand preserver of all life, the inspirer of all noble thoughts and theanswerer of pious prayers, the rewarder of all who trust in him, andthe forgiver of the penitent. It is good to sacrifice to him and tooffer him soma in abundance; for it strengthens him to take up afreshhis conflicts and labours as the champion of man. Indra is surroundedby the Maruts, the storm-gods, who are separately invoked in manyhymns. They drive through the sky with splendour and with mightymusic, and bring rain to the parched earth. Their father is Rudra, also a god of storms, the handsomest of all the gods, and, in spiteof his thunderbolts, a helpful and kindly being. Wherever he seesevil done, he hurls his spear to smite the evildoer, but he is also ahealer of both physical and moral evils, and the best of allphysicians. Of the same order of deities are Vata or Vayu, the wind, and Parjanya, the rain-storm. But the loftiest of all the Vedic godsis Varuna, the great serene luminous heaven. The hymns addressed tohim are comparatively few, but among them are those which rise to thehighest moral and religious level. In language recalling that of thepsalmists and prophets of the Bible, they exalt Varuna as the creatorof the world and of heaven and the stars, as the omniscient defenderof the good and avenger of all evil, as just and holy, and yet fullof compassion, so that the conscience-stricken suppliant isencouraged to turn to him. 

We here give a few extracts from hymns addressed to some of the godswe have spoken of. The versions are those of the late Dr. John Muir. A metrical version can scarcely represent the hymns with the accuracythe scholar would desire, but, on the other hand, a literaltranslation, such as that of Professor Max Müller in vol. Xxxii. Ofthe Sacred Books of the East, gives a less true idea of the spirit ofthe pieces, and is less fitted at least for a work like this. 

TO INDRA

 Thou, Indra, oft of old hast quaffed With keen delight, our Soma draught. All gods delicious Soma love; But thou, all other gods above. Thy mother knew how well this juice Was fitted for her infant's use, Into a cup she crushed the sap Which thou didst sip upon her lap; Yes, Indra, on thy natal morn, The very hour that thou wast born, Thou didst those jovial tastes display, Which still survive in strength to-day. And once, thou prince of genial souls, Men say thou drained'st thirty bowls. To thee the Soma draughts proceed, As streamlets to the lake they feed, Or rivers to the ocean speed. Our cup is foaming to the brim With Soma pressed to sound of hymn. Come, drink, thy utmost craving slake, Like thirsty stag in forest lake, Or bull that roams in arid waste, And burns the cooling brook to taste. Indulge thy taste, and quaff at will; Drink, drink again, profusely swill!

ANOTHER TO INDRA

 And thou dost view with special grace, The fair complexioned Aryan race, Who own the gods, their laws obey, And pious homage duly pay. Thou giv'st us horses, cattle, gold, As thou didst give our sires of old. Thou sweep'st away the dark-skinned brood, Inhuman, lawless, senseless, rude, Who know not Indra, hate his friends, And spoil the race which he defends. Chase far away, the robbers, chase, Slay those barbarians black and base. And save us, Indra, from the spite Of sprites that haunt us in the night, Our rites disturb by contact vile, Our hallowed offerings defile. Preserve us, friend, dispel our fears, And let us live a hundred years. And when our earthly course we've run, And gained the region of the Sun, Then let us live in ceaseless glee, Sweet Soma quaffing there with thee. 

TO AGNI

 Great Agni, though thine essence be but one, Thy forms are three; as fire thou blazest here, As lightning flashest in the atmosphere, In heaven thou flamest as the golden sun. 

 It was in heaven thou hadst thy primal birth, But thence of yore a holy sage benign, Conveyed thee down on human hearths to shine, And thou abid'st a denizen of earth. 

 Sprung from the mystic pair by priestly hands, In wedlock joined, forth flashes Agni bright; But--O ye heaven and earth I tell you right-- The unnatural child devours the parent brands. 

TO VARUNA

 The mighty lord on high our deeds, as if at hand, espies; The gods know all men do, though men would fain their acts disguise. Whoever stands, whoever moves, or steals from place to place, Or hides him in his secret cell, --the gods his movements trace. Wherever two together plot, and deem they are alone King Varuna is there, a third, and all their schemes are known. This earth is his, to him belong those vast and boundless skies; Both seas within him rest, and yet in that small pool he lies. Whoever far beyond the sky should think his way to wing, He could not there elude the grasp of Varuna the king. His spies, descending from the skies, glide all this world around, Their thousand eyes all-scanning sweep to earth's remotest bound. Whate'er exists in heaven and earth, whate'er beyond the skies, Before the eyes of Varuna, the king, unfolded lies. The ceaseless winkings all he counts of every mortal's eyes, He wields this universal frame as gamester throws his dice. Those knotted nooses which thou fling'st, O God, the bad to snare, All liars let them overtake, but all the truthful spare. 

Varuna, the all-embracing sky, is also in many hymns a solar deity. There are also other solar deities; Mitra who is frequently invokedalong with Varuna; Surya, Savitri, Vishnu, and Pushan, are all godsof this class. Each of these has some attributes or some story of hisown. Surya keeps his eye on men and reports their failings to Varunaand Mitra. Savitri, the quickener, raises all things from sleep inthe morning with his long arms of gold, and covers them with sleep inthe evening. Vishnu, the active, traverses the universe with threestrides. Pushan is a shepherd who loses none of his flock; a guidealso, both in the journeys of this world and in the last journey. Anumber of the principal gods have the common title of Adityas orchildren of Aditi, immensity, a being too vast and undetermined to beclearly represented. We should also mention Ushas, the dawn, agoddess whom the sun-god is daily chasing; the Asvins or two heavenlycharioteers, who daily make the circuit of the heavens; Tvashtri, thesmith who made the thunderbolt of Indra; the Ribhus, artificers whowere once men and have been admitted to the society of the gods. Yamais the god of the dead, he first traversed the road to the countrybeyond, and now he rules over it, and comforts with substantial joysthe spirits guided there by Agni (this points to cremation which wasfrequent but not universal) or by Pushan. There the Pitris or fatherssit at the same tables with the gods, and are eternally happy. Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, is a god of another type, apersonification of the act of ritual, and his presence in the Vedas, beside the elemental deities, shows how early speculation had begun. 

To what Stage does this Religion belong?--Our sketch of this systemis necessarily brief; we have now to inquire as to the place itoccupies in the religious growth of India. It is held, on the onehand, that it is a primitive religious product, that it shows us someof the very first efforts men made to have a religion; while on theother hand it is held that the Vedic hymns and the Vedic system aresacerdotal, and are due to an advanced organisation of worship and toa special set of men who were much in advance of their age. 

1. It is Primitive. --Mr. Max Müller[1] says that "the sacred books ofIndia offer the same advantages ... For the study of the origin andgrowth of religion ... Which Sanscrit has offered for the study ofthe origin and growth of human speech. " Dr. Muir[2] claims that theVedic hymns illustrate the natural workings of the human mind in theperiod of its infancy. In the Vedas, these writers consider, we areable to watch the process by which the earliest men rose to thebelief in gods, and the naïve and simple methods by which man's firstintercourse with gods was carried on. The undoubted antiquity ofthese pieces favours this view; the Rigveda is admitted on all handsto be the earliest part of Indian literature, and many of the hymnswere written about 1500 B. C. [3] The pure and simple nature of theVedic religion may also appear to favour this view. It is a religionsingularly free from the lower elements of man's early faith. Savagelegends and especially immoral stories of the gods are markedlyabsent from the hymns; they are also free from the element of magicand fetishism; the gods are great beings, and religion consists inintercourse with these great beings. Now the later religiousliterature of India, the brahmanas or commentaries on the Rigveda andthe other later Vedas, contain a variety of legends and a religion byno means free from magic. It may be maintained therefore that thepure religion of the Aryans afterwards became contaminated by contactwith the lower religion of the tribes the Aryans had conquered. Itwas from the Dravidian and Kolarian aborigines, we are told, thatIndian religion took its later corruptions. The Vedic religion has noidols, it has no dark descriptions of hell, the caste system on whichlater Brahmanism was based is absent from it, it has no demons to beguarded against, and no bad deities. The doctrine of metempsychosisis not found here, except perhaps in germ. The immolation of thewidow on the funeral pile of her husband is not sanctioned by theVedas, and of ancestor-worship only a few traces are found. Allthese, it may be held, are later corruptions. The Vedic religion is abright and happy system, and the primitive beliefs of mankind, lesschanged by the Indians than they were elsewhere, are here to be seen;the hymns show the kind of faith to which a strong and happy race ofmen naturally came, as their minds began to open to the wonders ofthe world they lived in, the faith of "primitive shepherds praisingtheir gods as they lead their flocks to the pasture. " The Indians hadpreserved, longer than other peoples, the gift of recognising deityin nature; and the primitive beliefs of mankind survive here insomething like their first integrity, while elsewhere they werebroken up and confused. 

[Footnote 1: _Origin of Religion_, p. 135. ]

[Footnote 2: _Sanscrit Texts_, vol. V. P. 4. ]

[Footnote 3: According to Mr. Max Müller the Mantra or hymn period isto be placed 1000-800 B. C. ; but other scholars place it earlier. ]

2. It is Advanced. --On the other hand, it is urged that the societyin which the hymns arose was not a primitive one, but oneconsiderably advanced both in arts and institutions. The Rishis(seers), who composed them, belonged to families who cultivated suchan art; and the hymns were no artless outpourings of childlikeemotion, but were written on an elaborate metrical system for adefinite purpose, namely, to form part of great acts of worship. Asfor the absence from them of savage myths and of immoral stories ofthe gods, this fact does not prove that such things were not known tothe people at the time, but only that the poets did not put them intheir hymns. Mr. Lang has collected the savage myths, similar tothose of other peoples in various parts of the world, which are foundin Indian literature of a later date, and has also shown that thehymns themselves were not quite ignorant of some of them. The Indiansknew the myth of the marriage of heaven and earth, with theconsequent birth of the gods. They had the story of the deluge. Theyhad the still more primitive story of the raising up of the earthfrom the bottom of the sea. They had various myths of old conflictsof the gods, and of the production of the earth and all the men in itfrom the dissection of an immense prototypal human monster. Men wereof different castes, they held, because they came from differentportions of Purusha's body when it was cut up. Many stories are to befound in Indian literature which when found elsewhere are judged tobe products of savage imagination, and the fact that the Rigvedaignores some of them and refines others, simply shows that theauthors of that collection were on a higher level than their peoplein point of cultivation and of piety, as the psalmists and theprophets of Israel were in advance of theirs. We are led, accordingly, towards the conclusion that during the period when thehymns were written those who took charge of the development ofworship in India were seeking to draw away attention from the moresuperstitious and childish elements of religion, and to bring to thefront the pure and lofty intercourse man could have with the goodgods. Bad gods are not cultivated; if there are foolish stories aboutthe gods, they are not repeated, everything dark and terrible, aswell as everything irrational, is removed from the working religion. Ancestor-worship is not encouraged; family rites continued, but theworship was wider than the family, and was not restricted toparticular places. The ideas connected with sacrifice are not indeedvery lofty. Sacrifice is, in the first place, barter. Gifts areprovided for the gods, that they may give in their turn. In thesecond place it is a social function in which the god and theworshipper both take part. The food, and especially the soma, strengthens the god, and man and god are thereby drawn into closesympathy. But in the third place sacrifice was a piece of magic. Themere accurate performance of the rite had a mystic efficacy. It wasbelieved to help to uphold the order of the world; without it thegods would grow weak, the ordinances of nature would fail, and manwould relapse to the state of savagery. The gods themselves firstsacrificed; from sacrifice they themselves were born, so thatsacrifice is an essential principle of the universe, was so in thebeginning, and must always be so. The Vedic leaders of religion, therefore, were not merely champions of enlightenment in religion;they were also ritualists, the rite was to them an end in itself; theproper performance of sacrifice was their principal object. This sideof their work had, as we shall see, grave consequences. But theRigveda did a great work for India in cultivating gods who weremoral, and to whom man was drawn by higher than selfish motives. Godswho are just and who watch man's conduct, and do not fail to rewardhim according to his deeds, must quicken the conscience of those whobelieve in them, and gods who are able to help the weak and toforgive the penitent must make their people also merciful. In all theaberrations of Indian religion the high moral standard set by theVedic gods is never lost sight of. 

Where a plurality of gods is believed in, these gods must stand insome relation to each other; and it is of importance to notice howthe gods of the Veda are arranged. We can see here very clearly howunstable a thing polytheism is. The position of the gods isconstantly changing with reference to each other. We find Agniaddressed as if he were undoubtedly supreme; he dwells in the highestheavens, he generates the gods, he ordains the order of the universe;but then we find Indra spoken of in the same way, and Varuna, andMitra, and others. Then we find pairs of gods addressed together. Indra and Agni are frequently so treated; so are Varuna and Mitra. There is no supreme god, or rather, each god is supreme in turn; thepoet wants a god capable of being exalted in every way, and does soexalt the god he has before him. In this way a Monotheism is reached;the mind recognises a god to whom unlimited adoration can be paid. But it is a monotheism, as M. Barth well puts it, the titular god ofwhich is always changing; and Mr. Max Müller gives to this partialmonotheism the name of Kathenotheism; that is, the worship of one godat a time without any denial that other gods exist and are worthy ofadoration. Now this form of religion, in which several gods areworshipped, each of whom in turn is regarded as supreme, is notpeculiar to India; we have met with it already, we shall meet with itagain. But in India a peculiar way was found out of the difficulty. The Indian gods were too little defined, too little personal, toomuch alike, to maintain their separate personalities with greattenacity; nor did they lend themselves to a monarchical form ofpantheon; no one of them was sufficiently marked out from the rest orabove the rest, to rule permanently over them. Yet the sense of unityin Indian religion is very strong; from the first the Indian mind isseeking a way to adjust the claims of the various gods, and view themall as one. An early idea which makes in this direction is that ofRita, the order, not specially connected with any one god, whichrules both in the physical and the moral world, and with which allbeings have to reckon. Philosophy is busy from the first with theVedic gods; the impulse to good conduct and that to mysticism areequally innate in this religion. We can see, even in the Rigveda, that India is to solve the problem of its many gods not in the way ofMonotheism, by making one god rule over the others, but in the way ofPantheism, by making all the gods modes or manifestations of onebeing. "Agni is all the Gods" we read here. And a religion whicharranges its objects of worship in this way will not be a religion ofaction, but of speculation and of resignation. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

_S. B. E. _ vol. Xxxii. Vedic Hymns. Xlvi. Hymns to Agni. 

Muir's _Sanscrit Texts_. 

M. Müller's _Hibbert Lectures_. 

Monier Williams, _Indian Wisdom; Hinduism_ in "Non-ChristianReligious Systems" (S. P. C. K. ). 

Kaegi, _The Rigveda, the oldest literature of the Indians_, 1886. 

Barth, _The Religions of India_, in Trübner's Oriental Series. 

Herrmann Oldenberg, _Die Religion der Veda_, 1894. 

Bergaigne, _La Religion Védique_, 3 vols. , 1878-83. 

E. Hardy, _Die Vedisch Brahmanische Periode der Religion des altenIndiens_. 

Lehmann, in De la Saussaye. 

Rhys Davids, _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. I. P. 1, _sqq. _

CHAPTER XIXINDIA

II. _Brahmanism_

The period in which the songs were collected by the Aryans dwellingin the Punjaub was succeeded by a period of wars and troubles, afterwhich the successful race is found to have spread further towards theEast, and to have settled on the Ganges and its tributaries. Alongwith this change of position a great change has also taken place inthe spirit of the people, a change which is strikingly seen in theirreligion. The priesthood has come to occupy the position of aseparate class to an extent not formerly the case, and all thephenomena are apparent which are generally found associated with ahierocracy or rule of priests. The early religious writings have beenformed into a sacred canon: there is an active production of newworks which explain the old ones; the sacrifices grow more elaborateand new virtues are attributed to them; and along with this hardeningand formalising of the outward parts of religion there is a religiousspeculation of great volume and of great freedom of character. 

The Caste System: The Brahmans. --The key to the whole movement is tobe found in the new position of the priesthood, or in theestablishment at this period of the system of caste. Though thissystem is only once mentioned in the Rigveda, and that in a hymn oflate date, scholars find traces of it in the arrangement of thehymns, and as it is found in Persia, the Indians probably had itbefore they entered India. It may even, it is judged, be traceable tothe division of ranks among the primitive Aryan families. Teutonic aswell as Indian legends are found explaining how mankind were dividedfrom the first into different classes. [1] But the primitivedifferences of rank must have had a great development before theytook shape in the rigid caste system of India. This system appears tobe organised with a view expressly to the exaltation of thepriesthood, and must have been the result of a struggle between thepriests and the warrior or ruling classes. The priests have madethemselves indispensable in nearly all religious acts. Their verytitle shows this. While _Brahman_, as the name of a god, meansprimarily growth, and later, devotion or prayer, _brahmana_ (neut. )signifies the ritual texts according to which worship is performed, and _brahman_ (mas. ) is the name of those who use such texts, andcomes to stand for the highest caste of Indian society. Without thebrahman there can be no satisfactory worship, because there can be nosecurity that any rite is performed correctly; and a rite which isnot performed correctly has no efficacy. Religion, therefore, is inthe hands of this caste, whose sacredness is hereditary, and cannotbe acquired in any other way than by birth. The members of that casteand they alone are qualified to superintend religious observances, and without them the intercourse between man and the gods cannot bekept up. From his birth the brahman is a being of superior holiness;he is destined for higher ends than other men, and the distinctionbetween him and them must be manifested in all his acts and habitsthroughout his life. He is the natural lord of all the classes. 

[Footnote 1: Compare Hans Sachs, _Die Ungleichen Kinder Eva's_. ]

If the highest caste is strictly defined, so also are the others. Thesecond caste is that of the Kshatriyas, warriors or rulers, the thirdthat of the Vaisyas or farmers. These three have rank, they are thetwice-born classes (their second birth answers to confirmation, andtakes place when a young man is invested with the sacred thread). TheSudras are the fourth and lowest class; no duty is assigned to themin the law books but that of serving meekly the other castes. It hasbeen thought that the Sudras represent the conquered aborigines, thethree classes of rank belonging to the Aryan invaders, but this isopen to question. 

The student of religion has to fix his attention on the Brahmans, whohave secured themselves in the position of the leading caste. Wespeak first of the literary movement in which they were concerned, then of the sacrifices they conducted, and of their gods. We shallthen say something of the practical operation of their religion as arule of life, and lastly we shall come to the speculative work oftheir period, which is not, however, to be set down to them alone. 

1. The Growth of the Sacred Literature. --The Vedas rose in sacrednessafter the age which produced them passed away. A few centuries afterthey were written they were not generally intelligible; they neededinterpretation, but at the same time the doctrine of theirinspiration rose higher and higher. The brahmans had both tointerpret the words of the old hymns and to explain how, when used atthe sacrifice, they produced the effect ascribed to them. This led tothe production of the earliest Indian prose, the brahmanas or ritualtreatises. Primarily intended to be directories of worship for thepriests, these works were enriched with all sorts of ideas about thesacrifices, their origin, and their effects; points in the ritual areexplained in them by mythological stories which we should nototherwise know, and we see from them that many superstitions, towhich the Vedas gave no encouragement, yet lived among the people. Each Samhita, or collection of hymns, had its Brahmana, and some ofthe collections had several. These works, though transcending indreariness most directories of worship, are yet of great value forthe light they throw on the history of Indian manners and ideas, aswell as on that of mythology. And as it happened among the Jews intheir later period so it happened here;--the sanctity of the text wasextended to the commentary, the brahmana also was held to begod-given and inspired, and by some was even more highly esteemedthan the hymns themselves. A third class of inspired writingsconsists of the Upanishads, or speculative treatises, of which weshall speak later. The "Veda" in the larger sense is made up of thesethree bodies of compositions, mantras, brahmanas, and upanishads. These three belong to revelation or "S'ruti, " _i. E. _ hearing; what iscontained in these is to be regarded as having been heard by inspiredmen from a higher source. The counterpart of S'ruti is "smriti, "_i. E. _ recollection, tradition. This embraces the Sutras or worksdealing with ceremonial in the way of short rules gathered from theolder literature, with the exposition of the Vedas, with domesticrites and conventional usages. The law books, the epics, and thePuranas, or ancient legendary histories, also belong to this class. 

The doctrine of the Vedas, of their sacredness and of their virtues, played a great part in Indian thought. They were revered not as awritten word, for they were not written but handed down bymemory, --the Brahman still knows his sacred literature by heart, --butas hymns possessing supernatural powers and of far higher than humanorigin. They were raised to the rank of a divinity, they were said tohave had to do with the creation of the world, or to have been amongthe first created beings. The value of the study of them was not tobe exaggerated; he who engages in it, we hear, offers a completesacrifice, obtains for himself the world which does not pass away, and becomes united with Brahma. The class of men who had installedthemselves as the authorised interpreters of the hymns, had evidentlytaken up a very strong position. 

2. Sacrifice. --Indian ritual is an immense subject. In the Vedicperiod there were several orders of sacrifice--the hymns of theRigveda have to do with the Soma-sacrifice alone--and several kindsof priests, and it stands to reason that an elaborate ritual derivedfrom a distant age and cherished by a priestly caste which wasgrowing in power, could not quickly change. In spite of theconsiderable amount of materials accessible in the Brahmanas andSutras, a history of Indian sacrifice as a whole has still to bewritten. 

It is characteristic of early Indian sacrifice that it is notconfined to a temple or to any sacred spot, and that it does notrequire any image of the deity. Instructions are always given forchoosing and preparing a place for the rite, and for erecting analtar; a place had to be prepared on each occasion. The gods wereasked to come, or were thought to be seated in heaven looking on; thesacrifice is in the open air. While the celebration proceededaccording to a certain ritual, it lay with the worshippers to fix towhat god or gods the sacrifice should be addressed. There was not oneritual for Agni and another for Indra, but the same would serve foreither or for both. The sacrifices of which we hear in the Brahmanasare domestic rites; they are offered by the heads of the household, who invite ancestors also to be present. A Brahman is present todirect those who sacrifice and the inferior priests who assist them, and the benefits of the act extend to all the dependants of thehousehold. The time was determined by natural seasons or by householdevents. Some sacrifices were greater than others, the more elaborateones requiring several days, months, or even years for theircelebration. Among the kinds of offerings which might be made we findthat of man enumerated; human sacrifice, however, if it had prevailedin earlier times, had now grown obsolete. 

The rise of the Brahmans into a caste changed the character of thesacrifice by making its due celebration depend more on specialknowledge, and by increasing its elaborate mystery. Once the hymn wasrecognised as an essential element of such an act, the person whocould interpret the hymn and explain its effects acquired greatimportance. And when the explanation of all the various features ofthe sacrifice was once begun, a wide door was opened to minuteingenuity. It is astonishing to what trifles these priestlydirectories descend, what explanations are brought from every part ofearth and heaven of the most trivial circumstances, and whatsacredness is found in the very blades of grass around the altar. Nowthe effect of such a treatment of ritual is inevitably that the riteitself, the outward mechanical performance, comes to be regarded asimportant, and that the ethical and religious end which wasoriginally aimed at, is lost sight of. The priest and those he actsfor are so intent on the minutiæ of their celebration that theyforget about the god it is intended for. And as they are quiteconvinced that the sacrifice, if offered with perfect correctness andwith nothing left out, must produce its effect, the sacrifice itselfcomes to appear as the agent of the desired blessing; the god growsless but the sacrifice grows more. This process, which may beobserved wherever ritualism exists, was carried in the period ofBrahmanism to its utmost length. In this period the old gods lost thestrong hold they had before over the people's mind; men ceased tolook for their gods to the sky or to the tempest, and began to lookinstead to the long ceremonies of the priest or to the hymn hechanted at the altar, or to the austerities he practised. Gods of anew type now make their appearance. As in the Vedic period we sawthat Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, had a place beside Indra andVaruna, so now we see that the supreme deity is named Brahma. Theprayer connected with the sacrifice has given its name to the rulerof the universe. Other names for the supreme are also found to bemaking their way to general use, as the old historical andmythological gods fall into the background, and an abstract divineunity is sought after. Prajapati, lord of creatures, who is littleheard of in the hymns, is frequently invoked as the head of all thegods, and a triad of gods is heard of, consisting of Agni, Vayu, Surya, fire, the air, the sun, and summing up the divine energies. The attributes of the gods are personified, and a set of paleabstractions is thus added to the Pantheon; and spirits and goblinsnot heard of in the hymns, though not therefore necessarily unknownin the former period, make their appearance. These are, perhaps, thegods of the aborigines, who thus revenge themselves, as the religionof the invaders which at first suppressed them loses its earliervigour. The strong gods retire and weak gods, many and shadowy, andbad as well as good, are worshipped. The Asuras were formerly thegods generally, now they are evil beings with whom the good gods haveto contend. 

3. Practical Life. --We possess very complete pictures of Indian lifeand manners in the period of Brahmanism. Of the codes of ancientsages by which Hindu society was supposed to be governed many areextant to us; and in Mr. Max Müller's _Sacred Books of the East_ theEnglish reader may make himself acquainted with several of these. Themost famous and the longest, is the laws of Manu, a mythicalprogenitor of mankind. In the form in which we have it this workdates probably from the second century A. D. , but the body of the workis much older. Originally a local collection of rules, it extendedits authority gradually over the entire Hindu population of India. With other collections, also of local origin, it represents to us thecondition of Indian society after the caste system became fixed; butmuch of the law thus handed down to us must have had its origin inprehistoric times. 

The law of Manu hinges on the superiority of the Brahman over theother castes. The Brahmans form the centre of the state and reallycontrol everything; but their life, in turn, is framed in strictrules, and their whole history and actions are laid down for them tothe last detail from the moment of their birth. The life of theBrahman is divided into four periods. For a quarter of his life he isa student living with a teacher and learning from him the sacredknowledge of the Vedas. Every act of study begins with the so-calledSavitri-verse, "Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divineVivifier. May he enlighten our understandings. " This prayer, with themystic syllable, Om (thought to have to do with the three gods of atriad, but probably the original meaning is Yes, an abstractall-embracing yes, in which nothing but pure being is affirmed), isrepeated at every return to study, and also with great frequency atother times. The teacher is more to the student than his father, andis to be treated with the greatest deference and courtesy; theseyears are a training in gentle and seemly conduct as well as in law. His student days completed, the Brahman offers his first sacrifice, marries, and becomes a householder. Little is said of earning aliving; the Brahman is not to be worldly, but he is to be independentif he can. He is, however, allowed to beg if in want. But more stressis laid on the continued pursuit of knowledge, and on the domesticsacrifices to gods and manes which are to be his daily care. After hehas brought up a son to take charge of his house and goods, the thirdstage of his life is reached; he may retire from the world and becomea recluse, giving himself to contemplation and austerities. Thefourth stage is that of the ascetic, _bhikku_ or _sannyasin_, theaged man who having given up all possessions, all human society, andthe practice of all rites, and subsisting only on alms, seeks topurge his heart of all desire and to become united by deep meditationwith the supreme soul, thus attaining union with Brahma and finalliberation. In this section of the laws of Manu an ideal of moralperfection is set forth, which is not demanded at the earlier stagesof life. 

"_Let him not desire to die; let him not desire to live; let him waitfor his time as a servant for the payment of his wages. _

"_Let him patiently bear hard words, let him not insult any one, norbecome any one's enemy for the sake of this perishable body. Againstan angry man let him not in return show anger; let him bless when heis cursed. _"

He is to be sedulously careful not to injure any living creature, heis to meditate on the supreme soul which is present in all organisms, both the highest and the lowest. He is to give up all attachments, and in this way, as his body decays, he enters even here into a stateof perfect freedom and repose and union with the great spirit. 

Such ideas prove that the mind of Brahmanism was not occupied withsacrifices alone. Manu speaks of the superintendence of sacrifices asonly one of several careers which the Brahman might choose; and if hemight with equal right devote himself to study or to self-discipline, we see that another side of religion than that directing itself toexternal gods or occupying itself with outward acts, was pressingitself forward. The inner world of the mind is growing larger as theoutward gods grow shadowy; it is being found that salvation may bereached by inwards efforts as well as by outward rites, that thesearch for wisdom and the work of self-conquest, and a union with thedeity which is quite apart from any offering or from any form ofworship, also lead to salvation. It is objected to the ethics of Manuthat the ideal they set up is not an active but a suffering one; theascetic is placed on a higher platform than the householder, men areencouraged to withdraw from the performance of their duties in thefamily and in society, and to devote themselves to an aim which, however lofty, is personal and, so far, selfish. It is certainly aweakness in the religion that it has no higher aim than this to setbefore its most eager minds. Apart from this, life is regulated in away we cannot but admire. Amid the mass of trivialities andformalities in which every action is involved there breathes a gravehumane and gentle spirit, and a sound practical morality, and theordinary household of the Brahman may have been a scene of activityand cheerfulness. The Sudra, however, is spoken of everywhere as abeing whose degradation can never be removed, and to touch whom is tobe defiled. Those who belonged to no caste were in a still worseplight and lived in the greatest misery. 

4. Philosophy. --We have seen how both in the ritual system theyadministered and in the ideal they formed of the highest good, theBrahmans were led forward from the old ground of the Vedicnature-worship to a more inward and subjective religious attitude. The exaltation of Brahma, the power of prayer, to be the supreme god, was an advance from an external deity to a deity both external andpresent in man's own experience; and the appearance of a new way ofsalvation, though only permitted at first to the world-weary ascetic, in which inner contemplation and absorption could lead to the highestconsummation of life, also showed that a new form of religion was athand. In the philosophy of the Brahmanic period, the transition ismade from the service of gods external to man, by the mechanism ofrites, to the acknowledgment of a divine being with whom man feelshimself to be inwardly akin and to whom he draws near by his ownspiritual effort. In this movement, to which we learn that members ofthe lay aristocracy and even women of intellectual distinction madeimportant contributions, and which may have appeared in itsbeginnings as a sceptical revolt against their own system, theBrahmans yet took part, and the works in which the record of it iscontained became a part of revelation. The "Upanishads" or"communicated doctrines, " form the third branch of the sacredknowledge, and much of this literature belongs to the period beforeBuddhism. These books are read still by the educated Hindu as part ofscripture, and the philosophy of them is a part of his religion. Wecan only point out the principal terms and notions of thatphilosophy. 

Seeking to escape from the confusion of many gods the Indian mind islooking out even from the Vedic period for some means to conceive ofthem all as one. In the earliest period each reigned in turn as thesupreme; a god is supreme not because he is essentially the greatestof the gods, but because circumstances have brought him to the front. This is Henotheism. Then we have attempts to sum them all up in oneexpression. Prajapati, lord of creatures, Visvakarman, maker of allthings, represent such attempts. Then we have as the supreme, Brahma, the power of prayer, [2] a being of a different character from all hispredecessors. Brahma is an intellectual deity. He is a thinker, aknower, he is the "Mahan Atma" or great spirit, which sits inunbroken calm above the change and distraction of the universe. Inrendering Mahan Atma by great spirit, however, we are anticipating. Atma, originally breath or life, comes, afterwards, to mean theperson, the self when all that is accidental is removed from it, theessential, innermost self. Now Brahma is the great self, the inmostessence of all things, which was before them, and is unaffected bytheir changes. But man also has an atma, a self; it may be very smalland lodge in a part of the body where it cannot be detected, but itis there, and the small atma is the same as the great one. By whatphysiological doctrines this is upheld, cannot here be traced; butthe notion of the atma, the great form of which in Brahma isidentical with its small form in man, lies at the basis of Brahmanicthought. 

[Footnote 2: On the etymology of Brahma see Mr. Max Müller's _HibbertLectures_, p. 366. ]

In Brahma one god has been reached, but he has been reached bythinking away from him everything concrete. All predicates areunsuitable to him, as any predicate implies a limitation; he can onlybe described in negatives, or in questionable metaphors. He is meantto satisfy the religious craving for a being quite free from anyimperfection and entirely supreme--and it is the penalty of this thathe has no clear outline or character. And how indeed is he to berelated to the world? This world of change and decay, ofdisappointment and sorrow, what has the perfect being to do withthat? Did he make it, and is he responsible for it? The answer tothis in Hindu thought is that the world is due to Maya, illusion. Itwas due to an aberration in Brahma, which is represented in variousways, that the transition was made from the one to the many, and thiserror has been productive of all that has been suffered on the earth. Or else it is held that it was not Brahma who became subject toillusion, but that the illusion resides in man's views and thoughtsabout the world; and if a man could free himself from the meshes ofMaya by recognising that the world is an illusion, and that nothingexists but Brahma only, then he would have done something for his ownemancipation, the Brahma in him would be free from illusion, and hewould also have done something, though little, for the salvation ofthe world from its great error. 

That the whole world-process is nothing but an illusion, a confusedand troubled dream passing over the mind of Brahma, who himself aloneis real, this is the cardinal doctrine of Brahmanism, from whichBuddhism also, as we shall see, sets out. The world is really nothingbut an apparent world; and the true wisdom, the only salvationconsists in knowing this, and in living a life in accordance withthat knowledge. The wise man should regard a world which he knows tobe illusion, with complete indifference; it can do nothing to him, hecan do nothing for it; it affects him only with an ineradicableregret that it exists at all, and with a longing for itsdisappearance. The practical outcome of the state of matters which herecognises is firstly negative, that he must not allow the world toinfluence him at all, and, secondly, positive, that he must strive tobe united with Brahma. The negative task is performed by withdrawingthe mind from all particular things, and letting it be filled withthe general, the absolute alone; and similarly by forbidding thedesires to fasten on any worldly objects, by extinguishing desire andceasing to be affected in any way by worldly things. The positivetask is performed by means of a mental process which we cannot heredescribe, but by which the mind returns to the self that is withinand realises it as it is, cleared from all particular thoughts andaffections. These exercises cannot be called moral; where all isillusion morality disappears. There is no good, no evil, no effort topromote the good and lessen the evil. It is not because the world isbad that it is condemned, but because it exists. The energy which inother faiths is devoted to a moral struggle, is here poured into theascetic discipline by which the individual looks to escape altogetherfrom the world as it is. There are no good works, what is good is toabstain from all works; there is no benevolence further than that themind must be kept clear of all that confuses or degrades; thesalvation of the individual alone is sought after; there is no desireto spread the light and save others, since few are capable of thatknowledge of the illusive nature of all things by which alonesalvation is possible. 

This, it is plain, could never be a popular religion. Brahma, theabstract one, does not appeal to the imagination; he could not driveout the popular nature-gods with their definite myths and attributes. Nor could a religion spread among the people, which regarded thesocial and the domestic state as inferior, and could only bepractised by one who had left his home and family. The hermits andascetics and begging monks may form the religious aristocracy; but ateaching of a different nature was necessary for the people. And wefind, in fact, two religions prevailing in India in the period ofBrahmanism; that which we have described for the enlightened, whoescapes in it from all law, all creed, all ritual, whose wholereligion more than any other which ever flourished in the world iswithin the mind;[3] and on the other hand, a religion in whichoutward gods are worshipped, an outward law enforced which is countedsacred because a god or gods inspired it, and in which superstitionsgathered from all quarters find shelter. The higher religion by nomeans killed the lower one, as we see in India to this day. On thecontrary, the withdrawal of the higher religion of the country to aregion whither the people could not follow, left the religion of thepeople to sink into a degradation unknown before. One doctrine musthere be noticed. The belief in transmigration which Buddhism receivedfrom the religion it found existing in India, does not belong to thehigher thought of Brahmanism described in this section; the atman orself, which is identical with the supreme self, belongs to quite adifferent order of thought from the soul which was formerly in someone else, is now in me, and may yet come to be in many another being. The doctrine is thought to have been an importation into India aboutthe time we are speaking of. It admits of being made a powerfuldeterrent from vice and incentive to virtue. If my present sufferingsare due not to my acts, but to the acts of the person in whom my souldwelt before, it is possible for me so to act that my soul's futureexistence may be better and not worse than this one, and that itshall not sink but rise in the order of beings, and draw nearer toits final deliverance. Of this we shall hear more in connection withBuddhism. 

[Footnote 3: "From the standpoint of unity with Brahma, the gods areno-gods, the Vedas no-Vedas. "]

The further development of Indian religion, apart from Buddhism, isin two directions. There is a philosophical movement, in which theBrahmanic ideas on God, the world, the soul and its changes, arefurther worked out, and which leads to the six schools of Hinduphilosophy. On the other hand, the gods have their history. Brahmaremains the great god, but as his character is so undefined he islittle worshipped. Indra, the old national god, yields to Vishnu, theold sun-god of the three steps (heaven, the air, the earth), whobecomes the favourite deity. The stern and destructive S'iva is a newfigure, and seems to be partly an adaptation of a god of the savageaborigines: his worship is the most fanatical. These three, theCreator, the Upholder, and the Destroyer, form the Trimurti, ordivine trinity of India, --a trinity arrived at not by unfolding theriches of the one great god, but by compounding the claims of threegods who were rivals. The doctrine of incarnation is also found here. Vishnu has ten avatars or incarnations in human form; he comes downto the earth when there is a special reason for his interference. Inthese avatars, especially in Krishna, the dark god, whose exploits asa hero are told in the great epic the Mahabharata, the need is tosome extent met, of which both Buddhism and Christianity lay hold, ofa divine figure who is not too far away from man, and who can beregarded with personal affection. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

Most of the books mentioned at the end of last chapter deal also withBrahmanism. 

Of the Brahmanic literature given in the Sacred Books of the East, the following may be mentioned:--

 Vols. I. And xv. Upanishads. 

 Vols. Ii. And xiv. Sacred Laws of the Aryas. 

 Vol. Vii. The Institutes of Vishnu. 

 Vols. Xii. , xxvi. , and xli. The Satapatha-Brahmana (Sacrificial Rituals). 

 Vol. Xxv. Manu. 

 Vols. Xxix. , and xxx. Grihya-Sutras (Domestic Ceremonies). 

 Vol. Xxxiv. Vedic Hymns. Xlvi. Hymns to Agni. 

 Vols. Xlii. -xliv. Hymns of the Atharva-Veda. 

 Vols. Xxxiv. , xxxviii. , xlviii. Vedanta Sutras. 

Muir's _Sanscrit Texts_. 

Weber, _Indische Skizzen_. 

Haug, _Aitareya Brahmana_. 

CHAPTER XXINDIA

III. _Buddhism_

In Buddhism the great movement of Indian religion works itself out toits ultimate conclusion and reaches a stage beyond which there can beno advance. Here we have a religion, if such it may be called, without a god, without prayer, without priesthood or worship; areligion which owes its great success, not to its theology, nor toits ritual, since it has neither, but to its moral sentiment and toits external organisation. Originating in the centre of India, andgiving practical form to Indian ideas, it spread rapidly and widelyboth in the country of its birth and in neighbouring lands. It is nowextinct in India, yet it numbers more adherents than any otherreligion. It has been divided since the Christian era into two greatbranches. Southern Buddhism is the religion of Ceylon, of Burmah, andof Siam; while Northern Buddhism extends over Tibet, China, andJapan, and the islands of Java and Sumatra. 

The Literature. --These two branches of Buddhism have differentliterary traditions, though some works are common to both; and theseliteratures, differing from each other in language, also differwidely in contents and in spirit. The southern tradition, composed inPali, the literary language of Ceylon, has recently been opened up toscholars, and has greatly changed their views of the origin and thetrue nature of this religion. The Canon of Southern Buddhism, whichwe might call the Pali Bible, is a literature about twice as large asthe Bible of Europe, although if the repetitions in it were removed, it would be somewhat smaller than the Bible. It consists of threePitakas, baskets or collections. The first is the Vinaya Pitaka, dealing with discipline, but including the Mahavagga, a history ofthe first beginnings of the order as the founder gathered it aroundhim. The second is the Sutta Pitaka or collection of teachings. Itcontains the earliest account of the later life of the founder, booksof meditation and devotion, collections of sayings by the Master, poems, fairy tales, and fables, stories about Buddhist saints, and soon. The third collection, the Abidhamma, contains speculations anddiscussions on various subjects. Much of these materials is notpeculiar to Buddhism, there is much pre-Buddhistic speculation, andthere are many stories which are not peculiar even to India. Alongwith all this, however, the books give us the earliest accounts ofthe life and of the death of the founder, and contain arepresentation written a century after his death, of what he wasconsidered to have taught. The founder himself wrote nothing; but thework of composing books about him and his doctrine began early, andmuch of the canon is considered, especially by English scholars, tohave been in existence during the first Buddhist century. [1] For manycenturies they were preserved by memory alone. 

[Footnote 1: The Buddhist literature given in the _Sacred Books ofthe East_ is as follows:

 Vol. X. The Dhammapada, containing the quintessence of Buddhist morality, and the Sutta-nipata, giving teachings of Buddha on religion. 

 Vol. Xi. Buddhist Suttas. Religious, moral, and philosophical discourses. Vol. Xlix. Buddhist Mahayana Sutras. 

 Vol. Xiii. Vinaya Texts. The Patimokha or order of discipline, and the beginning of the Mahavagga, containing an account of the opening of the ministry of the founder. 

 Vol. Xvii. Vinaya Texts ii. Mahavagga continued. Kullavagga or discipline as established by the Master. 

 Vol. Xx. Kullavagga continued. 

 Vols. Xxii. , xlv. Contain Suttas of the religion of the Jainas. 

 Vols. Xxxv. , xxxvi. Questions of King Milinda. ]

Was there a Personal Founder?--Senart in his _Essai sur la légende duBuddha_, and Kern in his _Het Buddhisme in Indie_, both hold that wehave here to do with a sun-myth, and interpret the various featuresof the legend in a very ingenious way in accordance with that theory. This view has made few converts. Many incidents in the story arenatural, and appear to be due to a real tradition; there is literaryevidence of the early existence of the books, and the religion can bebest understood if regarded as the work of a real personality ofcommanding greatness. [2]

[Footnote 2: Recent archæological discoveries, of which an account isgiven by Mr. Rhys Davids in the _Century Magazine_, April 1902, placeit beyond doubt that the Buddha really existed, and that piousoffices were paid to his ashes after his cremation by the members ofhis own clan as well as by others. Inscriptions brought to light in1898 show that the Sakhya clan, of which he was a member, dwelt atthe time of his death in what is now a frontier district of Nepal. Three years before that event they were driven from their old capitalKapilavastu; but they formed a new one fifteen miles further south, just beyond the present frontier of Nepal, and there they erected a_stupa_ or massive stone cairn, to guard the portion of the ashes ofthe Buddha which was committed to their keeping. ]

Scholars, however, are agreed as to the difficulty of drawing theline between what is history and what is legend. Even in the earlyPali accounts the hero has become a religious figure, he wears titleswhich lift him above mankind, and he has supernatural powers at hiscommand. A laborious critical process must be undertaken, comparingthe various narratives with each other and testing them in otherways, before the real history can be regarded as made out beyondquestion. The slight sketch of the story which we give does not aimat such critical correctness; we merely indicate the outline of anarrative which is one of the principal sources of the strength ofthe religion. 

The Story of the Founder. --The founder's family name was Gautama, andby that name he was commonly known during his lifetime. The personalname given him as a child was Siddartha. Those who wished after hisdeath to speak of him with reverence called him Sakya-Muni, the Sageof the Sakyas. These were a tribe who dwelt, at the period of thestory, _i. E. _ half a millennium before Christ, in the country to thenorth of the sacred Ganges, a few days' journey from the city ofBenares. Gautama's father, Suddhodana, was rajah (chief) of theSakyas; his residence was Kapilavastu, near Oude. The future sagethus belonged to the Kshatriya class, and was accustomed to aposition of rank and ease. We hear little of his youth; he had beenmarried ten years, and his wife, whom he loved, had just brought hima son, when, at the age of twenty-nine, he suddenly and secretly lefthis home to devote himself to the religious life. He was led to thisstep by witnessing various painful sights which caused him vividly torealise the suffering which accompanies all existence, and made himscorn a life of luxury. It was a time when many were seeking a betterway, and when a superior mind naturally turned to that retirement andabsorption in which it was believed that the key to life's pains andmysteries was to be found. In the "Great Renunciation, " as this actis called, there is nothing we cannot understand. This lofty act, however, was followed by a temptation; Mara, the spirit of evil, urged him, but urged him in vain, to give up the purpose he hadformed. He then attached himself to Brahmanic ascetics, from whom helearned their philosophy; and after this he devoted himself for sixyears to a life of fasting and penance, the Brahmanic method fordrawing nearer the goal of the religious life. After this period hegave up his fasting, not having profited by it as he had expected, and returned to an ordinary diet. This change cost him the adhesionof five disciples who had become attached to him, and had been filledwith wonder at his mortifications. But the loss was a small onecompared with the gain which was at hand. After a second greatspiritual struggle and a renewal of the temptation, he at lastreached that which he had long been seeking. Seated under a _ficusreligiosa_, the tree afterwards called the tree of knowledge, or theBo-tree, he rose in contemplation above all his temptations anddoubts till he beheld at length the true nature of things. From thismoment he was Buddha, Enlightened; he had the key of truth, and forhimself he was assured that sorrow and evil had lost all hold on him. His doctrine had dawned in his mind. He had discovered the cause ofthe sorrow which is so closely intertwined in man's life, and haddivined the way in which sorrow might be overcome. The method hadbeen found by which one could escape from the unending succession ofnew lives, all painful, to which, according to the general belief ofthe time, men were condemned. The words placed in the mouth of thefounder when he attained to Buddhahood tell their own tale. "Lookingfor the Maker of this tabernacle, I have to run through a course ofmany births so long as I do not find him; and painful is birth againand again. But now, Maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen;thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again. All thy rafters arebroken; thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, approaching theeternal, has attained to the extinction of all desires. "[3]

[Footnote 3: Dhammapada, _S. B. E. _ x. 42. ]

The great discovery being made, and duly pondered and realised, thequestion arose, What was to be done with it? The Buddha shrinks fromthe work of preaching it to others. Brahma himself is brought intothe story to encourage him to make his secret known to others, and toassure him that many will receive it with great joy. The Blessed Oneconsents, and thus replies: "Wide open is the gate of the Immortal toall who have ears to hear; let them send forth faith to meet it. Theteaching is sweet and good; because I despaired of the task, I spakenot to men before. "[4] He turns his steps, guided by his ownsupernatural knowledge, to the city of Benares, to seek the fivemonks who had formerly abandoned him. On his way thither he meets anaked ascetic who asks the reason of his cheerful mien; he answersthat he has overcome all foes, has reached emancipation by thedestruction of desire, and has obtained Nirvana. "To found thekingdom of Truth I go to the city of the Kasis (Benares); I will beatthe drum of the Immortal in the darkness of this world. " The accountwhich follows of the opening of the "kingdom of righteousness"presents many analogies to the early stages of other spiritualmovements. The founder, immovably sure of himself and of hisdoctrines, goes from place to place, spending the rainy season intown, and preaching everywhere. It is at Benares that the "wheel ofthe law" is first set in motion; there the first sermon was preached. The circumstances are also narrated under which other sermons weredelivered, details being given as to time, place, the persons whoheard them, the incidents which occasioned them. His converts atfirst are few and their names are recorded, but by degrees theybecome more numerous. The more devoted of them become members of hisorder, Bhikkus (for Bhikshus), mendicants; they forsake domesticlife, shave their heads, adopt the yellow dress and the alms-bowl. They also are sent out to preach. "Go ye, O Bhikkus, and wander, forthe welfare of many, out of compassion for the world, for the gainand for the welfare of gods and men. Let not two of you go the sameway. Preach, O Bhikkus, the doctrine which is glorious in thebeginning, glorious in the middle, glorious in the end, in thespirit, and in the letter; proclaim a consummate, perfect, and purelife of holiness. There are beings whose mental eyes are covered withscarcely any dust, but if the doctrine is not preached to them theycannot attain salvation. " The incidents narrated in this part of thestory are mostly connected with persons seeking admission to theorder, or persons requiring to be convinced; the doctrine and itsspread are everything. That spread takes place, as it is desired bythe Buddha, chiefly among the higher classes of society; a greattriumph is reached when Bimbisara, king of Magadha, becomes a patronof the order, and some accounts tell of the conversion of theBuddha's own father and mother. The work of the mission is of apeaceful nature; the Buddha lives on good terms with the Brahmans andwith other teachers and their pupils. The only formidable oppositionhe had to meet arose within the order. His cousin Dewadatta, who hadbecome a monk, wished to found a new order with much stricter rulesthan those of the original one. The Buddha refused to attachimportance, as was proposed, to matters of clothes and food, orliving in the open air; to do so would have made his movementnarrower and less universal than he desired. 

[Footnote 4: Mahavagga, _S. B. E. _ xiii. 88. ]

The beginning of the ministry is told in some detail, but of a longperiod of the life only a few scattered incidents are given. There isa detailed account of the three last months of the life. The Buddhais now eighty years of age, and in the Maha-paranibbana Sutta[5] thetale of his migrations and preachings is carried on according to thesame scheme as in the accounts of his early days. During the rainyseason, however, when he has reached the age of eighty, he has anillness, and sees he cannot live long. This he tells his monks, exhorting them with urgency to be true to the teaching and the order, and to shed the light abroad. His end is hastened by a meal of porkset before him by a goldsmith, a man of low caste, who hospitablyentertained him. After this his face shines with a heavenly radiance, and as the end approaches many heavenly signs appear. The Buddha isfully conscious that he is about to leave the world, and that hisdeath is an event of supreme interest to the heavenly powers, whom hebelieves to be thronging around to watch his last hours. He issolicitous, however, to soothe the grief of his friends, largenumbers of whom also are around him, and to give them such counselsand such incentives to a faithful upholding of the cause as he yetmay. They ask about his obsequies, and he claims that the remains ofsuch an one as he is, of a Tathagata, "one who has attainedperfection, " should be treated as men treat the remains of a king ofkings. He recognises the kindness of Ananda, his most intimatedisciple, and tries to comfort him by encouraging him to be earnestin effort, so that he too may soon be free from evils. He directs hisdisciples generally not to mourn too much at his removal as if theywere being deserted. The truths which he has set forth, and the rulesof the order he has laid down for them, are to be their teacher afterhe is gone. He asks if any of them has any doubt or misgiving as tothe Buddha, or the truth, or the faith, or the way. If so, they areto inquire freely, so that they may not reproach themselvesafterwards for not having consulted him while still among them. Thebrethren, however, are silent, though addressed again and again inthe same way. In the whole assembly there is not one who has anydoubt or misgiving. Even the most backward of these brethren hasbecome converted (lit. "entered into the current"); he is no longerliable to be born to a state of suffering, but is assured of eternalsalvation. 

[Footnote 5: _S. B. E. _ vol. Xl. ]

"Then the Blessed One addressed the brethren and said, 'Behold now, brethren, I exhort you, ' saying, 'Decay is inherent in all thingsthat have come into being. Work out your salvation with diligence!'

"This was the last word of the Tathagata!"

His death or Nirvana forms the era of Buddhist chronology, and thedate has now been approximately fixed with some certainty; it tookplace somewhere in the decade 482-472 B. C. 

Is Buddhism a Revolt against Brahmanism?--Before proceeding todiscuss the religion to which this somewhat monkish narrative formsthe preface, it is necessary to say a few words on the relation whichthat religion is now supposed to hold to the general history ofIndian piety. It was customary, till recently, to regard Buddha as agreat reformer, and his religion as a great revolt against that whichit found prevailing in India. He is credited with having preachedatheism as a reaction against the burdensome worship of too manygods, with having instituted a great social movement consisting inthe abolition of caste, with having openly denied the authority ofthe Vedas, till then unchallenged, and with having rebuked the prideof Brahmanism by making his order of mendicants the representativesof his religion. None of these assertions can now be upheld. Insteadof having been a tremendous reaction against Brahmanism it is seenthat Buddhism was the natural outgrowth of that system. The closerknowledge of both, gained by the opening up of the sacred books ofIndia, tends to show that much that was formerly thought distinctiveof Buddhism was in reality inherited from Brahmanism. We saw indealing with the earlier form of Indian religion that a form of pietyhad been struck out in it which made the ascetic independent ofsacrifice, priesthood, even of the gods, all save the one God who isin all things. In that phase of Indian religion the authority of theVedas had already been impugned, an inner discipline had taken theplace of outward worship, the saint had learned to forsake the world. This turn of religious thought produced all the phenomena of Buddhismbefore the period of Gautama. The sannyasin (_vide sup. _, chapterxix. ) of Brahmanism is also called bhikku, mendicant; the rules ofthe older ascetics are closely similar to those of the Buddhist monk;their very outfit, their cloak and alms-bowl, are the same. 

A circumstance which shows very clearly how far Buddhism was frombearing the character of a revolt, is the occurrence at the same timeand in the same district of India of another movement of a verysimilar nature. Jainism is an Indian religion so like Buddhism as tohave been considered by many to be a sect of the latter. It also hasan order of monks with robes and with a rule like those of theBuddhist fraternity. It also has a human founder on whom many of thesame titles are conferred as on Gautama, and who is afterwardsdeified and worshipped. Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, is, likeGautama, the son of a royal house; and the Jainist and the Buddhistlegend have many features in common. Was the legend of Mahavira, then, a sectarian version of the legend of Gautama, did no suchperson exist, at least as the founder of a religious body? So it wasformerly considered; but it has now been discovered that the Buddhistscriptures themselves bear witness to the actual existence ofMahavira in the lifetime of Gautama, who once had an encounter withhim and confuted him. It appears then that two similar movements weregoing on close together at the same time. They were independent ofeach other; the two rules differ in important particulars. Jainismcarries to a much greater length than Buddhism the "ahimsa, " orprohibition of the destruction of life; the Jainists practiseausterities which Buddhism discards, and in the philosophies of thetwo systems there are far-reaching discrepancies. On the other hand, both Buddhism and Jainism borrow from Brahmanism most of theirpractices and institutions; both are developments of the way ofsalvation struck out not by Brahmans alone, but by men of othercastes and other views, when faith in the old national gods wasgrowing dim. 

We now proceed to discuss the Buddhist system, taking it as itappears in the early books, which tell us at least what was believedin the fourth century B. C. To have been the ideas and intentions ofthe founder. The following is the formula in which the convertexpressed his desire to be admitted to the order: "I take shelter inthe Buddha, I take shelter in the Dhamma (doctrine), I take shelterin the Samgha (order). "

1. The Buddha. --This confession of faith is directed to a triad ofwhich the Buddha is the first member. Now the title Buddha was notinvented by Buddhism, but belongs to earlier Indian thought, whichheld that from time to time, in a specially favoured age, anEnlightened One and Enlightener, an omniscient and perfect teacher, visited the world. Of these there had been in former agestwenty-four, and the followers of Gautama held him to be thetwenty-fifth, but not the last. The application to Gautama of thistitle removed him, to the believer, from the ranks of ordinary men, and was the signal for a constantly increasing exaltation of hisperson. In adhering to the Buddha, therefore, the convert is notbowing to a mere man, but to one in whom a new type of deity is onthe way to be realised. He is a man; there is a record of his humanlife, in which he made a great renunciation, abandoning, out ofcompassion for men's sufferings, a position of lordly ease for thatof the mendicant. In this way he is a saviour not too exalted for thepious heart to love and follow. Having found out in his ownexperience the way of peace, and opened up that way for others, he isa pattern and an encouragement as well as a lawgiver to the earnestsoul; and the personal relation which may thus be enjoyed with thefounder is one great secret of the success of the religion. On theother hand, he is more than a man. The belief grew up very early thathe was not born in the ordinary way, but that his birth had been hisown voluntary act, and that his great renunciation consisted in hischoosing, out of compassion for men, to enter human life and to bearthe burden of its sufferings. In this way a religion which originallyhad no gods and no worship began to supply itself with these. Somescholars hold that it was among the lay community, among men notthoroughly initiated into Buddhist thought, and failing to find inthe new faith what their former religions had afforded, that thedeification of the Buddha and the worship of him began; it maycertainly be doubted whether the religion could have lived long orspread far if these deficiencies had not been early supplied. 

2. The Doctrine. --The life of the founder gives us the key to hisdoctrine. We see at once that that doctrine was not negative butpositive and constructive. Neither was it socially of a revolutionarycharacter, nor did it deny any part of the existing religion. Wenever read that Gautama's teaching was assailed by the Brahmans asunsound; it was centuries after his death that antagonism broke outbetween the order and the upholders of other systems. Nor again didthe teaching put forward a new philosophy. On certain points which weshall notice there is a development of thought in it; but this wasnot obtruded. 

In fact the doctrine is not a speculation at all, but a way ofsalvation which is preached for its own sake, and carefully guardedfrom being mixed up with speculative or religious controversy. TheBuddha is one who has found out a new way to be saved, and he comesforward to preach what he has discovered, and that alone. Othermatters he leaves as they are. "All his discourses savour ofredemption as all the sea is salt. " Other men may draw inferences asto the relation his doctrine bears to the position of the Brahmans, or to the sacrifices, or to existing beliefs; he does not draw theseinferences, he feels no need to do so. 

The doctrine professes to be an answer to a definite problem--theproblem of pain. It is the most characteristic thing about both thefounder and the doctrine, that they start from the universalexistence of pain, to seek a remedy for it; they are inspiredtherefore from the first by a dark view of human life, and by thesentiment of compassion. It was the impression made on the youngprince, of the general prevalence of suffering, that drove him forthfrom the palace to be a sannyasin or devotee. In a striking sermon heuses the figure of fire to indicate how universal is the rule of painin all parts of nature and of human life. "All is burning; the eye isburning, and all it looks on and all it remembers of what it hasseen"; so it is with each of the senses, so also with the mind. Thefire is that of passion, of malice, of illusion, of birth, of age, ofdeath, of pain, despondency, and despair. But the nature of thecomplaint from which man suffers, and also the remedy for it, aredescribed most clearly in the "Four Noble Truths" set forth in theopening sermon at Benares. In these memorable utterances the teacherexpresses himself according to the rules of the medical art, firstsetting forth the nature of the disease, then its cause, then how ittakes end, and lastly, the means to be adopted in order that it maydo so. 

1. The Noble Truth of _Suffering_. Birth is suffering, decay issuffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering. Presence ofobjects we hate is suffering, separation from objects we love issuffering, not to obtain what we desire is suffering. Briefly, thefivefold clinging to existence is suffering. 

2. The Noble Truth of the _Cause of Suffering_. Thirst that leads torebirth, accompanied by pleasure and lust, finding its delight hereand there. This thirst is threefold, namely, thirst for pleasure, thirst for existence, thirst for prosperity. 

3. The Noble Truth of the _Cessation of Suffering_. It ceases withthe complete cessation of this thirst, a cessation which consists inthe absence of every passion, with the abandoning of this thirst, with the deliverance from it, with the destruction of desire. 

4. The Noble Truth of the _Path which leads to the Cessation ofSuffering_. The holy eightfold Path; that is to say, Right Belief, Right Aspiration, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means ofLivelihood, Right Endeavour, Right Memory, Right Meditation. 

In these statements there are some things which we can readilyunderstand, but also some things which are not so easy. It is athought with which Christians are familiar, that desire is the parentof all sorts of pain and disappointment, that the assertion of theself, the putting forward of personal wishes and claims, involvessuffering. And we read in the Gospels that the way to escape fromsuch suffering is to cease from desire, no longer to be anxious aboutwhat this world can give us or take from us, and not to lay uptreasures. Buddhist doctrine has its moral basis in the perception ofthe vanity of all human effort and desire, and in the conviction thatthe true riches for man cannot consist in any of those goods to whichthe heart naturally clings. Where that perception does not exist, where the first of the Noble Truths is not accepted as beyond allquestion, Buddhism can have no hold. So far the doctrine is easy tofollow. But in the second of the Truths we find that the cause ofsuffering is sought in the history of the human person as Indianthought conceives it. Man suffers because he has been born again, hassuffered a rebirth, and the cause of his rebirth is the thirst whichhas been felt or even nourished in a previous existence. The thoughtthat suffering is due to desire is not presented simply, as it is inour Gospels, but in connection with a doctrine of man's life and ofthe connection of one generation with another, which is quite strangeto us, but apart from which primitive Buddhism held that its doctrineof suffering could not be understood. The Buddha, after discoveringthe doctrine, is at first in doubt whether or not he will preach it;and the cause of his doubt is that he is not sure if men will be ableto understand the law of causality and the chain of existence, onwhich he himself meditated a whole night after his enlightenment, andhis discovery of which he regards as a great part of his achievement. This chain of causation is stated in a long series of assertedprocesses, in which the connection between one generation andanother, and the transmission from life to life of the melancholyheritage of desire and sorrow, is obscurely and enigmatically traced. The beginning of all is ignorance (of the four truths); fromignorance proceed the "samkharas" or forms of production, from thesein turn consciousness, the senses, contact, sensation, thirst, and soon to birth and the miseries of life. Suffering is destroyed bytracing this sequence over again in a negative way, so that, thefirst member of it being destroyed, each subsequent member isdestroyed in turn. 

It is no wonder that the founder doubted whether this doctrine ofcausation would be generally understood; for it is in fact an attemptto reconcile two opposite views of the nature of the human person. Inthe first place we find in early Buddhism the thought that there isno such thing as a self in the human being; a man is made up ofvarious bundles of attributes and sensations called _skandhas_, buthe himself is none of these. There is no persistent substratum of aself under these activities and forms, any more than there is acarriage in addition to the wheels, shafts, nails, etc. , of which acarriage is composed. The Buddhist is called on to give up the beliefin a permanent ego; only where the various parts come together is theman there. This is the well-known denial of the soul in thisreligion; the soul is nothing but the "name and form" of a chancecollocation of elements. It is hard to know where this doctrine camefrom; Kern says it is derived from the science of dissection, otherscompare it with the doctrine of Heraclitus, taught about the sametime in Greece, that all things are in constant flux, nothingpermanent. The last words of the Master assert that decay isuniversal; and the doctrine of the skandhas is a corollary from thatprinciple; if all the elements of which the human person is made upare in process of decay, then the self cannot be a substantial andpersistent thing. That doctrine, however, does not go well togetherwith the belief in the universality and inexorableness of suffering. If there is no self, must not consciousness come to an end when theelements fall asunder which chance has brought together, and must notthe hour of death be also the hour of complete emancipation? This, however, it was impossible to hold in India at the time of Gautama;the belief in transmigration was too firmly fixed, he never thoughtof disputing it. That belief indeed is what chiefly makes thesuffering of the world so lamentable. To Indian eyes the painactually in the world was magnified a hundred-fold by the darkimagination of its connection with the past and with the future. Whata man suffered was the result of acts done in many former lives, allspent in the vain misery of desire; and the sad prospect was extendedbefore him that death would not end his pains, but that he would beborn again and again to suffer ever anew so long as desire continued. But if this is the case, then the soul would seem to be a durable andpersistent thing which is able to go through many lives and muchsuffering without being brought to an end. On the theory oftransmigration the soul is not a mere shadow-name of an aggregationof qualities, but the one durable thing which survives when all thatis accidental and temporary falls away from it. The doctrine of theSkandhas and that of transmigration are thus opposed, and thedoctrine of the _nidanas_ or the chain of causation is the bridgewhich satisfied Gautama's own mind, but which he was doubtful aboutpresenting to others, to bring them into harmony. He aimed at showingby his catalogue of these obscure processes how the actions done in alife set up a tendency to a corresponding existence in another lifewhich begins after the former one ends. Though there is no soul to betransmitted, the moral effects of former lives are transmitted totheir successors. 

The essential doctrine of the Buddha, however, is determined by thebelief in transmigration. His cry of triumph at the time of hisenlightenment is to the effect that the long series of sufferingexistences through which he has passed has now come to an end, andthat he will not be born again. And what he preaches with constantiteration is the misery of this awful succession of births to renewalof suffering, and the infinite blessedness of escaping from thiscycle. The disciple, when converted, is to be able to say: "Hell isdestroyed for me, and rebirth as an animal or a ghost or in any placeof woe. I am converted, I am no longer liable to be reborn in a stateof suffering, and am assured of eternal salvation. "

Now it rests with a man's own acts to end his sufferings. The chainof causation which ends with suffering begins with ignorance. Theignorance which is meant is that of the four noble truths, of the wayof salvation. Let a man cease from ignorance, let him accept theNoble Truths and the insight they convey into the cause of suffering, then by ceasing to thirst, or to burn, or in our own language byturning his mind away from all desire, believing that what he doeswill be effective for his salvation, he sets up a chain of causationin an opposite direction, and having destroyed ignorance he may restassured that he has destroyed suffering too and is in the right way. The burden he has inherited he will not need to carry any farther, but will, when he dies, lay down for ever. 

When we look at the fourth Noble Truth, which tells what a man has todo in order to obtain this salvation, we are at first surprised. After the deep earnestness with which the nature of the disease andthe cause and cure of the disease have been stated, we expect thatstronger practical measures will be asked for than these eight formsof moderation. Christianity speaks of cutting off the right hand, plucking out the right eye, in order to cut off desire: and theBrahmanic method of union with the Deity was, as we have seen, thatof the most extreme self-mortification united with contemplation. This Brahmanic method, the _yoga_ by which the devotee sought toescape from all the accidents of being and to make himself one withthe great Self, the Buddha had tried for six years; but he had givenit up for a year when the hour of his enlightenment struck, and heexplicitly condemns for others the path he had found unprofitable forhimself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The oneextreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading, sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given tomortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoidingthese two extremes the Tathagata has gained the knowledge of theMiddle Path, which leads to insight, wisdom, calm, to Nirvana. " Theway, therefore, to escape from the Karma, the moral retribution whichworks inexorably in one life the result stored up in previous lives, is that of a careful and unintermitted self-discipline, which doesnot run to extremes, but practices, with perfectly clear purpose andself-possession, the needful virtues mentioned in the fourth of theNoble Truths. What are these? There is to be--

 1. Right belief, without superstition or delusion. 

 2. Right aspiration, after such things as the thoughtful and earnest man sets store by. 

 3. Right speech, speech that is friendly and sincere. 

 4. Right conduct, conduct that is peaceable, honourable, and pure. 

 5. Right means of livelihood, _i. E. _ a pursuit which does not involve the taking or injuring of life. 

 6. Right endeavour, _i. E. _ self-restraint and watchfulness. 

 7. Right memory, _i. E. _ presence of mind, not forgetting at any time what one ought to remember; and

 8. Right meditation, _i. E. _ earnest occupation with the riddles of life. 

This is the path; there are four stages of it--

 1. The stage of him who has entered the path. 

 2. The stage of him who has yet to return once to life. 

 3. The stage of him who returns not again, but may be born again as a superior being; and

 4. The stage of the worthy, holy one, the _Arahat_, who is free from desire for existence, and also from pride and self-righteousness, and who is saved and has obtained holiness, even in this life. 

An Arahat is not equal to a Buddha; the former is himself saved, butthe perfect Buddha is able by his perfect knowledge to save others. Of Buddhas, however, there are not many. One becomes an Arahat by alife of strenuous and untiring discipline. Ten fetters are to bebroken by which a man is kept from freedom; self-deception is one ofthem, trust in sacrifice another, and the list embraces both sensualand intellectual weaknesses. One must watch and be sober; every act, however trivial, is to be done with full self-consciousness andearnestness. One must remember that he is engaged in a great and ahard work, and must resolutely "swim upstream, " estimating at itsproper value every affection and temptation that would hold him back. The body is to be contemned, and all natural ties; emotion is to beuprooted from the heart so that the proper state of entire calm andundisturbedness may be maintained. Then one is an Arahat, a trueBrahman. This manner of life requires withdrawal from the world; thetrue salvation can only be attained by him who has left his home forthe houseless life. But Buddhism has also a general moral code forthose who have not taken this step; the keeping of it will not savethem directly; from the life they are now leading that is impossible, but it is a beginning; it will make it easier for them to becomeArahats and attain salvation in some future existence. For all it isgood to be free from desire; as all desire contains in itself a germof death, there is no approach to salvation except in this direction. 

Buddhist Morality. --Towards fellow-men Buddhist morality is based onthe notion of the equality of all; respect is to be paid to allliving beings. The five rules of righteousness which are binding onall followers of the Buddha are:

 1. Not to kill any living being. 

 2. Not to take that which is not given. 

 3. To refrain from adultery. 

 4. To speak no untruth. 

 5. To abstain from all intoxicating liquors. 

To these are added five more for members of the order, who are alsorequired to refrain from all sexual intercourse, viz. :

 1. Not to eat after mid-day. 

 2. Not to be present at dancing, singing, music, or plays. 

 3. Not to use wreaths, scents, ointments, or personal ornaments. 

 4. Not to use a high or a broad bed. 

 5. To possess no silver or gold. 

These commandments, like those of the Decalogue, are negative inform; but in the Buddhist scriptures a positive moral ideal isinculcated on all, which is grave and attractive in its character, and is sustained by a strong though quiet enthusiasm. We find here adelicate conscientiousness as to the relations to be cultivated withone's fellow-men; the widest toleration is enjoined, a tolerationextending to all beings, to all opinions. Hatred is to be repaid bylove, life is to be filled with kindness and compassion. TheDhammapada and the Sutta-nipata deserve to be read by all who carefor the unseen riches of the soul. By their simple earnestness, theirquaint use of parable and metaphor, and their mingling of thehomeliest things with the highest truths, these books take rank amongthe most impressive of the religious books of the world. We give onlya few jewels from this treasury. 

From the Dhammapada. --Earnestness is the path of immortality(Nirvana), thoughtlessness the path of death. Those who are inearnest do not die, those who are thoughtless are as if dead already. 

All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is foundedon what we have thought, it is made up of what we have thought. If aman speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like ashadow that never leaves him. 

By oneself evil is done, by oneself one suffers; by oneself evil isleft undone, by oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belongto oneself; no one can purify another. 

From the Sutta-nipata. --To live in a suitable country, to have donegood deeds in a former existence, and a thorough study of oneself, this is the highest blessing. 

As a mother at the risk of her life watches over her own child, heronly child, so also let every one cultivate a boundless friendly mindtowards all beings. 

A Bhikku who has turned away from desire and attachment, and ispossessed of understanding in this world, has already gone to theimmortal place, the unchangeable state of Nirvana. 

Nirvana. --Our account of the doctrine would appear incomplete if wedid not attempt to answer the question, What is Nirvana? It is, asthe last extract shows, the state of salvation in Buddhism. As wehave seen, it is the condition of the man who has escaped from theseries of rebirths, and will never be born again. It is attained evenin this life by the Arahat, in whom all desire and restlessness havecome to an end. On the other hand, it is said of such an one that heenters Nirvana when he dies, as if it were a state not of this life, but of the period beyond. Thus it has been much debated whether theBuddhist (or rather Indian, for the notion is not peculiar toBuddhism) Nirvana is extinction, annihilation, of which the quenchingof desire in this life is the prelude, or if it is a state ofnegative or quiescent blessedness, on which the saint can enter hereand now, but which is only made perfect when he dies. But there aretwo Nirvanas;--that of entire passionlessness attained in this life, and the consummate Nirvana entered at death. The saint does not needto wait for death for his redemption, nor must he hasten his death inorder to enjoy it fully; Buddha, by example and by precept, forbidsany such anticipation. Death seals that which was already won, thereis no return from the Nirvana of death to any further life. This, however, does not amount to an assertion that the dead Arahat has nolife or knowledge in the beyond; he is freed from desire, but whetherhis consciousness is altogether extinguished, Buddhism does notdecide, and regards as a vain speculation. 

No Gods. --We shall speak afterwards of this view of redemption, whichis the key to the nature of the Buddhist religion. We remark herethat it is a redemption man achieves by his own efforts, without anyoutward prop or aid. In this system there is no occasion for anypriests or sacrifices, for any prayers, or for any gods. There is noritual, because there is no object of worship, there is no sin in thesense of offending a higher being. The gods are denied not because ofany speculative doubt of their existence, but because in that innerworld of moral effort which man has come to feel so supremely realand important, they have no part to play. As all the gods faded awayin Indian speculation before Brahma, so Brahma's own turn has come tofade away. The Buddhist speaks of the gods as if they existed, and hemakes no attack on the sacrifices; but no living god fills his heart. The Buddha is greater than all the gods; his teaching is for thebenefit of gods as well as men. But the Buddha is not an object ofworship. If the Buddhist can be said to worship any higher power, itis the moral order which never fails to reward men according to thedeeds done in this or former existences. That is for him a real andtremendous, though impersonal power, and in contemplating it he maybe said to worship after a fashion. But he has no aid to look forfrom any power in heaven or earth in working out his salvation. Buddhism is the most autosoteric of all religions; it declares moreuncompromisingly than any other, that man must save himself by hisown efforts, and that no one can possibly stand in his place orrelieve him of any part of his great task. All that any one, even theBuddha, can do for another, is to enlighten him, to open his eyes tothe true knowledge, and show him the narrow path on which he mustthenceforth walk. 

3. The Order. --There were monks before Buddhism. That religion madeits appearance when Indian thought was at the stage of growth atwhich monastic communities may be expected to arise. When religionhas ceased to be regarded as the affair of the nation or the tribe, and is cherished as the affair of the individual, when the mind turnsfrom the sacrifices and ritual of public religion to cultivaterelations with a power known chiefly in the heart and soul, and whenreligious duty has thus come to be recognised as a boundless andall-embracing thing, not a service the hands and feet can discharge, but the effort, never ending, still beginning, to make the wholepersonality with all its acts and aims conform to the ideal, then itis that men who are living for religion seek for such aid as they cangive each other, and find it in an order and a discipline. The rulesof the Buddhist Samgha or order are extant, and so are the rules ofthe contemporary Jainist fraternity. The Samgha resembled theFranciscan more than the other great Christian orders. The Bhikku onjoining it abandoned his family and property, assumed the yellow robeand other scanty properties of the character, and lived thenceforthby begging, and in strict subjection to the rules, in which everydetail of his food, his clothing, his residence, and his daily walkand conversation, were laid down. The two great objects of thesociety were mutual help in the religious life and the preaching ofthe doctrine. Under the first head come the frequent meetings ofmonks and the confessions they make to each other according to afixed form. There is no vow of obedience; the monk obeys the law, notthe human authority. In preaching they are to go one by one, and theyare to preach to all. To all who would hear it was the gate open tothis salvation. Here the Buddhist neglect of caste comes in. Buddhismmakes no general or formal declaration of the equality of all men, nor is there any attack on the Brahman caste or any exaltation of thelower castes. The order drew its recruits at first from the ranks ofthe Brahmans. But the impelling motive of the new religion wascompassion, and genuine compassion is not to be restrained inartificial limits. The salvation preached was fitted for all men. Thedisease to be cured was one from which all suffer, and the cure wasone which all could at least begin to lay hold of. Thus Buddhism wasfitted to break through the barriers of caste, and to gather into onereligious community men of all castes alike. In the community, it washeld, these distinctions disappeared. Not birth but conduct theremade the true Brahman. The universalist tendency of the religion alsofitted it to spread to other lands. It was not limited by anything inits teaching to the soil of India, nor to the territory of anyparticular set of gods. So wide indeed is its toleration, that a manmay embrace it without giving up the faith in which he lived before. One can add it without incongruity to one's former beliefs andpractices. The believer in Shang-ti can be a Buddhist as well as thebeliever in Brahma. [6] The absence of any hierarchy or centralisedorganisation enabled it to spread freely, and the very meagreness ofits doctrine, and its freedom from ritual, were also in its favour. 

[Footnote 6: Millions of Buddhists in China and Japan are alsoadherents of the other religions of these countries. ]

Buddhism made Popular. --Buddhism proved able to spread over manylands because it was so simple, and in its essence so moral and sobroadly human. But, like other faiths which have spread to manylands, it assumed very different forms in different countries, andthe later form is often very different from the early simplicity. Even at the outset it was not free from a strong infusion of magic;the Arahat, like the Brahmanic ascetic before him, was believed toobtain influence over the gods by his virtues, and thus a claim tosupernatural power is brought in, which agrees but ill with theethical doctrine. The religion, which at first ignored the gods andbade each man trust to his own efforts for his highest good, became, ere long, what a popular religion at the stage of progress prevailingat that time necessarily was, namely, a worship of superior beingsand a method of obtaining benefits from them. The national gods werediscarded, but the deification of the founder early furnished a beingwho could be worshipped. Legend grew luxuriantly round his birth andearly career; and he obtained the rank of the greatest of all thegods. Former Buddhas who had lived in former ages still lived asgods; and the divine family, being once founded, admitted of variousadditions; even a popular deity, such as Indra, could be joined tothe growing circle. The chief scenes of the life of the founderbecame holy places and objects of pilgrimage, where relics wereexposed for adoration. The growth of legend and of magic proceededmore rapidly, and went to greater lengths, in Northern than inSouthern Buddhism; but in the land of its birth, too, Buddhism provedunable to serve as a working religion without additions andmodifications entirely foreign to its true character. The professionof Buddhism was combined even with the savage worship of thenon-Aryan tribes; Siva was identified with Buddha and then worshippedinstead of him, as also was Vishnu, and the perversion anddegradation of the religion prepared for its expulsion from thecountry of its birth. That expulsion was probably brought about moreimmediately by the advance of Mohammedanism in India, and took placein the period of the early Middle Ages. We cannot speak here of thestrange guise Buddhism has assumed in the north of India, notably inTibet. The Lamaism of that country, with its perpetual livingincarnation of the divine Buddha in a succession of humanrepresentatives, its hierarchical church strongly resembling in manyof its features the Church of Rome, and the prayer-flags and wheelsfor the mechanical discharge of religious acts, have long been thewonder of the world. 

Conclusion. --It is not from what Buddhism is now in any of thecountries where it flourishes, and where it has votaries who professother religions also, that we can judge of what it really is, orestimate its value as a product of the human mind. It is to earlyBuddhism that we must look for this. What are we to judge of thisreligion without gods, and based on the assertion that all life issuffering, and that the chief good is altogether to escape from life?It is not true to characterise it as a religion in which there is nojoy, and which deliberately refuses to have anything to do with joy. The Arahat, in whom desire is vanquished, and who has no furtherbirth to anticipate, is filled with a deep joy and triumph as of avictor who has conquered every foe; and those who are less advancedin the path yet have their share in this enthusiasm, and are inspiredby it to continue the struggle. Still Buddhism is a sad religion. Itarrives in India when the Deity there believed in has deserted theworld, and tells man he is alone in it. There is no one to help him, no one to assure him that the good cause in a wider sense--a causeextending beyond his own personal life--is destined to succeed; thereis no upholder of any moral order beyond that which works itself outin each individual experience. The result is that the believer doesnot trouble himself about the world, but only about his own personalsalvation. This religion is not a social force, it aims not at aKingdom of God to be built up by the united efforts of multitudes ofthe faithful, but only at saving individual souls, which in the actof being saved are removed beyond all activity and all contact withthe world. Buddhism, therefore, is not a power which makes activelyfor civilisation. It is a powerful agent for the taming of passionand the prevention of vagrant and lawless desires, it tends, therefore, towards peace. But it offers no stimulus to therealisation of the riches which are given to man in his own nature:it checks rather than fosters enterprise, it favours a dullconformity to rule rather than the free cultivation of various gifts. Its ideal is to empty life of everything active and positive, ratherthan to concentrate energy on a strong purpose. It does not train theaffections to virtuous and harmonious action, but denies to them allaction and consigns them to extinction. This condemnation it hasincurred by parting with that highest stimulus to human virtue andendeavour, which lies in the belief in a living God. By so doing itceased to fulfil the office of a religion for men, and though, forhistorical purposes, we may class it among the religions of theworld, a system which leaves its adherents free not to worship atall, or to find satisfaction for their spiritual instincts in theworship of beings whom it regards with indifference, comes short ofthe notion of religion, and is not properly entitled to that name. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

Monier Williams, _Buddhism, in its connection with Brahmanism andHinduism, and in its contrast with Christianity_, 1889. 

Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_ (S. P. C. K. ). 

Oldenberg's, _Buddha, his Life, his Doctrine and his Order_, 1882(out of print). (Third German Edition, 1897. )

Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, 1860. 

E. Hardy, _Der Buddhismus_. 

CHAPTER XXIPERSIA

The Aryans who entered India to become its dominant race came fromCentral Asia, and left behind them there other tribes of Aryanculture. These tribes remained in what is called Iran, in the lands, that is to say, between the Indus, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and the Persian Gulf. It is from this region, a part of which bore inancient times the name of Ariana, that the word "Aryan" is derived. The languages of this territory are akin to Sanscrit; and there isample evidence that before the Indian invasion the progenitors of theIndians and those of the Iranians dwelt together there, and enjoyed acommon civilisation. If the civilisation was the same the religionalso was the same. How the Indo-Iranian religion was developed inIndia, we have seen. At first a worship of active and militantdeities, it became by degrees a religion of a passive type, in whicha suffering, acquiescent, and brooding humanity presented to heavenits needs and problems, and received a corresponding answer. TheAryans who remained in Iran retained their active and practicaldisposition. While by no means wanting in sensitiveness andflexibility of mind, they were less given to speculation and more toa robust morality than their Indian kinsmen. It has to be noted thatwhile the religion of India has not influenced Europe in any manifestdegree until the present century, that of Persia has contributed in amarked way to form the world of thought in which we dwell. 

Sources. --The views generally current about the ancient religion ofPersia are derived from late Greek writers, whose accounts will benoticed at the end of this chapter. A truer knowledge is nowpossible, since the sacred books of the religion are now open to theworld. They were only obtained from the Parsis, who keep up theirancient religion on the soil of India, during last century, and thestudy of them has been very laborious and difficult, and has givenrise to great controversies which are not yet settled. These ancientbooks are furnished with Eastern translations and commentaries. Isthe Western scholar to place himself under the guidance of these, which no doubt are part of the historical tradition of the religion, or may he claim that he is himself in as good a position as theOriental commentator for understanding the original meaning of thetexts; and will he best interpret them by comparing them with theVedas? What is their age; in which of the lands of Iran were theywritten; was any part of them written by Zoroaster, or is Zoroasterto be regarded as an historical personage at all? On all thesequestions and on many others, scholars are not yet agreed; and whileso much is uncertain about the books, there must also be greatuncertainty about the history and the very nature of the religion. Inwhat follows we are guided mainly by the scholars who have takencharge of the volumes connected with Persia in the _Sacred Books ofthe East_. [1] In the last of these volumes (xxxi. ) a new clue isgiven to the subject, of which we shall gladly avail ourselves. 

[Footnote 1: Zend-Avesta, _S. B. E. _, vols. Iv. , xxiii. , xxxi. ]

The sacred books of Persia are known by the name of "Zend-Avesta, "which is an incorrect expression; we ought to say Avesta and Zend. "Avesta, " like the kindred word "Veda, " signifies knowledge, and theword "Zend" denotes here not the language of that name, but the"commentary" afterwards added to the original knowledge or text. Thecommentary is not written in the Zend language, but in Pahlavi orPersian. The Avesta, which is written in the older Zend, the sacredlanguage of Persia, is, like other Bibles, a collection of bookswritten in different ages, and even, it may be, in different lands. The books were brought together into one only at some period afterthe Christian era. The later legends as to the supernaturalcommunication to Zoroaster of the earlier books need not detain us;we must notice, however, that the preserved books of Persian religionare held to be no more than the scanty ruins of an extensiveliterature. The Avesta consisted originally of 21 Nosks or books, andmost of these were destroyed by Alexander when he invaded the East;only one Nosk was preserved entire. As we have it, the Avesta is aliturgical work, it contains some legends and some ancient hymns, aswell as a good deal of law, but its prevailing character is that of aservice-book, and it is to this that its partial preservation both atthe invasion of Alexander, and at that of the Mohammedans in a latercentury, is probably due. It consists of three parts. The oldest isthe Yasna, a collection of liturgies, which admit and indeed invitecomparison with those of early Christianity: along with these arefound the Gathas or hymns, the only part of the Avesta composed inverse, and written in an older dialect. The Visperad is a collectionof litanies for the sacrifice; and the Vendidad is a code of earlylaw, but contains also various religious legends. Besides theseworks, which constitute the Avesta proper, there is the Khorda (orsmall) Avesta containing devotions for various times of the day, forthe days of the month, and for the religious year; these are for theuse not of the priests alone but of all the faithful, and many ofthem are still so used. 

The Contents of the Zend-Avesta are Composite. --In these works thestudent soon observes that he has before him not one religious systemonly but several. In one place we find a worship of one god, as ifthere were no others to be considered; some of the litanies on theother hand contain lengthy and elaborate lists of objects of worship. In some parts the religion is personal and immediate; in others it ispriestly. Parsism is often called fire-worship, and the elements ofearth and water also obtain extreme sanctity in it, but of this alsothere is in the oldest books little trace. The variety in theliterature no doubt reflects a variety in the religion of Iran. Iranin fact had not one religion but several, and thus the problem is totrace how these successively entered into contact with Mazdeism orZoroastrianism, which is the religion most native to Iran, and wereembodied in it. The different religions belonged to a certain extentto different provinces. We know that Persia, the conqueror of Media, was conquered in turn by the Median religion; we also know that thereligion of the Persian kings as read in their inscriptions[2] doesnot correspond to any of the religious positions held in the Avesta. The Magi, from whom also the religion as a whole derives one of itsnames, belonged to Media and passed from there to greater power inIran as a whole. From the Scythians on the north and from Babyloniaon the south, ideas and practices were imported; and in these andother ways, forms of religion arose as different from the faith ofZoroaster as later forms of Christianity from the simplicity ofChrist, yet looking to him as their founder and the giver of theirlaw. 

[Footnote 2: _Records of the Past_, i. 107. ]

Zoroaster. --We begin with the teaching of Zoroaster. Dr. E. Meyer inhis _Geschichte des Alterthums_, vol. I. , and Mr. Darmesteter in hisadmirable introduction to the Avesta (_S. B. E. _ vol. Iv. ) both treatZoroaster as a mythical personage, a figure-head of the officialclass of the religion, who give currency to their edicts under hisname. Weighty authorities may, however, be quoted for the historicalreality of Zoroaster, and what appears to us most important of all, the editor of the Gathas, in the _S. B. E. _ vol. Xxxi. , departingfrom his collaborateur, Mr. Darmesteter, has treated these hymns, which give an account of the founder's acts and experiences whenfirst proclaiming the true doctrine, in such a way as to produce onthe mind of the reader the strongest impression of the historicalreality of the prophet and of his mission. They introduce us to areligious movement actually in progress in the poet's time, amovement in which a pure and lofty faith is struggling to establishitself against prevailing superstitions. The doctrine placed in themouth of the reformer is that which is most central in Persianreligion; and only by such deep earnestness and devotion as is hereascribed to him, could it have attained that position. We start, then, with Zoroaster and his work; and first of all we ask what washis date, where did he live, and what kind of religion did he findexisting in his country?

The date of Zoroaster or Zarathustra--the former is the Greek, thelatter the old Iranian form of the name, contracted in Persian toZardusht--can only be fixed very approximately. He stands at the verybeginning of the Avesta literature, and the developments in religionto which that literature testifies must have occupied a long period. On the other hand no one proposes to place Zarathustra before thedeparture of the Indian Aryans from the Indo-Iranian stock. From suchvague data he may be assigned perhaps to somewhere about 1400 B. C. Asto his province, there is considerable agreement among scholars thathis doctrine spread from the east of Iran westwards; and thoughtradition gives him a birthplace in Media, his mission lay nearer toIndia, in Bactria. 

Primitive Religion of Iran. --He did not preach to men unacquaintedwith religion. Many of the religious ideas and figures of the Vedasoccur also in Persia, and by the study of these it is possible toform certain inferences as to the mental history of Persia beforeZarathustra. Mithra the sun-god belongs to Persia as well as India. The heaven-god known in India as Varuna grew into the principal deityof Persia. A fire-god, wind- and rain-gods, and the serpent hostileto man, on whom these made war, are common to both countries. Theinstitution of sacrifice, in which the deities are served withofferings and with hymns, is markedly alike in both countries. Inboth alike sacrifice is at first the affair not of a priesthood butof laymen, especially of princes, and is not confined to temples butis performed in the open air, on a spot judged to be suitable. Themost imposing sacrifice is that of the horse, and an offering ofconstant occurrence is that of the intoxicating liquor, in IndiaSoma, in Persia by a recognised transliteration Homa, which is itselfviewed as a cosmic principle of life, and addressed as a deity. Andin both countries alike the view of sacrifice prevails in earlytimes, that the gods come to it to take their part in a banquet whichtheir worshippers share with them, and that they are strengthened andencouraged by it. 

These similarities, and others which might be mentioned, show thatthe religion of India and that of Persia started from a common stockof ideas and usages. A further circumstance of great importance showsnot only the original identity of the two systems, but also perhapshow they came to diverge from each other. Two generic titles fordeities occur in India. The first of these--_deva_, is said tosignify the bright or shining one, the second--_asura_, the livingone. Now these titles are also found in Persia; but the use of theterms is different in the two countries. In India both are at firsttitles for deity, but by degrees, while "deva" continues to denotethe gods who are worshipped, "asura" assumes a less favourablemeaning, until at length it comes to stand for a second order ofbeings, inferior to the devas, and including such powers as aremalignant and hostile. In Persia the fortunes of the two words arereversed. _Ahura_ becomes the god _par excellence_, the supreme god;while "deva, " the title which in India remained in honour, is in theAvesta that of evil gods who are not to be worshipped. In this somescholars consider that we may hear the watchwords of the conflictwhich led to the separation of the two religions; there was a schismbetween the followers of the Ahuras and those of the Devas, which ledto the entire separation of the two parties. This is the latest formof the old view which makes Zoroastrianism the outcome of a religiousconflict, of a reaction against the gods afterwards worshipped inIndia. There is no direct evidence of such a conflict, and thedifference we have described may be due to the natural development ofthe Indo-Iranian religion in different sets of circumstances andamong different peoples. Zarathustra in the Gathas finds theantithesis fully formed between the good and the evil deities; heappeals to his countrymen on that matter as one which he does notneed to teach them, but with which they have long been familiar. Inspeaking of his date this has to be remembered. 

We proceed now to describe from the Gathas the work and teaching ofZarathustra. The Gathas are poems written in metres which occur alsoin the Vedas, and intended, like the Indian hymns, to be used inworship. The account which they furnish of the mission and theteaching of the sage are thus clothed in a poetical dress, and do notnarrate bare facts as they occurred, but the facts as interpreted andtreated for religious use. They are in the mouth of Zarathustrahimself; he writes them for use at sacrifice, and remembering howthey are to be rendered, he sometimes puts in the mouth of thecelebrants the words, "Zarathustra and we. " These words do not provethat the hymns are not by him. As explained by Dr. Mills, the hymnsare seen to be very fully charged with meaning and with sentiment. Uncouth and inartistic in expression, and demanding an immense amountof patience and ingenuity to trace their connection of thought, theysurprise the reader when once he seizes their meaning, by the depthand spirituality of their contents, and force him to acknowledge thatthey are a worthy document of the birth of a great religion. 

The Call of Zarathustra. --The hymns give a vivid picture of thatearly world in which the prophet lived. It was a world distractedwith conflict. On one side there is an agricultural community bent onindustry, and, like the Hindus, even at this day, valuing as mostsacred the cattle which form their chief substance. On the otherhand, there are men who dwell on the outskirts between the tilledland and the wilderness, who are constantly making raids on thefarms, driving off and killing the cattle for sacrifice and for food, and ruining the fields by destroying the irrigating works on whichtheir fertility depends. And there is a religious difference as wellas a difference in culture between these two sets of people. Theagriculturists are worshippers of Ahura; the contemners of the cattleworship beings called in the Gathas "daevas. " This schism was not ofZarathustra's making, he found it going on, and being a priest wasentitled to come forward and seek to guide others with regard to it. Such is the situation which the hymns present to us. We will try tostate the substance of some of those hymns. The naked words of them, even when we are sure of the correctness of the translation, arebarely intelligible without lengthy commentary; and on the otherhand, no short statement in modern terms can convey the force andsolemnity of these struggling utterances. As we are dealing with theoriginal revelation of Zarathustra, the source of the Persianreligion, we shall give the story with some degree of detail. 

The first hymn in the arrangement presented to us in _S. B. E. _ dealswith what we may term the call of Zarathustra. It sums up in a poeticand dramatic form the religious result of the movement which led himto come forward. 

The "Soul of the Kine" first speaks; it is the impersonation of theagricultural community, to whom their cattle are most sacred. Sheraises a complaint to Ahura and Asha (the righteousness which is anattribute of Ahura, and like his other attributes often appears as anindependent person) of the insolence and highhanded devastation androbbery she has to suffer. "For whom did ye fashion me, " she says;"wherefore was I made?" She appeals to the Immortals for instructionin tillage with a view to security and welfare. 

Ahura then speaks and asks Asha what guardian has been appointed forthe kine to lead and to defend her; and Asha answers that no one, himself free from passion and violence, could be found who wascapable of being an adequate guardian. The causes of these evils lieat the roots of the constitution of things, and therefore thoseseeking success in any enterprise must approach Ahura himself and notany subordinate being. 

Zarathustra speaks, and confirms the utterances of Asha; it is inAhura himself that he and the kine place their confidence; to hiswill they submit themselves; the doubts and questions arising fromtheir outward insecurity, they refer to him. 

Ahura speaks and answers his own question. It is true that no lord ofthe kine is to be found, who in himself is quite equal to thatposition, but he appoints Zarathustra as head to the agriculturalcommunity. 

A chorus speaks, consisting of a company of the faithful supposed tobe present, or of the Ameshospends, the personified attributes ofAhura, and praise the Lord for his bounty and for the wisdom he makesknown; but asks whom he has endowed with the Good Mind, or, as wemight say, the Holy Spirit, to make known to mortals his doctrine. The call of Zarathustra, intimated in the foregoing verse, isoverlooked, as if it were impossible that such a one as he couldundertake the office. Ahura replies, repeating his commission toZarathustra, here called also by his family name of Spitama, andpromising to establish him and make him successful in his work. 

The Soul of the Kine speaks, lamenting still that no adequate lordhas been assigned her. Zarathustra is a feeble and pusillanimous man, not one of royal state who is able to bring his purpose to effect. The Ameshospends join in the cry for the true lord to appear. 

Zarathustra then speaks, accepting the mission in an address toAhura, whom he entreats to send his blessings of peace and happiness, since none but he can give them, and to set up in the minds of thedisciples of the cause that joy and that kingdom which, though itfirst comes inwardly, yet brings with it also all outward blessings. For himself also he prays that the Good Mind and the Sovereign Power(another of the attributes) of the Lord may hasten to come to him andstrengthen him for his mission. 

This poetical rendering of the call of Zarathustra is free both frommiraculous embellishment and from undue exaltation of the person ofthe prophet, and forms a great contrast to later statements in theAvesta, where the prophet is placed in secret conclave with Ahura, asking him questions and receiving detailed replies which at oncerank as revelation. In the Gathas, allowing for the theological andpoetic form, everything is human and natural. We are stronglyreminded of the accounts of the calls of prophets in the OldTestament--there is the same choice by the deity of an apparentlyweak instrument to accomplish a work urgently called for by thetimes, the same sense of insufficiency on the part of the prophet, but the same absolute confidence on his part in the power of thedeity, and hence the same absolute assurance, once the mission isaccepted, that the cause which he has been called to carry forwardmust succeed. In many of the following Gathas the same parallel isstrongly impressed on the mind of the reader. The sense of weaknessis expressed again and again--the prophet has no victorious career, but is exposed to much gainsaying, which he feels acutely. Yet henever doubts that his god is with him, and is working for him. To himhe commits his doubts and fears, of his goodness he is joyfullyassured, and his aid he expects with confidence. He is entirelydevoted to Ahura and his cause, and offers himself up with his wholepowers to work out the divine will. He will teach, he says, as longas he is able, till he has brought all the living to believe. He isconscious of a divine power working in him. Nothing in himself, he isstrong by the divine grace which Ahura sends him: his words haveefficacy to keep the fiends at a distance, and to advance in men'sminds the divine kingdom; like St. Paul he feels his message to be tosome a savour of life unto life, to others a savour of death untodeath. 

The Doctrine. --And what is the message he proclaims? It is aphilosophy of the origin of the world, but a philosophy theacceptance of which involves immediate and strenuous action. Thedistracted condition of the world before him requires to beexplained, so that a remedy for it may be found; and Zarathustraprays, when he is about to bring forward his doctrine, that Ahurawould help him to explain how the material world arose. Theexplanation when it appears is not quite new, it has been shapingitself already in the mind of his people, but he sets it forth as adogma, and draws from it at once all its practical consequences. Inthe third hymn of the first Gatha he solemnly brings forward hisdoctrine before the people, and appeals to them, not as a people, butas individuals, each for himself, with a full sense of hisresponsibility, to consider it, and adopt it, and act upon it. It isthe doctrine of dualism, not in the fully developed later form inwhich two personal potentates divide the universe between them fromthe first, but as yet in a form more speculative and vague. There aretwo primeval principles, spirits, things, as is well known--theexpression is indefinite--the counterparts of each other, independentin their action, a better and a worse, and Zarathustra calls on hisaudience to choose between them, and not to choose as do theevildoers. The world, as it is, was made by the joint action of thetwo principles, and they also fixed the alternative fates of men, forthe wicked, Hell--the worst life; and for the holy, Heaven--the bestmental state. After the creation was accomplished, the two principlesdrew off from each other, the evil one making choice of evil and ofevil works, and the bounteous spirit choosing righteousness, makinghis strong seat in heaven, and taking for his own those who do goodand who believe in him. The Daevas and their followers are incapableof making a just choice between the good and the evil; they havesurrendered themselves from the outset to the "Worst Mind, " the demonof fury, and to all evil works. (There are vague suggestions here ofa temptation and a fall, but only of the evil spirits and theirfollowers. ) From this point onwards the world is filled with a greatstruggle. On the one side is Ahura, the only god worshipped by namein the Gathas. Ahura is a heaven-god, he is, in fact, the brightheaven, and then the good and beneficent being who dwells inbrightness. In the hymns he is losing his definite character andbecoming an abstraction, a god of dogmatics rather than of history. He is the good principle personified, and as becomes a god of suchtranscendent character, he does not act directly, but through hissatellites. His attributes personified, do his bidding, aid thesaints in spiritual ways, and prepare for the better order of things. On the other hand are the Daevas with the demon of wrath, whopropagate everywhere lies and mischief, and heap up vengeance forthemselves against the final judgment. For the good there is nothingbetter than to aid, --for they can aid, in bringing on the renovation, dwelling with Ahura even now, and by his attributes which work inthem as well as in him, reinforcing the righteous order, andpreparing themselves to dwell where wisdom has her home. In the endthe Demon of the Lie will be rendered harmless and delivered up toRighteousness as a captive. 

Inconsistencies. --As it happens in every such reform, the newteaching is not quite consistent with itself; old views are taken upinto the new teaching, although they do not harmonise with it; thespiritual way of looking at things alternates with a more worldlyway. The following are some examples of this:--The great doctrine ofHeaven and Hell as inner states, as being simply the best and theworst state of mind, is clearly announced; but the traditional viewof future abodes of happiness and misery also appears. TheKinvat-bridge is mentioned several times in the Gathas, over whichIran conceived that the individual had to pass after death. If he wasrighteous the bridge bore him safely over to the sacred mountain, where the good lived again; if he was wicked, he fell off the bridgeand found himself in the place of torment. It is anotherinconsistency that Zarathustra expects, on the one hand, to convertthe world by his preaching, while on the other hand his sense of theantagonism between the good and the evil spirits and their followersoften hurries him into violent methods. One hymn concludes with asummons to his adherents to fall on the unbelievers with the halberd, and he is constantly predicting their sudden overthrow. Along withthis, we may mention that he sought to ally himself with powerfulfamilies for the sake of the support they would bring the cause. Thename of Vishtaspa, king we know not of what realm, is alwaysassociated with the prophet as that of his royal patron; otherinfluential friends are also mentioned. Another point, in which wenotice accommodation to existing usage, is that of sacrifice. TheGathas have several noble passages describing the true sacrifice manhas to offer to God for his goodness, as consisting simply in theoffering of self, in the devotion to the deity of all a man is, andall he can do. At the same time Zarathustra has not a word to say indisparagement of the sacrifice of victims. He prays for guidance inthis part of religious duty; he desires to have everything connectedwith sacrifice done in the best way and with the most effectivehymns. Thus the spiritual life is not left to stand alone. There is apersonal walk with God, our piety is said to be God's daughter in us, his righteousness is working in us and moulding us for his purposes;both will and deed of the good man are attributed to him, and theprocesses are described with true insight by which the soul issanctified and wedded to her task and her true destiny; but at thesame time there is an intent looking to that sacred Fire which is anoutward representative of deity; there is the offering of victims, even of horses, when the prophet's mind is bent on war (theHoma-offering does not occur, and we may suppose the prophet rejectedthis service of the deity by intoxication); there is the smiting ofthe demons with prayer, and imprecations, similar to those in thePsalms, against adversaries of the cause. 

It is no proof of unspirituality that the welfare of the Kine, withwhose wail the call of the prophet began, is steadily kept in viewduring his mission. The agriculturists are on the side of therighteous being, good and ever-better tillage is a means of pleasinghim; it is his will that the kine should be freed from alarms andshould prosper; and he may be appealed to to give lessons with a viewto that end. The doctrine passes far beyond its first occasion; yetthe occasion which called for it is never lost sight of. 

The Gathas, taken alone, tell us hardly anything of the religion inwhich Zarathustra's fellow-countrymen believed. They believedundoubtedly in many gods; in those parts of the Avesta which comenext to the hymns in time, polytheism is in full force. ThatZarathustra only speaks of one god, Ahura (though he also speaks of"the Immortals" generally), may be due to the limited extent andspecial purpose of the hymns, but it may also be taken as anindication that the prophet did not needlessly interfere with thebeliefs of his people: content to preach the doctrine with which hewas charged, and which was to him the sum and substance of allreligion, he, like several other religious founders, stirred up nostrife he could avoid. The doctrine he preached was not unpreparedfor in the mind of his country, and continued to be the leadingfeature of Persian religion in subsequent periods. 

It is a momentous step in religious progress, which the prophet ofIran calls on his countrymen to take. We notice the main features ofthe advance. 

1. Man is Called to Judge between the Gods. --Zarathustra, likeElijah, puts before his people the choice between two worships. Various distinctions between the two cases might be drawn. In theScripture case Baal is not a bad god, but simply the wrong god forIsrael to worship. In the case of our reformer the difference betweenthe two worships is a deeper one. The individual is to choose hisgod, he is to declare of his own motion that one god is better thanothers, and that no worship whatever is to be paid to these others. This was a new departure in antiquity; the early world loved to thinkof many gods, all alike divine and worshipful, each race or clanhaving its god whom it naturally served, or each part of the earthbeing portioned out to a divine lord of its own. Neither Greece norRome ever thought of making the individual man the arbiter among theunseen beings whom he knew, and requiring him to decide which of themhe should consider divine, and which he should disown. In the casebefore us, moreover, the choice is to be made on moral grounds. Menare called to judge of the character of the beings who are calledgods, they are told that there is no necessity to acknowledge thoseof whom they disapprove, they are emancipated from the fear ofhurtful and evil beings. There is war in heaven, and men areencouraged to take part in that war, and to cast off allegiance tosuch powers as do not make for righteousness. How there came to besuch strife among the gods, and how it became necessary that menshould judge of it, we have no clear information; we only know thatthe momentous step was called for and was taken. 

The belief, however, remains even after the decision that there areunseen evil beings, who had influence in forming the constitution ofthings, and who have influence still over the government of theworld. The position taken up is not monotheism. The good god is notsole creator or sole governor of the world, he is a limited being;from the outset he has only in part got his own way, and he hasadversaries in the very constitution of things, whom he cannot getrid of. Persian thought is dualistic; the conception of an EvilCreator and Governor co-ordinate with the good one differentiates itfrom the thought of India, which always tends to a principle ofunity. 

2. In the second place, this religion is essentially intolerant andpersecuting. Having chosen his side in the great war which dividesthe universe, man can only prosecute that war with all his force; hemust regard the Daevas and their followers as his enemies, and try toweaken and extinguish them. The general feeling of the ancient worldabout differences in religion was that all religions were equallylegitimate, each on its own soil. The Jews, we know, shocked theGreeks and Romans greatly by denying this, and maintaining that therewas only one true religion, namely, their own, and that all theothers were worships of gods false and vain. But the Persians camebefore the Jews in this; the Gathas preach persecution, and theinsults offered by Persian kings in later times to the religions ofEgypt and Greece were no doubt justified by their convictions. InPersia, as in Israel, religion had come to entertain the notion offalse gods. And a religion which entertains that notion must beexclusive. Those who have refused to worship beings hitherto deemedgods, on the ground that they ought not to be worshipped and are nottruly gods, cannot but desire to bring the worship of such beingsentirely to an end, and to make the worship of the true God prevailinstead, by rude or by gentle means, as the stage of civilisation mayin each case suggest. 

Growth of Mazdeism. --After the Gathas proper we have other hymnswritten in the Gathic dialect, from which the history of the religionafter its foundation may be to some extent inferred. [3] These showthat the Zarathustrian religion was regarded, after the departure ofthe founder, as a great divine institution, and was worked out on thelines he had laid down. The forms of it became of course more fixed. The god it serves is now called "Ahura Mazda, " the "All-Knowing Lord"(the name is afterwards contracted into the Greek Oromazdes, thePersian Hormazd; and the religion is called from it Mazdeism); he isstill implored for spiritual blessings both for this and for thefuture life, and for furtherance in agriculture. There is, however, atendency to address prayer not only to Ahura himself but to beingsconnected with him. As if the mind wearied of dwelling on the onesupreme, the Bountiful Immortals are associated with him, the partsof his holy creation are invoked, the fire which is most closelyidentified with him, the stars which are his body, the waters, theearth, all good animals and plants. The kine's soul receivessacrifice, and not only the kine's soul which we have met before, butthe souls of "just men and holy women, " the Fravashis or spirits notonly of the departed but of the living also, the service of whichcontinues and increases henceforward in Persian religion. These areinvented deities and have a shadowy character; but gods of moresubstance, and more historical reality also came into view at thispoint. Zarathustra becomes a god, the hymns themselves are adored;the Homa-offering reappears, Mithra is often coupled with Ahura, other old gods creep back and are mentioned along with the moralabstractions, which also increase in number; in one passage there aresaid to be thirty-three objects of worship, a number which alsooccurs in India. 

[Footnote 3: Yasna Haptanghaiti, _S. B. E. _ xxxi. P. 218, _sqq. _, andothers following. ]

Organisation of the Heavenly Beings. --With all this multiplicationthere is, as we shall see, no compromise of the supreme claims ofAhura. In some of the hymns, all beings, all attributes, all places, and all times of a sacred nature are heaped indiscriminatelytogether, in interminable catalogues. But this apparent confusion iscorrected by a remarkable tendency to organisation. The Persianreligion ultimately came to have a very simple and very strikingtheology; and that theology was made up by transforming theabstractions in which the founder dealt, into persons, and arrangingthem after the pattern of Oriental society. In the later Yasnas(liturgies) a figure rises into view which the Gathas do not mention;that of Angra Mainyu, later Ahriman, the Bad Spirit. In thiscounterpart of Spenta Mainyu, the Good Spirit (who is not at firstidentified with Ahura, but proceeds from him), the demons obtain apersonal head, and the dualism which appears in all nature and allhuman society is thus brought to a personal expression. Ahura andAhriman confront each other as the good power and the evil. Bothalike had part in making the world what it is. In every part of theworld, and in all that is felt and done they are at strife. Ahura, toquote Mr. Darmesteter, is all light, truth, goodness, and knowledge;Angra Mainyu is all darkness, falsehood, wickedness, and ignorance. Whatever the good spirit makes, the evil spirit mars; he opposesevery creation of Ahura's with a plague of his own, it is he whomixed poison with plants, smoke with fire, sin with man, and deathwith life. 

The Attributes of Ahura. --Each of these beings has his retinue. Thatof Ahura was formed first; it consists of his attributes. Even in thehymns the attributes are regarded as persons, inseparable companionsof Ahura; appeals are made to one or another of them, according asthe worshipper seeks help from one side or the other of the divinebeing. By a process which frequently occurs in religious thought, they afterwards come to be more formally arranged and defined; thereare six of them, and each is charged with a province of the divineeconomy. They are as follows:

 Vohu Mano (Bahman) Good Mind; he is the head and the guardian of the living creation of Ahura. 

 Asha Vahista (Ardibehesht), Excellent Holiness; he is the genius of fire. 

 Kshathra Vairya (Shahrevar), Perfect Sovereignty; he is the lord of metals. 

 Spenta Armaiti (Spendarmat) divine piety, conceived as female, the goddess of the earth. 

 Haurvatat (Khordat) health. 

 Ameretat (Amerdat) immortality. 

The last two are a pair, and have charge conjointly of waters and oftrees. 

Ahura is himself one of these spirits; thus there are seven supremespirits. 

Retinue of Ahriman. --Angra Mainyu on his part comes to have acorresponding retinue of six daevas, each being the evil counterpartof one of the good spirits. Evil Mind, Sickness, and Decay are thenames of some of them. The whole spiritual world is ranged on theside of the good or of the evil deity. The Izatas (Izeds) or angelsconsist of gods of immemorial worship in Iran, some of whom are thesame as gods worshipped in India; but the title also applies to gods, heavenly and earthly, of later creation, so that the class is a verywide and elastic one. It comprises some beings who have been reducedby the operation of the new ideas from the first to the second rankof deities, such as Verethragna, who corresponds to the Vedic Indra, and Mithra, the sun-god. These now appear in the same rank as gods ofthe newer style, such as Sraosha, Obedience, and survivals of earlysuperstition, such as the "Curse of the wise, " a very powerful Ized. Zarathustra himself belongs to this class of deities, a miscellaneousone indeed. Another class of sacred beings of world-wide extent isthat of the Fravashis spoken of above. If the good spirits are manyand various, so are the evil. Of these are the great demon-serpentAzhi who plays a great part in Persian mythology, as Vrittra does inIndian. Aeshma, later Asmodeus, may be named; he is one of theDrvants, or storm-fiends. Gahi, an unfaithful goddess, has fallen toa demon of unchastity; the Pairikas (Peris) are female tempters; theYatu are demons connected with sorcery. 

The firm organisation of these hosts of spiritual beings, and thesense of a great conflict in which they are all engaged from thegreatest to the least of them, preserve Mazdeism from the weaknessand absurdity which are apt to creep over religion when thepopulation of the upper and the nether regions is unduly multiplied. The faithful never forget Ahura in favour of the minor deities, nordo they forget that morals and industry are the chief ends ofreligion, and that in cultivating these they hasten the coming of thekingdom. The following is the formula, the "Praise of Holiness, " withwhich every act of worship begins in the Yasts[4] (liturgies of theIzeds):

 May Ahura Mazda be rejoiced!

 Holiness is the best of all good!

 I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathustra, one who hates the daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura. 

[Footnote 4: _S. B. E. _ vol. Xxiii. ]

Ancient Testimonies to the Persian Religion. --It is at this stage, while it is still in a state of vigour, that we hear of the Persianreligion from various quarters in ancient records. The chapters inthe latter half of Isaiah, which so vigorously denounce idolatry, hail the approach of Cyrus towards Babylon, and claim unity ofreligion between him and the Jews (Isaiah xliv. 28 _sq. _). He is theshepherd who is to lead Jehovah's people back to their own land, andto cause their temple to be rebuilt. And this claim that the Jewishand the Persian religions were the same, that the Jews and thePersians were alike worshippers of the one true God, while all thesurrounding nations were polytheists and idolaters, was admitted onthe side of Persia. After his conquest of Babylon, Cyrus at oncepermitted the exiles to return to their own land. The Persianmonarchs of the following century, Darius and Artaxerxes, continuedto take a friendly interest in the worship of Jehovah, whom theyapparently regarded as a form of their own god, "the God of heaven, "Hormazd (Ezra vii. 21). They accordingly took measures for therebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem, and for the introduction thereof the new religious constitution which had been prepared at Babylon. This could not have happened if the religion of the Persian kings hadnot been a pure service of one god, [5] and the other information wehave on the subject shows that the Mazdeism of Persia at this periodwas a very elevated form of the religion. The inscriptions of Dariusdo not mention the spread of the worships of Mitra and Anahita, which, however, make their appearance in the later inscriptions ofArtaxerxes; in none of them is Ahriman spoken of. This, of course, does not prove that he was not believed in; when the Jewish prophetproclaims that Jehovah makes both light and darkness, that he bothwounds and heals, there may be a reference to Persian dualism. YetMazdeism was capable of appearing, and did appear to the foreigner, as a lofty worship of a god of light and goodness. The sameimpression is produced by the descriptions of the Greek writers. Herodotus (i. 131, 132) writes as follows; he is a contemporary ofEzra: "The following statements as to the customs of the Persians isto be relied on. They do not fashion images of the gods, nor buildtemples, nor altars--they consider it wrong to do so, and count it aproof of folly; their reason for this being, as I think, that they donot believe the gods to be beings of the same nature with men as theGreeks do. They are accustomed to offer sacrifices to Zeus on thesummits of mountains; they call the whole circle of heaven Zeus. Theysacrifice also to the sun, and the moon, and the earth, and to fire, and to water, and to the winds. These are the ancient parts of theirritual, but they have added the worship of the Queen of heaven, Aphrodite; it was from the Assyrians and the Arabs that they acquiredthis. The Assyrian name for Aphrodite is Mylitta, the Arabs call herAlilat, the Persians, Anahita. [6] Such being their gods the Persianssacrifice to them on this wise. They have no altar, and do not usefire in sacrifice, nor do they have libations nor flutes, nor wreathsnor barley. He who wishes to sacrifice takes his victim to a cleanspot and there calls on the deity, his turban wreathed, as a rule, with myrtle. He does not think of praying for benefits for himselfindividually in connection with his sacrifice; he prays for thewelfare of the Persian people and king; he himself is one of thePersian people. He then cuts up the victim, boils the pieces andspreads them out on the softest grass he can find--if possible, onclover. This done, one of the Magians who has come to assist, sings atheogony, [7] as they call the accompanying hymn; no sacrifice isallowed to be offered without one of the Magi being present. After ashort pause the sacrificer takes up the pieces of flesh and does withthem whatever he likes. "

[Footnote 5: These two religions, Kuenen says, were more like eachother than any other two religions of antiquity. --_Religion ofIsrael_, iii. 33. ]

[Footnote 6: Herodotus says Mitra; but this is a mistake, whether ofthe father of history or of a transcriber. ]

[Footnote 7: One of the Yashts in praise of the particular deity. ]

In other passages Herodotus tells us of the extreme sanctityattributed by the Persians to waters, to fire, and to the sun. Healso tells us that they regarded lying as the worst possible offence, and next to it falling into debt, since the debtor is tempted to telllies. 

Plutarch writes as follows, quoting from an earlier Greek writer ofthe third century B. C. : "Zoroaster the Magician, [8] who was 5000years before the war of Troy, named the good god Oromazes and theother Arimonius ... Oromazes is engendered of the clearest and purestlight, Arimonius of deep darkness; and they war one upon another. Theformer of these created six other gods (here follow the Amshaspands), but the latter produceth as many other in number, of adverseoperation to the former.... There will come a time when thisArimonius, who brings into the world plague and famine, shall ofnecessity be rooted out and utterly destroyed for ever ... Then shallmen be all in happy estate, they shall need no more food, nor castany shadow from them; and that god who hath effected all this shallrepose himself for a time, and rest in quiet. "

[Footnote 8: Holland's translation. ]

The Vendidad: Laws of Parity. --These extracts show the growth ofcertain ideas which we have not noticed before. The dualism is beingworked out more in detail, other gods are coming in, and the doctrineof the sanctity of the elements has made its appearance. Thatdoctrine is the basis of a new set of ideas and practices which wehave now to consider, those namely which are contained in theVendidad, one of the later works of the Persian canon. To pass fromthe Gathas to the Vendidad is like passing from Isaiah to Leviticus, and the laws of purity of Persian religion bear a strong analogy tothose of Judaism. The Vendidad[9] is composed principally of laws andrules designed to direct the faithful in the great task ofmaintaining their ritual purity. The whole of life is dominated inthis work by the ideas of purity and defilement; the great businessof life is to avoid impurity, and when it is contracted to remove itin the correct manner as quickly as possible. Purity here is notprimarily sanitary or even moral; though such considerations were nodoubt indirectly present. Impure is what belongs to the bad spirit, whether because he created it, as he did certain noxious animals, orbecause he has established a hold on it as he does on men at death. Aman is impure, not because he has exposed himself to the infection ofdisease, not because he has contracted a stain on his conscience, butbecause he has touched something of which a Daeva has possession, andso has come under the influence of that Daeva. Purification, therefore, and the act of healing consist of exorcisms of variouskinds. This notion of purity plays a great part in other oldreligions also; it is here that we see its original meaning mostclearly. Another great feature of the doctrine of purity in theVendidad is that the elements, fire, earth, and water, are holy, andto defile them in any way is the most grievous of sins. As everythingwhich leaves the body is unclean, a man must not blow up a fire withhis breath, and bathing with a view to cleanliness is not to bethought of. The disposal of the dead was a matter of immensedifficulty, since corpses, being unclean, could be committed neitherto Fire nor to the Earth. They are ordered to be exposed naked on abuilding constructed for that purpose on high ground, so that birdsof prey may devour them; and a great part of the Vendidad is taken upwith directions for purification, after a death has taken place, ofthe persons who were in the house, of the house itself, of those whocarried the corpse, and of the road they travelled, etc. 

[Footnote 9: _S. B. E. _ vol. Iv. ]

How this Doctrine Entered Mazdeism. --This system was not in force inthe time of Darius and Artaxerxes (when the dead were buried or, asin the case of Croesus, burned) though the ideas were appearing atthat period on which it is founded; and it is plain that it has nonecessary or vital connection with the religion of Zarathustra. Butin later Mazdeism there are many such importations. This religion, inits course from east to west, came in contact with beliefs and usageswith which, though foreign to its own nature, it yet came to terms. Mazdeism is not originally a markedly priestly religion; it isthought that it became so when planted in Media. No doubt there weregerms in the early Iranian religion of a priestly system. Zarathustrahimself was a priest and was favourable to due religious observances. But it is quite contrary to his spirit that life should be governedentirely by ritual law. It was in Media that this came to be thecase. The name of Magi, originally perhaps that of a tribe, became inMedia the name of the priesthood, and so furnished an additionaltitle for Mazdeism. It is to this stage of the religion that thepriestly legislation of the Vendidad, with all its puritanicalregulation of life, is to be ascribed. (The practice of exposing thebodies of the dead to be devoured by birds of prey is probably ofScythian origin. ) In this period also, remote from the origin of thereligion, we find a new view of Zarathustra himself and of hisrevelation. In the earlier sources Zarathustra composes his hymns ina natural manner; he is not an absolute lawgiver, but depends onprinces for the carrying out of his views. In the later works therevelation takes place in a series of private interviews betweenAhura and Zarathustra; the prophet puts questions to the god, and thegod dictates in reply sentences which are at once promulgated assacred laws. Mazdeism, like other religions, has its wooden age, itsverbal inspiration, and its priestly code. 

To trace the lines by which the influence of the religion of Persiaasserted itself in the wider world would be a large enterprise: onlya few indications can be given here. One great service which thatreligion did to the world was undoubtedly that it had sympathy withthe Jews, and enabled Jewish monotheism to take a fresh start on itsway to become a religion for mankind. Mazdeism itself had a tinge ofuniversalism; Zarathustra expected his religion to spread beyond hisown land, and it did spread over all the provinces of Iran. It neverbecame a world-religion, but it might have done so had it not becomeswathed and choked in Magism or had any new movement arisen in it toassert the supremacy of its purely human over its artificialelements. But Ahura himself, perhaps, was too abstract andphilosophic a god to inspire missionary ardour; it needed a beingmore firmly rooted in history, a god who had done more to prove theenergy and intensity of his nature, and, further, a god moreundoubtedly omnipotent than Ahura, to establish a universal rule. 

The interesting inquiry remains, how far the Jewish religion wasmodified by its contact with the Persian. The laws of purity in theJewish priestly code find a close parallel in the Vendidad; but withthe Israelites the notion of religious purity existed, and was workedout in considerable detail, as we see from Deuteronomy, before theexile, and therefore long before the period of the Vendidad. Thebelief in the resurrection, found among the Jews after the exile, andnot before it, has been maintained by many to be a loan from Persia, where the belief in future reward and punishment was a settled thingfrom the time of Zarathustra. But the Jews do not appear to havegrasped this belief all at once or fully formed. They arrived at itgradually, many Old Testament scholars affirm, and by spiritualinferences timidly put forth at first, from their own religiousconsciousness. A belief which the Jewish religion was capable ofproducing of itself need not, without clearer evidence than wepossess, be regarded as borrowed. We are not on much surer groundwhen we come to ask whether the angels and demons of Judaism areconnected with those of Persia. This belief also arises naturally inJudaism, where God came to be thought of as very high and veryinaccessible, and intermediate beings were therefore needed. Some ofthe figures of the Jewish spirit-world are, no doubt, due to Persia;the Ashmodeus of the book of Tobit is a Persian figure. Later Judaismis like Parsism in arranging the heavenly beings in a hierarchy, andassigning to the chief angels special functions in the administrationof God's kingdom, and still more so when the upper hierarchy isconfronted by a lower one with a great adversary and father of liesat its head. But this takes place long after the Persian contact. 

The Persian deities had, as a rule, too little legend to enable themto be received in other countries. Ahura does not travel. Anaitis isthought to have passed into Greece, changing her name to Aphrodite, but also to the severer Artemis; but she is perhaps not original inPersia. The Persian god best known in other lands was Mithra, thesun-god and god of wisdom. He was a favourite with the Roman armiesin the early empire, and representations of him as a hero in the actof slaying a bull in a cave have been found in many lands. There werealso mysteries connected with him, in which the candidates had topass through a great series of trials and hardships. Persiainfluenced Europe and the west of Asia at the same period in anotherway. Manicheism, a system which was one of the three great universalreligions of that time, and had a worship and a priesthood and asacred literature of its own, was founded by a native of Persia. Helaboured at a distance from his own country, and the doctrines hepropounded came more from Chaldea than from Persia, and consisted ofgreat histories, like those of the Gnostics, of the doings andsufferings of cosmic and other persons; a great struggle between thepowers of light and those of darkness was one of its principalfeatures. The worship of this church was spiritual; its morals werein theory of the purest and most ascetic kind, being founded on aprinciple of dualism in the material world, and requiring muchself-denial and long fasts. The higher virtue of the system was not, however, required of the ordinary member. Later Parsism, both in Iranand in India, has shown a disposition to cast off dualism, and tobecome, both philosophically and practically, a monistic system. 

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

_S. B. E. _ vols. Iv. , xxiii. (Darmesteter); xxxi. (Mills). _TheZendavesta_, vols. V. , xviii. , xxiv. , xxxvii. , xlvii. Pahlavi Texts(E. W. West). 

_The Histories of Antiquity_ of Duncker, Maspero, and Ed. Meyer. 

Haug's _Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of theParsis_. Second Edition, 1878, F. Windischmann, _Zoroastr. Studien_, 1863. 

Geldner, "Zoroaster, " in _Encyclopædia Britannica_; "Zoroastrianism, "in _Encyclopædia Bibl. _

Mills, _A Study of the Five Zarathustrian Gathas_, 1892-94. 

Lehmann, in De la Saussaye. 

Dadhabai Naoroji, _The Parsee Religion_. 

On Mithraism, _Dieterich Eine Mithras-liturgie. _

Cumont, _The Mysteries of Mithra_, 1903. 

PART VUNIVERSAL RELIGION

CHAPTER XXIICHRISTIANITY

The writer is aware that in offering a chapter on Christianity at theconclusion of this work, he attempts a difficult task. If treated atall, Christianity must be dealt with in the same way as the otherreligions, and no assumptions must be made for it which were not madefor them. And a view of our own religion written, not from thestandpoint of the faith and love we feel towards it but of scientificaccuracy, must appear to many pious Christians to be cold and meagre. But, on the other hand, Christianity is the key of the arch we havebeen building, the consummating member of the development we havesought to trace, and to withhold any estimate of its character wouldbe to leave our work most imperfect. It seems better, therefore, thatsome hints at least should be offered on this part of the subject. Christianity cannot indeed be dealt with in the same proportion asthe other religions; that would far exceed our space. But some viewsare offered regarding its essential nature, which the writer believesto be so firmly founded in fact that even those who are notChristians cannot deny them, and thus to afford a valid criterion forthe comparison of Christianity with other faiths. 

In the chapter on the religion of Israel we saw how the prophetsbefore and during the exile began to cherish the idea of a newrelation between God and man, which would not depend on sacrifice norbe confined to Israel. God, they declared, was preparing a new age, in which he would receive man to more intimate communion than before;and man would be guided in the right path, not by covenants and laws, but by the constant inspiration of a present deity. The new religionwould be one which all nations could share. Jerusalem, the seat ofthe true faith, would attract all eyes; all would turn to her becauseof the Lord her God. 

But, alas, instead of growing broader to realise its universaldestiny, the religion of Israel grew narrower after the exile, andseemed to forget the prospects thus opened up to it. Judaism, thoughimmeasurably enriched in its inner consciousness by the teaching ofthe prophets, maintained its earlier semi-heathenish forms ofworship, only surrounding them with new stateliness and newsignificance; and clothed itself in a hard shell of public ritual andpersonal observance. The Jews separated themselves rigorously fromthe world, and cultivated an exclusive pride; as if their religionhad been given them for themselves alone, and not for mankind. Underthe Maccabees they displayed the most heroic courage and tenacity, maintaining their own beliefs and rites amid the flood of Hellenismwhich at one time almost swept them away. That they carried theirnationality unimpaired through this period is one of the mostwonderful achievements of the Jewish race. In the succeeding period, however, many signs appeared showing that their religion was losingenergy. The rule of the priests and scribes extended more and moreover the whole of life, tradition and observance grew more and moreextensive, but the moral judgment lost its elasticity. The sense ofthe divine presence grew faint, and multitudes of spirits filled theair instead, oppressing human life with a sense of vague anxiety. Aspolitical independence was lost, the people became less happy andmore easily excited. But while formalism held increasing sway overtheir actions, imagination was free, and surrounded both the pasthistory of Israel and its future triumphs with manifoldembellishments. 

In such a condition was the religion of the Jews when Jesus appearedin Palestine and created a new order of things. Christianity was atfirst a movement within Judaism. Like all the religions which tracetheir history to personal founders, it grew from very smallbeginnings; but its doctrine was of such a nature, that ifcircumstances favoured, it could not fail to spread beyond Judaism, to men of other lands and other tongues. 

The doctrine consisted primarily in a declaration that that greatreligious consummation, the kingdom of God, which the prophets hadforetold, which was regarded by the fellow-countrymen of Jesus as afar-off hope, and which had just been heralded by John the Baptist asbeing immediately at hand, had actually taken place. The perfectstate was announced to have arrived, and to be a thing not of thefuture but of the present. The long-expected intercourse of God andman on new terms of perfect agreement and sympathy, had come intooperation; any one who chose could assure himself of the fact. Thetitle by which Jesus described the intimate relationship of man andGod which he announced, sufficiently shows its character. God is theFather in heaven; men are his children, and all that men have to dois to realise that this is so, to enter the circle and begin to livewith God on such terms. The great God seeks to have every one livingwith him as his child; and religion is no more, no less, than thiscommunion. Father and child dwell together in perfect love andconfidence; no outward regulations are needed for their intercourse, no bargains, no traditions, no ritual, no pilgrimage, no sacrifice. The intercourse can be carried on by any one, anywhere. It is not amatter of apparatus, but a purely moral affair, an affair of love. The Father knows all about the child, is able to give him all heneeds, even before he asks it; is willing to forgive his sins when herepents of them; is anxious above all to reinforce his efforts aftergoodness. The child knows that the Father is always near him, carriesevery need and wish to him in prayer, even though knowing that he isaware of them beforehand; regards all that happens, either good orill, as sent by him for the best ends, and seeks in every case toknow his will and to submit to it sweetly, and execute it faithfully. 

Nothing could be simpler, or deeper, or broader. Religion is herepresented free from all local or accidental or obscuring elements;religion itself is here revealed. Accepted in this form, it does forman all that it can. The relation between God and man is made purelymoral; the link is not that of race, nor does it consist in anythingexternal. The individual--every individual who will pause to hear--isassured that there exists between God and him a natural sympathy, andis urged to allow that sympathy to have its way. It is easy to seewhat effect such a belief must have. The individual, bidden to seekthe principle of union with God not in any external circumstance orarrangement, but in his own heart, becomes conscious of an innerfreedom from all artificial restraints. He finds in his own heart thesecret of happiness, and is raised above all fears and irritations;and hence the forces of his nature are encouraged to unfoldthemselves freely. He sees clearly what as a human person he iscalled to be and to do, and feels a new energy to realise his ideals. As God has come down to him, he is lifted up to God; a divine powerhas entered his life, which is able to do all things in him and forhim. 

It may be said that what we have described are the effects ofreligious inspiration generally, and may take place in connectionwith any faith. But the divine impulse communicated to mankind inChristianity differs from that of any other religion in two importantrespects. In the first place, the God who here enters into union withman possesses full reality and a character of the utmost energy. Itis Jehovah with whom we have to do here, changed, indeed, but stillthe same; a God of real and irresistible power, on whom speculationhas not laid its weakening hand. The union of man with God is notsecured by making God abstract and vague, nor is his infinitekindness and forgivingness purchased at the expense of his intensityand awfulness. With Jesus, God is still the power who has actualcontrol over everything that goes on, and who is able to do even whatappears to be most impossible. He is a God of strict justice andholiness; though he is so kind, his judgments have not ceased, butare still impending over guilty men and a guilty people. It is he whocan cast both soul and body into hell. It is a God of such energy, such zeal, who yet offers himself as the willing benefactor anddefender, and the loving guide and helper of the humblest of hishuman creatures. In the second place, the terms of the union hereformed between God and man are such as can be found nowhere else. Thedeity inspires man not to any particular kind of acts, not tosacrifices, nor to withdrawal from the world, but inspires him simplyto realise himself. Man is assured of the sympathy of this great God, and is then left in freedom as to the mode in which he should servehim. No rules are prescribed; human life is not pressed into anartificial mould, as is the case in so many great religions; nopreference is accorded to any one pursuit over others. This religionis not a yoke to coerce men and to make them less, but an inspirationcapable of entering into every kind of life, and of making mengreater and better in whatever occupation. Even religious duties areleft to form themselves naturally; all that is insisted on is thatthe child shall have living and real intercourse with the Father. Prayer is necessary, and so is the practice of good works; the childmust keep in sympathy with the Father by doing as he does. Furtherthan this, the forms of the religious life are not prescribed. Withregard to morals, it is the same. The moral life is to build itselfup freely from within; goodness is not to be a matter of rule, butthe spontaneous and happy development of a principle which lives andspeaks deep in the centre of the heart. Jesus is not a lawgiver, savein a metaphorical sense: the law which he sets up is nothing morethan that which every man, when he turns away from all that isartificial, can find in his own breast. 

It is one feature of the spontaneity and spirituality of the religionof Jesus, that it has no constitution. Jesus regarded himself as thefounder not of a new religion, but only of an inner circle of moredevoted believers inside the old religion of his country; he did nottherefore feel called to draw up rules for a new faith, and theresult of this is that the mechanism of the religion is of latergrowth. The authority of the founder can be appealed to for a directand constant intercourse with God as of a child with his father, andfor the conduct of men towards each other, which such intercoursewith God necessarily implies, but for hardly anything more. Here, asin no other historical religion, man is free. 

The religion of Jesus, therefore, is one of love alone. The divinenature consists in love, and the impulse which religion communicates, is simply that which proceeds from being loved and loving. And areligion of love finds the way, as no other can, to make man free, tounseal his energies, and to lead him upwards to the best life. Theappearance of such a religion forms the most momentous epoch of humanhistory. He who brought it forward must occupy a unique position inthe estimation of mankind. It can never be superseded. 

It is no doubt the case that the doctrine of Jesus was not in allrespects new. The ideas of the prophets live again in him; hisfollowers have always found many of the Jewish Psalms to be perfectlysuited to their experience. Jesus lived in the faith of Israel, andconsidered that he had come only to make that faith betterunderstood, and to free it from improper accretions. What was new washis own person. His great work was that he embodied his teaching in alife which expressed it perfectly. It is far short of the truth tosay that there was no inconsistency between what he taught and hisown conduct. His life is a demonstration, in every detail, of theeffects of his religion; all flows with the utmost simplicity, andeven as a matter of necessity, out of the truth he taught. What hepreached was, in fact, himself; he was himself living in the kingdomof God, to which he called others to come; he knew in his ownexperience what it was to live as a child with the Father in heaven, and to view all persons, all things, all duties, in the light of thatintercourse. All his acts and words flowed from the same spring inhis own inner experience. In no other way could his life shape itselfthan as it did, and he saw with perfect clearness what men must be, and on what terms they must live together when God and they were asFather and children to each other. What he thus knew he lived, as ifno laws but those of the kingdom of heaven had any authority for him, and so he presented to the world that living embodiment of the truereligion, which has been the main strength of Christianity. Jesusannounces a new union of God with man, a union in which he himself isthe first to rejoice, but which all may share along with him; andhence his person counts for more in his religion than that of anyother religious founder in his, and necessarily becomes an object offaith to all who enter the communion. The doctrine does not produceits specific effect apart from the person of Jesus. Because in himalone they know the truth which brings them peace, his followersregard him, in a way which has no parallel in any other religion, astheir Saviour. 

But this name is given to him by his followers, as it is claimed byhimself, for another reason also. Jesus was more than a teacher. Hefelt a power to be present in him which was able to supply all needsand to comfort all sorrows; he did not shrink from summoning all whowere weary and heavy laden to come to him, nor from undertaking togive them rest. Keenly alive to the sufferings of others, and able toperceive even those sufferings of which they were not themselvesconscious, he felt it to be his mission to deal with the sadder sideof human life; he was a physician sent to the sick, a shepherdseeking the lost sheep. It was among the poor and the sick, and evenamong the outcasts of society, in whom the sense of need wasstrongest, that he felt himself most at home and most able to fulfilhis calling. Thus the motive of compassion enters strongly into allhe said and did: but the compassion is not hopeless in this case asin the similar case of Gautama (see chapter xx. ), nor is the curerecommended for the ills of humanity that of withdrawal from mankindor of forgetfulness. Here there is a belief in God. The compassionfrom which the religion flows is not as in the case of Gautama, thatof a preacher who has ceased to trust in any heavenly power; it isannounced as existing first of all in the heart of God Himself. Godcan do all things, and in his yearning pity for his children has senthis representative to assure them of his sympathy and to comfort themin their sorrows. With Jesus therefore no evil is so great as not toadmit of a positive cure; he feels the remedy of all human ills to bepresent in his own heart, and so he appears as the Messiah, not sucha Messiah as his countrymen looked for, but as the true Messiah, inwhom all human wants are met, and all human hopes fulfilled. The curewhich he announces for all ills consists in devotion to the will ofthe Father in heaven. To give oneself unreservedly to the labour ofrealising the purposes of the heavenly Father in one's own heart andin the world, is to rise above all cares and sorrows; enthusiasm inthe Father's service is the sovereign remedy. To one who believes inthe Father, and seeks to live as his child, no despair is possible. To be engaged in his business is at all times the highest happiness, and his kingdom is assuredly coming, though man has still theprivilege of working for it, --the kingdom in which all darkness andevil will be put away. 

We have indicated the chief points which in a scientific comparisonof Christianity with other religions appear to constitute itsdistinctive character; and we have sought to make our statement suchas the reasonable adherent of other religions will feel to bewarranted. The points are these. Christianity is a religion offreedom, it is a system of inner inspiration more than of externallaw or system, it is embodied in the living person of its founder, inwhich alone it can be truly seen; and the founder is one who isliving himself in the relation to God to which he calls men to come, and feels himself called and sent to be the Saviour of men. 

It is impossible in this work to treat Christianity on the same scaleas the other religions; but the question of its universalism mustnecessarily receive attention. Jesus himself did not expressly saythat his religion was for all men. It was his immediate aim to bringabout the renewal of the faith of his countrymen, and to give it amore spiritual character; and some of his followers considered thathe had aimed at nothing more than this. But he formed a circle ofdisciples and adherents, which afterwards came to be the ChristianChurch, and he attached no ritual condition whatever to membership inthat community. Nay, more; by his repudiation of the Jewish system oftradition he showed that the Jewish laws of ritual purity were notbinding upon his disciples, and the further inference could readilybe drawn, that one could enter the Kingdom without being a Jew atall. The strong missionary impulse of the infant religion brought itvery early in contact with Gentile life, and the question soon arose, whether those who refused to become Jews could yet claim a share inthe Messiah. It was the task of the Apostle Paul to work out thetheory of the universalism of Christianity, and after some conflictthe principle was recognised that in the Church all racialdifferences disappear; "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek. "This controversy once settled--and a few years sufficed to settleit--the new religion was free to spread in all directions. It spreadrapidly; the gospel was very simple and imposed no burdensomeconditions, and it soon proved itself to be capable of striking rootin any country. The Apostle Paul was the first great theologian ofthe Church; but his doctrine, as will happen in such a case, does notin all points spring out of the nature of the religion itself. ThePauline theology is an attempt to reconcile the facts of Christianityand especially that great stumbling-block to the Jews, the death ofthe Messiah, with the requirements of Jewish thought. Instead ofseeing in the death of Christ, as the older apostles at first did, aperplexing enigma, St. Paul saw in it the principal manifestation ofthe compassion of the Saviour, and the great purpose for which he hadcome into the world. He concentrated attention on Christ's death andmade the cross rather than the doctrine of the Messiah the burden ofhis teaching. To understand Paul we must distinguish between hisreligion and his theology. His religious position is essentially thesame as that of Jesus himself; with him, too, the new religion isthat of father and child, and of the consequences which inevitablyflow from such a union. But the movement of thought which began atthe moment of the crucifixion, the concentration of Christian faithand love on the person of the Saviour, was now complete. The figureof the Crucified with its powerful tragic attraction, and with itsdeep lessons of conquest by self-surrender, of life by dying, remained from St. Paul onwards, in the centre of the faith. 

The world of the early centuries was in great need of a religion, andChristianity supplied the place which was vacant. Brought in contact, in the great ocean of the Roman Empire where all currents met, withreligions and philosophies of every kind, it proved best suited tothe task of supplying an inspiration for life, uniting togetherdifferent classes of men and schools of thought. But in the widearena of the Empire it received as well as gave, and in itsencounters with strange rites and doctrines it also put on many astrange aspect. It became the heir of the thoughts and aspirations ofa hundred empires; all the pious sentiments that flowed together fromevery quarter of the world helped to enrich its doctrine, and to makeit the great reservoir it is of all the tendencies and views, eventhose most contrary to each other, which are connected with religion. Its institutions are of diverse origin. From the Jews it received itsearliest Bible, for the Christians had at first no sacred books butthose of the old covenant, and its weekly festival, though the daywas changed. Its God was the God of the Old Testament, and itsSaviour was the Messiah of Jewish prophecy, so that it was acontinuation of the Jewish religion, and the attempts which were madeby early Gnostics to dissolve this tie were soon forgotten. 

From Greece it received much. The world it had to conquer was Greek, and the conquest could only take place by an accommodation to Greekthought and to Greek ways. In the end of chapter xvi. We spoke of thesecond Greek religion which arose under the influence of philosophy, and found its way wherever Greek culture spread. In this greatmovement, Christianity found a preparation for its coming in theGreek world, without which its spread must have been much moredoubtful. In the Graeco-Roman religion the advances which appear inChristianity are already prefigured. Thought has been busy inbuilding up a great doctrine of God, such a God as human reason canarrive at, a Being infinitely wise and good, who is the first causeand the hidden ground of all things, the sum of all wisdom, beauty, and goodness, and in whom all men alike may trust. Greek thought alsofound much occupation in the attempt to reach a true account of man'smoral nature and destiny. Both in theory and in practice many anattempt was made to build up the ideal life of man, and thus manyminds were prepared for a religion which places the riches of theinner life above all others. The Greek philosopher's school was asemi-religious union, the central point of which was, as is the casewith Christianity also, not outward sacrifice but mental activity. Itis not wonderful therefore if Christian institutions were assimilatedto some extent to the Greek schools. It has recently been shown thatthe celebration of the Eucharist came very early to bear a closeresemblance to that of a Greek mystery, and that there is an unbrokenline of connection between the discourse of the Greek philosopher andthe Christian sermon. In some of the Greek schools pastoralvisitation was practised, and the preacher kept up an oversight ofthe moral conduct of his adherents. While Christianity certainly hadvigour enough to shape its own institutions, and may even be seen tobe doing so in some of the books of the New Testament, the agreementbetween Greek and Christian practices amounts to something more thancoincidence. 

It was towards the end of the second century that the alliancebetween Christianity and the Greek world was finally ratified. Tillthen belief and practice were determined mainly by custom andtradition; but now these were to give way to definite laws andsettled institutions. There came to full development, about theperiod we have mentioned, a highly-organised system of churchgovernment, a canon of sacred books of Christian origin, and a creedin which the beliefs of Christians were drawn together in onestatement. It cannot be denied that the elaborate external forms withwhich the religion of Jesus was thus invested went far to change itsspirit also. But this happens to every religion which reaches thestage of organising itself in order to continue in the world and torule permanently in human thought and in human society. No externalforms can adequately express living religious ideas; and yet theremust be external forms in order that religious ideas may beperpetuated. The ministers of the new truth inevitably rise indignity till they grow into a hierarchy. That truth inevitably seeksto establish itself as scientifically true, and with the aid of theruling philosophical tendency of the day clothes itself in a view ofthe universe and in a creed. Thus the essence of Christianity came toconsist not in loving the Master and following him in faith and love, but in upholding the authority of the Church, receiving hersacraments, and believing various metaphysical and transcendentalstatements. Here also a hard shell is formed round the spiritualkernel of the religion which, if it is fitted to preserve the latterin rude and stormy times, is also fitted to confuse and also apt toconceal it. 

In each of the countries to which it came, Christianity adopted whatit could of the religion formerly existing there. The old religionsof these lands were not all alike, and hence it came to pass that asthe language of Rome was transformed in various ways, and passed intothe different yet cognate tongues of the Romance nations, so thereligion of the Empire, combining with various forms of heathenism, passed into several national religions, the differences of which areat least as conspicuous as their similarity. In Italy Christianityappears to be a system of local deities, each village worshipping itsown Madonna or saint. In Holland worship consists almost entirely ofpreaching. In other countries the ritual and the intellectualelements of religion are blended in varying proportions; and theformer heathenism of each land is also to be traced in many a popularobservance and belief. So great is the variety of the religions ofEurope, not to mention that of the negroes or the Shakers of America, that many have doubted whether they ought all to be considered asbranches of one faith, or whether they would not more fitly beregarded as so many national religions which have all alike connectedthemselves with Christianity. Against this there is to be urged inthe first place that as a matter of history they are all undoubtedlyoffshoots of the religion of Jesus. It may also be urged thatwherever the name of Jesus is named, his ideas must to some extent bepresent, however much they are obscured and prevented from operatingby lower modes of view. The Christianity of no country ought to bejudged by the attitude of its most ignorant or even of its averageadherents; and in every land where Christianity prevails, aninfluence connected with religion is at work, which makes for theemancipation and elevation of the human person, and for the awakeningof the manifold energies of human nature. This, as we saw, is theimmediate and native tendency of the religion of Jesus; it opens theprison doors to them that are bound; it communicates by its innerencouragement an energy which makes the infirm forget theirweaknesses, it fills the heart with hope and opens up new views ofwhat man can do and can become. It is this that makes it the onetruly universal religion. Islam, it is true, has also proved itspower to live in many lands, and Buddhism has spread over half ofAsia. But Buddhism is not a full religion, it does not tend to actionbut to passivity, and affords no help to progress. Islam, on theother hand, is a yoke rather than an inspiration; it is inwardlyhostile to freedom, and is incapable of aiding in higher moraldevelopment. Christianity has a message to which men become alwaysmore willing to respond as they rise in the scale of civilisation; ithas proved its power to enter into the lives of various nations, andto adapt itself to their circumstances and guide their aspirationswithout humiliating them. A religion which identifies itself, asChristianity does, with the cause of freedom in every land, and tendsto unite all men in one great brotherhood under the loving God who isthe Father of all alike, is surely the desire of all nations, and isdestined to be the faith of all mankind. 

A bibliography of the recent study of Christianity would be far tooextensive for this book. An excellent statement on the subject willbe found at the hands of Professor Sanday in the _OxfordProceedings_, vol. Ii. P. 263, _sqq. _

CHAPTER XXIIICONCLUSION

It will not be expected that the result of the great movement tracedin the chapters of this work can be summed up in a few words. We setout with a definition of our subject which we said could only befully verified after religion had accomplished its growth and hadfully unfolded its nature. We also set out with the assumption thatall the religion of the world is one, and that it exhibits adevelopment which is in the main continuous, from the most elementaryto the highest stages. We shall not now attempt to justify byargument that definition or that assumption. The history which wehave sought to place before the reader must itself be the proof ofthem. All that can be done in bringing this work to a close is topoint out one great line of development, which may be recognised moreor less distinctly in the growth of each religion, and may thereforebe held to be characteristic of religion as a whole. No doubt thegrowth of religion, as of other human activities, has many sides andaspects, but perhaps it may be possible to specify the central lineof growth in which the explanation of all the subsidiary and parallelforward movements is to be found. 

It was stated in our first chapter that religion is the expression ofhuman needs with reference to higher beings who are supposed to becapable of fulfilling men's desires, and it was also stated as aninference from this, that the growth of human needs is the cause ofreligious change and progress. If this is true, then the key to theprogress of religion is to be found in the successive emergence inhuman experience of higher and still higher needs. If we can discoverthe order in which higher aspirations successively emerge in thegrowth of humanity, then we shall possess the chief clue to thecourse of religious advance. Now while there is infinite variety inthe needs and desires of men, every land and each nation havingideals all its own, we can yet discern, on a broad view of humanprogress, an advance from lower to higher needs which is common tothe human race, and manifests itself in the history of each nation. Three successive conditions of human life stand out before us asmarkedly distinct, and as occurring wherever civilisation continuesto advance. The first is that in which material needs areall-absorbing; the second that in which freedom from material needshas been to some extent attained, and the highest aspirations aredirected to the safety and advancement of the nation in which menfind themselves united and secure; and the third is that in which theindividual realises his own value apart from the state, and developsa personal ideal which is thenceforward his chief end. To these threestages of human existence three types of religion correspond, and thegrowth of religion consists in the main in its passage from the lowerto the higher of these stages. 

The religion of the tribe belongs to that stage of man's existence inwhich his energies are entirely occupied in the struggle againstnature and against other tribes. The conditions of his life do notallow his higher faculties to grow, and while he is not without manyglimpses and anticipations of higher things, his religion, as awhole, is a mass of childish fancies, and of fixed traditions whichhe cannot explain, but does not venture to criticise or change. Hisgods are petty and capricious beings, and his modes of influencingthem, though used with zeal and fervour, have little to do withreason or with taste or with morality. It is in this kind of religionthat magic of all sorts is at home. 

The advance from the religion of the tribe to that of the nation wasbriefly described above (chapter vi. ). The leading classes of thestate at least having gained some measure of security and leisure, ideas of a nobler order spring up in their minds. The service of thegreat gods of the state is organised with befitting dignity andsplendour; the best minds contribute to it all they can in the way ofart, of poetry, of purified legend, of stately ceremonial. Patriotismand religion are one, the offices of worship are upheld by the wholepower of the state, and the gods speak with new authority to thespirit of the worshipper. Now it is that great religious systemsarise, so powerful, so highly organised, so splendidly adorned, andsurrounded with such venerable traditions, that they seem to bedestined for eternity. The priesthood becomes a very powerful class, and acquires a personal holiness which marks out its members asdifferent from other men; the sacrifices acquire the character ofdivine mysteries, every detail of which, even the most trivial, has asacred meaning; religious books are compiled or written, which by andby are regarded as inspired, and as possessing absolute authority. Itis to be observed that the older style of religion is not at oncedriven out by the growth of the new, but continues to flourish besideit and under its shadow. The tribes of whom the nation is composedstill cherish and adore their own special deities. That older worshipis often thought to bring blessings which the new worship of thestate does not command, and many a piece of ancient magic, many apractice which has no connection with the state religion, still goeson, especially among those who are not cultivated enough toappreciate the nobler faith which has arisen. 

This, however, does not keep the national faith from growing inriches and consistency; and religion appears, as this growthproceeds, to have attained the highest degree of power and authorityat which it can possibly arrive. Commanding as it does all theresources of the nation, enriched by all that can be brought to it ofmaterial or intellectual riches, placed in a position of absoluteexaltation and inviolableness, to what further conquests can it stilllook forward? Yet when a national religion appears to be most firmlyestablished, the forces are most certainly at work which must erelong lead to a far-reaching change. While the national worship hasbeen growing up to its highest splendours, the lives of the citizenshave also been growing richer and deeper, and the individual soul hasbecome aware of wants and longings which cannot be satisfied in thenational temple. The further progress of religion is apt to appear asa revolt against the system which has grown so strong. The individualsets out to seek a consistent intellectual view, and so figures as asceptic. He aims at a higher moral law than that of the priestlysystem, and is accused of undermining public morality. He feels a newcall to personal goodness, a new need for personal atonement with theideal holiness which he has learned to apprehend; and as the publicritual does not meet these needs, he seeks for new religiousassociations and perhaps appears to preach a doctrine contrary topatriotism, as it is subversive of the established religion of hiscountry, and to be wilfully destroying what his countrymen revere, and wilfully breaking through old ties and obligations. Thus theindividualist stage of religion succeeds the national. But theindividualist stage is also, in part at least, the universal stage. What the thinking mind and the pious heart seeks and cannot find inthe national worship, is a religion free as the seeker himself hasbecome free, from all that is unreasonable and artificial, a religiontherefore in which every thinking mind and every pious heart can havea share. What is gained by individuals in this direction is capable, therefore, if circumstances favour, of proving an acquisition notonly for the individual reformer or his nation, but for all men. Butas the rise of national religion does not bring to an end the ruderworships of the tribes, which still go on beside it, so neither doesthe rise of individualism, even in its purest form, bring to an endthe national worship. In the long run this may follow, but it doesnot take place at once. All three forms of religion go on together;the religion of magic, that of stately public sacrifices andceremonials, and that of intellectual effort and pious meditation andprayer. Each no doubt influences to some extent the others, and isinfluenced by them in turn. 

The movement thus indicated from tribal to national, and fromnational to individual and to universal religion, is the centraldevelopment of religion, and all the minor developments which mightbe traced, as that of sacrifice from rude to spiritual forms, of thefunctions of the sacred class, of the morality dictated by religionat its various stages, or of the literature connected with piety, maybe explained by reference to this one. This movement has taken placein every nation; we have seen something of it in each of ourchapters. In some nations it has been early arrested, so that noimportant contribution has there been brought to the general religionof mankind, in others it has run its full course, and like a greatriver has arrived at the ocean at last, to mingle its waters withthose of other mighty streams. 

The story of the growth of the world's religion has therefore to betold in a number of parallel narratives, each dealing with theexperience of a separate nation. There can scarcely be any generalhistory of the religion of the world, in addition to those specialhistories. Some epochs, it is true, stand out as having witnessedsimultaneous religious movements in many lands, as if the mind of thewhole human race had then been passing through the same crisis ofthought. The sixth century B. C. Is the age of Confucius and ofLaotsze in China, of Gautama in India, of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and theUnknown Prophet of the Exile, of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, andXenophanes, and also of the rise into prominence of the Greekmysteries. Widely different as the movements are which thus tookplace contemporaneously in these lands, we may discern in all of themalike the tendency to plant religion in the mind and heart, and tocreate a deeper union than the old external one, a union based oncommon intellectual effort and spiritual sympathy. The periodimmediately before and after the Christian era might also appear tobe one in which the mind of the world as a whole made a great stepforward. The union of many nations under the sway of Rome, and theuniversal diffusion of the Greek language as a means of generalcommunication, made men conscious at this time as they had never beenbefore, of the unity of mankind in spite of all differences of raceand speech. A philosophy also was popular at this time which wascosmopolitan in its character, and occupied itself with the greatproblems, which are the same for all, of man's relation to the godsand of his moral duty. If we add to this the combination which tookplace at Rome and wherever different races met, of various rites andcreeds, we see that the age was one singularly disposed to thebreaking down of artificial barriers between men, and singularlyfitted to promote the growth of a belief in which men of all nationsmight unite and feel themselves to be brethren. 

In these two periods we may recognise important steps in that greatEducation of the Human Race which the Apostle Paul refers to in abold philosophy of history (Galat. Iv. ), and which later thinkershave striven to set forth in detail. After the long servitude ofmankind to irrational practices and to gods who were no gods, therecomes first the period when men recognise that the true God is to befound not merely outside them but within their hearts and minds, andthen the period when they find that the true God is the same to allmen, that they are all children of the same Father. But while thesegeneral movements of the human mind may be acknowledged, theeducation of the human race proceeds for the most part in nations. Aseach nation has to elaborate its own art, its own literature, its ownsystem of law, so each nation has to perfect its own religion. Evenafter a universal faith has appeared, religion does not cease to be anational thing. Each people moulds the universal religion which ithas adopted into a special form, continues by means of it the ritesand traditions of the past, and expresses through it its own nationalcharacter and aspirations. Each nation as well as each individualmust necessarily have a faith specially its own, arising out of itsown character and experience and in great part incommunicable toothers. No two nations could possibly exchange religions. 

But on the other hand every nation contains within itself forms ofreligion which differ from each other as widely as those of twoseparate nations. It has been said that no religious belief or usagewhich has once lived can ever be destroyed; and the proof of this maybe witnessed in every nation. Even after that religion has come whichhas its main seat in the heart and soul, the ruder forms of pietylive on, and even at times aggressively assert themselves. If thereare classes for whom the struggle against material hardships stillcontinues, no lofty religion can be attained by them any more than bysavage tribes. As the conditions of their life forbid the growth oftheir higher faculties, their religion cannot be one of thought or ofrefinement, but must be one which promises palpable benefits or anescape from immediate dangers. At a somewhat higher stage is theclass of those who, while partly escaped from the struggle againstwant, have not yet fully realised themselves as thinking andspiritual beings, and to whom the benefits of religion still lieoutside, rather than in the inner life. When the benefits of religionare thus conceived, its processes must be of a mechanical nature. Hence the various systems of apparatus for connecting the worshipperwith a source of good distant from him in time or space, and forfetching as it were from another region, with certainty and accuracy, needed supplies of grace. 

The further development of religion in a community so mixed mustdepend on the progressive education and elevation of the people. Asmore and more of them are freed first from distracting wants andcares, and then from sordid and materialistic views, their spiritualnature will expand. The need for God himself rather than for hisgifts, will arise and increase in their hearts, and they will growcapable of that highest religion which is the life of the soul withGod; they will feel its beauty and will drink of the deep springswhich it contains, of strength and peace. 

To attain this true religion the human race has had to travel far andto make many experiments. Many temples were built and fell to ruinbefore the true temple of the soul was reached in which, as eachfinds what he as an individual requires, there is also room for allmankind. Even after this highest religion has been made known to men, it has often been obscured and lost, and many a struggle has beenneeded to vindicate its claims and help it to retain its rightfulplace. But with growing experience the world becomes more assuredthat the simplest and broadest religion ever preached upon this earthis also the best and the truest, and that in maintaining Christianityas at first preached, and applying it in every needed direction, liesthe hope of the future of mankind. To those who agree in thisconclusion the history of the religion of the world, full of errorsand of grievous failures as it has been seen to be, cannot appear tohave been a vain and purposeless excursion in a land of shadows. Notwithout a divine call, and not without divine guidance did man setout so early, and persevere so constantly in spite of all hisdisappointments, in the search for God. 

INDEX

Aesir, 267

Ahura Mazda, 387, 391, 397, 398, 405

Allah, 222

Allat, "The Lady, " 165, 173, 219

Amartas, 44

Anaitis, 407

Ancestor-worship, primitive, 33, 40 China, 115 Aryan, 250 India, 338

Angels and demons, Persia, 400, 407

Animals, worship of, 29, 57 in Peru, 86 in Babylonia, 96 in Egypt, 130 how accounted for, 133 in Arabia, 219 in Greece, 277

Animation of Nature in savage thought, 24

Animism, meaning of, 40, 96, 308 in Roman religion, 308

Anthropomorphism, 53 Babylonia, 96 Egypt, 132 Greece, 281

Apocalypse, 213

Arabia, before Mahomet, 218 gods of, 219 Judaism and Christianity in, 223

Art, Phenician, 174 Egyptian, 132 Greece, 280, 292

Aryans, the, 245 description of, 248 in Europe, 256 religion, 250 etymology of names of gods, 250

Ascetics, Brahmanic, 350

Ashera, Canaanite goddess, 172

Ashtoreth, 176

Association, forms of religious, Totem-Clan, 70 nation, 84 Greek mysteries, 298 Greek schools, 303 new form in Israel, 212 new form in Islam, 233

Asuras, 44

Baal, Canaanite god, 171, 189

Babylon and Assyria, religion of, 93 connection with Egypt, 94, 96, 97 connection with China, 93, 98 mythology of, 100

Belief, an essential part of religion, 9, 13 less important than rite in primitive religion, 66

Brahman, etymology of, 339

Brahmanism, 338

Buddhism, 353, _sqq. _ in China, 123

_Burnt Njal_, 264

Burton, Captain, _Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca_, 236

Caaba, 220, 236

Cabiri, 177

Canaanites, 170 religion of, 171, 191

Caste, 338

Celts, 257

China, 106 connection with Babylonia, 107 state religion of, 111

Christianity, 411, _sqq. _

Civilisation and religion advance together, 15 origin of, 19

Classification of religions, 80

Confucius, 107, 117, _sqq. _

Continuity of growth in religion, 6

Curiosity, an element of religion, 12

Daniel, 213

Decalogues, 202

Definition of religion, preliminary, 8 fuller, 13

Degeneration in civilisation, 19 in religion, 38

Deuteronomy, 201

Devas, 44, 396

Development of religion, 8, 51, _sqq. _, 430, _sqq. _

Domestic worship, origin of, 33 China, 115 Aryans, 251 Iceland, 264 Greece, 275 Rome, 311 Brahmanic, 342

Dualism, 56

Eddas, 266

Egypt, religion of, 126, _sqq. _

Elijah and Elisha, 190

Elves, 265

Ephod, 188

Etruria, religion of, 318

Exile of Israel, 202

Ezra, 204

Fairy Tales (German), 262

Fate, 289

Festivals, Greek, 294

Fetish-worship, 35

Fetishism, 38

Fire, 31

Frazer, Mr. , 58, 59; _Golden Bough_, 28, 279

Frisia, religion in, 263

Functional deities, Greece, 275 Rome, 308

Funeral practices, 62 Egypt, 149 Icelandic, 264 Greece, 282, 290 India, 332 Persian, 405

Games, Greek, 294

Gautama Buddha, 356 his death, 361

Germans, the ancient, 258 their gods, 259 their gods identified with Roman, 260 working religion of, 260 later religion, 263

Ghosts, 34

Gods, the great, in Babylonia, 98 in Egypt, 137 of the Aryans, 252 German, 259 Icelandic, 266 of Homer, 285 Roman, 311 Indian, 326

Gomme, _Ethnology in Folklore_, 60, 249, 254

Greece, 274

Grimm, German Mythology, 260

Hades, 291

Hammurabi, 93, 95, 202

Hanyfs, 224

Hartmann, Edward von, 46

Heaven, 52 an object of primitive worship, 31, 53 Babylonia, 93 China, 112 Arabia, 219 India, 318, 326, 333

Hegira, 231

Hell, 229, 265, 392

Henotheism, 56

Heroic legends, Babylonian, 100 German, 262

Hesiod, 291

Homer, 283 worship in, 287

Homeric gods, 285

Hymns, Babylonian, 101 Egyptian, 144 Vedic, 328 Persian, 383. See Psalms

Iceland, 264 decay of old religion of, 272

Idols, none in primitive religion, 73 Arabia, 219, 220 German? 264

Immortality, China, 115 Egypt, 152

Incas, the religion of, 85-88

India, 324

Individual, the, not considered in primitive religion, 76

Individual religion, Babylonia, 104 Israel, 205 Greece, 300 India, 346 a high stage of religion, 429 the porch to universalism, 430 See Buddhism

Indo-Europeans. See Aryans

Isaiah xli. -lxvi. , 203

Islam, 217. See Mahomet meaning of, 226 spread of, 237 a universal religion, 240 weakness of, 241

Israel, 179

Israel and Canaanites, 184 Prophets, 189 reforms of religion, 200 exile, 202 the return, 204

Istar, 101

Jainism, 362

Japan, 115

Jehovah, 182

Jesus Christ, 413, _sqq. _

Jewish religion, 205 spiritual elements of, 209 heathenish elements of, 210 Persian influence on? 215

Jinns, 220

Job, 215

Judaism, 205 _sqq. _ Hellenistic period of, 412 at time of Christ, 413

Kathenotheism, 55, 336

Koran, 225, 227, 239

Lang, Andrew, 25, 59; _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, 22

Legge, Dr. , 110, 113

Literatures, sacred, 179 Babylonia, 93, 100 Buddhist, 353 China, 108 Eddas, 266 Egypt, 127, 154 Koran, 225, 227, 239 Israel, 179, 207 Sibylline books, 319 Vendidad, 406 Zend-Avesta, 382

Local nature of early religion, 60

Local observances, Aryan, 253 old German, 262 Icelandic, 264

Lockyer, _Dawn of Astronomy_, 94

Magi, 405

Magic, 74 Babylonia, 95 Egypt, 155

Mahomet, 225, _sqq. _ preaching, 228 leaves Mecca, 231 at Medina, 232 breach with Judaism and Christianity, 234 domestic, 235

Manicheism, 408

Mannhardt, _Feld- und Waldkulte_, 59, 262

Manu, law of, 344

Massebah, 172

Maya, 349

McLennan, 59

Mecca, 220 becomes capital of Islam, 235

Meyer, E. , 247

Mithra, 407

Moloch, 174

Monarchical Pantheon of the Aryans, 253

Monotheism, not primitive, 37, 56 in Egypt? 144 emergence of, in Israel, 196 in India, 348

Morality, in primitive religion, 77 Egyptian religion, 155 Greece, 279 Vedic religion, 335 Brahmanism, 345 of Buddhism, 372

Moslem, meaning of, 226 duties of the, 238

Müller, Mr. Max, 10, 42, 246, 250, 332 his theory of the origin of religion, 43

Mycenæ, 282

Mysteries, the Greek, 298

Mythology, origin of, 51 Babylonia, 100 Egypt, 138 Greece, 280 Icelandic, 267 Indian, 333

National religion, how different from earlier form, 81, 428 Israel, 191

Natural religion, 80

Nature gods, growth of, 51

Nature-worship, the greater, 30, 43 the minor, 32, 42, 57

Nirvana, 361, 373

Omens, 290 Roman, 312

Orientation, of temples, 100

Origin of religion, (1) Primitive revelation, 26 (2) Innate idea, 26 (3) Psychological necessity, 27

Orphism, 302

Other World, the in Egypt, 151 with the Semites, 167 Jewish beliefs about, 214 Arabia, 220 Iceland, 265, 266 Homer, 283

Pantheism, in Egypt, 148 India, 336, 348

Patriarchal society and religion of Aryans, 248

Perkunas, 36

Persia, 381 primitive religion, 385 contact of Jews with, 401, 406

Pfleiderer, Otto, 47

Phenicians, 170 religion of, 176 influence on Greece, 282

Philistines, 170

Philosophy, Greek, 301 Indian, 347

Polytheism, origin of, 53 Indian, 335

Prayer, primitive, 71 Israel, 198, 212 Indian, 339 Persian, 382, 394

Priestly code, 202, 403

Priests, none in the earliest religion, 72 not necessary in early Israel, 187 Roman, 313 Brahmans, 338

Primitive religion, the, 21 difference between it and later forms, 79

Prophets, in Israel, 189 their criticism of the old religion of Israel, 192

Psalms, 210. See Hymns

Purity, laws of, Israel, 209 Persia, 404

Rationalism, Greece, 297 India, 350

Reforms, of Israelite religion, 200 of Augustus, 322

Renouf, Le Page, 145

Revealed religion, 80

Réville, M. , 25, 31, 42

Resurrection, 214

Retribution, after death, in Egypt, 155 Mahomet, 229 Israel, 214

Rig-veda, the, 325

Ritualism, Brahmanic, 343 Roman, 314 Persian, 403 Jewish, 204, 208

Rome, 305, _sqq. _

Rougé, M. De la, 145

Sacred places, 59 Semitic, 165 Canaanite, 184, 200 Arabia, 219 Germany, 261

Sacred seasons, 75

Sacrifice, primitive, generally a meal, 67 in China, 114 Semitic, 164 human (Phenician), 175 human (Israel), 187 human (Icelandic), 265 early Israelite, 183 denounced by O. T. Prophets, 193 Jewish, 207 Icelandic, 264 Homeric, 287 Persia, 394

Saussaye, P. D. Chantepie de la, 17

Savage elements in all the great religions, 21

Savages, their religion falls short of the definition, 8 represent the original state of mankind, 19 mental habits of, 23 all have religion, 25 the religion of, described, 29, _sqq. _ their beliefs furnish the elements of the great religions, 63

Schrader (Aryans), 247, 252

Semites, 161 religion of, 162 gods of, 164, 173 goddess of, 99, 165, 219

Seraph, 220

Shin-to, 115

Sin, Babylon, 103 Israel, 205

Slavs, 256

Smith, Robertson, 61; _Religion of the Semites_, 58, 70, 162

Spencer, Mr. H. , 11, 39

Spirit, the great, 36

Spirits, of dead persons, 33 worship of, the origin of all religion? 38 in Babylonia, 95 in China, 114 in Arabia, 220 in Greece, 275 in Persia, 398

Standing stones, 60

Sun, 30

Sun-gods, Babylonia, 99 Egypt, 140, 148 Phenician, 176 Arabian, 219

Supreme Being, an object of primitive worship? 36

Survival of savage state in the great religions, 21

Synagogue, 212

Syncretism, of gods in Egypt, 148

Taboo, 72

Taoism, 121

Taylor, Dr. I. , 247, 248

Temples, not primitive, 72 Babylonia, 99 Egyptian, 128, 130, 136 Phenician and Jewish, 178 Greek, 292 Roman, 318, 323

Teraphim, 188

Teutons, 256. See Germans

Thunder, 30, 265, 270

Tiele, Dr. C. P. , 15

Totemism, 58, 135, 277

Transmigration, 302, 351, 368

Tree-worship, primitive, 32, 59, 278 Babylonia, 101 Canaanites, 172 Arabia, 219 Greece, 278

Tribal religion, 57, 77, 427

Tylor, Mr. , _Primitive Culture_, 10, 20, 25, 29, 39, 62, 63, 68

Under-world, the, Babylonia, 100, 102 Egypt, 140, 142, 152

Unity of all religion, 4

Universal deities of the Aryans, 252

Universalism, in O. T. Prophets, 195 in Islam, 240 in Christianity, 419

Urim and Thummim, 188

Vedic hymns, 328

Vedic religion, 324, _sqq. _ its gods, 326 is it early or late? 331

Vow, original meaning of, 75

Waitz and Gerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, 29

Wellhausen, J. , 163, 218

Wells, sacred, 32, 57, 59

Worship, an essential element of religion, 9 primitive, 66 Chinese, 112 Egyptian, 147 Canaanite, 173 Israelite, 187 Jewish, 207 Roman, 309 See Sacrifice

Zeus, etymology of, 250, 286, 296

Zoomorphism, 53

Zoroaster, 384 his call, 388 his doctrine, 391

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