CHAPTER IINTRODUCTORYOver the chancel-arch of the church at South Leigh, a few miles west of Oxford, is a fresco of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection, of the type well known in mediÆval art. On the adjoining south wall stands the stately figure of the archangel Michael. In his right hand he holds a pair of scales. In one scale is the figure of a soul in the attitude of prayer; beside it is Our Lady carrying a rosary. The other contains an ox-headed demon blowing a horn. This scale rises steadily, though another demon has climbed to the beam above to weigh it down, and a third from hell's mouth below endeavours to drag it towards the abyss. The same theme recurs in several other English churches; and it is carved over the portals of many French cathedrals, as at Notre Dame in Paris. Unroll a papyrus from an Egyptian tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty before the days of Moses, and you will see a somewhat similar The scenes and the persons differ; but the fundamental conception of judgment is the same, and it is carried out by the same method. Is this an accidental coincidence of metaphor? Surely men of low degree are vanity, The mysterious hand wrote upon the wall of Belshazzar's palace the strange word Tekel, which contained the dreadful sentence, "Thou art weighed in the balances and art found wanting." To early Indian imagination, before the days of the Buddha (500 B.C.), the ordeal of the balance was part of the outlook into the world beyond. In the ancient Persian teaching, Rashnu, the angel of justice, before the shining "Friend," the mediator Mithra, presided over the weighing of the spirits at the bridge of destiny, over which they would pass to heaven or hell. Is Michael the heir of Thoth or Rashnu? He passed into the Christian Church from the Jewish Synagogue, where he was specially connected with the destinies of the dead. He guided the souls of the just to the heavenly world, where he led them into the mystic city, the counterpart of Jerusalem below; or he stood at the gate as the angel of righteousness to decide who should be admitted. So for the Greeks Hermes was the guardian of the spirits of the departed, whom he conducted The religion of the ancient Hindus was founded, as every one knows, upon the venerable hymns collected into one sacred book under the name of the Rig Veda. These hymns, 1017 in number, containing over Just at this era, by a singular coincidence, a remarkable controversy was raging in the schools of Mohammedan theology. Mohammed died in A.D. 632. He had himself recorded nothing; the traditions about him are not even On such hints was founded the remarkable doctrine that the Koran was eternal in its essence as the word of God, a necessary attribute of the Most High. First formulated in the middle of the eighth century (A.D. 747-748), it roused extraordinary interest outside the theological schools. It was fostered by the early Caliphs, for it supported their political authority, and the emphasis which it placed on the doctrine of predestination supplied them with a potent weapon. Opposition Every great historical religion passes through numerous phases, as it is brought into contact with different cultures, and evokes various forms of speculative thought and inward But in the course of several generations remarkable changes took place. Environed by philosophical speculations, Buddhism could not remain wholly unaffected by the great ideas of metaphysics. While one branch, now surviving in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, remained faithful to the Founder's exclusion of all such conceptions as being, substance, and the like, others began to interpret the person of the Buddha in terms of the Absolute, and identified him with the Eternal and the Self-Existent, who from time to time for the welfare of the world took on himself the semblance of humanity, and appeared to be born, to attain Enlightenment, and die. The great aim of the deliverance of all sentient beings from error, suffering, and guilt, expressed itself further in the association with him of numerous other holy forms sharing the same purpose of the world's salvation. Among these was the Buddha AmitÂbha, the Buddha of Boundless Light,[ His disciple Shin-ran carried the doctrine of his master yet a little farther. Filled with adoring gratitude to the Buddha of Boundless Light, who, as the deliverer, was also the Buddha of Boundless Life, he argued that infinite mercy and infinite wisdom must belong to him; and these in their turn implied the The foregoing sketches raise many problems. What are the actual features in different religions which are susceptible of comparison? How can we distinguish between resemblances which are deep-seated and spring from the fundamental principles of two given faiths, and those which are only on the surface, and probably accidental? How far can such parallels be ascribed to suggestion through historical contact, and, if they lie too far apart for possibilities of any form of mutual dependence, out of what common types of experience are they derived, what forces of thought have shaped them, what feelings do they express? The student of Comparative Religion seeks answers to these and similar questions. A vast field of inquiry is at once opened before him. It embraces practically every continent, people, and tribe on the face of the globe. It begins in the last period of the great ice age, when men lived in this country in the company of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the mammoth, and hunted their game through The first objects of comparison are thus found in the outward acts which fall more or less clearly within the sphere of religion, the places where these are performed, the persons who do them, the means required for them, the occasions to which they are attached. These all belong to the external world; they can be observed and recorded, even though we may not be sure what they mean. When they are brought together, a series of gradations of complexity can be established, while a common purpose may be traced through all. Behind the external act lies the internal world of thought and feeling. The social sanction may invest the ceremony itself with so much force that the worshipper's interest may lie rather in the due performance of the rite than in the deity to whom it is addressed. The element of belief may be relatively vague and indefinite. But in the more highly organised religions belief also may externalise itself through hymn and prayer, through myth and history and prophecy. When a religion is strong enough to create a literature, a fresh object of comparison is presented. The utterances of poet and sage, of lawgiver and seer, can be set side by side. Their conceptions of the Powers towards which worship is directed can be studied; the characters and functions of the several deities can be determined. This There remains the element of feeling. This also may be so entangled in tradition, so enveloped in the pressure of surrounding influences, that it is at first obscure and indistinct. But its importance was early recognised when the origin of religion was ascribed to fear, in the oft-quoted line of the Roman Satirist Petronius Arbiter at the court of Nero (who committed suicide A.D. 66)— "Primus in orbe deos fecit timor. In the eighteenth century the genius of Lessing (1729-1781) fastened on the feeling of the heart as the essential foundation of religion. No written record, no historical event, could guarantee its truth; that lay in the constitution of the human spirit in its interpretation of its experience. In his famous drama of "Nathan the Sage" he applied this to the representatives of three great historical religions which were thus brought together for comparison: the Christian Templar, the Mohammedan Saladin, and the Jew Nathan. Herder (1744-1803) endeavoured with the What, then, is the basis of comparison among different faiths? The student who is engaged in tracing the life-history of any one religion will naturally start from the field of investigation thus selected. As he widens his outlook he will find that a number of illustrative instances force themselves upon his view. The people whose institutions and ideas he is examining are members of a given ethnic group. The ancient Hebrews, for instance, belong on the one side to the life of the desert, and are kin with the nomad Arabs, That such inquiries must be conducted without prejudice need not now be enforced. An eighteenth-century writer might lay it down that "the first general division of Religion is into True and False," and might draw the conclusion that "the chapter of False Religions is by much the longest in the History of the religious opinions and practices of mankind."[ "Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One, The materials of comparison are, of course, of the most varied kind. The interest of the ancient Greeks was early roused in the diverse practices which they saw around them, and the observations of Herodotus concerning the Egyptians, the Persians, the Scythians, and many another tribe upon the fringe of barbarism, have earned for him the modern title of the "Father of Anthropology." Travellers, missionaries, government officers, men of trade and men of learning, have recorded the usages of the lower culture all over the world, naturally with varying accuracy and penetration, and a vast range of facts has been registered through successive stages of complexity in social and religious development. Many of these have their parallel in the folklore of countries where the uniformity of modern civilisation has not crushed out all traditional beliefs, while annual customs or even village games may contain survivals of what were once important ceremonial rites. The irruption of the Arab conquerors into Europe brought Christianity face to face with Mohammedanism and its sacred book. In the Meanwhile the lovers of the past were at work in many other directions. The Swedish Lonrott collected the ancient songs of the Finnic people, under the name of the Kalevala. Other scholars brought to light the treasures of Scandinavian mythology in the Icelandic Edda with its two collections of poetry and prose. In Wales and Ireland the texts which enshrined the Celtic faith awoke new interest. The students of classical antiquity began to The last century has thus accumulated an immense mass of material in literature and art. There are codes of law regulating in the name of deity the practice of family and social life. There are hymns of praise or of penitence, sometimes in strange association with the spells of magic. There are books of ritual and sacrifice, of ceremonial order, of philosophical speculation and moral precept. There are rules of discipline for religious communities; and there are pictures of judgment and delineations of the heavenly life. Sculpture and painting have been employed to give external form to the objects of pious reverence; and the architecture of the sanctuary has wrought into stone the fundamental conceptions of majesty, proportion, and grace. All this, it is plain, rests upon history. When Confucius visited the seat of the imperial dynasty at the court of Chow, he studied with deep interest the arrangements for the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth; he surveyed the ancestral temples in which the emperor offered his worship; he inspected the Hall of Light whose walls bore paintings of the sovereigns from the remotest times; and then he turned to his disciples with the remark: "As we use a glass to examine the forms of things, so must we study the past to But behind the external evolution of a given religion, its modes of worship, its ministers, its doctrines, lie more complicated questions. What causes shaped these acts and moulded these beliefs? What elements of race are to be discerned in them? How can we account for the diversities between the religions of peoples belonging to a common stock, like those of India and those of ancient Italy? What have been the effects of climate, of the struggle with alien peoples and new environment? How does the food-supply influence And, lastly, the values of these facts must be estimated. How far can they be accepted as expressing the reality of the Unseen Power, and man's relation to it? Hierology may explain how men have developed certain practices or framed certain beliefs; to determine their reasonableness is the task of the philosophy of religion or hierosophy.[ The study of "Comparative Religion" assumes that religion is already in existence. It deals with actual usages, which it places side by side to see what light they can throw upon each other. It leaves the task of Three hundred years ago Edward Herbert,[ The theory held its ground in various forms till its last echoes appeared in highly theologic guise in the writings of Mr. Gladstone. He pleaded that there must have been a true religion in the world before an untrue one began to gather and incrust upon it, and this religion included three great doctrines—the existence of the Triune Deity, the advent of a Redeemer, and the power of the Evil One and the defeat of the rebel angels. These had formed part of a primeval revelation. In the Homeric theology he traced the first in the three sons of Kronos—Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon. The second he found in Apollo, whose mother Leto represented the Woman from whom the Redeemer should descend. The rebel angels were equated with the Titans; It is on this great idea that the whole study of the history of religion is now firmly established. At the foundation of all endeavours to classify the multitudinous facts which it embraces, lies the conviction that whatever may be the occasional instances of degeneration or decline, the general movement of human things advances from the cruder and less complex to the more refined and developed. In the range of knowledge, in the sphere of the arts, in the command over nature, in the stability and expansion of the social order, there are everywhere signs of growth, even if isolated groups, such as the Australians, the Todas of India, or the Veddas of Ceylon, seem to be in the last stages of stagnation or decay. Religion is one phase of human culture, it expresses man's attitude to the powers around him and the events of life. Its various forms repose upon the unity of the race. The anthropologist is convinced that if a new tribe is discovered in some forest in central Africa, whether its stature be large or small, its And just as the general theory of evolution includes the unity of bodily structure and mental faculty, so it will vindicate what may be called the unity of the religious consciousness. The old classifications based on the idea that religions consisted of a body of doctrines which must be true or false, reached by natural reflection or imparted by supernatural revelation, disappear before a wider view. Theologies may be many, but religion is one. It was after this truth that the Vedic seers were groping when they cried, "Men call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; sages name variously him who is but one"; or again, "the sages in their hymns give many forms to him "Great Sun Power! I am praying for my people that they may be happy in the summer "Help us, Mother Earth! for we depend upon your goodness. Let there be rain to water the prairies, that the grass may grow long and the berries be abundant. "O Morning Star! when you look down upon us, give us peace and refreshing sleep. "Great Spirit! bless our children, friends, and visitors through a happy life. May our trails lie straight and level before us. Let us live to be old. We are all your children, and ask these things with good hearts." CHAPTER IITHE PANORAMA OF RELIGIONSTwice in the history of the world has it been possible to survey a wide panorama of religions, and twice has the interest of travellers, men of science, and students of philosophy, been attracted by the immense variety of worships and beliefs. In the second century of our era the Roman Empire embraced an extraordinary range of nationalities within its sway. In the twentieth the whole history of the human race has been thrown open to the explorer, and an overwhelming mass of materials from every land confronts him. It may be worth while to take a hasty glance at the chief groups of facts that are thus disclosed, and make a sort of map of their relations. I The scientific curiosity of the ancient Greeks was early awakened, and Thales of Miletus (624-546 B.C.), chief of the seven "wise men," and founder of Greek geometry and philosophy, was believed to have studied under the priests of Egypt, as well as to have When the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) threw open the gates of Asia, a stream of travellers passed into Persia and India, whose reports were utilised by the geographers of later days. The religion of Zoroaster, whose name was already known to Plato, attracted great attention. At the court of Chandragupta on the Ganges, at the opening of the third century B.C., Megasthenes, Meanwhile the great library and schools at Alexandria had been founded. Hither came students from many lands; and the Christian fathers Eusebius and Epiphanius in the fourth century attributed to the librarian of the royal patron of literature, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), the design of collecting the sacred books of the Ethiopians, Indians, Persians, Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Phoenicians, Syrians, and Greeks. The Jews had settled in Alexandria in considerable numbers; they began to translate their Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and little by little they planted their synagogues all round the Eastern Mediterranean, and finally established their worship in Rome. The Egyptian deities in their turn went abroad. The worship of Serapis was introduced at Athens. Isis, the sister-wife of The introduction of Greek gods had begun centuries before. As early as 493 B.C., at a time of serious famine, a temple had been built to Demeter, Dionysus, and PersephonÊ; many others followed; resemblances among the native gods quickly led to identifications; and new forms of worship tended to displace the old. After another crisis (206 B.C.) the "Great Mother," CybelÊ, the Phrygian goddess of Mount Ida, was imported. The black aerolite which was supposed to be her abode, was presented by King Attalus to the ambassadors of the Roman senate. The goddess was solemnly welcomed at the Port of Ostia, and was ultimately carried by noble Roman ladies on to the Palatine hill. The history of later days was full of notes upon religion. CÆsar interspersed them among the narratives of his campaigns in Gaul; Tacitus drew on his recollections as In Rome, where ritual tradition held its ground with extraordinary tenacity amid the By this time the origin of the term "religion" had begun to excite interest, as its meaning began slowly to change. Varro's contemporaries, Cicero (106-43 B.C.) and Lucretius (about 97-53), discussed its derivation. Cicero connected it with the root legere, to "string together," to "arrange"; while Lucretius found its origin in ligare, to "bind." Philology gives little help when it But, on the other hand, a new use of it passes into Roman literature in the writings of Cicero. The feeling of awe still lies in the background, but the word takes on a reference to the acts which it prompts, and thus comes to denote the whole group of rites performed in honour of some divine being. These make up a particular cult or worship, ordained and sanctioned by authority or tradition. "Religion" thus comes to mean a body of religious duties, the entire series of sacred acts in which Of these "religions" history and philosophy sought to give some account. As will be seen hereafter (Chap. VI), Babylon and Egypt both claimed a divine origin for their rites, their arts, and laws. Plutarch expressly defends the idea of revelation in the cases of Minos of Crete, the Persian Zoroaster, Zaleucus the shepherd legislator of the Locrians, Numa of Rome, and others. Pan was in love with Pindar, and Æsculapius conversed with Sophocles: if such divine diversions were allowed, how much more should these greater Philosophers, on the other hand, discussed the meaning of religion upon different lines. A wide-spread view already noted presented it as a mere instrument of policy, devised to overawe the intractable. The diversity of religions seemed to support this view. Plato's Athenian, in one of his latest works, the Laws, mentions the teaching of sophists who averred that the gods existed not by nature but by art, and by the laws of States which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them. In a fragment of a drama on Sisyphus ascribed to Critias, the friend of Alcibiades, it was alleged that in the primeval age of disorder and violence laws might strike crimes committed in open day, but could not touch secret sins, hidden in the gloomy depths of conscience. A sage advised that to moralise men they must be made afraid. Let them invent gods who could see and hear all things, cognisant not only of all human actions but also of men's inmost thoughts and purposes. They were accordingly connected with the source of the most terrifying and the most beneficent phenomena, the sky, home alike of thunder and lightning, of the shining sun and fertilising From another point of view, however, the practical universality of religion was again and again cited in proof of its truth. Antiquity was not scientific in its method of treatment, and though it did not accept all religions as altogether equal, it had no difficulty in regarding them as substantially homogeneous. The Egyptian worship of animals might be lashed with satiric scorn, but the mysteries of its religion, venerable from an immemorial past, deserved the highest respect. The process of identification of the gods of different religions was always going on as they were carried from land to land. The Apologist, therefore, like the Cretan Cleinias in Plato's Laws when the Athenian stranger asked him to prove the existence of the gods, could always appeal to two main arguments—first, the fair order of the universe and the regularity of the seasons, and secondly, the common belief of all men, both Hellenes and barbarians. This common belief, however, itself required explanation. Its value The term logos has played a famous part in philosophical theology. It appears in our New Testament at the opening of the fourth Gospel, "In the beginning was the Logos." Our translators render the Greek term by the English "Word." It is derived from the verb legein, to "speak" or "say." Logos is primarily "what is said," utterance, or speech. Speech, however, must mean something. When we look out upon the objects of the world around us—rock, river, tree, horse, star—we learn to separate them into groups, because while some say quite different things to us, others speak to us, as it were, with nearly the same meaning. We recognise a common meaning in various sorts of dogs, or in still larger classes such as the whole family of birds. But in human intercourse what is said has first been thought. Logos thus takes on another meaning; it is what thinking says to itself, or what we call "reason." The processes of science consist in finding out these meanings or reasons, and getting them into intelligible relations with each other. The philosophy of Heracleitus "the Obscure" (at Ephesus, 500 B.C.) has received in modern times widely different interpretations; but whether or not the Stoics were right in understanding his doctrine of the Logos to imply the existence of a cosmic reason universally diffused, present both in nature and man, it is certain that such ideas appear soon afterwards in Greek literature. Pindar affirms the derivation of the soul from the gods. Plato and Euripides declare the intelligence of man both in nature and origin to be divine; and Pseudo-Epicharmus lays it down (in the second half of the fifth century) that "there is in man understanding, and there is also a divine Logos; but the understanding of man is born from the divine Logos." On this basis the Stoics worked out the conception of a fellowship between man and God which explained the universality of religion. Its seat was in human nature. Every one shared in the Generative Reason, the Seminal Word (the Logos spermatikos). In the long course of ages, says Cicero, when the time arrived for the sowing of the human race, God quickened it with the gift of souls. So we possess a certain kinship with the heavenly The part played by this doctrine in the early Church is well known. When the new faith began to attract the attention of the educated, it was impossible that the resemblances between Christian and Hellenic monotheism should be ignored. Philosophy had reached many of the same truths, and poets and sages bore the same witness to the unity and spirituality of God as the prophets and psalmists of Israel. It was easy to suggest that the Hebrew seers had been the teachers of the Greek; might not Plato, for instance, have learned of Jeremiah in Egypt? On the other hand, the pleas of chronological and literary dependence might be insufficient; there were radical differences as well as resemblances; the Apologist might deride the diversities of opinion and make merry over the contradictions of the schools. Nevertheless Christianity was often presented by its defenders as "our philosophy." The Latin writer Minucius Felix (in the second century) is so much struck by the parallels in the higher thought that he boldly declares, "One might think either that Christians are now philosophers, or that philosophers were then already Christian." The martyr Justin (about The cultivated and mystical Clement, who became head of the catechetical school of Alexandria towards the close of the second century, enforced the same theme. An enormous reader, he loved to compare the Such comparisons, however, had a very different side. Greece had long had its secret mysteries, with their sacred initiations, their rites of purity and enlightenment, their promises of welfare beyond the grave. When the new deities from Asia Minor, from Egypt, Syria, and the further East, were brought to Italy, the resemblances of their practice to that of the Christian Church excited the For a time the rivalry was acute, as his worship was carried through the West as far as York and Chester and the Tyne. But with the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century the sounds of conflict die away. The men of learning, Eusebius of CÆsarea (about A.D. 260-340), Augustine (A.D. 354-430) bishop of Hippo, surveyed the religions and philosophies of antiquity as conquerors. The faiths of Egypt, Phoenicia, Greece, and Rome, are passed in review. With a broad sweep of learning Eusebius comments on the ancient mythologies, the oracles, the theory of demons, II The panorama of religions unrolled before the student of the present day is far vaster than that which offered itself to the thinkers of Greece and Rome, and its meaning is far better understood. When Pausanias describes the daily sacrifice to a hero at Tronis in Phocis, where the blood of the victim was poured down through a hole in the grave to the dead man within, while the flesh was eaten on the spot, he notes, like the careful author of a guide-book, a curious local usage, but he does not know that it belongs to a group of From continent to continent a multitude of observers have gathered an immense range of facts, which show that amid numerous differences in detail the religions of the lower culture may all be ranked together on the basis of a common interpretation of the surrounding world. Philosophy suggests that man can only explain nature in terms of his own experience. He is encompassed by powers that are continually acting on him, as he to a much smaller extent can in his turn act on them. By various processes of observation and reflection (p. 85), he comes to the conclusion that within his body lives something which enables it to move and feel and think and will, until at death it goes away. To this mysterious something many names are given, and for purposes of modern study they are all ranked under the term "spirits." This explanation is then applied to the behaviour of all kinds of objects within Such religions belong to no specific ethnic group. They appear either in existing practice or in the shape of occasional survivals in all of the three great racial divisions of mankind—the white or Caucasic, the yellow or Mongolian, and the black or Negroid. They are to be found under the Equator and among the Arctic snows. They are sometimes associated with a peculiar form of social structure regulating inter-tribal relations known as totemism. It was at one time supposed that this designated a stage of evolution through which all peoples had passed. The totem or clan-sign, whether animal or plant, or more rarely an inanimate object like wind, sun, or star, was supposed to have The higher forms of animistic religion pass out into polytheisms of more or less dignity. They do not succeed in embodying themselves in permanent literary product, they create no In the old world Asia has been the mother of religions, but various fates have befallen her offspring. The ancient cults of Babylonia, after an existence longer than the period from Moses to the present day, vanished from the scene. The teachings of Zoroaster were planted in China in A.D. 621, and a temple was erected at the capital, Changan; but the Persian faith could not maintain itself in such a different culture. After the Mohammedan conquest in the eighth century it was finally carried by a little band of exiles into India, and is still cherished by their descendants who bear the name of Parsees. The Jew and the Christian have only a precarious toleration in the land which was once their home. In India and in China alone is the religion of to-day linked in unbroken continuity with the distant past. Islam may set itself in lineal succession to the teachers of old, and claim a place for Mohammed in the sequence of Abraham, Moses, and Christ. But it is the youngest, and in some respects the least original, of the world's great faiths. India has its own panorama of religions, from the animistic practice of the tribes of the jungle and the hills, up to the refined pantheism of the philosophical school. Diversities of race have been strangely intermingled, and fifty languages make it impossible to secure any uniformity of culture. There are the descendants of the ancient inhabitants who occupied the country before The literary foundation of the religions of India lies in the ancient hymns of the Rig Veda, sung by the immigrant Aryans as they entered from the North-west and gradually established themselves in the Ganges valley. These hymns were addressed to gods of earth and air and sky; they celebrated the glories of dawn and day; they told of the conflict between sunshine and storm; they praised Agni, the god of fire, messenger between heaven and earth, himself as agent of the sacrifice a kind of priest among the gods; they commemorated the dead who passed into the upper world and adorned the sky with stars. Already in some of the later hymns the poet's thought endeavoured to find some principle or power that should unite these different agencies as manifestations of one ultimate reality; and philosophic imagination at length fixed on the conception of Brahman, a term whose original meaning Meantime the social order was acquiring the first forms of caste. The priests and the fighting men, the people who settled on the lands for pasture and tillage, and the tribes of aborigines whom they dispossessed and subdued, formed the basis of divisions which were gradually multiplied with extraordinary complexity. A religious authority was found for the whole system in the teachings of the Veda, and to contest its claims was to defy the power which slowly spread with subtle hold through the whole peninsula. By its side arose the doctrine of the Deed (karma, p. 217), which explained the varied conditions of human life by the principle that Out of these elements, a crude and ever-varying animism at the bottom, a highly refined metaphysical pantheism at the top, figures of incarnation and deliverance, the cultus of the dead, caste, and transmigration, the complex strands of modern Hinduism have been woven. Many have been the growths upon the way. The early Buddhist texts, representing the society of the "Middle Country," show already in the fifth century B.C. a surprising activity of speculation, busily engaged in questioning every received doctrine of religion and morals. Some forms held their ground for a few centuries and then disappeared. One religious community of that date alone survives, viz. the Jains, who still number about a million and a third. Buddhism, after sending out its missionaries into Ceylon in the south and China in the north, was driven from its ancient seats, and But Hinduism still lives on with a marvellous and self-renewing power. Two great divine figures have been set beside the original creative Brahma, representatives of the forces that preserve and destroy, Vishnu and Çiva (p. 128). Vishnu succeeded to the place of the Buddha; and Hindu religion gave prominence in him to the conception of a Divine Person who out of love for man assumed human shape to conquer evil and establish truth. The worship of Çiva has been carried everywhere by the Brahmans; if he destroys, he also reproduces; he, too, appears to bless and help, and the Tamil poets of South India in the early Middle Ages sang his praises in hymns that still feed the piety of the people. Again and again reforming teachers have initiated movements on behalf of spiritual religion. Their followers have multiplied and broken up into sects, but still remain within the general area of the ancestral faith, which now embraces considerably more than 200 million souls. The disciples of Nanak (1469-1538), however, known as Sikhs, formed into a semi-military organisation by the Guru Gobind "the Lion" (1675-1708), retain their religious independence, China, like India, illustrates the principle of religious continuity. Its earliest historic date is fixed by an eclipse in 776 B.C.; and the traditions of its dynasties stretch more than a thousand years beyond. The ancient religion depicted in the books known as the Shu and the ShÎ Kings, which Confucius (550-478 B.C.) was supposed to have edited out of much older documents, rested upon the solemn order of the living Heaven and Earth, with multitudinous ranks of associated spirits, and the generations of the dead. This has remained the formal basis of the national religion (p. 97). Meanwhile the ethical sayings of Confucius acquired extraordinary ascendency. They formed the chief element in the national education, and supplied the ideals of popular culture. Carried into Japan in the sixth century of our era, they filled a gap in the old Japanese teaching, which we know by the name of Shin-To or "Spirits' way." Confucius himself became the object of general commemorative homage; and annual ceremonies are still celebrated in his honour with great splendour in the Confucian temples which adorn every city within the empire above a certain rank.[ In the popular religion demonology and magic play a constant part, and numerous growths out of the worship of ancestors provide ever fresh additions to the higher ranks of spirits. These are regulated by decrees of the Board of Rites, one of the most ancient religious institutions in China. The spirit of a departed governor, perhaps two centuries ago, is believed to have appeared in time of flood, and by his beneficent influence dangers have been averted. Memorials are sent up to Peking by the local authorities, and after repeated manifestations divine honours are awarded. Beneath these august personages are the spirits which preside over the trades and professions, over the parts of a house—the door, the bed, or the kitchen range—over the breeding of domestic animals, and a large variety of occupations, to say nothing of medicine and disease, the limbs of the body, and the stars. They are analogous to the Kami, the equivalent powers in Japan (p. 91); and they are not without parallel in religions further west. Half a century before Confucius, in 604, was born another sage, known in history as Lao Tsze. Fragments of his teaching are embodied in a small book of aphorisms, concerned with the doctrine of the Tao, the way, the path, or course. In nature this corresponded to the ordered round of the seasons, and the regularities which we call laws. In man it might be seen in the line of right The statements about the appearance of Buddhist teachers and Buddhist books in China before our era have been much disputed: the first trustworthy record relates that in the year A.D. 65, a deputation of eighteen persons was sent to Khotan to make inquiries, and they returned two years later with books and images and a teacher. A second teacher arrived shortly after, a temple was built at the imperial capital, Lo-Yang, and the laborious work of translation was begun. A stream of missionaries, Hindus, Parthians, Huns, slowly flowed into the Flowery Land, "moved," says the chronicler, "by the desire to convert the world." After a while the Chinese students sought the holy places in India, and learned Sanskrit at the great Buddhist university at Nalanda, near Buddha Opposed again and again by the Confucian literati, its temples destroyed, its religious houses suppressed, its monks and nuns driven back into the world, Buddhism has still lived on. It has created impressive devotions, and generated numerous sects. It has spread through Corea, Mongolia, and Japan; on the west it is planted in Tibet. It has exercised immense influence on Chinese culture; architecture, art and letters being all deeply indebted to it. In numerical estimates of different religions common in the last century Buddhism always headed the list, for the whole population of China—vaguely reckoned at 400,000,000—was included in its fold. Such estimates are no longer trustworthy.[ Yet another great religion, the latest born among the higher faiths of the world, has established itself in both India and China. The first Mohammedan invasion of India took place in A.D. 664. The followers of the prophet are now reckoned at more than 66 millions. In 628 Mohammed himself sent his uncle to China with presents to the Emperor. He travelled by sea to Canton, where the first mosque was afterwards built. Islam, resignation or submission to the will of God, was the name given to his religion by the prophet himself, who died in A.D. 632. But in the hands of his first followers submission was no passive virtue. Tradition ascribed to him the idea of addressing all known sovereigns, and promising them safety if they accepted the faith. His successors, therefore, conceived that the fulfilment of Allah's will demanded a resolute effort to make known the new revelation. A fierce burst of missionary effort carried the Moslem armies far and wide. In the year of Mohammed's death they attacked Persia and Syria; a few years later they invaded Egypt. Within the first century they had entered India, and had swept through north Africa into Spain. But they had twice been obliged to retreat from Constantinople, and in 732 they were defeated on the Loire by Charles Martel near Tours, and forced to retire behind the Pyrenees. With the same astonishing energy they Like the higher religions of India, like Judaism in its long and chequered career whether in Palestine or in the Dispersion, like the "universal religions" of Buddhism and Christianity, Mohammedanism has known how to accommodate itself to very different levels of culture. In the Arabian deserts much of the earlier animism still remains. It is not rudely expelled either at the present day as Islam advances through Africa. Other impulses have worked in different directions. There are religious orders and mendicant ascetics. There are mystical schools of refined spirituality, to which the influences of Neo-platonism, of Christianity, and Buddhism, have all contributed. Sufiism (as this type of thought is called) was fed from various sources, and has assumed different forms in different countries, but its best-known literary products came from the great poets of Persia. From that subtle race issues the most remarkable movement which modern Mohammedanism has produced. In 1844 a young man not twenty-five years of age, named Ali Mohammed, of Shiraz, appeared under the title of the "Bab" or Gate. Disciples gathered round him, and the movement was not checked by his arrest, his imprisonment for nearly six years, and his final execution in 1850. Thirteen years later one of his disciples named BahÁ-ullah, "Splendour of God," announced CHAPTER IIIRELIGION IN THE LOWER CULTUREReligion presents itself in its most obvious form as a mode of activity. It is seen in some kind of behaviour; it prompts a particular sort of conduct. Behind the customs and rites which are its visible sign lie certain thoughts and feelings, often dim, indistinct, obscure. In the totality of its beliefs, emotions, and institutions, it is as much the product of the human spirit as poetry, or art, science, morals, and law. It will therefore always bear some kind of relation to the general circumstances of the social development to which it belongs. The interpretation of the surrounding scene which is implied in its intellectual outlook will vary with the elements of the scene itself. But the limits of variation are much smaller than might be expected. The questions "why" and "how" may be answered very differently under the Equator and within the Arctic zone, but they are the same questions, and spring from common impulses of thought. Moreover, while race, climate, and economic conditions may all vary, it happens to all men to be born Religion always implies some kind of want. The young husband wants male children, the hunter game, the warrior victory, the diviner the knowledge of secrets, the saint holiness. The wants may be crude or refined, the satisfaction of a physical appetite, protection against some anticipated danger, the realisation of an exalted spiritual fellowship. But religion suggests that there is some Power capable of satisfying these wants, and undertakes to provide the means for setting man in proper relations with it. All round him are the objects and forces of the visible world. He learns by degrees that some help him to gratify his desires, and others hinder them. There are many things that he cannot understand, and some of which he dimly feels that he must not presume to try: he is only conscious towards them of a strange wonder and awe; they are uncanny; he cannot bring them into his experience; he must not meddle with them, he must keep away. But other things are more kindly, and fulfil his hopes. Out of such vague consciousness he gradually frames a working method. Some sort It is plain at once that no records remain of what is still sometimes called "primitive religion." Even tribes that seem to be living in the Stone Age have as long a past behind them as any European of light and leading. Whatever the beliefs may be that belong to any given stage of social culture, they are not new inventions, they depend on immemorial tradition. And they are not, as now cherished, the results of individual research or reflection. They are held in common by all the members of the tribe, so that they have a kind of collective force. No doubt in the long process of their formation and transmission modifications may have been introduced, as some elder, shrewder than his fellows, gave new emphasis to some leading idea, or suggested the adoption of some fresh action. Trace them back into the dim realm of conjecture, and some mind With religion is constantly associated, both in historical record and in the lower forms of present-day practice, another kind of activity known as Magic. The relation between them has been variously interpreted. The modern anthropologist, Dr. Frazer, finds himself in unexpected agreement with the philosopher Hegel in supposing that magic was the first to appear upon the scene. It is represented as a kind of primitive science, founded on certain elementary axioms, such as that "like produces like," or that things once in contact with each other will continue to act upon each other when the contact is broken. The Central Australian performs elaborate ceremonies to stimulate the multiplication of the totem which provides the supply of food for his tribe. Suppose it is the witchetty grub. A kind of pantomime is performed representing the emergence of the One of the commonest illustrations is the attempt to compass the death of an enemy by injuring or destroying an image or figure supposed to correspond to him. Such images were made in ancient Babylonia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. One North American Indian will draw a figure of his adversary in the sand, or in ashes, and prick it with a sharp stick. Another will make a wooden image, and insert a needle into the head or the heart. Clay is used for the purpose by the African Matabele, wax in Arabia, the guelder rose in Japan, materials of all kinds in India. In Scotland the corp chre, as it was called, was a clay body, which was stuck full of pins, nails, and broken bits of glass, and set in a running stream with its head to the current; a modern specimen from Inverness-shire may be seen in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Is all this really as Dr. Frazer supposes, prior to the birth of religion, and does man only turn to the propitiation of superior powers when he cannot get what he wants through magic? Of that process no evidence can be offered. The essence of magic lies in some kind of compulsion or constraint. Through the proper spell, or through the will of the magician, In such experiences lie the roots of both religion and magic. In their earliest forms they may be as difficult to discriminate as the simplest types of animal and vegetable life. If it be asked what distinguishes them outwardly, when both are transmitted by tradition, both rest upon custom, it may be answered that religion is concerned with what tends to the stability of the community. Its interests are those of the group. It supplies the bond of united action for clan or tribe or people. It is pre-eminently social; it expresses itself in ceremonies, feasts, and rites in which all can join, or in commands which all can obey. Even the Australians, so poor in elements of worship, have tribal laws which have been imparted to them from on high (Chap. VII). Over against the community stands the individual, object of all kinds of jealousies and enmities. All sorts of antisocial arts may be practised for his destruction. The pointing-stick of Australia provides a common magical weapon. It is carried away into a lonely spot in the bush, and the intending user plants it in the ground, crouches down over it, and mutters a curse against the object of his hatred: "May your heart be rent asunder, may your backbone be split open!" Then Of course magic may also be used for the benefit of the individual, and the practice of exorcism for the cure of diseases caused through possession by evil spirits long found shelter in some branches of the Christian Church. The kinship between Magic and Religion is clearly marked when the priest takes the place of the devil-dancer or the medicine man. Yet they are on different planes; religion is prescribed and official, and demands specific services; magic falls into the background, it becomes a secret, perhaps a forbidden, art. Nevertheless, between religion and antisocial magic lies a large group of rites, essentially magical in character, like the North American Indian rain-dances or the totem-ceremonies of the Arunta in Central Australia, designed for the general welfare. Even in much higher cultures the spell frequently mingles with the prayer, and ceremonies of sacrifice carry with them elements of compulsion or constraint. What traces, then, do the phases of religion in the lower culture exhibit of a view of the world and its powers out of which these diverging lines of practice might emerge? Among the North American Indians similar conceptions may be traced. The Algonquin manitou represents a subtle property believed to exist everywhere in nature, though some persons and objects possess more of it than others. Among the Sioux the sun, the moon, the stars, thunder, wind, are all wakanda. So are certain trees and animals, the cedar, the snake, the grey elephant; and mystery-places like a particular lake in North Dakota, or some peculiar rocks on the Yellowstone River. The term carries with it power and sacredness; it belongs to what is ancient, grand, and animate. The Iroquoian tribes designate this mysterious force orenda. It expresses an incalculable energy, manifested in rocks and streams and tides; in plants and trees, in animals and man; it belongs to the earth and its mountains; it breathes in the winds and is heard in the thunder; the clouds move by it, day and night follow each other through it; it dwells in sun, moon, and stars. The shy bird or quadruped which it is difficult to snare or kill, possesses it; so does the skilful hunter; it gives victory in intertribal games of skill, and is the secret force of endurance or speed of foot. The prophet or the soothsayer discloses the future by its aid; and whatever is believed to have been instrumental in accomplishing some purpose or obtaining some good, finds in orenda the source of its effectiveness. Not dissimilar is the conception of mulungu among the Yaos, east of Lake Nyassa. The term is wide-spread through the eastern group of Bantu tongues, and is said to have the meaning of "Old One" or "Great One"; and in this sense it has been employed as equivalent to God. But we are expressly told that in its native use and form it does not imply personality. Etymologically it ranks with the leg, arm, heart, head, of the human frame. Yet it denotes rather a state or property inhering in something, like life or health in the body, than any single object. It indicates a kind of supernormal energy, displayed in actual experience, but not to be detected by any physical sense. It is the agent of wonder and mystery; the rainbow is mulungu; and it sums up at once the creative energy which made the earth and animals and man, and the powers which operate in human life. At the foot of a tree in the village courtyard, where men sit and talk, a small offering of flour or beer is placed on any distinctive occasion in the communal life; at a meal, or on a journey at cross roads, a little flour is set aside. It is "for Mulungu"; sometimes dimly conceived as a spirit within; sometimes regarded as a universal agency in nature and affairs, impalpable, impersonal; sometimes rising into distinctness as God. Such terms are, of course, generalisations from many separate experiences. Out of this sense of mystery grow more definite ideas. The poets of the ancient Vedic hymns beheld everything around them full of energy. The names by which they designated what they saw all denoted action or agency. The swift flow of the stream gained it the title of the "runner"; as it cut away the banks or furrowed its course deep between the rocks, it was the "plougher"; when it nourished the fields it was the "mother"; when it marked off one territory from another it was the "defender" or "protector." So the seers addressed their invocations to the dawn or the sun, to the winds and the fire, to the river or the mountain, to the earth-mother or the sky-father, as living powers, capable of responding to the prayers of their worshippers. Similar energy dwelt in the horse or the cow, the bird of omen and the guardian dog. It was even shared by ritual implements such as the stones by which the sacred soma-juice was squeezed out, or by the products of human handiwork, the war-car, the weapon, the drum, and the peaceful plough. At the present day the Batak in the north-west of Sumatra interpret the world about them in terms of a soul-stuff or life-power called tondi. A vast reservoir of this exists in the world above, and flows down upon men and animals and plants. The biggest animal, like the tiger, the most important of plants, like rice (chief source of food), have most We touch here another root of religious belief, which produces growths so wide-spreading that some interpreters bring the whole range of objects of worship within their shade. How, after all, does man explain himself to himself? At first he does not think about thinking. Such words as he uses are vague and elastic, like the Polynesian mana, which covers a multitude of facts without and within. Only through long dim processes does any idea corresponding to our conception of personality come into his consciousness. He is as confused about the objects round him as he is about himself. "I find that the arguments which are to convince these ignorant people must be by no means subtle, such as those which are found in the books of learned schoolmen, but such as their minds can understand. They asked me again and again how the soul of a dying person goes out of the body, how it was, whether it was as happens to us in dreams, when we seem to be conversing with our This explanation is found all round the globe. Many other experiences confirm the impression of some kind of dual existence. The shadow or shade which follows a man repeats his movements, and appears as a sort of double. It is even widely believed in the face of the simplest evidence that a dead body casts no shadow (of course, as it lies upon the ground the shadow may almost disappear). Your reflection in river, pool, or lake, actually reproduces your colour as well as your form: beware lest a crocodile seizes it and drags you in. From ancient times down to Shelley and Walt Whitman, poetry has designated Sleep and Death as "brothers"; in death that which was temporarily absent in sleep has gone away for good. It may have rushed out with the blood from a gaping wound; it may have quietly departed with the last faint breath. So it may be summoned back, as in Chinese custom, on the housetop, in the garden or the field. Ghostly sounds may be heard in the forest, among the rocks, borne along the wind; the clairvoyant may discern dimly strange faces, vanished forms; the dead can sometimes make themselves seen in their old haunts; Such presences are grouped, for the modern student, under the general title "spirits." But the explanations which lead to these beliefs are not concerned with human beings only. Animals share in the incidents of life and death; plants, even, grow and blossom and decay; and animals, plants, and inanimate objects of all sorts may be seen in dreams. Hence the analysis which is applied to man can be readily extended; and another world is called into existence, strangely blended with this, a realm of immaterial counterparts and impalpable forces. A Fiji native, placed before a mirror, recognising himself and object after object, whispered softly, "Now I can see into the world of spirits." With the help of this elementary philosophy a vast machinery of causation is always at hand for explaining untoward events. The Tshi-speaking negro on the West Coast of Africa has inside him a kind of life-power named kra. It existed long before his birth, for it served in the same capacity a whole series of predecessors; and it will continue its career after his death, when the man himself becomes a srahman or ghost. The adjoining Ga-speaking tribes modify the kra into two kla, one male and one female, the first of a bad disposition, the second good, who give advice and prompt to actions according Meantime the original kra is set behind all the activities of nature, and extended to the whole sphere of material objects. Each town or village or district has its own local spirits, rulers of river and valley, rock and forest and hill. Sometimes they take human shape, and colour, white or black, for transformations of all kinds are always possible. They are not all of equal rank; the broad lake, the mountain, the sea where the surf breaks heavily and the frail craft are upset—the lightning, the storm, and the earthquake—the leopard, the crocodile, the shark, and the devastating smallpox—such are among the dreaded manifestations of these dangerous and mysterious powers. But the actual dead must not be forgotten; they must be provided with ghostly counterparts of food and weapons and utensils, with cloth and gold-dust, just as a departed chief must be accompanied into the next life by the wives and slaves who adorned his household state in this. The ritual of the dead belongs, as we have seen (p. 20), to the earliest-known activities of European man. It is found in some form or other in every country under the sun. Sometimes it is prompted by fear, and has for its object to keep the dead imprisoned in the grave, or to prevent their spirits from returning to their old haunts (p. 228). Sometimes it is warmed by affection, as the departed are recalled to the homes where they were loved. In ancient Egypt it was developed with the utmost elaboration, and created a literature describing a kind of "pilgrim's progress" through the scenes of the next world (p. 237); while in Greece and Rome the cultus of the dead acquired, as in India and China, immense social significance. The question that arises in the study of religion in the lower culture is concerned with the probable connection between the two groups of spirits, which may be broadly distinguished as spirits of nature and spirits of the dead. That the latter are constantly propitiated in various forms is well known. They are to be found everywhere, lurking in the trees, flying through the air, sojourning in caves, haunting the promontories on the rivers or hidden in the forest-depths. With them lie the causes of disease and madness; they are malevolent and hurtful, as well as kindly and good. What differences are to be discerned between them and the powers of nature? Are we to suppose, with some Consider, for example, the ancient religion of Japan, which we know by an adaptation of two Chinese words as Shin-To, the "spirits' way," or in its native form kami-no-michi.[ But in this vast assembly are included also the spirits of the dead. They likewise become kami of varying rank and power. Some dwell in temples built in their honour; some hover near their tombs; some are kindly, and some malevolent. They mingle in the immense multiplicity of agencies which makes every event in the universe, in the language of the Shinto writer Motowori (1730-1801), "the act of the Kami." They direct the changing seasons, the wind and the rain; and the good and bad fortunes of individuals, families, and States, are due to them. From birth to death the entire life of man is encompassed and guided by the Kami. Hence came the duty of worship on which Hirata (1776-1843) lays great stress. The heaven-descended Ninigi, progenitor of the imperial line, was taught by his divine forefathers that "everything in the world depends on the spirits of the kami of heaven and earth, and therefore the worship of the kami is a "Reverently adoring the great God of the two palaces of IsÉ (the Sun-goddess) in the first place, the 800 myriads of celestial kami, the 800 myriads of ancestral kami, all the 1500 myriads to whom are consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands and all places in the great land of 8 islands, the 1500 myriads of kami whom they cause to serve them.... I pray with awe that they will deign to correct the unwitting faults which, heard and seen by them, I have committed, and, blessing and favouring me according to the powers which they severally wield, cause me to follow the divine example, and to perform good works in the way." Here, the spirits of the dead are blended with those of nature, without any definite attempt to assign them to different ranks or functions. Among the dead themselves there are such distinctions, which do not, however, concern us here; there are "spirits of crookedness," The student of the hymns to Fire in the Rig-Veda (Agni = Latin ignis) cannot fail to notice the emphasis laid upon the birth of the god out of the wood, as the fire-drill kindles the first sparks, and the flame leaps forth. Here is something quick-moving, vital; the fire is the god; he may rise into cosmic significance as a pervading energy sustaining the whole world; but he never loses his physical character, any more than the solid earth or the encompassing sky. These are again and again the chief co-ordinating powers of the higher animism. Their separation out of the primeval mass of obscure and indiscriminate chaos has been the theme of myth from Egypt to New Zealand; just as their "bridal" has served to express the union and co-operation of the forces of nature all around the world. Of this the ancient Chinese religion, still the Taken together Heaven and Earth thus include all the energies of the universe. The world, as we see it, is, indeed, full of opposing powers, one group (yang) representing light and warmth and life, the contrary (yin) manifesting themselves in cold and darkness and death.[ The Chinese genius was ethical rather than metaphysical. It was not concerned with the Infinite, the Eternal, and the Absolute. But it was deeply impressed with the moral aspects of the sky, its universality, its comprehensive embrace of all objects and powers beneath its far-stretching dome, its all-seeing view, its inflexible impartiality. Its decrees are steadfast, and proceeded from its sovereign sway; and in this capacity it bore the Beneath the sky lay the earth, receptive of the energies descending upon it from on high; "Heaven and Earth, Father and Mother," are conjoined in common speech. Together they guided the changes of the year, in steadfast tread along the annual round. Folded in their wide compass were the Shin, charged with the regulation of the elemental powers. Under Heaven's control were the Shin of sun and moon, planets, stars, meteors, comets; of clouds and winds, thunder and rain; of the seasons, months, and days. Those of the earth were organised in territorial divisions, representing the dominions of the vassal princes down to the district areas. The higher were graded according to the political rank of the several provinces; beneath them were reckoned the spirits of the mountains, forests, seas, rivers, and grains. The privileges of worship granted to the various officials were part of the State order, and helped to maintain political and civic stability. The imperial sacrifices to Heaven and Earth were performed at the winter and the summer solstices. The great altar to Heaven Splendid processions of princes and dignitaries, musicians and singers, accompany the Emperor to the great ceremonial. The recent Manchu sovereigns employed the prayers of the Ming dynasty which preceded them: here "O TÎ, when thou hadst separated the Yin and the Yang (i.e. the earth and the sky), thy creative work proceeded. "Thou didst produce the sun and moon and the five planets, and pure and beautiful was their light. "The vault of heaven was spread out like a curtain, and the square earth supported all upon it, and all things were happy. "I thy servant venture reverently to thank thee, and while I worship, present the notice to thee, calling thee Sovereign. ***** "All the numerous tribes of animated beings are indebted to thy favour for their beginning. "Men and things are all emparadised in thy love, O TÎ. "All living things are indebted to thy goodness, but who knows from whom his blessings come to him. "It is thou alone, O Lord, who art the true parent of all things." Here the ancient view of the living sky has given place under the influences of CHAPTER IVSPIRITS AND GODSReligion in the lower culture takes many forms, but, speaking broadly, they rest upon a common interpretation of the world. Man sees around him all kinds of motion and change. He finds in everything that happens some energy or power; and the only kind of power which he knows is that which he himself exerts. As long as he is alive he can run and fight, he can throw the spear or guide the canoe; death comes to the comrade by his side, and all is still. So in wind and stream, in beast and tree, in the stones that fall upon the mountain side, in the stars that march across the nightly sky, he sees a like power; they, too, have some sort of life. Life as an abstract idea, a potency or principle, is but rarely grasped. But its manifestations early attract notice, and can be roughly explained. They are due to something inside the living body, which can pass in and out, and can finally leave it altogether. Here is an immense store of causality provided, to account for all the incidents of each day's experience. Modern language calls Sometimes these are merged under a common term, like the Japanese kami, sometimes they are separately named. They bear different characters of good and evil, as they are ready to help or hurt; and the same spirit may be now kindly and now hostile, without fixity of disposition or purpose. To such spirits the ancient Babylonians gave the name of zi. Literally, we are told, the word signified "life"; it was indicated in their picture-writing by a flowering plant; the great gods, and even heaven and earth themselves, all had their zi. The Egyptians, in like manner, ascribed to every object, to human beings, and to gods, a double or ka. The word seems to be identical with that for "food"; it was another way of indicating that all visible things, the peoples of the earth, the dwellers in the realms above and below, shared a common life. The history of religion is concerned with the process by which the great gods rise into clear view above the host of spirits filling the common scene; with the modes in which the forces of the world may be grouped under their control; with the manifold combinations which finally enable one supreme power to As the inquirer casts his eye over the manifold varieties of the world's faiths, he sees that they are always conditioned by the stage of social culture out of which they emerge. The hunter who lives by the chase, and must range over large areas for means of support; the pastoral herdsman who has acquired the art of breeding cattle and sheep, and slowly moves from one set of feeding-grounds to another; the agriculturist who has learned to rely on the co-operation of earth and sky in the annual round,—have each their own way of expressing their view of the Powers on which they depend. Little by little they are arranged in groups. The Celts, for instance, coming to river after river in their onward march, employed the same name again and again, "Deuona," divine (still surviving in this country in different forms, Devon, Dee, etc.), as though all rivers belonged to one power. They were the givers of life and health and plenty, to whom costly sacrifices must be made. So they might bear the title "Mother," and were akin to the powers of fertility living in the soil, the "Mothers" (Matres or MatronÆ), cognate with the "Mothers" who fulfil similar functions in modern India. The adjacent Teutonic peoples filled forest and field with wood-sprites and elves, dwellers in the air and the sunlight. The springs, the streams, and the lakes, were the home of the water-sprites or nixes; in the fall of the mighty torrent, among the rocks on the mountain heights, in the fury of the storm or the severity of the frost, was the strength of the giants. Yet further east and north the Finnic races looked out on a land of forest and waters, of mists and winds. The spirits were ranged beneath rulers who were figured in human form. The huntsman prayed with vow and sacrifice to the aged Tapio, god of the woods and the wild animals. Kekri watched over the increase of the herd, while Hillervo protected them on the summer pastures. The grains and herbs—of less importance to tribes Ukko, thou of gods the highest, Many causes contribute to the enlargement and stability of such conceptions. Tribes of limited local range and a meagre past without traditions may conceive the world around them on a feeble scale. But migration helps to enlarge the outlook. Local powers cannot accompany tribes upon the march. Either they must be left behind and drop out of remembrance, or they must be identified with new scenes and adapted to fresh environments. When the horizon moves ever further forwards with each advance, earth and sky loom vaster "If a man stands or walks or hides, if he goes to lie down or to get up, what two people sitting together whisper, King Varuna knows it, he is there as the third. "This earth, too, belongs to Varuna, the king, and this wide sky with its ends far apart. The two seas (sky and ocean) are Varuna's loins; he is also contained in this small drop of water. "He who should flee far beyond the sky, even he would not be rid of Varuna, the king." The supreme power of the universe is here conceived under a political image. Conceptions of government and social order supply another line of advance, parallel with the forces of nature. On the African Gold Coast, after eighteen years' observation, Cruickshank ranged the objects of worship in three ranks: (1) the stone, the tree, the river, the snake, the alligator, the bundle of rags, which constituted the private fetish of the individual; (2) the greater family deity whose aid was sought by all alike, sometimes in a singular act of communion which involved the swallowing of the god (p. 144); and (3) the deity of the whole town, to whom the entire people had recourse in times of calamity and suffering. The conception of the deity of a tribe or nation may be greatly developed under the influence of victory. War becomes a struggle between rival gods. Jephthah the Gileadite, after recounting the triumphs of Israel to the hostile Ammonite king, states the case with the most naked simplicity: "Yahweh, Israel's god, hath dispossessed the Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldest thou possess them? Wilt thou not possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess? So whomsoever Yahweh our god hath dispossessed from before us, them will we possess" (Judges xi. 23, 24). The land of Canaan was the gift of Israel's God, but at first his power was limited by its boundaries: to be driven from the country was to be Other causes further tended to give distinction to the personality of deities, and define their spheres. A promiscuous horde of spirits has no family relationships. A god may have a pedigree; a consort is at his side; and the mysterious divine power reappears in a son. Instead of the political analogy of a sovereign and his attendants, the family conception expresses itself in a divine father, mother and child. Thus the Ibani of Southern Nigeria recognised Adum as the father of all The divisions of the universe suggested another grouping. The Vedic poets arranged their deities in three zones: the sky above, the intervening atmosphere, and the earth beneath. Babylonian cosmology placed Anu in the heaven, Bel on the earth, and Ea in the great deep, and these three became the symbols of the order of nature, and the divine embodiments of physical law. Homer already divides the world between the sky-god Zeus, Poseidon of earth and sea, and Hades of the nether realm: and Rome has its triads, like Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, or again Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. Whatever be the origin of the number three in this connection, it reproduces itself with strange reiteration in both hemispheres. Other groups are suggested by the sun and moon and the five planets, and appear in sets of seven. Egyptian summaries recognised gods in the sky, on earth, and in the water; and the theologians of different sanctuaries loved to arrange them in systems of nine, or three times three. Out of this vast and motley multitude emerge certain leading types in correspondence Sometimes the creative power (especially on the American continent) is figured as a marvellous animal, a wondrous raven, a bird-serpent, a great hare, a mighty beaver. Or the dome of sky suggests an original world-egg, which has been divided to make heaven and earth. Even the Australians, whose characteristics are variously interpreted as indications of extreme backwardness or of long decline, show figures which belong to what Mr. Andrew Lang designated the "High Gods of Low Races." Among the Narrinyeri in the west Nurrundere was said to have made all things on the earth; the Wiimbaio told how Nurelli had made the whole country with the rivers, trees, and animals. Among the Sometimes speculation takes a higher flight. The ZuÑis of Mexico have remained in possession of ancient traditions, uninfluenced by any imported Christianity. After many years' residence among them Mr. Cushing was able to gather their ideas of the origin of the world. Awona-wilona was the Maker and Container of all, the All-Father-Father. Through the great space of the ages there was nothing else whatever, only black darkness everywhere. Then "in the beginning of the new-made" Awona-wilona conceived within himself, and "thought outward in space," whereby mists of increase, steams potent of growth, were evolved and uplifted. Thus by means of his innate knowledge the All-Container made himself in the person and form of the sun. With his appearance came the brightening of the spaces with light, and with the brightening of the spaces the great With a yet bolder leap of imagination did a Polynesian poet picture the great process. From island to island between Hawaii and New Zealand is a "high god" known as Taaroa, Tangaloa, Tangaroa, and Kanaroa. The Samoans said that he existed in space and wished for some place to dwell in, so he made the heavens; and then wished to have a place under the heavens, so he made the earth. Tahitian mythology declared (the versions of priests and wise men differed) that he was born of night or darkness. Then he embraced a rock, the imagined foundation of all things, which brought forth earth and sea; the heavens were created with sun, moon, and stars, clouds, wind, and rain, and the dry land appeared below. The whole process was summed up in a hymn— "He was: Taaroa was his name. The relations of these creative Powers to man are conceived very differently. The "O eternal ruler, lord of all being, grant that the name of the king thou lovest, whose name thou hast proclaimed, may flourish as seems pleasing to thee. Lead him in the right On the other hand, the "High Gods of Low Races" often seem to fade away and become inactive, or at least are out of relations to man. Olorun, lord of the sky among the African Egbas, also bore the title of Eleda, "the Creator." But he was too remote and exalted to be the object of human worship, and no prayer was offered to him. Among the southern Arunta of central Australia, reports Mr. Strehlow, Altjira is believed to live in the sky. He is like a strong man save that he has emu feet. He created the heavenly bodies, sun, moon, and stars. When rain-clouds come up, it is Altjira walking through the sky. Altjira shows himself to man in the lightning, the thunder is his voice. But though thus animate, he is no object of worship. "Altjira is a good god; he never punishes man; therefore the blacks do not fear him, and render him neither prayer nor sacrifice." In Indian theology the reason for the discontinuance of homage was thus frankly stated by one of the poets If the deity who has provided the scene of existence thus recedes into the background, it is otherwise with the powers which maintain and foster life. Among the impulses which drive man to action is the need of food; and the sources of its supply are among the earliest objects of his regard. A large group of agencies thus gradually wins recognition, out of which emerge lofty forms endowed with functions far transcending the simple energies at first ascribed to them. Even the rude tribes of Australia, possessing no definite worship, perform pantomimic ceremonies of a magical kind, designed to stimulate the food supply. The men of the plum-tree totem will pretend to knock down plums and eat them; in the initiation ceremony of the eagle-hawks two representatives will imitate the flapping of wings and the movements of attack, and one will finally wrench a piece of meat out of the other's mouth. At a higher stage of animism the Indians of British North America pray to the spirit of the wild raspberry. When the young shoots are six or eight inches high above the ground, a small bundle is Here the whole class of plants is already conceived as under the control of a single power. In ruder stages the hunter will address his petitions to the individual bear, before whose massive stature he feels a certain awe, entreating him not to be angry or fight, but to take pity on him. Pastoral peoples will employ domesticated animals in sacrifice, while the products of the field occupy a second place; the cow may become sacred, and the daily work of the dairy may rise, as among the Todas, to the rank of religious ritual. Some element of mysterious energy will even lie in the weapons of the chase, in the net or the canoe, and may be found still lingering in the implements of agriculture, such as the plough. Among settled communities which live by tillage the succession of the crops from year to year acquires immense importance. Earth and sky, the sun, the rain, and time itself in the background, are all contributory powers, but attention is fastened upon the spirit of the grains. The Iroquois look on the spirits of corn, of squashes, and of beans, as three The ceremonies connected with the cultus of the rice-spirit in the East Indies still perpetuate in living faith beliefs once vital To such a group belong different forms in Egypt, Syria and Greece, whose precise origin cannot always be traced amid the bewildering variety of functions which they came to fulfil. But they all illustrate the same general theme. The worship of Osiris early spread throughout Egypt, and its various phases have given rise to many interpretations of his origin and nature. Recent studies have converged upon the view that he was primarily a vegetation deity. In the festival of sowing, small images of the god formed out of sand or vegetable earth and corn, with yellow faces and green cheek-bones, were solemnly buried, those of the preceding year being removed. On the temple wall of his chamber at PhilÆ stalks of corn were depicted springing from his dead body, while a priest poured water on them from a pitcher. This was the mystery of him "who springs from the returning waters." The annual inundation brought quickening to the seed, and in the silence and darkness of the earth it died to live. Of this process Osiris became the type for thousands of years. Already in the earliest days of the Egyptian monarchy he is presented as the divine-human king, benevolent, wise, Such might be the splendid evolution of a deity of the grains. But food was not, of course, the only need. The family as well as each individual must be maintained. Mysterious powers wrought through sex. Strange energies pulsed in processes of quickening, and these, too, were interpreted in terms of divine agency. They found their parallels in the operations of nature (like the Yang and Such deities, however, represent much more than the physical life. They have a social In Rome numerous powers were recognised in early days as guardians of the home and the farm-lands. Vesta had her seat upon the hearth, which was the centre of the family worship, and afterwards became the object of an important city-cult. The store-chamber behind was the dwelling-place of the Penates, and with its contents no impure person might meddle. Where farm met farm stood the chapel of the local Lares, and there whole households assembled, masters and slaves together, in annual rejoicings and good fellowship. Brought into the home, the Lar became the symbol of the family life, and the ancestral pieties gathered round him. More vague and elastic was the conception of the Genius, a kind of spiritual double who watched over the fortunes of the head of the home, and through the marriage-bed provided for the continuity of descent. This protecting power could take many forms with continually expanding jurisdiction. The city, the colony, the province, the "land of Britain," Rome, the Emperor himself, were thus placed under divine care, or rather were viewed as in some way the organs of superhuman power. In the energy which built up states and brought peoples into order lived something that was creative and divine. From distant times in many forms of society This is something more than the extravagance of court-scribes, or the fawning adulation of oriental dependents. In the worship paid to the Roman Emperor many feelings and associations were involved. The power which had brought peace, law, order, into the midst of a multitude of nations and languages, and subdued to itself the jarring wills of men, seemed something more than human. When Tertullian of Carthage coined the strange word "Romanity," he summed up the infinite This is the most highly developed form of the doctrine of the divine king, which the Far East has retained for the sovereigns of China and Japan to our own day. The language and practice of Roman imperialism called forth the impassioned resistance of the early Christians, and the clash of opposing religions is nowhere portrayed with more desperate intensity than in the Book of Revelation at the close of our New Testament, where Rome and her false worship are identified with the power of the "Opposer" or SÂtÂn, and are hurled with all their trappings of wealth and luxury into the abyss. The conception of a god as "saviour" or deliverer is founded on incidents in personal or national experience, when some unexpected event opens a way of escape from pressing danger. When the Gauls were advancing against Rome in 388 B.C., a strange voice of warning was heard in the street. It was neglected, but when they had been repelled, Camillus erected an altar and temple to the mysterious "Speaker," Aius Locutius, whose prophetic energy was thus manifested. In the second Punic war, when the Carthaginian general, Hannibal, was marching against the city in 211 B.C., he suddenly changed his course near the Capena gate. Again the might of an unknown deity was displayed, and the grateful Romans raised a shrine to him under the name of Tutanus Rediculus, the god who "protects and turns back." It might be the attack of an enemy, it might be the imminence of shipwreck, it might be a desolating plague, or any one of the vicissitudes of fortune, the distresses and anxieties of the soul or of the State, in the power which brought rescue or health or peace to body or mind, or life hereafter in a better world, the grateful believer recognised the energy of some superhuman being. Just as the making of the world required a creative hand, just as the arts and laws of social life were the product of some divine initiative (p. 171), just as the higher virtues belonged to a band of spiritual forces which had a kind of individuality of their own, Similar conceptions are seen in India. The founder of Buddhism, Gotama of the Sakyan clan, was believed to have attained the Enlightenment which enabled him to discern the whole secret of existence. After a long series of preparatory labours in previous lives he had appeared as a man in his last birth, to "lift off from the world the veils of ignorance and sin." He had himself repudiated all ontological conceptions; he had explained the human being without the hypothesis of a soul or self, and the world without the ideas of substance or God. But in due time the rejected metaphysics insisted on recognition; and some three hundred years or more after his death a new interpretation of his person arose. Under the stress of pious affection, the influence of philosophical Brahmanism, and the need of permanent spiritual help, he was conceived as a manifestation of the Infinite and Eternal, who for the sake of suffering humanity from time to time Over against this great figure Brahmanism placed another, that of Vishnu, with his series of "descents," in which the Buddha was formally incorporated as the ninth. The most famous of these were the heroes Rama and Krishna; and Krishna became the subject of the best-known book of Indian devotion, the Bhagavad-Gita or the "Divine Lay," which has been sometimes supposed to show traces of the influence of the Gospel of St. John. Here was a religion founded on the idea of divine grace or favour on the one part, and adoring love and devotion on the other. Krishna, also, taught a way of deliverance from the evils of human passion and attachment to the world; and Vishnu came to be the embodiment of divine beneficence, at once the power which maintained the universe and revealed himself from time to time to man. Vishnu was an ancient Vedic deity connected with the sun; and by his side Hindu theology set another god of venerable antiquity, once fierce and destructive, but now known under the name of Çiva, the "auspicious." The great epic entitled the Mahabharata does not conceal their rivalry; but with the facility of identification By various paths was the goal of monotheism approached, but popular practice perpetually clung to lower worships, and philosophy could often accommodate them with ingenious justifications. A bold and decisive judgment like that of the Egyptian Akhnaton might fix on one of the great powers of nature—the sun—as the most suitable emblem of Deity to be adored, and forbid all other cults. Or the various groups and ranks of divine beings might be addressed in a kind of collective totality, like the "all-gods" of the Vedic hymns. At Olympia When the unity of the moral order was combined with the unity of creative might, the transition to monotheism was even more complete. It could, indeed, be deferred. In the ancient poems of the great religious reformer whom the Greeks called Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda is the supremely Good. Beside him are the Immortal Holy Ones, Holy Spirit, Good Mind, Righteous Order, and the rest. True, in the oppositions of light and darkness, heat and cold, health and sickness, plenty and want, life and death, he is for a time hampered by the enmity of "the Lie"; but the power of evil would be finally destroyed, and the sovereignty of Ahura established for ever (p. 247). From another point of view the divine purpose of deliverance must be conceived upon an equally world-wide scale. One type of Indian Buddhism looked to AvalokiteÇvara CHAPTER VSACRED ACTSOne morning, Plato tells us, as Socrates was in the Porch of the King Archon, he met Euthyphro, a learned Athenian soothsayer, on his way to accuse his father of impiety for having caused the death of a slave. Socrates, who was also expecting an accusation against himself, engaged him in a conversation, as his manner was, on the nature of impiety, and its opposite, piety. The talk leads Euthyphro to maintain that piety or holiness consists in learning how to please the gods in word and deed, by prayers and sacrifices. "Then," inquires Socrates, "sacrifice is giving to the gods, and prayer is asking of the gods?" and Euthyphro is driven to assent to the conclusion that piety is an art which gods and men have of doing business with one another. It was a satirical description of the popular Greek view. But the argument of Socrates really corresponds to world-wide practice. However dim and confused the elements of belief may be, every tribe has some rites and ceremonies which express the desire to get the Powers The active side of religion may be considered under two aspects. There is, on the one hand, the effort to enter into helpful relations with the energies which pervade nature and operate on man. Such efforts spring from manifold emotions of hope and fear, of affection and reverence. They seek to inaugurate such relations; to maintain them through the vicissitudes of experience, the phases of life, the sequences of time; and to renew them when they have suffered sudden And, secondly, apart from public or private acts of homage, thanksgiving, submission, propitiation, addressed specifically to the higher Powers, there are modes of behaviour which are believed to be pleasing or displeasing to them. Some things may be done, and others may not. Certain acts, or words, or even thoughts, are forbidden; others are enjoined. The sphere of daily conduct is thus brought into connection with what is "above." "Act," said the Japanese teacher of Shinto, Hirata, in the last century, "so that you shall not be ashamed before the Kami" (p. 93). It was a universal rule. Morality is thus placed under the guardianship of religion (Chap. VII). At the funeral of Lord Palmerston (1865), the chief mourner was observed to drop several diamond and gold rings upon the coffin as it was lowered into the grave. A little child, seeing a steam-tram advance with irresistible might along the road, offered it her bun. It may be surprising to meet with a piece In its widest use the word covers an extensive range of purposes, and begets a large variety of questions. On whose behalf is the offering made, a single individual, or some social group, his family or clan, a secret society, a tribe, a nation? What persons are required for the due performance of the rite, the head of the family, the village magistrate, the fetish man, the priest? A complicated Vedic sacrifice needed the co-operation of various orders of priests. What objects are effected by it, a house or city-gate to be protected, a river to be crossed, a battle to be won, a covenant or contract to be sealed? To what powers does the worshipper address himself, in gratitude, homage, or submission, seeking renewal of favour, or purging himself of some sin, or desiring actual fellowship with his god? Behind these external features lie more difficult problems in connection especially with animal sacrifices, concerned Offerings to the dead pass through a long series of stages, from the simple provision for the wants of the dead man in the grave up to his proper equipment with all that is due to his rank and state in the next life, or the maintenance of the ties of guardianship and protection over unborn generations. The earliest human remains imply some dim belief that the grave was the dead man's dwelling (p. 20), and there he must be supplied with the requisites for some kind of continued Or the offering may be made for the cherishing of the dead in their former home. The simplest and the most common sacrificial act in Melanesia, Bishop Codrington tells us, is that of throwing a small portion of food to the dead. It may be nothing more than a bit of yam or a morsel of betel-nut; it is not for food, but for remembrance and affection. But sometimes it is for actual nourishment. The dead in ancient India who had none to render to them the needful sustenance, wandered as dismal ghosts round their former dwellings, or haunted the cross roads, compelled to feed themselves on the garbage of the streets. The funeral meals, continued at intervals, were celebrated for the purpose of providing the departed with new forms, and converting them into the higher rank of "Fathers." In many lands, from Europe to Japan and Central America, an annual feast for the dead has been maintained in various modes both in classic antiquity and in modern usage; and the ancient practice still survives in strangely altered fashion in the cakes and confectionery carried on All Souls' Day to the graves in the great Parisian cemetery of PÈre Lachaise. Such acts of recognition and fellowship pass through very different stages. They begin with a desire for self-identification with the In many cases such offerings carried with them the additional purpose of actually increasing the vigour of the god. Dim notions of promoting the divine vitality hovered in the background. The physical effect might be reached by divers modes. Food was at first conveyed by actual contact; it might be smeared upon the idol's mouth. Offerings to earth spirits were buried in the ground. Water deities received them when they were thrown into the well, the river, or the lake. Even in Greece Poseidon's horses were driven into the sea, just as the horses of the defeated Mallius were offered by the Gallic victors to the Rhine. Indian realism provided the Fathers who assembled for the rice-ball sacrifice with water and tufts of wool to cleanse themselves after the meal. In more refined usage fire conveyed the essence of the food to the upper airs. At Noah's sacrifice on the subsidence of the flood Yahweh smelt the sweet savour, and in the corresponding Babylonian narrative the gods, drawn by the scent, gathered together around the offerer "like flies." The American Osages invited the Great Spirit, Fire, and Earth, to smoke with them at the beginning of a new enterprise. The Sioux lighted the pipe of peace and offered it Many and various are the ideals which have gathered round the offering, as magic and religion have strangely blended. The sacred tree, whether among the Celts of the West or the Syrians of the East, is hung with rags of clothing, sometimes doubtless with the same motive which prompts similar gifts at the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, for the transference of diseases from the sick. The highest value was reached among the ancient Irish, as among the Semites, in the sacrifice of the first-born; and the long tale of human victims indicates man's passionate desire to secure in divers forms supernatural aid. They have been slain in crises of national danger by plague or war, in atonement for sin,[ Brahmanical speculation carried the ideas of sympathetic magic in association with sacrifice to their highest pitch. The Vedic hymns early formulated the idea of reciprocal Along other lines the conception of fellowship with Deity may be realised through a common act. Above the personal fetish of a Gold Coast negro to which he made offerings of rum and palm-wine, oil, corn, sheep, goats, stood the patron god of the family. Before a separation which would prevent them from ever again worshipping together, they engaged in a strange kind of communion. The fetish-priest pounded up some sacred substance and mixed it with water, which was then drunk by the whole family in turn. During the rite the priest enjoined all present in the name of the deity to abstain from some particular kind of food, fish, beef, fowl, milk, or other article of diet. None of the company tasted it again. They were united by the deity within them; and obedience to his command bound them, however far apart, in common worship. Sometimes the worshipper sat at the table of the god, who was in some sense present at the meal celebrated in his honour. In the usage of ancient Israel the householder shared with his family, kinsmen, neighbours, and guests, in the sacred feast "before Yahweh." How far the belief in Yahweh's presence was actually cherished by the participants cannot An inscription at Magnesia describes a festival of twelve gods, whose images, adorned with festal array, were carried into the marketplace, and arranged on three cushions under a canopy. When sacrifices had been offered, the priests and people partook of a common meal with the gods. The old Latins and other Italians believed the deities of the house to be present at their meals. The Penates, Mr. Warde Fowler tells us, were the spirits of the foods. Rome celebrated its solemn feast of Jove in the Capitoline temple every September on full-moon day, when Jupiter, with his face painted red, Juno, and Minerva, were present in their statues to share the meal with the magistrates and Senate of the city. To "lay a couch for the god" (as we might say "to lay a table") was a common phrase. Recently discovered papyri, illustrating so But the worshipper might not only eat with the god, he might more rarely, and under special circumstances, even eat him. A more intimate union was thus effected. When the altar imparted its sanctity to the victim laid upon it, the holy food distributed to the worshipper had some kind of divine presence in it, and virtue passed through the meat into the eater. The late Prof. Robertson Smith, in his famous lectures on "the Religion of the Semites," endeavoured to show that sacrifice originally consisted in slaying the animal of the totem-group, of which members of the totem-kin partook so that they received into their own persons the divine power incarnated in the totem animal. Further research has failed to confirm this view; but a similar conception has been illustrated from another side. The agricultural usages of which Dr. Frazer has collected so many examples, show how out of the last sheaf, which had become the home of the corn-spirit, the grain was baked in human form as its embodiment, and solemnly eaten. In the East Indian archipelago, on Twice a year was the great Mexican deity Huitzilopochtli presented in the form of dough images to his worshippers, and with elaborate ceremonies was consumed. Tezcatlipoca, in like manner, chief god of the Aztecs, represented by a handsome and noble captive wearing the divine emblems, was slain on the great altar; the body of the victim was respectfully carried down into the court below, divided into small pieces, and distributed among priests and nobles as blessed food. It is strange to find such savagery associated with prayers of exalted fervour and devotion. But ecstasy is roused by various means, and is not affronted at the most brutal rites. There were incidents in the Orphic cult of the Thracian Dionysus grouped under the name of the "Omophagy" (literally "raw-eating") of like character. In frenzied excitement the devotees flung themselves on bull or goat, rent it asunder, and devoured the bleeding flesh. Such was the condition of securing the actual entry of the god into the believer's person, so that he became entheos, "with the god inside him." Words have strange histories, and few now remember, when they describe the welcome of a monarch by acclaiming crowds, or the excitement roused by a In the "art which gods and men have of doing business with each other," Socrates associated sacrifice with prayer (p. 133). The association is world-wide, and here religion reaches its utmost inwardness. The feeling which expresses itself in action will also prompt gesture and speech; rude rhythms mould words into chant and song; and even without a definite object of address some utterance breathes a desire. "May it be well with the buffaloes, may they not suffer from disease and die ... may there be water and grass in plenty." So runs the dairy-ritual of the Indian Todas, without the direct invocation of any gods. But there is no element here of compulsion or constraint. The distinction between prayer and spell is clear; the attitude is religious, not magical. On the other hand, sacrifices are sometimes offered to a "High God," as by the Dinkas of the Bahr-el-Ghazal in Central Africa to Deng-deet, who is described as "Ruler of the universe, Creator of mankind, the actual Father of human beings"; but, adds Captain Cummins, imagine it does not occur to them to pray. Others, by contrast, make morning and evening prayer part of their daily practice; the Nandi of East Africa concludes his devotions (addressed to Asista, the ordinary word for the sun): "I have prayed to thee, thou Prayer in the lower culture is rarely individualised. It is almost always a social act. Common prayers for food or rain, for protection against danger, the removal of pestilence, victory over enemies, represent the wants of all. The group may be the family, as in the evening worship of the Such prayers may be traced through many expanding phases up to the higher petitions which seek to place the civic and moral life under the guidance of the heroic dead. The element of bargain or contract which Socrates so sarcastically emphasised, here drops away. "To what god or what hero shall we pray," inquired the people of Corcyra, weary of internal strife, at the oracle of Dodona, "in order to obtain concord, and to govern our city fairly and well?" Chinese statecraft well understood the significance of such worship as a social bond. The ancient author of the LÎ ChÎ, or "Book of Rites," laid it down that "the prayers of the principal in the sacrifice to the spirits, and the benedictions of the representatives of the departed, are carefully framed. The object of all ceremonies is to bring down the spirits from above, even their ancestors; serving also to rectify the relations between ruler and minister, to maintain the generous feeling between father Attention is thus concentrated upon common sentiments and universal relationships, and prayer acquires a deeper ethical meaning. It then comes to rest upon devout experience, which seeks to interpret life in relation to the permanent forces of justice which are believed to rule the world. The hymns of Egypt celebrate in lofty terms the majesty and beneficence of the gods, and the psalmists of the Nile sang of the divine love encompassing all lands, setting every man in his place, and amid diversities of colour and speech supplying all human needs. The Babylonian poets addressed Shamash or Sin, sun or moon, as the symbols of the universal order of nature, the witnesses of thought and deed over the wide earth, the rulers on whom man could place unchanging reliance. The Vedic singer found a similar figure of moral sovereignty in Varuna (p. 106). Out of the depths of her distress Hecuba (in the "Trojan Women") appeals to the mysterious Power whom she can still glorify in her anguish: "Thou deep base of the world, and thou high throne above the world, whoe'er thou art, unknown and hard of surmise, chain of things to be, or reason of our reason, God, to thee I lift my praise, seeing the silent road Two or three thousand years before, the pious Egyptian had been bidden to enter quietly into the sanctuary of God, to whom clamour is abhorrent. "Pray to him with a longing heart in which all thy words are hidden, so will he grant thy request, and hear that which thou sayest and accept thy offering." Dear was this silent worship to the higher teachers. A hymn to Thoth (p. 8) addresses him as "Thou sweet spring for the thirsty in the desert," adding, "It is closed for those who speak there, it is open for those who keep silence there. When the silent man cometh, he findeth the spring." Petitions such as these, rooted in ethical sentiment, demand as their moral condition purity of heart and concentration of thought. The prophets of all ages have protested against formalism and insincerity. The Japanese The need of righteousness begets penitence and confession. A Buddhist liturgy issued in China in 1412 with a preface by the Emperor Yung Loh of the Ming dynasty, after the opening invocations, proceeded thus: "We and all men from the very first, by reason of the grievous sins we have committed in A higher note is sounded here than in the famous penitential psalms of ancient Babylon, where the poet, smitten with various distresses, laments the unknown sins which have roused the anger of his god, and passes into fierce incantations against the demonic powers which are the instruments of the divine wrath. Here prayer makes a close alliance with magic: and its formulÆ are always in danger of this degeneration. In the old Italian ritual of a guild at Iguvium the exact titles of the deity must be rehearsed, and the proper words recited. The slightest slip invalidated the entire rite, and the officiating priest was required to repeat the whole over again. To this rigid adhesion to consecrated In the long story of Indian religion many notes are struck in the wide range of human want, of divine grace, and adoring faith. The Vedic poets speak with full hearts of the simple joys of earth; the happiness of home with its passionate desires for children and long life; the pleasures of wealth in horses and chariots and cows. Rescue from poverty or danger, victory over the godless enemy, influence in the assembly and superiority in debate, these are the gifts which are sought with the utmost directness of speech: "If I, O Indra, were like thee, the single sovereign of all wealth, my worshipper should be rich in kine." But other tones are not wanting: "Aditi, Mitra, Varuna, forgive us, however With the development of Brahmanical speculation prayer rises to more abstract ideas: "Lead me from darkness to light, from falsehood to truth, from death to the deathless." The association of prayer and magic is seen in the fact that the very term brahma has the double meaning of prayer and spell, something like the Greek euchÊ or the Hebrew "bless," which could imply a curse as well as a prayer. But in its higher sense it gave birth to the "Lord of Prayer," Brahmanaspati, a kind of house-priest of the gods, a heavenly personification of the priesthood on earth, in whom resided the power of influencing events by prayer and incantation. Nay, just as the hymns came to be regarded as originally existing in the realm of the infinite and the undying (p. 12), so prayer was said to have been born of yore in heaven. And thus the Lord of Prayer acquires a more lofty character as its generator and inspirer; he is even called the "Father of the gods"; and the very universe depends upon him, for he holds asunder the ends of the earth. In the shining company of deities, moreover, stand Sacred Speech, and Devotion, and Lovely Praise, and Holy Thought, with others of the goodly fellowship of Prayer, to attest its power, and approve its worth. The subsequent devotion of India aspires In the first, the believer looks to his heavenly Lord with adoring faith (p. 128) and lowly love (bhakti), and feels the inflowing of divine favour or grace (prasada). The long line of mediÆval poets transmitted from generation to generation passionate impulses of devotion which expressed themselves again and again in legend and song. "Search in thy heart," pleaded the weaver Kabir in the fifteenth century, "search in thy heart of hearts, there is God's place of abode." Not, however, without conditions: "Unless you have a forgiving spirit, you will not see God." He might describe himself in his humility as "the worst of men"; that only made the marvel of divine grace more wonderful: "I am thy son; Thou art my Father; we both live in the same place." On the philosophical side a modern manual of Hindu practice endeavours to combine religion and metaphysics. Ere the believer rises from bed in the morning he should confess his unworthiness: "O Lord of the universe, O All-Consciousness, presiding Deity of all, Vishnu, at thy bidding, and to please thee alone, I rise this morning, and enter on the discharge of my daily duties. I know what is righteous, yet I feel no attraction for it; I know what is not righteous, yet I have no repulsion from it. O Lord of the senses, O Thou seated in the heart, may I do thy commands as ordered by thee in my conscience." But in order to remind him of his divine origin, in this age of sordid interests and low ideals, he is enjoined also to look upon himself as the reflected image of God, the Eternal, the All-Knowing, the All-Glad, and to recite the ancient verse, "I am divine and not anything else, I am indeed Brahma above all sorrows, my form is Being, Intelligence, and Bliss, and eternally free is my nature." The duties of offering and prayer may be performed from day to day, or they may be reserved for special occasions of enterprise, danger, and thanksgiving. They mark the incidents of the week, the month, the year; there are sabbaths, new moons, seed-time and harvest, and new year festivals. This periodicity affects the whole community together. But there are also personal events, marking For life, in the lower culture, is exposed perpetually to dangers of all kinds. Demonic influences continually threaten it; strange pollutions beset it; the blood in which it is often located has about it something weird, uncanny, sometimes unclean. So there are preliminary rites for bringing in the soul of the child as yet unborn from its home in the ground, among the flowers and trees, or in wells and lakes and running streams. Among tribes which regard the mother as unclean before birth, the uncleanness is transmitted to the child, and ceremonies of purification must be performed for both. The child must be guarded against the evil eye, perils of infection of various kinds, or the attacks of hostile demons. The ritual of cleansing must be scrupulously performed. When Apollo and the future Buddha were born, divine beings received them; Apollo was washed in fair water, and wondrous Around the cradle friendly influences must be secured, the child must be duly incorporated into the circle of the cosmic powers and of human life. He is laid upon the ground for contact with the supporting earth, and presented to the great vivifier, the sun, or held over the fire. Out of the bath grew a rite of immersion designed to solemnise his admission into the guild of mankind, and wash away the strange element of evil which seemed to inhere in human nature. In Peru this was exorcised by the priest, who bade it enter the water, which was then buried in the ground. The Aztec ritual of baptism, according to the native writer Sahagun, began: "O child, receive the water of the lord of the world which is our life. It is to wash and purify. May these drops remove the sin which was given to thee before the creation of the world, since all of us are under its power." This was a real act of regeneration, for the priest concluded: "Now he liveth anew, and is born anew, now he is After purification comes the ceremony of giving the name, fittingly performed in the temple, as in Greece, Rome, or Mexico. Elements of personality inhere so strangely in names, that this rite also acquires great significance. Perhaps the name of some ancestor is chosen, who may thus endow the child with some of his qualities, or at least be invoked for protection and aid. Divine powers have watched over his birth (p. 121); others may decide his destiny, like the three Greek fateful goddesses Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, or the venerable Scandinavian Norns. Or the aid of the stars must be invoked, and a horoscope must be prepared by the astrologer. Sometimes a special guardian power may be chosen for the infant, sometimes the choice is reserved for him at a later stage. Or he may be dedicated from the outset to some hallowed service, as the child Samuel was given to Yahweh. More important even than the rites of birth and infancy are those of the attainment of adolescence, when the youth is admitted to the privileges of manhood and instructed in the secrets of the tribe. All round the world the lower culture has its ceremonies of initiation, which have sometimes survived in more refined forms in more highly organised societies. They involve seclusion from the common life, for no woman must be cognisant The ancient Indian ritual was more refined. The three upper castes, the Brahman, the noble, and the cultivator of the land, belonged to the "twice-born." Only to these was the study of the Veda permitted. When the youth was led to his teacher to be invested with the sacred thread, the symbol of his dignity, blessings were uttered and holy water was sprinkled on him. Then for the first time was he permitted to repeat the sacred verse (known as the Gayatri, Rig Veda, iii. 62, 10), "Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine Vivifier, may he enlighten our understandings," which is still recited daily by millions of devout Hindus. One of the later books of the Zoroastrian faith lays down that "it is necessary for all those of the good religion to celebrate the ritual and become navazÛd, newly born," or born again. The ceremony began with a purification which lasted nine nights, and included sprinkling with water; the candidate for the priesthood must be of the age of fifteen; he must confess his sins, endure the scourge; and might then be regarded as regenerate. Within the whole group of initiates secret societies were often formed, bound together by special vows, and using the instrumentality of religion. Observers in West Africa and The rites of the Phrygian Sabazius touch the processes of the lower culture at more than one point. In his great oration "on the Crown" (315 B.C.) Demosthenes twits his opponent Æschines in such terms as these: "You assisted your mother in the initiations, you read aloud the books (the ritual prayers), and took part in the rest of the plot. You put on (or, you robed the candidates in) fawn-skins; you sprinkled them with water from the bowl; you purified and rubbed them with clay and bran, then you raised them from their purification, and bade them say, 'I have fled the bad, and found the better.'" On the gold Orphic tablets discovered in South Italy and Crete occur strange phrases: "I, a kid, fell into the milk," "O blessed and happy one, thou hast put off thy mortality and hast become divine," which are interpreted with great probability as references to a ritual of milk-baptism in which the initiate was born again. That idea was certain expressed in the mysteries of Isis, which were widely spread in the Eastern Mediterranean (p. 40). Here, too, was a solemn kind of death and re-birth; here, too, lustrations of the purest water, the priestly declaration of the pardon of the Associated with sacrifice and prayer, and partaking at once of the characters of magic and mystery, is the sacred dance. Rhythmic movement of body and limbs readily becomes the expression of strong feeling; and the feeling in its turn may be reawakened by the solemn renewal of the action. When it imitates the motions of the warrior or the huntsman it comes to possess a magical value, and the women who remain at home will dance all day while their husbands are engaged in battle or the chase. Does it not quicken their courage or enhance their skill? The child in an elementary school now learns The vow, the fast, and all the varied forms of asceticism which Eastern religions have so abundantly produced, all involve common elements of sacrifice and self-subjection. The vow, indeed, has in part the nature of a contract. It is not magic, it is a bargain. There is no constraint, the deity may avail himself of what is offered, or may not. If Yahweh will go with me, says Jacob, and provide me food to eat and clothes to wear, he shall be my god and get his tithe. But the vow involves the surrender of something otherwise desirable. It is the same with the ascetic, who gives up food, or clothing, or sleep, or the bath, or speech, or a fixed home; who sits between four fires under a blazing sun; who lacerates his back with the scourge or his flesh with knives; who holds a flower-pot in his hand till the fingers grow round it immovably; who hangs himself up by hooks in his bare back, or loads himself from neck to feet with chains. Men may fast religiously to overcome bodily desire; or to prepare the higher insight for strange openings of vision. "The continually stuffed body," say the Amazulu, "cannot see secret things." Lacordaire bade the brethren of his Order scourge him that he might humble himself, and taste the pain of his Redeemer. But the extremer forms of asceticism (especially as a life-long practice) are always based on the idea that they are in CHAPTER VISACRED PRODUCTSIn the intimate connection of religion with life all primitive interests are placed under its sanction. A large portion of time is occupied with its ceremonials. The fortunes of the tribe are bound up with it. To the bounty of its powers they owe abundant food and safety or success in war. Beneath its protection the newly born enter the world, and to its care the elders are committed when they die. Its holy persons rule in their midst; its holy places are all round about them; its sacred objects are in their homes. It is not surprising, therefore, that all the higher possessions of the tribe, its arts and crafts, its traditions, its customs and laws, its stories of the gods and their dealings with each other or with man, should be ascribed to the same origin. Where individuality is hampered at every turn by time-honoured conventions, and personal initiative is imperfectly developed and timidly confined within the narrowest limits, all higher intellectual products, command over nature, inventions, poetry and song, the usages of Thus at the present day many of the Australian tribes whose condition has probably changed little since the date of the oldest civilisations of antiquity, regard their scanty institutions as ordained by beings above. Ask the Narrinyeri why they adhere to any custom, the answer is that Nurrundere commanded it. Baiame and Bunjil laid down the marriage laws for their respective tribes; Bunjil, moreover, taught the Kulin the arts of life; and Daramulun gave the Yuin laws which the old people handed down from generation to generation. The elaborate cultures of Babylonia and Egypt claimed similar origins. In the vast prehistoric period before the Flood the people round the lower Euphrates had lived without rule or order, like the beasts of the field, till a wondrous Fish-Man, whom the Greek historian called Cannes, appeared out of the Persian Gulf with wisdom from the sea. He The Egyptian priests, perhaps as late as the great Nineteenth Dynasty, before the days of Moses, threw into definite shape the vague traditions of immemorial antiquity, when men had lived devouring one another, ignorant how to till the ground. Osiris (p. 119) taught the art of tillage, the use of the plough and hoe, how to grow wheat and barley, and the culture of the vine; and Isis added the domestic arts of making bread and weaving linen. Osiris, moreover, appointed the offerings to the gods, regulated the ceremonies, composed the texts and melodies of the hymns. And among his successors was Thoth of Hermopolis (p. 8), who introduced astronomy and divination, medicine, arithmetic, and geometry, and whose "books," embracing a kind of religious encyclopÆdia, were known to the Christian teacher, Clement of Alexandria, in the second century of our era. So Zeus gave laws to Minos in Crete, and Apollo revealed the Spartan constitution to Lycurgus; Numa, the traditional founder of the Roman ceremonial law, received instruction from the nymph Egeria. The shepherd slave, Zaleucus (whom Eusebius placed about 660 B.C.), taught the Locrians what Athena had first taught him, and prefaced his laws by enjoining them to revere the gods as the real causes of all things fair and good in life, and keep their hearts pure from all evil, inasmuch as the gods do not take pleasure in the sacrifices of the wicked, but in the righteous and fair conduct of the good. From the New World come a series of similar figures. Mr. Curtin claims to show that the vast area of the American continent is pervaded by one system of thought incalculably old. In the central group of the most sacred personages is the Earth with Sky and Sun conceived sometimes as identical sometimes as distinct. The Earth-maiden on whom the Sun has gazed, becomes a mother, and gives birth to a great hero. He bestows on men all gifts that support existence, and it is through him that the race lives and prospers. To the Algonkins he was Michabo or Manibozho, the "Great Light," who imparted vision, author of wisdom, arts, and institutions. Among the Toltecs at Tulla he was Quetzalcoatl, virgin-born, founder of civilisation, who organised worship without human or animal sacrifices, and endured no These stories all belong to the class known as myths. They are not accounts of what actually happened, they are the work of religious imagination operating on a particular group of facts, and endeavouring to explain them. The scope of mythology, whatever may be its particular origins, is of the widest compass. It embraces the whole field of nature and life. It first came into modern view through the study of classical antiquity But it was gradually found necessary to abandon one after another of the philological identifications which had at one time been proposed with confidence. New aspects of mythology demanded consideration. It was not only concerned with the incidents and powers of nature, or with the various relations of the gods. It appeared also in the field of ritual. It often contained antique secrets of the meaning of religious performance. It was the key to the dramatised representations of the sacred dance, the ceremonials on which depended the welfare of the tribe. And in proportion as action acquired a larger psychological recognition in shaping the character of religion, and belief receded into the background, the significance of the development of myths was changed. As religion, however, became more self-conscious, the intellectual element in it gained more force and energy, and the thinkers of the priestly schools endeavoured to bring the claims of different deities into some sort of order, and regulate the hierarchy of heaven. When the gods have withdrawn from human fellowship, and no longer choose their brides from the dwellers upon earth, or even vouchsafe to appear among them in various forms for temporary help or promise of blessing, the communications from heaven do not cease altogether. The Vedic poet might challenge the existence of Indra, the fool might say in his heart, "There is no God"; but the Powers above never left themselves without a witness. The negro going out of his hut one morning strikes his foot against a peculiarly shaped stone. "Art thou there?" he inquires, and recognises the presence of a guardian and The lot took the responsibility of decision out of the hands of man, and vested it in the presiding deity. There is always a mystery in chance, which could be interpreted as the will of God. The oath implied that the heavenly Powers could be at any moment summoned to attest man's veracity; and the vow must be fulfilled, though it might cost Jephthah the sacrifice of his daughter. Perjury and broken vows were early recognised Another mystery lay in dreams, which have been connected with supersensual powers all the world over. To the savage who cannot analyse his experience the dream-world is as real as that of his waking hours. The dreams that follow fasts, whether compulsory through deficient food, or voluntary through preparation for some solemn event, possess peculiar vividness; and, when attention has been fixed upon some expected crisis, readily acquire a prophetic significance. Divine forms are seen, and strange intimations are conveyed from another world. The dream verses of the Icelander brought tidings from those who had been lost at sea. To sleep upon the grave of a dead kinsman, still more of a hero or a seer, was the means of receiving communications from the wisdom of the dead. Did not philosophy teach that in sleep the mind is less hampered by its physical environment, and attains truth more nearly; In Greece, accordingly, the practice of sleeping at the tombs of heroes or in the temples of gods was regularly organised. The sanctuaries of Æsculapius, of which more than two hundred can be traced round the Eastern Mediterranean and in Italy, were specially frequented by patients who resorted thither for medical treatment and the advice of the god. The sufferer must pass through the preliminary discipline of the bath, and to his purifications must add the due offering of a sheep. The victim's fleece was carried into the holy precincts, and on it the sick man lay down for the night. In the visions of the dark hours the god appeared, and prescribed the mode of cure, or even condescended to operate himself. An inscription at Epidaurus records that the stiffened fingers of a patient were straightened out and restored for use by the god's own grasp. Was it surprising that Æsculapius should become the object of increasing reverence, and in the second century of our era should be enthroned in the highest as "Saviour (or Preserver) of the universe"? Under other conditions the visitation of the god expresses itself in poetic form. Among the ruder peoples whose songs are of the simplest—perhaps the most childish—kind, the faculty of rhythmic utterance seems superhuman. Words, lines, stanzas, follow The lovely forms of the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory, or with an alternative mother in Harmony, were endowed with functions of song and prophecy, and between them and the historic poets stood a group, half mythical, half human, whose names were attached to actual hymns and poems. Such were Orpheus, Musseus, Eumolpus, Thamyris, and Linos. The verses ascribed to them tended to acquire an authoritative character; they were cited as a rule or norm for conduct; Another mode of converse between deity and man was found in the oracle. Widespread was the belief that through certain chosen persons or in certain peculiar spots the gods deigned to communicate with those who sought their aid. Such agencies were peculiarly numerous in the Hellenic world, and the oracle at Delphi acquired supreme importance. As early as the eighth century B.C., in the days of Amos and Isaiah, it is rising into prominence as an authority that may take the leading place in Greek religion. At one time it almost seemed as if it might succeed When the Israelites had renewed their temple in the days of Darius, and the scribes were beginning to busy themselves with the remains of their national literature, Greek writers also interested themselves in the collection of the utterances of the past. About 500 B.C. Onomacritus gathered together the oracles of MusÆus. It was the first instance of what became a frequent practice Italy, in like manner, had its libri fatales, its sacred books of destiny. There were Etruscan oracles under the name of the nymph Begoe or Vegone; there were the Marcian Songs, said to have been adopted as genuine by the Roman Senate in 213 B.C. The ancient city of Veii had its books; Tibur (Tivoli) the "lots" of the nymph Albunea. Most famous of all were the Sibylline books, brought (according to later tradition) from CumÆ to Rome, perhaps in the last days of the monarchy, or a little later (about 500 B.C.), and placed in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol under the charge of two special guardians. These were afterwards increased to ten, and in the year 51 B.C. to fifteen. The office remained till the books were destroyed in A.D. 400, when Christianity had been finally established as the imperial religion. What they contained is doubtful; how they were consulted is not known. Their aid was sought after prodigies, pestilence, or disaster had awakened general alarm; but their actual In the year 83 B.C. the temple which contained the books was burned. The greatest anxiety was displayed for their restoration. Envoys were sent to Sicily, Greece, and Asia Minor to collect fresh verses; they were deposited in a new temple, and prophecies were founded on them in the last days of the Republic. But it was believed that spurious verses had got into circulation, and Augustus ordered a rigid examination. Some two thousand volumes, it is alleged, were destroyed; those which were admitted as genuine were removed to a temple of Apollo which Augustus had himself dedicated on the Palatine hill. Here are the characteristics of a Canon. The books are kept under special charge in a temple. Their authority suffices to modify old cults and introduce new. When they perish, they must be restored. The false must be separated from the true, the genuine eliminated from the spurious. The Amoral element in them seems to have been entirely subordinated to the ritual; but they were believed to express in seasons of difficulty and danger the demands of the gods. The transition to what are formally called "Sacred Books" leaves a considerable The "Bibles of Humanity," as the foundation-books of the great religions have been called, belong to one continent. Asia has been the mother of them all. The oldest takes shape in India in the Vedic hymns; and the immense literatures of Brahmanism, early and later Buddhism, and the Hinduism which In the Far East Chinese culture reposes on the so-called Classics, the five King and the four Shu, which had a chequered history till they finally acquired their position as fountains of knowledge and models of composition. The ancient odes of the ShÎ King, the traditions of rulers and the counsels of statesmen in the Shu King, the collections of the teaching of Confucius and Mencius, and the remaining works which need not be mentioned here, raise none of the claims which have been preferred for the Indian Veda, or the Christian Bible. Nor does the singular little book of aphorisms ascribed to Lao-Tsze, which serves as the starting-point for Taoism (p. 67). The Shintoist of Japan finds the earliest records of his religion in the national chronicles known as the Kojiki and the Nihongi; and the Some smaller communities claim a passing word. The Jains (p. 61), once the rivals of the Buddhists, possess a sacred literature only less copious. Group after group appears in mediÆval India singing the hymns of its founder, such as the Kabir-panthis, till the poet Tulsi-Das (born 1532) embodies in his version of the ancient Ramayana the essence of Hindu religion for some ninety millions from Bengal to the Punjab. The Sikhs (p. 62) stay themselves upon the words of their holy teachers in the Adi-Granth. The followers of Mani in the third century of our era, who threatened the progress of the Christian Church, and spread all the way from Carthage to Middle Asia, possessed a gospel and epistles of their Prophet, portions of which were brought to Berlin a few years ago from Chinese Turkestan. The Druzes of the Lebanon, whose origin goes back to the Caliph Hakim at Cairo in the eleventh century A.D., treasure the documents of the faith in 111 treatises and epistles, starting from Hakim's vizier, Hamza. And the hapless prophet of Persia, who designated himself the Bab (p. 70), composed in the Beyyan (among numerous other works) an exposition of the Truth for his disciples. For such small communities a sacred literature is in fact a necessity. Around the Scriptures of the greater religions devout reverence has gathered with ardent faith. The Hindu term Veda (meaning literally "knowledge") has a narrower and a wider sense. In its limited application it denotes the four collections of hymns, of ritual formulÆ, and sacrificial songs, of which the Rig-Veda is the most important (p. 10). Their history must be inferred from their contents; of the circumstances of their formation there is no external evidence, save that the early Buddhist texts show that the fourth or Atharva-Veda had not acquired canonical value in the days of the Teacher Gotama. But the term Veda is also extended to include a mass of ceremonial compositions known as Brahmanas, attached to one or other of the ancient collections, and handed down in different religious schools. These are all included more or less definitely in what a Western theologian might term "Revelation." They are technically designated as Çruti or "hearing"; they form the matter of the sacred teaching transmitted orally, which must be reserved for a special order and not imparted to the world outside. The books of household law, on the other hand, prescribing the domestic ceremonies for birth, marriage, and death, regulating caste-privileges, and laying down rules for The Buddhist Scriptures were early grouped in three divisions under the title of the Three Baskets. The teachings of the Supremely Enlightened were of course absolutely true, and his rules for the members of his Order were of compelling authority. It was assumed The oldest portion of the sacred literature collected under the name of the Zend Avesta consists of five hymns (called Gathas), ascribed to Zarathustra himself. They bear many marks of high antiquity, and they acquired a peculiar sanctity, so that the later sacrificial hymns already regard them as objects of homage to which worship should be offered. Above the actual Scriptures rose a radiant figure, in which the conception of revelation Jewish theology was not altogether deficient in similar conceptions. Corresponding to the Torah or Law imparted to Moses, was a heavenly Torah, infinitely richer in content. It formed one of a mysterious group of seven Realities which existed, like the Throne of Glory, Eden, and Gehenna, before the making of the earth and sky. It was a kind of epitome of all possible cosmic relations, so that as an architect frames his plan for a city, God looked into the Torah when he would create the world. Christian theology has never employed this imagery to express its conception of Revelation. But it lies at the back of the curious language of the Koran concerning the "Mother Christian theology has refrained from these physical emblems. But it was possible for a scholar of unquestioned learning to declare CHAPTER VIIRELIGION AND MORALITYThe expression of religion in action produces the offering and the prayer: by sacrifice and devotion, with thanksgiving and requests, do men approach their gods. But there is another way of entering into fruitful obedience to them. Certain kinds of conduct may be acceptable to them, and others not. Are these concerned only with ceremonial acts, or do they include the behaviour of men to each other? How far does religion promote or regulate what we call morality? What are their relations, and how do they affect one another? This question has been discussed in innumerable treatises; attention can only be invited to it here from the point of view of the historical comparison of religions, without reference to philosophical definitions. Every one admits a connection of some sort, for good or for evil, at some period in their respective development. They may not have started hand in hand. Their alliance may be disbanded, and morality may claim total independence. But at some time on the journey they have marched together. The difficulty of the inquiry arises in part from the variety of views as to the scope and essence of both morality and religion. Where do they begin, and in what do they consist? The philosopher may demand a complete recognition of the freedom of the will, and the independent activity of the conscience, and savages who have no such words are set down as destitute of morality, just as those who have no Heavenly Father and no devil, no heaven and no hell, are described as without religion. It is obviously impossible to expect to find everywhere our categories of right and wrong; yet even Lord Avebury lent his high authority to the statement that there are many savages almost entirely without moral feeling largely on the ground of the absence of ideas of sin, remorse, and repentance. Mr. Huxley in the same way declared it obvious that the lower religions are entirely unethical. On the other hand, the idealist strenuously affirms the intimacy of the connection. We are assured that the historical beginning of all morality is to be found in religion; or that in the earliest period of human history, religion and morality were necessary correlates of each other; or that all moral commandments have originally the character of religious commandments. And the student of comparative religion like the late Prof. Robertson Smith cautiously affirms that "in ancient society all morality, as morality was then understood, was consecrated and enforced by religious The difficulty of broad general statements lies in the imperfection of our knowledge. Again and again closer observation has revealed quite unexpected secrets. Whole ranges of belief, feeling, action, formerly concealed from observation, have been brought to light. Thus about twenty years ago Major Ellis, writing of the Ewe, Tshi, and Yoruba peoples on the Gold Coast, laid it down that "religion at the stage of growth at which we find it among these three groups of tribes, has no connection with morals, or the relations of men to one another." But the German missionary, Jakob Spieth, now tells us (1911) that among the Ewe-speaking folk not only does Mother Earth punish with death those who have sworn The beginnings of morality can no more be discovered historically than the beginnings of religion. Language, in various nations, implies that it springs out of custom. The foundation of practical ethics, whatever may be the ultimate interpretation of such terms as duty and conscience in more advanced cultures, lies in social usage. When any custom is established with sufficient strength to serve as a rule demanding observance, so that its breach evokes some feeling, the seed of morals is already germinating. No group however small, no society however crude, can cohere When custom has gained this power, it carries with it an element of control. Impulse must not be inconsiderately indulged, it must be governed. Private interests must be subordinated to a rule, and conduct conformed to a standard of behaviour. In the ruder culture, where the supply of food is of urgent importance, such rules gather around the produce of the chase or of the ground. Among the Australian Kurnai, for example, all game caught by the men, all roots or fruits collected by the women, must be shared with others according to definite arrangements. Methodic distribution is obligatory, and self-denial in sharing and eating is thus impressed upon the young. Moreover certain varieties of food are strictly forbidden to women, children, and boys before initiation. Prohibitions of this kind, extending over many branches of conduct, are found all over the world. They are often designated by a The objects and actions placed under such taboos are various; and it is for the anthropologist and the psychologist, if they can, to discover their origin and application in each particular case. They involve ideas of purity and defilement, the holy and the common, the clean and the unclean. They gather in particular round blood, which rouses in some animals as in many human beings an instinctive aversion and disgust, and yet is at the same time sacred as a seat of life. They enter at the great crises of existence, birth and death; the mother, and perhaps also the new-born child, are unclean, and must be purified; the corpse defiles whoever touches it. They attend the sexual processes, which are the occasion of releasing dangerous Ritual religions are full of survivals of such taboos. "O Maker of the material world," inquires Zarathustra of Ahura Mazda, "can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcass of a dog, or the corpse of a man?" In ancient Israel various foods were forbidden by religious law; the priest might not touch a dead body; when a murder had been committed and the murderer could not be found, the elders of the city must solemnly purify the ground which unpunished bloodshed had defiled. Early Roman religion contained many such prohibitions; from certain sacrifices women and strangers and fettered criminals must withdraw; there are traces of taboo on All over the world, as we have seen (p. 161), the young receive a very severe training in preparation for their entry into the full privileges and duties of the tribe. They are then instructed in the traditional rules of conduct, the proper abstinences, the right behaviour of the sexes. Such ceremonies are recognised as of great importance in communities of the simplest form without political control, for it is through them that the social ties of tribal kinship gain coherence and strength. Various observers have testified to the consideration displayed in Australia, for instance, towards the aged, the sick, and the infirm. The blind are often carefully tended, and the best fed. "As a matter of fact," says Mr. Marett, "the earlier and more democratic types of primitive society, uncontaminated by our civilisation, do not present many features to which the modern conscience can take exception; but display rather the edifying spectacle of religious In West Africa Miss Kingsley noted the close connection in negro communities between religion and life. To get through day or night a man must be right in the religious point of view; he must be on working terms with the great world of spirits round him. In spite of much make-believe the secret societies in which the men are enlisted under solemn oaths, are recognised as important moral agencies. The Ukuku, recently described by Dr. Nassau, could settle tribal quarrels, and proclaim or enforce peace, when no individual chief or king could end the strife. Such organisations regulate marriage laws, the duties of parents and children, the privileges of eldership, the recognition of age and worth. The entry into them lies through the rites of religion. "I have studied these societies," wrote Miss Kingsley; "I am in possession of fairly complete knowledge of three of them. I know men acquainted with ten other societies, and their information is practically the same as my own, viz. that those rites consist in a series of oath-takings as you pass from grade to grade ... Each grade gives him a certain amount of instruction in the native law. Each grade gives him a certain function in carrying out the law. And finally, when he has passed through all the grades, which few men do, when he has sworn the greatest oath Taboos may be violated unconsciously, and tribal laws may be transgressed sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident. The resulting guilt must be removed, if the offender or the community is not to incur the wrath of the affronted Powers. Sin, like holiness, has this peculiar property that it can be communicated by contact. Savage morality does not always rise above the confusion between the physical and the mental. Evil qualities such as uncleanness can be transferred from persons to things, just as from things to persons. Pains and diseases can be extracted from the sufferer, and magically sent into animals or objects which can be driven away or destroyed; and moral evil can be similarly removed. When an Atkhan of the Aleutian Islands had committed a serious offence and desired to unburden himself, he chose a time when the sun was clear, picked up certain weeds, and carried them about his person. After they were thus sufficiently impregnated by contact The Peruvian made his confession to the sun, and then bathed in an adjoining river. There he rid himself of his iniquity, saying "O thou river, receive the sins I have this day confessed to the sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear." The oldest and the most recent rituals repeat the same idea in various forms. In one of the Vedic ceremonials of sacrifice, the sacrificer and his wife towards the close bathed and washed each other's backs. Then having wrapped themselves in fresh garments, they stepped forth, and we read: "Even as a snake casts its skin, so does he cast away all his sin. There is in him not so much sin as there is in a toothless child." Water was likewise employed in Babylonia, where the incantation ran, "I have washed my hands, I have cleansed my body with pure spring water which is in the town of Eridu. All evil, all that is not good, in my body, my flesh, my limbs, begone!" Or, "By the wisdom of thy holy name let the sin and the ban which were created for man's misery be removed, destroyed, and driven away." Like physical evil such as disease, so moral evil might be attributed to the action of spirits, and periodic ceremonies might be performed for purging the community by driving them So in modern times in Nigeria the town sins are annually laid on some unhappy slave-girl, perhaps selected some time before. As she The relation of morality to religion tends to become more definite along different lines of thought, which are constantly intertwined, and of which three are only isolated here for the purpose of the briefest possible illustration of the forms in which they have appeared historically. In the first place, the world may be regarded as a scene in which rival powers of help and hurt are engaged in constant conflict; and the physical dualism thus exhibited may be reproduced in the sphere of morals as a contest between powers of good and evil. Secondly, the course of nature may be viewed as a world-order, where seasonal uniformities are the manifestation of a permanent principle of harmony which is the guide of human conduct, and the vicissitudes of daily or annual experience are interpreted as the judgments of heaven on man's doings, national or personal. And thirdly, the development of the individual conscience may surmount the confusion which ranks ritual offences along with moral transgressions, and the ethical life may be set wholly free from ceremonial bondage, and carried up into the realm of spirit. The lower culture all over the world ascribes disease or accident, madness, calamity, and death, to the agency of hostile powers lying The oppositions of light and darkness belong to every zone all round the world, and were perhaps most strongly felt among the Indo-Iranian branches of the great Aryan family. The name deva in ancient Indian mythology denotes the shining powers of the upper world, the radiant dwellers in the sky. In contrast with it stands another, the It was, however, among the cognate Iranian people that this antithesis acquired the greatest force, under the influence of the prophet Zarathustra. By a curious historic-religious process which cannot here be traced, the terms of the opposing forces were reversed. Ahura (= asura) remained the name of the Supreme Power, with the addition of the term Mazda, "all-knowing," and the daevas (= devas) became the evil multitude. In the oldest part of the Zend Avesta Ahura appears as the sole Creator, the God of light and purity and truth, who dwells on high in the Abode of Song. Beside him is his Good Mind, and the Holy (or beneficent, gracious) Spirit. But opposed to him in the realm of darkness beneath is "the Lie" (drug), with its correlates the Bad Mind and the Evil Spirit (AÑra Mainyu, not yet a proper name). The world between is the scene of continuous struggle, and in this conflict man is called to take his A second group of figures embodying the same idea of the connection of morality with religion is found in the various impersonations Behind Greece lay Egypt, where tradition said that Thales, first of Greeks to philosophise, had studied. When the soul of the dead man was brought to the test of the balance (p. 8), Chinese insight early reached a similar thought. Before the days of Confucius or his elder contemporary Lao-Tsze, the wiser observers had noted the uniformity of Nature's ways. Were not Heaven and Earth the nourishers of all things? Did not Heaven pour The Vedic seers were hardly less impressed with the sense of an orderly control in contemplating the energies around them. Four Rita, however, did not establish itself as a permanent conception in Indian theology. Its place was taken by another idea, which still sways the thought and rules the lives of hundreds of millions of believers in India and the Far East, Karma, or the doctrine of the Deed. It is well known that this doctrine does not appear in the Vedic hymns. It is first discussed as a great mystery in the forest-sessions where teachers and students met together, where kings could still instruct Brahmans, and women might speak in debate. In the Brahmana of a Hundred Paths it is summed up in a maxim which was first formulated in connection with ceremonial obligation, but came to have a much wider application: "A man is born into the world that he has made"; to which the Law-books added the warning: "The Deed does not perish." Man is for ever making his own world. Each act, each word, even each thought, adds something to the spiritual fabric which he is perpetually producing. He cannot escape the results of his own conduct. The values for good or evil mount up from hour to hour, and their issues must be fulfilled. When this The doctrine of Transmigration has appeared in various forms, in very different cultures. But nowhere has it swayed whole civilisations as it has done in the East. It has expressed for innumerable multitudes the The ethical element necessarily varies in richness of content and intensity of feeling in different religions. In the classifications which have been from time to time proposed, attention has often been fixed upon its presence as the marked characteristic of a group. Thus Prof. Tiele, of Leiden, proposed to treat the higher religions of Revelation under two heads: (1) religions embodying a sacred For not only did philosophical and religious communities like the Pythagoreans enunciate such maxims as these: "Purity of soul is the "Into an odorous temple he who goes The religion of Zarathustra, on the other hand, did not maintain its primitive elevation. The prophet's Gathas (p. 191) summoned the believer to live in the fellowship of the Good Mind and in obedience to the Most Excellent Order (Asha vahista), and the later Avesta seems sometimes to repeat their high demand: When Moses established the administration of justice at the sanctuary of Yahweh, he planted a powerful ethical influence in the heart of the religion of Israel. No reader of the Old Testament needs to be reminded of the prophetic rebukes of a monarch's crimes. Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, have become universal types. The history of Hebrew ethics shows how the conception of morality gradually passed from the regulation of external conduct into the inner sphere of thought; and the offender was no longer regarded merely as a member of a tribe or nation on which punishment might alight collectively; he stood in an immediate relation to his God. Primitive imagination could rest content with supposing that sin had first entered the world through the Along a quite different line of thought, which may possibly have been stimulated from the Greek side, the humanists of later Israel endeavoured to bring nature and social life under one common conception of divine Wisdom. The earlier prophecy had regarded the physical world as plastic in Yahweh's hands, so that its events—such as drought or flood, the locust and the blight, could be made the immediate instruments of Israel's discipline. A wider culture brought new ideas. There were statutes and ordinances for the cosmic powers just as there were for communities of man. The universe was the product of the divine thought, and the same agency was seen in the structure and That Mosaism started with a vigorous moral conception of the divine demands, however limited might be its early scope, is generally recognised. The gradual settlement of the immigrant tribes in the land of Canaan, the appropriation of Canaanite sanctuaries, and the adoption of their festivals and ritual, brought new influences which threatened the ancient simplicity. The voices of Hebrew prophecy rang out at Jerusalem ere Greek thought had begun to move. It was a singular result in Israel's history that the great truths of the unity and spirituality and holiness of God, which prophecy had won out of impassioned experience, were confided for their preservation to a code of Priestly Law which raised the elements of ritual and sacerdotal caste to their highest significance in the nation's life. But the law which declared sacrifice to be legitimate only on one altar, made room for a new development of Israel's religion. If CHAPTER VIIIPROBLEMS OF LIFE AND DESTINY"If a man die, shall he live again?" The question is as old as the Book of Job, but the affirmative answer is much older. The earliest human remains in Europe imply some provision for the dead, and it did not occur to the peoples of the lower culture all over the world to doubt the reality of some kind of continued existence. Did not the living still see them in their dreams (p. 86)? But this life might be conceived in an infinite variety ol forms. Where was it passed? under what conditions? what would be its privileges and its requirements? how long would it last? To these and a hundred other questions no uniform answers have been returned; and numerous as are the stories of visits to the other world, there is little agreement as to its place, its scenery, its occupations, its society, its government, its duties, its punishments, or its rewards. Yet no field of human imagination reflects more clearly the stage of social and moral development which creates it. Into his pictures of the future man has persistently woven his The logic of the treatment of the dead is full of gaps and inconsistencies. The same people will perform rites which rest upon quite different theories; customs have run together in strange incoherence. This may be sometimes due to the necessity for making provision for different elements in the person which were united while on earth. The wealthy Egyptian required an elaborate home in the tomb for his double or ka, while his ba started on its perilous journey through the mysterious regions of the world of the dead. From the ethical point of view, however, which chiefly concerns the student of comparative religion, the doctrine of the next life falls into two main divisions, as Burton and Tylor pointed out more than a generation ago—theories of continuance, and theories of retribution. They are connected by many intermediate stages of transition, and they range all the way from the crudest conceptions of prolonged existence in the grave, up to exalted solemnities of judgment, of doom, and of the fellowship of heaven. When a man dies, where will his spirit dwell? The tomb was sometimes constructed to resemble the home and admit the members of the family together. Under the cliffs of Orvieto is an Etruscan city of the dead, where the stone houses (usually with two rooms) stand side by side in streets. The prehistoric gravemounds of Scandinavia have disclosed sepulchral burial chambers, entered by a gallery or passage, divided by large slabs of granite into alcoves or stalls, round which the dead were seated. Just so does the Eskimo of the present day arrange his dwelling. Those who had lived in caves and left their dead there, retained the usage long after they had learned to construct tents or build houses for themselves. The chief was carried to the hills, as the barrows on our own moors show, or to the mountain top, where his spirit blended perhaps with the spirit of the place and lent an additional awe to the heights; or to secure him from disturbance, as the Spanish observers noted in Columbia (S. America), a river was diverted from its course, his grave was made in its bed, and the waters, restored to their former channel, kept the secret safe. The dream experience only provides the world of the dead with scenery and occupations resembling those of common life, with more rapidity of change and mysterious ease of transformation. But when tribes have migrated from one locality to another,—and in the vast reaches of prehistoric time such movements were incessant though The brotherhood of sleep and death has always been recognised, and we still call our graveyards "cemeteries," or sleeping-places. The ancient Israelite said of his dead that he "slept with his fathers." Earth burial suggested a locality beneath the ground, vast and gloomy like some huge cave. The Mesopotamian thought of it as a city, ringed with seven walls; and even the Hebrew who pictured the underworld, Sheol, as a gigantic pit, sometimes imagined it to be approached through gates. There lay the nerveless feeble forms of the mighty ones of earth. The separate nations had their several stations allotted to them, where ghostly warriors lay dark and silent with their ghostly swords around the ghostly thrones of ghostly kings. The transfer of souls through death from one kind of life to another does not necessarily involve any moral change. The relations of earth are resumed in the new scene. The ancient Celts who placed letters to their friends on the pyre of a dead relative, or even expected to receive in the next world the repayment of loans in this, conceived existence hereafter on the same plane as the present, like the modern Chinaman who celebrates the wedding of his spirit-son with the spirit-daughter of a suitable friend, and thus brings peace to a tormented house. The spirit-land of Ibo on the lower Niger had its rivers and forests, its hills, and towns, and roads, below the ground like those above, only more gloomy. In Tuonela, the land of the dead, Finnic imagination pictured rivers of black water, The chief is usually sure of admission into high society in the next world. The Maori paradise was a paradise of the aristocracy; heroes and men of lofty lineage went to the skies. But common souls, in passing from one division to another of the New Zealand Hades, lost a little of their vitality each time, until at last they died outright. Polynesian fancy Courage and daring are of immense social importance, and are among the most important elements in primitive virtue. Strength, valour, skill in war and hunting, lift men into leadership, and the pre-eminence won here is retained hereafter. But these qualities are not limited to chiefs. The happy land of the Greenlanders, Torngarsuk, received the valiant workers, men who had taken many whales and seals, borne much hardship, and been drowned at sea, and women who had died in childbirth. A mild and unwarlike tribe in Guatemala might be persuaded that to die by any Such was the destiny, also, of the Mexican warriors, who daily climbed to the zenith by the sun's side with shouts of joy, and there resigned their charge to the celestial women, who had given their lives in childbed. Merchants, too, were in the procession, who had faced risk and peril and died upon their journeys. But this privilege tasted only four years, when they became birds of beautiful plumage in the celestial gardens. In the far East, in the abode of Tlaloc, god of waters, were those who had died by lightning or at sea, sufferers from various diseases, and children who had been sacrificed to the water-deities. These last, after a happy time, were born again; the rest passed in due course to the underworld of Mictlan in the far north, "a most obscure land, where light cometh not, and whence none can ever return." There the rich were still rich, and the slaves still slaves. But their term was short. Mictlan had nine divisions, and at the end of the fourth year the spirit reached the ninth and ceased to be. This curious distribution has little moral significance, save for its recognition of valour, as in the Teutonic welcome of the warrior into Valhalla, or of social service, as in the case of those who give their lives for the community, the merchant like the Greenland whaler, or the mothers who did not survive their labour. But the beginnings of ethical discrimination sometimes present themselves in very much more simply organised communities. A rude social justice expresses itself in the belief of the Kaupuis of Assam that a murdered man shall have his murderer for his slave in the next life. The Chippeways predict that the souls of the wicked will be pursued by phantoms of the persons they have injured; and horses and dogs which have been ill-treated will torment their tormentors. Murder, theft, lying, adultery, draw down a singular chastisement in the Banks Islands. The spirits of the dead assemble on the road to Panoi, when each fresh comer is torn to pieces and put together again. Then the injured man has his chance. He seizes a part of the dismembered soul, so that it cannot be reconstructed, or at least suffers permanent mutilation. No judge presides over the process, no law regulates it; punishment is still a private affair. But the entry into the new life is not unconditional. The American Choctaws conceived their dead to journey to the east, till they reached the summit of a hill. There a long pine-trunk, Sometimes a new religious motive is more or less plainly apparent. Even the rude Fijian award depended in some way on the satisfaction of the gods. The Tonga Islanders were more explicit; neglect of the gods and failure to present due offerings would involve penalties hereafter. The sun-worshipping people of Achalaque in Florida placed men of good life and pious service and charity to the poor in the sky as stars, while the wicked languished in misery among mountain precipices and wild beasts. Two centuries ago Bosnian heard some of the negroes on the Guinea coast tell of a river in the heart of the land where they would be asked by the divine judge if they had duly kept the holy days, abstained from forbidden meats, and maintained their oaths inviolate, and those who could not answer rightly would be drowned. Such anticipations really introduce a fresh principle. Above the tribal morality, the custom of the clan, rises an obligation of no obvious and immediate use; even ritual practice, the observance of special seasons, or of proper taboos, the offering of prescribed The ancient Semitic cultures formulated no general doctrine of immortality in the higher sense of the word. Faint traces of a hope of resurrection appear here and there in Babylonian texts; but there is no judgment beyond the grave; the chastisements of the gods arrive in this life; and it is only occasionally that the fellowship of heaven becomes the privilege of the great. In Israel the higher prophecy from Amos onward interprets "Yahweh's day" as a day of doom instead of victory; but the divine judgment would alight on the whole people, and would be realised in no future life but in some overwhelming national catastrophe. In Egypt the destiny of the dead was already individualised. Around it gathered the solemnities of the Osirian judgment-seat (p. 8); the ritual and the ethical demands of the forty-two assessors show the moral tests advancing through the ceremonial. The believer who passed safely through the ordeal of the balance and was duly fortified with the proper spells, was mystically identified with Osiris as the "justified," and different texts present different types of future bliss. He might find a home in the fields of Ialu, where numerous servants answered to his call, and he feasted on the magic corn. Or a fresh form might be Egypt, thought Herodotus, had been the teacher of immortality to Greece. The statement is at least interesting as a sign that in the traveller's view the Hellenic faith of his day possessed some analogies with the Egyptian. The ethical element in it, at any rate, was gaining more and more force. In Homer Hades, who is after all another form of Zeus in the underworld, is sovereign, but not judge, of the nether realm. The Erinnyes, who are originally ghosts of the dead, inflict their punishments mostly in the life of earth; only for broken oaths is penalty imposed below; and Tartarus, in the lowest deep, is reserved for the giant Titans who had challenged the majesty of heaven. In the stony asphodel meadow Achilles is but a shade among the rest; if Menelaus is admitted to the Elysian plain, it is no superior valour but aristocratic connection which wins him his place. Rare is the allusion to a judgment; the tribunal of Minos, son of But in the fifth century B.C. fresh influences are at work. Pythagoras has founded his communities, half philosophical, half religious. The higher thought has become markedly monotheistic, and Orphism with its rude sacrament (p. 147) has helped to develop conceptions of fellowship with deity which made new hopes for the future possible. So Pindar, nearest of kin among Greek poets to the prophetio voices of Israel, emphasises the retributive government of God. Man may be nothing more than "a dream of a shadow," nevertheless he is not too insignificant to escape the dooms of heaven upon his guilt, and if there is requital for evil there are also happy islands for the blest. The ethical leaven is already powerfully at work. The language of Cebes and Simmias in Plato's dialogue of the PhÆdo shows, however, that the belief was by no means universal; and the beautiful sepulchral reliefs at Athens give no hint of that august tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthus and Æacus, which Plato pictures as engaged in judging souls. But the great mysteries of Eleusis certainly fostered the hope of immortality. The conviction grew stronger that the initiated would have a happier lot in the life to come, so that Diogenes sarcastically inquired whether an initiated robber would be better off than an uninitiated honest man. The inscriptions of The theories of continuance all assume that the world will go upon its usual way. Generation will follow generation in this life, but the lower culture does not ask what will happen in the next. It cannot take big time-surveys, like the Egyptian "millions of years" or the Hebrew "ages of ages." The future will be like the present, as the present has been like the past. Imagination can conceive a beginning, it does not at first advance to an end. But the development of astronomy in Babylonia, with the discovery of regular periodicities in Nature, seems to have suggested the idea of a great World-Year, an immense period beginning with creation, which would be brought to an end by some This mechanical reproduction of a whole previous age down to its minutest details did not, however, really engage the higher Greek thought. That was chiefly occupied with the Indian thought, as has been already indicated, worked out a complete identification of life with the moral order by means of the doctrine of the Deed (p. 217). The scheme of transmigration took up the earlier ideas of the elder thinkers. The Vedic poets had told of the land of Yama, who was sometimes presented as the first man to die and enter the heavenly world. In one hymn he is associated with Varuna in the highest heaven, where the pious live from age to age, and are sometimes identified with the sun's rays or the stars. There kindred were gathered, and warriors and poets received their reward, and the devout realised the object of their prayers; and Yama sat under a tree of goodly leaves, drinking with the gods the life-giving soma-juice, father and master of the house, tending the heavenly sires. Deep below was the dark pit for those who would not sacrifice to Indra, or persecuted his worshippers. There were fiends of various kinds to torment the wicked, the untruthful, or the seducer. But there are no traces of any specific judgment, with definite awards of heaven and hell. In the later scheme of life founded on the conception of Karma such a tribunal might seem unnecessary: the product of the past works By what channels the doctrine of successive world-ages entered Hindu religion cannot be definitely determined. Early Buddhist teaching assumes it as familiar, though it is not included in the prior Brahmanical literature; and minutely describes the great conflagration which will consume the universe through the heat engendered by the appearance of seven suns. Karma, however, could not be destroyed. No fire could burn it, nor could the other agencies of dissolution, like water or wind, drown or disperse it. It must proceed unerringly to its results. These might be for a time suspended, they could not be frustrated for ever. Their energies lay latent, waiting their opportunity. So a new world would arise to provide the means and the field for their operation, and from age to age, through seasons of dissolution and restoration, with intervals of incalculable time, the endless process would fulfil its round. This would be no literal repetition. The history of a new world-age would be quite fresh, for the potencies of Karma were of infinite variety, and were for ever being re-shaped, cancelled, or extended by the action of the new personalities—divine, human, demonic—(reincarnation might also take place in animal or plant)—in To that question different answers were returned by different teachers. The forest-sages had already pleaded for the recognition of the identity of the self within the heart with the Universal Self (p. 60). There was the path by which the phenomenal scene could be transcended, and the soul brought into its true fellowship with the Infinite Being, Intelligence, and Joy. But inasmuch as this deliverance was only realised by a few, and could not be self-wrought, it must be the result of a divine election; they only could attain it whom the Self chose as his own. With its repudiation of all ontological ideas of soul, or substance, or universal Self, early Buddhism threw the whole task of achieving emancipation on the individual, who must himself win the higher insight and discipline his character with no aid but that of the Teacher and his example. The passion for the salvation of the world might generate an unexampled missionary activity, transcending all bounds of caste and race. It might express itself in singularly The theologians and philosophers of India might devise various methods for the believer's escape from the round of re-births; but on the ecclesiastical side they never surmounted the practical limitation of nationality, or sought to address themselves to the world at large; while the mystics who more easily passed the bounds of race usually lacked the aggressive energy which demanded the conquest and suppression of evil and the assurance of the victory of good. It was reserved for the Persian thinkers, led by Zarathustra, to work out a scheme for the ultimate overthrow of the power of "the Lie" (p. 211). Egyptian theology had impersonated the forces of evil in Set. There were the constant oppositions of darkness The history of the world, accordingly, was ultimately arranged in four periods of three thousand years each. The life of Zarathustra closed the third. At the end of the fourth the great era of the Frasho-kereti, the entry into a new age and a new scene, would arrive. It would be preceded at the close of each millennial series by the advent of a deliverer, wondrously born of Zarathustra's seed. During The Iranian Apocalypse is not the only presentation of conflict and victory in the widespread Indo-Germanic group. The Old Teutonic religion produced its Volospa, the seer's high song of creation and the overthrow of evil. Here is in brief the story of the Above the theories of world-continuance and world-cycles must be ranked those of a world-goal, which imply more or less clearly the conception of a world-purpose. The supreme expression of this in religious literature is found in the Christian Bible. The prophecy of Zarathustra belonged to the same high ethical order as that of Israel. How much the Apocalyptic hopes of the later Judaism were stimulated by contact with Persian thought cannot be precisely defined: the estimates of careful scholars differ. But there is no doubt whatever of the dependence BIBLIOGRAPHYOut of the immense literature produced since Max MÜller's Essay on Comparative Mythology (1856) only a small number of the most important books can be here named, and the list is limited to works in English. Superior figures attached to titles indicate the edition. [Transcriber's note: the superscripted edition numbers have been replaced with the edition in brackets.] GENERAL INTRODUCTION.—Tylor, Primitive Culture (4th ed.) (2 vols. 1903); Max MÜller, Introd. to the Science of Religion (1873), Hibbert Lectures (1878), Gifford Lectures (4 vols. 1889-93); W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (2nd ed.) (1902); J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (3rd editioin) (now in course of publication); A. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion (2nd ed.) (2 vols. 1899), The Making of Religion (2nd ed.) (1900), Magic and Religion (1901); Goblet d'Alviella, Origin and Growth of the Conception of God (Hibbert Lectures, 1892); Tiele, Elements of the Science of Religion (2 vols. 1897); F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion (2nd ed.) (1902); Crawley, The Mystic Rose (1902), The Tree of Life (1905); Farnell, The Evolution of Religion (1905); Westermaarck, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), 2 vols.; Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution (1906), 2 vols.; Marett, The Threshold of Religion (1909). RELIGION IN THE LOWER CULTURE.—Ratzel, The History of Mankind, tr. Butler (1896), 3 vols.; Turner, Samoa (1884); Codrington, Melanesians (1891); A. B. Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples (1890); Yoruba-speaking Peoples (1894); Tshi-speaking Peoples (1897); Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India (2 vols. 1896); Miss M. H. Kingsley, Travels in West Africa (1898), West African Studies (1899); Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904); Howitt, Native Tribes of South-eastern Australia (1904); Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (1906); Roscoe, The Baganda, their Customs and Beliefs (1911); Brinton, Myths of the New World (2nd ed.) (1878); McClintock, The Old North Trail (1910); Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. For the higher religions a few of the best English introductions are here named, in addition to the copious collection of materials in the Sacred Books of the East (50 vols.). BABYLONIA: Sayce, Hibbert Lectures (1887), Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia (1902); Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria (1898), American Lectures. CELTS: Rhys, Hibbert Lectures (1886); Macculloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts (1911). CHINA: Legge, Chinese Classics (2nd ed.) (1893), 5 vols. (in 8 parts); de Groot, The Religious System of China (1892-1910), 6 vols.: already published, The Religion of the Chinese (1910). CHRISTIANITY (primitive): Wernle, Beginnings of Christianity (1903), 2 vols.; Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity (1906), 4 vols. Fuller bibliography in Encycl. Brit., (11th ed.) by G. W. Knox. EGYPT: Renouf, Hibbert Lectures (1879); Maspero, The Dawn of Civilisation (1894); Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia (1902); Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion (1907); Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (1911), 2 vols. GREECE: Farnell, Cults of the Greek States (1896-1909), 5 vols., Greece and Babylon (1911), Higher Aspects of Greek Religion (1912); Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Themis (1912); Sir W. M. Ramsay, in Hastings' Dict. of the Bible, extra vol. (1904), "Religion of Greece and Asia Minor." INDIA: Barth, Religions of India (1882); Hopkins, Religions of India (1895). VEDIC: Macdonell, Vedic Mythology (1897) in BÜhler's Grundriss; Bloomfield, Religion of the Veda (1909). For BUDDHISM, see Mrs. Rhys Davids' vol. in this series. HINDUISM: Monieu Williams, Religious Thought and Life in India (1883). ISRAEL: Kuenen, Religion of Israel (1874), 3 vols.; Montefiore, Hibbert Lectures (1892); Kautzsch, in Hastings' Dict. of the Bible, extra vol. (1904), "Religion of Israel." Kent, Hist. of the Hebrew People, 2 vols. (1890-7); Hist. of the Jewish People (1899); Addis, Hebrew Religion (1906); Marti, Religion of the Old Testament (1907). JAINS: Jacobi in Sacred Books of the East, vols. xxii (1884) and xlv (1895); BÜhler, On the Indian Sect of the Jainas (1904). JAPAN: The Nihongi, tr. Aston (1896), 2 vols.; Aston, Shinto (1905); papers in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan; Griffis, The Religions of Japan (4th ed.) (1904, New York); Knox, Development of Religion in Japan (1907); Tada Kanai, The Praises of Amida, tr. Lloyd (1907, Tokyo). MEXICO AND PERU: Reville, Hibbert Lectures (1884); Payne, History of the New World called America (1892), 2 vols. MOHAMMEDANISM: see Prof. Margoliouth's vol. in this series. PERSIA: Jackson, Zoroaster, the Prophet of ancient Iran (1899); Sanjana, Zarathushtra and Zarathushtrianism in the Avesta (1906, Leipzig); Moulton, Early Religious Poetry of Persia (1911). ROME: W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, 1899, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911); Glover, Studies in Virgil, 1904; Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius (1904); Carter, The Religion of Numa (1906), The Religious Life of Ancient Rome (1912); Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (1911), Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (1912). SIKHS: Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion (1909), 6 vols. TEUTONS: Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1883), 2 vols.; Grimm, tr. Stallybrass, Teutonic Mythology (1900), 4 vols.; Chantepie de la Saussaye, Religion of the Teutons (1902). Small popular volumes in the series on "Non-Christian Religious Systems" (Soc. for Promoting Christian Knowledge), and more recently in Constable's series, "Religions Ancient and Modern." Valuable articles in Hastings' EncyclopÆdia of Religion and Ethics, and in EncyclopÆdia Britannica. INDEXAdi-Granth, the, 188 Aditi, 155 Adonis, 119 Æschylus, 130 Africa, 111, 113 f., 140, 148, 163, 182, 203 Ahriman (AÑra Mainyu), 155, 212, 248 Aius Locutius, 126 Akhnaton, 129 "All-gods," the, 129 American Indians, North, 57, 81, 110, 173, 235 Amida (AmitÂbha), 16 ff., 132, 246 Annam, 83 Apollo, 123, 127, 145, 159, 173, 181, 183 Artemis, 127 Asceticism, 168 Asista, 148 Athens, 228 Attis, 119 Augury, 178 Augustus, 125 Australia, 33, 75, 78 f., 86, 110, 114 f., 149, 162, 171, 199, 202 Awona-wilona, 111 Babylonia, 39, 58, 102, 109, 145, 151, 171, 178, 205, 209, 237, 240 Baptism, rites of, 160 Bhagavad-Gita, the, 128 Bhakti, 157 Bible, the, 194 Birth, deities and rites of, 121, 159 Blackfoot Indians, the, 35, 167 Book of the Dead, the, 186 Brahmanaspati, 156 Brahmanical sacrifice, 143 Buddha, the future, 159. Cp. Gotama Buddhism, 15, 24, 61, 65, 131, 153, 155, 219, 241, 244 f. Buddhist Scriptures, 190 Bjunjil, 171 Celts, the, 27, 41, 104, 142, 231 Chemosh, 107 China, 58, 63, 65, 68, 87, 90, 95, 125, 150, 178, 214, 231 Chinese Classics, 187 Chrysippus, 184 Classification of religions, 220 Clement of Alexandria, 50 f. Corea, 66 Creation-myths, 110 CybelÊ, 40 Dahomey, 138 Dance, the sacred, 166 Dead, cultus of the, 20, 90, 137 ff. Death, 121 Deng-deet, 148 Divination, 178 Druzes, the, 188 Earth, mother, 59, 95, 97, 173 Eating the god, 146 Egypt, 7, 39, 46, 102, 109, 113, 124, 129, 151 f., 171 f., 209, 213, 227, 237 f., 246 Eleusinian Mysteries, 164, 239 Entheos, 147 Erinnyes, the, 238 Euahlayi, the, 149 First-borns sacrificed, 142 Florida, 236 Food-deities, 115 ff. Gabriel, 131 Genius, the, 123 Gold Coast negroes, 107, 138, 144, 197 Greece, 37, 90, 121 f., 145, 161 Hades, 238 Hammurabi, 172 Heaven and Earth, 63, 94 ff., 213 ff. Hebrews, the, 140. See Israel. Heracleides, 184 Herbert, Lord, 31 Hestia, 122 Hierography, Hierology, Hierosophy, 29 f. Hinduism, 62 Homeric Hymn, 164 Huitzilopochtli, 147 Incubation, 180 Initiation ceremonies, 161 ff. Irish sacrificed first-borns, 142 Isis, 39 ff., 51, 109, 127, 165 Islam. See Mohammedanism. Israel, 201, 222, 230, 237, 249 Jacob, 168 Japan, 63, 66, 91, 125, 135, 138 f., 152, 246 Jephthah, 107 Jeremiah, 182 Jews, the, 39, 58. See Israel. Judgment after death, 7 ff., 233 ff. Jumala, 105 Juno, 145 Justin the Martyr, 49 Kings, as divine, 124 Koran, the, 13, 69, 155, 187, 192 f. Krishna, 128 Lares, the, 123 Lesa, 140 Lessing, 22 LÎ ChÎ, the, 150 Life after Death, 226 ff. Life, in the universe, 83 Loki, 210 Lot, the, 178 Lycurgus, 173 Maat, 214 Magic, 75 ff., 120, 142, 148, 154 Mahabharata, the, 190 Mama Ogllo, 174 Manco Capac, 174 Manetho, 39 Manitou, 81 Manu, 190 Marcian Songs, 184 Mawu, 198 Messiah, the, 250 MÊtis, 176 Mexico, 57, 117, 147, 161, 232, 234 Michabo, 173 Migration, 229 Minucius Felix, 49 Mohammed, 12 f., 67 f., 187, 193 Mohammedanism, 24, 26, 58, 63, 67, 155 Moses, 222 "Mothers," 104 Motowori, 92 Mulungu, 82 Muses, the, 181 Mythology, 174 ff. Nanak, 62 New Zealand, 232 Nezahuatl, 130 Niger, tribes of Lower, 150, 198, 231 Noah's sacrifice, 141 Norns, the, 161 Nurrundere, 171 Nyongmo, 113 Oannes, 171 Omophagy, 147 Onomacritus, 183 Oracles, 182 ff. Ordeals, 179 Orenda, 81 Orpheus, 181 Osiris, 8, 109, 119, 172, 209, 237, 247 Pachacamac, 152 "Parasites," 145 Parsees, the, 58 Petronius Arbiter, 22 Pindar, 44, 48, 153, 213, 239, 242 Plato, 38, 45 f., 48 f., 133, 178, 182, 239, 242 PolydÆmonistic religions, 55 Prometheus, 137 Pythagoras, 38 Quetzalcoatl, 173 Rain-making, 54 Rameses, 108 Religio, 42 Rig Veda, 10 f., 59. See Veda. Rita, 216 Rites of passage, 159 Roman emperor, 124 Rome, 41, 52, 90, 109, 123, 131, 145, 161, 178, 201 Sabazius, 165 Sacred Books, 185 ff. Samuel, 161 Saoshyant, 248 SÂtÂn, the, 223 Scape-goat, in Israel, 206 Schleiermacher, 23 Scriptures, 189 ff. Self, doctrine of the, 85 ff. Semites, the, 142 Set, 209 Sheol, 230 Sibylline books, 184 Sin, communicable and removable, 204 ff. Sin (moon-god), 151 Snake-dance, 167 Sophocles, 44 SotÊr (saviour, etc.), 124 f., 127 Stars, the dead as, 231, 240, 243 Stoics, the, 178 Sufiism, 70 Syrians, the, 142 Taaroa, 112 Taboo, 200 ff. Tammuz, 119 Tao, the, 215 Tezcatlipoca, 147 Thargelia, the, 206 Thor, 210 Tibet, 66 Time, 143 Totemism, 55 Triads, 109 Trimurti, 129 Truth, goddesses of, 8 Tutanus Rediculus, 126 Ukko, 105 Universal Religions, 70 Valhalla, 235 Varro, 42 Varuna, 34, 106, 151, 155 f., 211, 243 Veda, the, 136, 142, 151, 155, 163, 177, 189, 205, 215, 243 Vegetation-gods, 118 ff. Vesta, 122 f. Votan, 174 Vows, 168 Wakanda, 81 World-year, 240 Xavier, Francis, 86 Yahweh, 107, 144, 161, 168, 222 Zarathustra (Zoroaster), 38, 44, 58, 131, 163, 187, 201, 221, 246 f. Zend Avesta, the, 187, 191 f., 211 Zeus, 103, 106, 109, 127, 153, 173, 176, 181, 213, 238, 243 Zi (Babylonian), 102 ******** THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 16mo cloth, 50 cents net, by mail 56 cents PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION Just Published PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY ... By BERTRAND RUSSELL Future Issues THE OLD TESTAMENT ... By GEORGE MOORE
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