J. M. Robertson

When religion has entered on the stage of quasi-civilized organization, with fixed legends or documents, temples, and the rudiments of hierarchies, the increased forces of terrorism and conservatism are in nearly all cases seen to be in part countervailed by the simple interaction of the systems of different communities. There is no more ubiquitous force in the whole history of the subject, operating as it does in ancient Assyria, in the life of Vedic India and Confucian China, and in the diverse histories of progressive Greece and relatively stationary Egypt, down through the Christian Middle Ages to our own period of comparative studies.

In ages when any dispassionate comparative study was impossible, religious systems appear to have been considerably modified by the influence of those of conquered peoples on those of their conquerors, and vice versÂ. Peoples who while at arm’s length would insult and affect to despise each other’s Gods, and would deride each other’s myths,1 appear frequently to have altered their attitude when one had conquered the other; and this not because of any special growth of sympathy, but by force of the old motive of fear. In the stage of natural polytheism no nation really doubted the existence of the Gods of another; at most, like the Hebrews of the early historic period, it would set its own God above the others, calling him “Lord of Lords.” But, every community having its own God, he remained a local power even when his own worshippers were conquered, and his cult and lore were respected accordingly. This procedure, which has been sometimes attributed to the Romans in particular as a stroke of political sagacity, was the normal and natural course of polytheism. Thus in the Hebrew books the Assyrian conqueror is represented as admitting that it is necessary to leave a priest who knows “the manner of the God of the land” among the new inhabitants he has planted there.

See 2 Kings xvii, 26. Cp. Ruth i, 16, and Judges xvii, 13. The account by Herodotos (ii, 171) of the preservation of the Pelasgic rites of DÊmÊtÊr by the women of Arcadia points to the same principle. See also hereinafter, ch. vi, § 1; K. O. MÜller, Introd. to a Sci. Study of Mythol., Eng. trans., p. 193; Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, i, 189; Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2nd ed., p. 69; Max MÜller, Anthropological Religion, p. 164; Gibbon, ch. xxxiv—Bohn ed., iii, 554, note; Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 113–15; and Dr. F. B. Jevons’s Introd. to the Hist. of Relig., 1896, pp. 36–40, where the fear felt by conquering races for the occult powers of the conquered is limited to the sphere of “magic.” But when Dr. Jevons so defines magic as to admit of his proposition (p. 38) that “the hostility from the beginning between religion and magic is universally admitted,” he throws into confusion the whole phenomena of the early official-religious practice of magic, of which sacrifice and prayer are the type-forms that have best survived. And in the end he upsets his definition by noting (p. 40) how magic, “even where its relation to religion is one of avowed hostility,” will imitate religion. Obviously magic is a function or aspect or element of primitive religion (cp. Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der rohesten NaturvÖlker, 1880, p. 144; Sayce, pp. 315, 319, 327, and passim; and Tiele, Egyptian Rel., pp. 22, 32); and any “hostility,” far from being universal, is either a social or a philosophical differentiation. On the whole question compare the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 11–38. In the opinion of Weber (Hist. of Ind. Lit., p. 264) the magic arts “found a more and more fruitful soil as the religious development of the Hindus progressed”; “so that they now, in fact, reign almost supreme.” See again Dr. Jevons’s own later admission, p. 395, where the exception of Christianity is somewhat arbitrary. On this compare Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, B. iv, Th. ii, § 3.

Similar cases have been noted in primitive cults still surviving. Fear of the magic powers of “lower” or conquered races is in fact normal wherever belief in wizardry survives; and to the general tendency may be conjecturally ascribed such phenomena as that of the Saturnalia, in which masters and slaves changed places, and the institution of the Levites among the Hebrews, otherwise only mythically explained. But if conquerors and conquered thus tended to amalgamate or associate their cults, equally would allied tribes tend to do so; and, when particular Gods of different groups were seen to correspond in respect of special attributes, a further analysis would be encouraged. Hence, with every extension of every State, every advance in intercourse made in peace or through war, there would be a further comparison of credences, a further challenge to the reasoning powers of thoughtful men.

On the normal tendency to defer to local deities, compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, as last cited; B. Thomson, The Fijians, 1908, p. 112; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 147, and The Ewe-Speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 55; P. Wurm, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2te Aufl., p. 43 (as to Madagascar); Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 589; Waitz, Anthropologie der NaturvÖlker, iii, 186; P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. 1908, p. 191; W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, pp. 56, 84; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, i, 86–87, 94, 100; iii, 188; iv, 170; v, 467–68; W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 1906, p. 263; Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 262; Élie Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 254–56; Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, pp. 289, 301–302; CastrÉn, Vorlesungen Über die Finnische Mythologie, 1853, p. 281; Gummere, Germanic Origins, 1892, p. 140, citing Weinhold, Deutsche Frauen, i, 105; Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale, 2e Éd. p. 67; E. Higgins, Hebrew Idolatry and Superstition, 1893, pp. 20, 24; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 77; Wellhausen, Heidenthum, pp. 129, 183, cited by Smith, p. 79; Lang, Making of Religion, p. 65; Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 72. Above all, see the record in Old New Zealand, “by a Pakeha Maori” (2nd ed. Auckland, 1863, p. 154), of the believing resort of some white men to native wizards in New Zealand.

Stevenson, again, is evidently proceeding upon observation when he makes his trader in The Beach of FalesÀ say: “We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many traders take them up, splendidly educated white men that have been bookkeepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country” (Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893, pp. 104–105). In Abyssinia, “Galla sorceresses are frequently called in by the Christians of Shoa to transfer sickness or to rid the house of evil spirits” (Major W. Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia, 1844, iii, 50). On the other hand, some Sudanese tribes “believe in the virtue both of Christian and Moslem amulets, but have hitherto lent a deaf ear to the preachers of both these religions” (A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 50).

This tendency did not exclude, but would in certain cases conflict with, the strong primitive tendency to associate every God permanently with his supposed original locality. Tiele writes (Hist. of the Egypt. Relig., Eng. trans. introd. p. xvii) that in no case was a place given to the Gods of one nation in another’s pantheon “if they did not wholly alter their form, character, appearance, and not seldom their very name.” This seems an over-statement, and is inconsistent with Tiele’s own statement (Hist. comparÉe des anc. relig. Égyptiennes et sÉmitiques, French trans., 1882, pp. 174–80) as to the adoption of Sumerian and Akkadian Gods and creeds by the Semites. What is clear is that local cults resisted the removal of their Gods’ images; and the attempt to deport such images to Babylon, thus affecting the monopoly of the God of Babylon himself, was a main cause of the fall of Nabonidos, who was driven out by Cyrus. (E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i (1884), 599.) But the Assyrians invoked Bel Merodach of Babylon, after they had conquered Babylon, in terms of his own ritual; even as Israelites often invoked the Gods of Canaan (cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, Relig. of the Anc. Babylonians, p. 123). And King Mardouk-nadinakhe of Babylon, in the twelfth century B.C., carried off statues of the Assyrian Gods from the town of Hekali to Babylon, where they were kept captive for 418 years (Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4e Éd. p. 300). A God could migrate with his worshippers from city to city (Meyer, iii, 169; Sayce, p. 124); and the Assyrian scribe class maintained the worship of their special God Nebo wherever they went, though he was a local God to start with (Sayce, pp. 117, 119, 121). And as to the recognition of the Gods of different Egyptian cities by politic kings, see Tiele’s own statement, p. 36. Cp. his Outlines, pp. 73, 84, 207.

A concrete knowledge of the multiplicity of cults, then, was obtruded on the leisured and travelled men of the early empires and of such a civilization as that of Hellas;2 and when to such knowledge there was added a scientific astronomy (the earliest to be constituted of the concrete sciences), a revision of beliefs by such men was inevitable.3 It might take the form either of a guarded skepticism or of a monarchic theology, answering to the organization of the actual earthly empire; and the latter view, in the nature of the case, would much the more easily gain ground. The freethought of early civilization, then, would be practically limited for a long time to movements in the direction of co-ordinating polytheism, to the end of setting up a supreme though not a sole deity; the chief God in any given case being apt to be the God specially affected by the reigning monarch. Allocation of spheres of influence to the principal deities would be the working minimum of plausible adjustment, since only in some such way could the established principle of the regularity of the heavens be formally accommodated to the current worship; and wherever there was monarchy, even if the monarch were polytheistic, there was a lead to gradation among the Gods.4 A pantheistic conception would be the highest stretch of rationalism that could have any vogue even among the educated class. All the while every advance was liable to the ill-fortune of overthrow or arrest at the hands of an invading barbarism, which even in adopting the system of an established priesthood would be more likely to stiffen than to develop it. Early rationalism, in short, would share in the fluctuations of early civilization; and achievements of thought would repeatedly be swept away, even as were the achievements of the constructive arts.

The process thus deducible from the main conditions is found actually happening in more than one of the ancient cultures, as their history is now sketched. In the Rig-Veda, which if not the oldest is the least altered of the Eastern Sacred Books, the main line of change is obvious enough. It remains so far matter of conjecture to what extent the early Vedic cults contain matter adopted from non-Aryan Asiatic peoples; but no other hypothesis seems to account for the special development of the cult of Agni in India as compared with the content and development of the other early Aryan systems, in which, though there are developments of fire worship, the God Agni does not appear.5 The specially priestly character of the Agni worship, and the precedence it takes in the Vedas over the solar cult of Mitra, which among the kindred Aryans of Iran receives in turn a special development, suggest some such grafting, though the relations between Aryans and the Hindu aborigines, as indicated in the Veda, seem to exclude the possibility of their adopting the fire-cult from the conquered inhabitants,6 who, besides, are often spoken of in the Vedas as “non-sacrificers,”7 and at times as “without Gods.”8 But this is sometimes asserted even of hostile Aryans.9 In any case the carrying on of the two main cults of Agni and Indra side by side points to an original and marked heterogeneity of racial elements; while the varying combination with them of the worship of other deities, the old Aryan Varuna, the three forms of the Sun-God Aditya, the Goddess Aditi and the eight Adityas, the solar Mitra, Vishnu, Rudra, and the Maruts, imply the adaptation of further varieties of hereditary creed. The outcome is a sufficiently chaotic medley, in which the attributes and status of the various Gods are reducible to no code,10 the same feats being assigned to several, and the attributes of all claimed for almost any one. Here, then, were the conditions provocative of doubt among the critical; and while it is only in the later books of the Rig-Veda that such doubt finds priestly expression, it must be inferred that it was current in some degree among laymen before the hymn-makers avowed that they shared it. The God Soma, the personification of wine, identified with the Moon-God Chandra,11 “hurls the irreligious into the abyss.”12 This may mean that his cult, like that of his congener Dionysos in Greece, was at first forcibly resisted, and forcibly triumphed. At an earlier period doubt is directed against the most popular God, Indra, perhaps on behalf of a rival cult.13 Later it seems to take the shape of a half-skeptical, half-mystical questioning as to which, if any, God is real.

To meet such a doubt, a pantheistic view of things would naturally arise, and in the Vedas it often emerges.14 Thus “Agni is all the Gods”; and “the Gods are only a single being under different names.”15 For ancient as for more civilized peoples such a doctrine had the attraction of nominally reconciling the popular cult with the skepticism it had aroused. Rising thus as freethought, the pantheistic doctrine in itself ultimately became in India a dogmatic system, the monopoly of a priestly caste, whose training in mystical dialectic made them able to repel or baffle amateur criticism. Such fortifying of a sophisticated creed by institutions—of which the Brahmanic caste system is perhaps the strongest type—is one of the main conditions of relative permanence for any set of opinions; yet even within the Brahmanic system, by reason, presumably, of the principle that the higher truth was for the adept and need not interfere with the popular cult, there were again successive critical revisions of the pantheistic idea.

In the earliest Upanishads the World-Being seems to have been figured as the totality of matter,16 an atheistic view associated in particular with the teaching of Kapila,17 who himself, however, was at length raised to divine status,18 though his system continues to pass as substantially atheistic.19 This view being open to all manner of anti-religious criticism, which it incurred even within the Brahmanic pale,20 there was evolved an ideal formula in which the source of all things is “the invisible, intangible, unrelated, colourless one, who has neither eyes nor ears, neither hands nor feet, eternal, all-pervading, subtile, and undecaying.”21 At the same time, the Upanishads exhibit a stringent reaction against the whole content of the Vedas. Their ostensible object is “to show the utter uselessness—nay, the mischievousness—of all ritual performances; to condemn every sacrificial act which has for its motive a desire or hope of reward; to deny, if not the existence, at least the exceptional and exalted character of the Devas; and to teach that there is no hope of salvation and deliverance except by the individual self recognizing the true and universal self and finding rest there, where alone rest can be found.”22

And the critical development does not end there. “In the old Upanishads, in which the hymns and sacrifices of the Veda are looked upon as useless, and as superseded by the higher knowledge taught by the forest-sages, they are not yet attacked as mere impositions. That opposition, however, sets in very decidedly in the Sutra period. In the Nirukta (i, 15) YÂska quotes the opinion of Kautsa, that the hymns of the Veda have no meaning at all.”23 In short, every form of critical revolt against incredible doctrine that has arisen in later Europe had taken place in ancient India long before the Alexandrian conquest.24 And the same attitude continued to be common within the post-Alexandrian period; for Panini, who must apparently be dated then,25 “was acquainted with infidels and nihilists”;26 and the teaching of Brihaspati,27 on which was founded the system of the KhÂrvÂkas—apparently one of several sections of a freethinking school called the LokÂyatas28 or LokÂyatikas—is extremely destructive of Vedic pretensions. “The Veda is tainted by the three faults of untruth, self-contradiction, and tautology.... The impostors who call themselves Vedic pandits are mutually destructive.... The three authors of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, and demons: All the well-known formulas of the pandits, and all the horrid rites for the queen commanded in the Asvamedha—these were invented by buffoons, and so all the various kinds of presents to the priests; while the eating of flesh was similarly commanded by night-prowling demons.”29

To what extent such aggressive rationalism ever spread it is now quite impossible to ascertain. It seems probable that the word LokÂyata, defined by Sanskrit scholars as signifying “directed to the world of sense,”30 originally, or about 500 B.C., signified “Nature-lore,” and that this passed as a branch of Brahman learning.31 Significantly enough, while the lore was not extensive, it came to be regarded as disposing men to unbelief, though it does not seem to have suggested any thorough training. At length, in the eighth century of our era, it is found applied as a term of abuse, in the sense of “infidel,” by KumÂrila in controversy with opponents as orthodox as himself; and about the same period Sankara connects with it a denial of the existence of a separate and immortal soul;32 though that opinion had been debated, and not called LokÂyata, long before, when the word was current in the broader sense.33 Latterly, in the fourteenth century, on the strength of some doggerel verses which cannot have belonged to the early Brahmanic LokÂyata, it stands for extreme atheism and a materialism not professed by any known school speaking for itself.34 The evidence, such as it is, is preserved only in Sarva-darsana-samgraha, a compendium of all philosophical systems, compiled in the fourteenth century by the Vedantic teacher MÂdhavÂchÂra.35 One source speaks of an early text-book of materialism, the Sutras of Brihaspati;36 but this has not been preserved. Thus in Hindu as in later European freethought for a long period we have had to rely for our knowledge of freethinkers’ ideas upon the replies made by their opponents. It is reasonable to conclude that, save insofar as the arguments of Brihaspati were common to the KhÂrvÂkas and the Buddhists,37 such doctrine as his or that of the later LokÂyatikas cannot conceivably have been more than the revolt of a thoughtful minority against official as well as popular religion; and to speak of a time when “the Aryan settlers in India had arrived at the conviction that all their Devas or Gods were mere names”38 is to suggest a general evolution of rational thought which can no more have taken place in ancient India than it has done to-day in Europe. The old creeds would always have defenders; and every revolt was sure to incur a reaction. In the Hitopadesa or “Book of Good Counsel” (an undated recension of the earlier Panchatantra, “The Five Books,” which in its first form may be placed about the fifth century of our era) there occur both passages disparaging mere study of the Sacred Books39 and passages insisting upon it as a virtue in itself40 and otherwise insisting on ritual observances.41 They seem to come from different hands.

But in the later form of the VedÂnta, “the end of the Veda,” a monistic and pantheistic teaching holds its ground in our own day, after all the ups and downs of Brahmanism, alongside of the aboriginal cults which Brahmanism adopted in its battle with Buddhism; alongside, too, of the worship of the Veda itself as an eternal and miraculous document. “The leading tenets [of the VedÂnta] are known to some extent in every village.”42 Yet the VedÂntists, again, treat the Upanishads in turn as a miraculous and inspired system,43 and repeat in their case the process of the Vedas: so sure is the law of fixation in religious thought, while the habit of worship subsists.

The highest activity of rationalistic speculation within the Brahmanic fold is seen to have followed intelligibly on the most powerful reaction against the Brahmans’ authority. This took place when their sphere had been extended from the region of the Punjaub, of which alone the Rig-Veda shows knowledge, to the great kingdoms of Southern India, pointed to in the Sutras,44 or short digests of ritual and law designed for general official use. In the new environment “there was a well-marked lay-feeling, a widespread antagonism to the priests, a real sense of humour, a strong fund of common sense. Above all there was the most complete and unquestioned freedom of thought and expression in religious matters that the world had yet witnessed.”45

The most popular basis for rejection of a given system—belief in another—made ultimately possible there the rise of a practically atheistic system capable, wherever embraced, of annulling the burdensome and exclusive system of the Brahmans, which had been obtruded in its worst form,46 though not dominantly, in the new environment. Buddhism, though it cannot have arisen on one man’s initiative in the manner claimed in the legends, even as stripped of their supernaturalist element,47 was in its origin essentially a movement of freethought, such as could have arisen only in the atmosphere of a much mixed society48 where the extreme Brahmanical claims were on various grounds discredited, perhaps even within their own newly-adjusted body. It was stigmatized as “the science of reason,” a term equivalent to “heresy” in the Christian sphere;49 and its definite rejection of the Vedas made it anti-sacerdotal even while it retained the modes of speech of polytheism. The tradition which makes the Buddha50 a prince suggests an upper-class origin for the reaction; and there are traces of a chronic resistance to the Brahmans’ rule among their fellow-Aryans before the Buddhist period.

The circumstances, however, that the Buddhist writings were from the first in vernacular dialects, not in Sanskrit,51 and that the mythical matter which accumulated round the story of the Buddha is in the main aboriginal, and largely common to the myth of Krishna,52 go to prove that Buddhism spread specially in the non-Aryan sphere.53 Its practical (not theoretic)54 atheism seems to have rested fundamentally on the conception of Karma, the transition of the soul, or rather of the personality, through many stages up to that in which, by self-discipline, it attains the impersonal peace of Nirvana; and of this conception there is no trace in the Vedas,55 though it became a leading tenet of Brahmanism.

The main differentiation of Buddhism from Brahmanism, again, is its ethical spirit, which sets aside formalism and seeks salvation in an inward reverie and discipline; and this element in turn can hardly be conceived as arising save in an old society, far removed from the warlike stage represented by the Vedas. Whatever may have been its early association with Brahmanism56 then, it must be regarded as essentially a reaction against Brahmanical doctrine and ideals; a circumstance which would account for its early acceptance in the Punjaub, where Brahmanism had never attained absolute power and was jealously resisted by the free population.57 And the fact that Jainism, so closely akin to Buddhism, has its sacred books in a dialect belonging to the region in which Buddhism arose, further supports the view that the reaction grew out of the thought of a type of society differing widely from that in which Brahmanism arose. Jainism, like Buddhism, is substantially atheistic,58 and like it has an ancient monkish organization to which women were early admitted. The original crypto-atheism or agnosticism of the Buddhist movement thus appears as a product of a relatively high, because complex, moral and intellectual evolution. It certainly never impugned the belief in the Gods; on the contrary, the Buddha is often represented as speaking of their existence,59 and at times as approving of their customary worship;60 but he is never said to counsel his own order to pray to them; he makes light of sacrifice; and above all he is made quite negative as to a future life, preaching the doctrine of Karma in a sense which excludes individual immortality.61 “It cannot be denied that if we call the old Gods of the Veda—Indra and Agni and Yama—Gods, Buddha was an atheist. He does not believe in the divinity of these deities. What is noteworthy is that he does not by any means deny their bare existence.... The founder of Buddhism treats the old Gods as superhuman beings.”62 Thus it is permissible to say both that Buddhism recognizes Gods and that it is practically atheistic.

On the other hand, the gradual colouring of Buddhism with popular mythology, the reversion (if, indeed, this were not early) to adoration and worship of the Buddha himself, and the final collapse of the system in India before the pressure of Brahmanized Hinduism, all prove the potency of the sociological conditions of success and failure for creeds and criticisms. Buddhism took the monastic form for its institutions, thus incurring ultimate petrifaction alike morally and intellectually; and in any case the normal Indian social conditions of abundant population, cheap food, and general ignorance involved an overwhelming vitality for the popular cults. These the orthodox Brahmans naturally took under their protection as a means of maintaining their hold over the multitude;64 and though their own highest philosophy has been poetically grafted on that basis, as in the epic of the MahÂbhÂrata and in the Bhagavat Gita,65 the ordinary worship of the deities of these poems is perforce utterly unphilosophical, varying between a primitive sensualism and an emotionalism closely akin to that of popular forms of Christianity. Buddhism itself, where it still prevails, exhibits similar tendencies.66

Thus early in our inquiry we may gather, from a fairly complete historical case, the primary laws of causation as regards alike the progress and the decadence of movements of rationalistic thought. The fundamental economic dilemma, seen already in the life of the savage, presses at all stages of civilization. The credent multitude, save in the very lowest stages of savage destitution, always feeds and houses those who furnish it with its appropriate mental food; and so long as there remains the individual struggle for existence, there will always be teachers ready. If the higher minds in any priesthood, awaking to the character of their traditional teaching, withdraw from it, lower minds, howbeit “sincere,” will always take their place. The innovating teacher, in turn, is only at the beginning of his troubles when he contrives, on whatever bases, to set up a new organized movement. The very process of organization, on the one hand, sets up the call for special economic sustenance—a constant motive to compromise with popular ignorance—and, on the other hand, tends to establish merely a new traditionalism, devoid of the critical impulse in which it arose.67 And without organization the innovating thought cannot communicate itself, cannot hold its own against the huge social pressures of tradition.

In ancient society, in short, there could be no continuous progress in freethinking: at best, there could but be periods or lines of relative progress, the result of special conjunctures of social and political circumstance. So much will appear, further, from the varying instances of still more ancient civilizations, the evolution of which may be the better understood from our survey of that of India.

The nature of the remains we possess of the ancient Babylonian and Assyrian religions is not such as to yield a direct record of their development; but they suffice to show that there, as elsewhere, a measure of rationalistic evolution occurred. Were there no other ground for the inference, it might not unreasonably be drawn from the post-exilic monotheism of the Hebrews, who, drawing so much of their cosmology and temple ritual from Babylon, may be presumed to have been influenced by the higher Semitic civilizations in other ways also.68 But there is concrete evidence. What appears to have happened in Babylonia and Assyria, whose religious systems were grafted on that of the more ancient Sumer-Akkadian civilization, is a gradual subordination of the numerous local Gods (at least in the thought of the more philosophic, including some of the priests) to the conception of one all-pervading power. This process would be assisted by that of imperialism; and in the recently-recovered code of Hammurabi we actually find references to Ilu “God” (as in the European legal phrase, “the act of God”) without any further God-name.69 On the other hand, the unifying tendency would be resisted by the strength of the traditions of the Babylonian cities, all of which had ancient cults before the later empires were built up.70 Yet, again, peoples who failed in war would be in some measure led to renounce their God as weak; while those who clung to their faith would be led, as in Jewry, to recast its ethic. The result was a set of compromises in which the provincial and foreign deities were either treated genealogically or grouped in family or other relations with the chief God or Gods of the time being.71 Certain cults, again, were either kept always at a higher ethical level than the popular one, or were treated by the more refined and more critical worshippers in an elevated spirit;72 and this tendency seems to have led to conceptions of purified deities who underlay or transcended the popular types, the names of the latter being held to point to one who was misconceived under their grosser aspects.73 Astronomical knowledge, again, gave rise to cosmological theories which pointed to a ruling and creating God,74 who as such would have a specially ethical character. In some such way was reached a conception of a Creator-God as the unity represented by the fifty names of the Great Gods, who lost their personality when their names were liturgically given to him75—a conception which in some statements even had a pantheistic aspect76 among a “group of priestly thinkers,” and in others took the form of an ideal theocracy.77 There is record that the Babylonian schools were divided into different sects,78 and their science was likely to make some of these rationalistic.79 Professor Sayce even goes so far as to say that in the later cosmogony, “under a thin disguise of theological nomenclature, the Babylonian theory of the universe has become a philosophical materialism.”80

The chequered political history of Babylon and Assyria, however, made impossible any long-continued development of critical and philosophical thought. Their amalgamations of creeds and races had in a measure favoured such development;81 and it was probably the setting up of a single rule over large populations formerly at chronic war that reduced to a minimum, if it did not wholly abolish, human sacrifice in the later pre-Persian empires;82 but the inevitably subject state of the mass of the people, and the chronic military upset of the government, were conditions fatally favourable to ordinary superstition. The new universalist conceptions, instead of dissolving the special cults in pantheism, led only to a fresh competition of cults on cosmopolitan lines, all making the same pretensions, and stressing their most artificial peculiarities as all-important. Thus, when old tribal or local religions went proselytizing in the enlarged imperial field, they made their most worthless stipulations—as Jewish circumcision and abstinence from pork, and the self-mutilation of the followers of CybelÊ—the very grounds of salvation.83 Culture remained wholly in the hands of the priestly and official class,84 who, like the priesthoods of Egypt, were held to conservatism by their vast wealth.85 Accordingly we find the early religion of sorcery maintaining itself in the literature of the advanced empires.86 The attitude of the Semitic priests and scribes towards the old Akkadic as a sacred language was in itself, like the use of sacred books in general, long a check upon new thought;87 and though the Assyrian life seems to have set this check aside, by reason of the lack of a culture class in Assyria, the later Babylonian kingdom which rose on the fall of Assyria was too short-lived to profit much by the gain, being in turn overthrown in the second generation by Cyrus. It is significant that the conqueror was welcomed by the Babylonian priests as against their last king, the inquiring and innovating Nabonidos88 (Nabu-nahid), who had aimed at a monarchic polytheism or quasi-monotheism. He is described as having turned away from Mardouk (Merodach), the great Babylonian God, who accordingly accepted Cyrus in his stead. It is thus clear that Cyrus, who restored the old state of things, was no strict monotheist of the later Persian type, but a schemer who relied everywhere on popular religious interests, and conciliated the polytheists and henotheists of Babylon as he did the Yahweh-worshipping Jews.89 The Persian quasi-monotheism and anti-idolatry, however, already existed, and it is conceivable that they may have been intensified among the more cultured through the peculiar juxtaposition of cults set up by the Persian conquest.

The Mazdean system, or worship of Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), of which we find in Herodotos positive historical record as an anti-idolatrous and nominally monotheistic creed90 in the fifth century B.C., is the first to which these aspects can be ascribed with certainty. As the Jews are found represented in the Book of Jeremiah91 (assumed to have been written in the sixth century B.C.) worshipping numerous Gods with images: and as polytheistic and idolatrous practices are still described in the Book of Ezekiel92 (assumed to have been written during or after the Babylonian Captivity), it is inadmissible to accept the unauthenticated writings of ostensibly earlier prophets as proving even a propaganda of monotheism on their part, the so-called Mosaic law being known to be in large part of late invention and of Babylonian derivation.93 In any case, the mass of the people were clearly image-worshippers. The Persians, on the other hand, can be taken with certainty to have had in the sixth century an imageless worship (though images existed for other purposes), with a supreme God set above all others. The Magian or Mazdean creed, as we have seen, was not very devoutly held by Cyrus; but Dareios a generation later is found holding it with zeal; and it cannot have grown in a generation to the form it then bore. It must therefore be regarded as a development of the religion of some section of the “Iranian” race, centering as it does round some deities common to the Vedic Aryans.

The Mazdean system, as we first trace it in history, was the religion of the Medes, a people joined with the Persians proper under Cyrus; and the Magi or priests were one of the seven tribes of the Medes,94 as the Levites were one of the tribes of Israel. It may then be conjectured that the Magi were the priests of a people who previously conquered or were conquered by the Medes, who had then adopted their religion, as did the Persians after their conquest by or union with the Medes. Cyrus, a semi-Persian, may well have regarded the Medes with some racial distrust, and, while using them as the national priests, would naturally not be devout in his adherence at a time when the two peoples were still mutually jealous. When, later, after the assassination of his son Smerdis (Bardes or Bardija) by the elder son, King Cambyses, and the death of the latter, the Median and Magian interest set up the “false Smerdis,” Persian conspirators overthrew the pretender and crowned the Persian Dareios Hystaspis, marking their sense of hostility to the Median and Magian element by a general massacre of Magi.95 Those Magi who survived would naturally cultivate the more their priestly influence, the political being thus for the time destroyed; though they seem to have stirred up a Median insurrection in the next century against Dareios II.96 However that may be, Dareios I became a zealous devotee of their creed,97 doubtless finding that a useful means of conciliating the Medes in general, who at the outset of his reign seem to have given him much trouble.98 The richest part of his dominions99 was East-Iran, which appears to have been the original home of the worship of Ahura-Mazda.100

The religion thus imposed on the Persians seems to have been imageless by reason of the simple defect of art among its cultivators;101 and to have been monotheistic only in the sense that its chief deity was supreme over all others, including even the great Evil Power, Ahriman (Angra Mainyu). Its God-group included Mithra, once the equal of Ahura-Mazda,102 and later more prominent than he;103 as well as a Goddess, Anahita, apparently of Akkadian origin. Before the period of Cyrus, the eastern part of Persia seems to have been but little civilized;104 and it was probably there that its original lack of images became an essential element in the doctrine of its priests. As we find it in history, and still more in its sacred book, the Zendavesta, which as we have it represents a late liturgical compilation,105 Mazdeism is a priest-made religion rather than the work of one Zarathustra or any one reformer; and its rejection of images, however originated, is to be counted to the credit of its priests, like the pantheism or nominal monotheism of the Mesopotamian, Brahmanic, and Egyptian religions. The original popular faith had clearly been a normal polytheism.106 For the rest, the Mazdean ethic has the usual priestly character as regards the virtue it assigns to sacrifice;107 but otherwise compares favourably with Brahmanism.

There is no reason to believe, however, that among the Persian peoples the higher view of things fared any better than elsewhere.108 The priesthood, however enlightened it may have been in its inner culture, never slackened the practice of sacrifice and ceremonial; and the worship of subordinate spirits and the propitiation of demons figured as largely in their beliefs as in any other. In time the cult of the Saviour-God Mithra came to the front very much as did that of Jesus later; and in the one case as in the other, despite ethical elements, superstition was furthered. When, still later, the recognition of Ahriman was found to endanger the monotheistic principle, an attempt seems to have been made under the Sassanian dynasty, in our own era, to save it by positing a deity who was father of both Ahura-Mazda and Angra-mainyu;109 but this last slight effort of freethinking speculation came to nothing. Social and political obstacles determined the fate of Magian as of other ancient rationalism.

The relatively rich store of memorials left by the Egyptian religions yields us hardly any more direct light on the growth of religious rationalism than do those of Mesopotamia, though it supplies much fuller proof that such a growth took place. All that is clear is that the comparison and competition of henotheistic cults there as elsewhere led to a measure of relative skepticism, which took doctrinal shape in a loose monism or pantheism. The language is often monotheistic, but never, in the early period, is polytheism excluded; on the contrary, it is affirmed in the same breath.110 The alternate ascendancy of different dynasties, with different Gods, forced on the process, which included, as in Babylon, a priestly grouping of deities in families and triads111—the latter arrangement, indeed, being only a return to a primitive African conception.112 It involved further a syncretism or a combining of various Gods into one,113 and also an esoteric explanation of the God-myths as symbolical of natural processes, or else of mystical ideas.114 There are even evidences of quasi-atheism in the shape of materialistic hymns on Lucretian lines.115 At the beginning of the New Kingdom (1500 B.C.) it had been fully established for all the priesthoods that the Sun-God was the one real God, and that it was he who was worshipped in all the others.116 He in turn was conceived as a pervading spiritual force, of anthropomorphic character and strong moral bias.117 This seems to have been by way of a purification of one pre-eminent compound deity, Amen-Ra, to begin with, whose model was followed in other cults.118 “Theocracies of this kind could not have been formed unconsciously. Men knew perfectly well that they were taking a great step in advance of their fathers.”119 There had occurred, in short, among the educated and priestly class a considerable development, going on through many centuries, alike in philosophical and in ethical thought; the ethics of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” being quite as altruistic as those of any portion of the much later Christian Gospels.120 Such a development could arise only in long periods of peace and law-abiding life; though it is found to be accelerated after the Persian conquest, which would force upon the Egyptian priesthood new comparisons and accommodations.121 And yet all this was done “without ever sacrificing the least particle of the beliefs of the past.”122 The popular polytheism, resting on absolute ignorance, was indestructible; and the most philosophic priests seem never to have dreamt of unsettling it, though, as we shall see, a masterful king did.

An eminent Egyptologist has written that, “whatever literary treasures may be brought to light in the future as the result of excavations in Egypt, it is most improbable that we shall ever receive from that country any ancient Egyptian work which can properly be classed among the literature of atheism or freethought; the Egyptian might be more or less religious according to his nature and temperament, but, judging from the writings of his priests and teachers which are now in our hands, the man who was without religion and God in some form or other was most rare, if not unknown.”123 It is not clear what significance the writer attaches to this statement. Unquestionably the mass of the Egyptians were always naÏf believers in all that was given them as religion; and among the common people even the minds which, as elsewhere, varied from the norm of credulity would be too much cowed by the universal parade of religion to impugn it; while their ignorance and general crudity of life would preclude coherent critical thought on the subject. But to conclude that among the priesthood and the upper classes there was never any “freethinking” in the sense of disbelief in the popular and official religion, even up to the point of pantheism or atheism, is to ignore the general lesson of culture history elsewhere. Necessarily there was no “literature of atheism or freethought.” Such literature could have no public, and, as a menace to the wealth and status of the priesthood, would have brought death on the writer. But in such a multitudinous priesthood there must have been, at some stages, many who realized the mummery of the routine religion, and some who transcended the commonplaces of theistic thought. From the former, if not from the latter, would come esoteric explanations for the benefit of the more intelligent of the laity of the official class, who could read; and it is idle to decide that deeper unbelief was privately “unknown.”

It is contended, as against the notion of an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine, that the scribes “did not, as is generally supposed, keep their new ideas carefully concealed, so as to leave to the multitude nothing but coarse superstitions. The contrary is evident from a number of inscriptions which can be read by anybody, and from books which anyone can buy.”124 But the assumption that “anyone” could read or buy books in ancient Egypt is a serious misconception. Even in our own civilization, where “anyone” can presumably buy freethought journals or works on anthropology and the history of religions, the mass of the people are so placed that only by chance does such knowledge reach them; and multitudes are so little cultured that they would pass it by with uncomprehending indifference were it put before them. In ancient Egypt, however, the great mass of the people could not even read; and no man thought of teaching them.

The Egyptian civilization was thus, through all its stages, obviously conditioned by its material basis, which in turn ultimately determined its polity, there being no higher contemporary civilization to lead it otherwise. An abundant, cheap, and regular food supply maintained in perpetuity a dense and easily-exploited population, whose lot through thousands of years was toil, ignorance, political subjection, and a primitive mental life.125 For such a population general ideas had no light and no comfort; for them was the simple human worship of the local natural Gods or the presiding Gods of the kingdom, alike confusedly conceived as great powers, figured often as some animal, which for the primeval mind signified indefinite capacity and unknown possibility of power and knowledge.126 Myths and not theories, magic and not ethics, were their spiritual food, albeit their peaceful animal lives conformed sufficiently to their code. And the life-conditions of the mass determined the policy of priest and king. The enormous priestly revenue came from the people, and the king’s power rested on both orders.

This was fully seen when King Akhunaton (otherwise Echnaton, or Icheniton, or Akhunaton, or Akhunaten, or Chuenaten, or Khu-en-aten, or Kku-n-aten, or Khouniatonou, or Khounaton!) = Amen-hetep or Amun-hotep (or Amenophis) IV, moved by monotheistic zeal, departed so far from the customary royal policy as to put under the ban all deities save that he had chosen for himself, repudiating the God-name Amen in his own name, and making one from that of his chosen Sun-God, Aten (“the sun’s disk”) or Aton or Atonou127 or Iton128 (latterly held to be = the Syrian Adon, “the Lord,” symbolized by the sun’s disk). There is reason to think that his was not a mere Sun-worship, but the cult of a deity, “Lord of the Disk,” who looked through the sun’s disk as through a window.129 In any interpretation, however, the doctrine was wholly inacceptable to a priesthood whose multitudinous shrines its success would have emptied. Of all the host of God-names, by one account only that of the old Sun-God Ra-Harmachis was spared,130 as being held identical with that of Aten; and by one account131 the disaffection of priests and people rose to the point of open rebellion. At length Akhunaton, “Glory of the Disk,” as he elected to name himself, built for himself and his God a new capital city in Middle Egypt, Akhet-Aten (or Khut-Aten), the modern Tell-el-Amarna, where he assembled around him a society after his own heart, and carried on his Aten-worship, while his foreign empire was crumbling. The “Tell-el-Amarna tablets” were found in the ruins of his city, which was deserted a generation after his death. Though the king enforced his will while he lived, his movement “bore no fruit whatever,” his policy being reversed after his family had died out, and his own monuments and capital city razed to the ground by orthodox successors.132 In the same way the earlier attempt of the alien Hyksos to suppress the native polytheism and image-worship had come to nothing.133

As the centuries lapsed the course of popular religion was rather downward than upward, if it can be measured by the multiplication of superstitions.134 When under the Ramesside dynasty the high-priests of Amen became by marriage with the royal family the virtual rulers, sacerdotalism went from bad to worse.135 The priests, who held the allegorical key to mythology, seem to have been the main multipliers of magic and fable, mummery, ceremonial, and symbol; and they jealously guarded their specialty against lay competition.136 Esoteric and exoteric doctrine flourished in their degrees side by side,137 the instructed few apparently often accepting or acting upon both; and primitive rites all the while flourished on the level of the lowest savagery,138 though the higher ethical teaching even improves, as in India.

Conflicts, conquests, and changes of dynasties seem to have made little difference in the life of the common people.139 Religion was the thread by which any ruler could lead them; and after the brief destructive outbreak of Cambyses,140 himself at first tolerant, the Persian conquerors allowed the old faiths to subsist, caring only, like their predecessors, to prevent strife between the cults which would not tolerate each other.141 The Ptolemies are found adopting and using the native cults as the native kings had done ages before them;142 and in the learned Greek-speaking society created by their dynasty at Alexandria there can have been at least as little concrete belief as prevailed in the priesthood of the older civilization. It developed a pantheistic philosophy which ultimately, in the hands of Plotinus, compares very well with that of the Upanishads and of later European systems. But this was a hot-house flower; and in the open world outside, where Roman rule had broken the power of the ancient priesthood and Greek immigration had overlaid the native element, Christianity found an easy entrance, and in a declining society flourished at its lowest level.143 The ancient ferment, indeed, produced many stirrings of relative freethought in the form of Christian heresies to be noted hereafter; one of the most notable being that of Arius, who, like his antagonist Athanasius, was an Alexandrian. But the cast of mind which elaborated the dogma of the Trinity is as directly an outcome of Egyptian culture-history as that which sought to rationalize the dogma by making the popular deity a created person;144 and the long and manifold internecine struggles of the sects were the due duplication of the older strifes between the worshippers of the various sacred animals in the several cities.145 In the end the entire population was but so much clay to take the impress of the Arab conquerors, with their new fanatic monotheism standing for the minimum of rational thought.

For the rest, the higher forms of the ancient religion had been able to hold their own till they were absolutely suppressed, with the philosophic schools, by the Byzantine government, which at the same time marked the end of the ancient civilization by destroying or scattering the vast collection of books in the Serapeion, annihilating at once the last pagan cult and the stored treasure of pagan culture. With that culture too, however, there had been associated to the last the boundless credulity which had so long kept it company. In the second century of our era, under the Antonines, we have Apuleius telling of Isis worshipped as “Nature, parent of things, mistress of all elements, the primordial birth of the ages, highest of divinities, queen of departed spirits, first of the heavenly ones, the single manifestation of all Gods and Goddesses,” who rules all things in earth and heaven, and who stands for the sole deity worshipped throughout the world under many names;146 the while her worshipper cherishes all manner of the wildest superstitions, which even the subtle philosophy of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonic school did not discard. All alike, with the machinery of exorcism, were passed on to the worship of the Christian Queen of Heaven, leaving out only the pantheism; and when that worship in turn was overthrown, the One God of Islam enrolled in his train the same host of ancient hallucinations.147 The fatality of circumstance was supreme.

Of the inner workings of thought in the Phoenician religion we know even less, directly, than can be gathered as to any other ancient system of similar notoriety,148 so completely did the Roman conquest of Carthage, and the Macedonian conquest of Tyre and Sidon, blot out the literary remains of their peoples. Yet there are some indirect clues of a remarkable sort.

It is hardly to be doubted, in the first place, that Punic speculation took the same main lines as the early thought of Egypt and Mesopotamia, whose cultures, mixing in Syria as early as the fifteenth century B.C., had laid the basis of the later Phoenician civilization.149 The simple fact that among the Syro-Phoenicians was elaborated the alphabet adopted by all the later civilizations of the West almost implies a special measure of intellectual progress. We can indeed trace the normal movement of syncretism in the cults, and the normal tendency to improve their ethics. The theory of an original pure monotheism150 is no more tenable here than anywhere else; we can see that the general designation of the chief God of any city, usually recognizable as a Sun-God, by a title rather than a name,151 though it pointed to a general worship of a pre-eminent power, in no sense excluded a belief in minor powers, ranking even as deities. It did not do so in the admittedly polytheistic period; and it cannot therefore be supposed to have done so previously.

Apart from this normal tendency to identify Gods called by the same title (a state of things which, however, in ancient as in modern Catholic countries, tended at the same time to set up special adoration of a given image), there is seen in the later religion of Phoenicia a spirit of syncretism which operated in a manner the reverse of that seen in later Jewry. In the latter case the national God was ultimately conceived, however fanatically, as universal, all others being negated: in commercial Phoenicia, many foreign Gods were adopted,152 the tendency being finally to conceive them as all manifestations of one Power.153 And there is reason to suppose that in the cosmopolitan world of the Phoenician cities the higher intelligence reached a yet more subversive, though still fallacious, theory of religion. The pretended ancient Phoenician cosmogony of Sanchoniathon, preserved by Eusebius,154 while worthless as a record of the most ancient beliefs,155 may be taken as representing views current not only in the time and society of Philo of Byblos (100 C.E.), who had pretended to translate it, but in a period considerably earlier. This cosmogony is, as Eusebius complains, deliberately atheistic; and it further systematically explains away all God stories as being originally true of remarkable men.

Where this primitive form of atheistic rationalism originated we cannot now tell. But it was in some form current before the time of the Greek EvÊmeros, who systematically developed it about 300 B.C.; for in a monotheistic application it more or less clearly underlies the redaction of much of the Hebrew Bible, where both patriarchal and regal names of the early period are found to be old God-names; and where the Sun-God Samson is made a “judge”156—having originally been the Judge-God. In the Byblian writer, however, the purpose is not monotheistic, but atheistic; and the problem is whether this or that was the earlier development of the method. The natural presumption seems to be that the Hebrew adaptors of the old mythology used an already applied method, as the Christian Fathers later used the work of EvÊmeros; and the citation from Thallos by Lactantius157 suggests that the method had been applied in Chaldea, as it was spontaneously applied by the Greek epic poets who made memorable mortals out of the ancient deities Odysseus and Æneas,158 Helen, Castor and Pollux, Achilles, and many more.159 It is in any case credible enough that among the much-travelling Phoenicians, with their open pantheon, an atheistic EvÊmerism was thought out by the skeptical types before EvÊmeros; and that the latter really drew his principles from Phoenicia.160 At any rate, they were there received, doubtless by a select few, as a means of answering the customary demand for “something in place of” the rejected Gods. Concerning the tradition that an ancient Phoenician, Moschus, had sketched an atomic theory, we may again say that, though there is no valid evidence for the statement, it counts for something as proof that the Phoenicians had an old repute for rationalism.

At the same time there are signs even in Phoenician worship of an effort after an ethical as well as an intellectual purification of the common religion. To call “the” Phoenician religion “impure and cruel”161 is to obscure the fact that in all civilizations certain types and cults vary from the norm. In Phoenicia as in Israel there were humane anti-sensualists who either avoided or impugned the sensual and the cruel cults around them; as well as ascetics who stood by human sacrifice while resisting sexual licence. That the better types remained the minority is to be understood in terms of the balance of the social and cultural forces of their civilization, not of any racial bias or defect, intellectual or moral.

Of all the ancient Asiatic systems that of China yields us the first clear biographical trace of a practical rationalist, albeit a rationalist stamped somewhat by Chinese conservatism. Confucius (Kung-fu-tse = Kung the Master) is a tangible person, despite some mythic accretions, whereas Zarathustra and Buddha are at best but doubtful possibilities, and even Lao-Tsze (said to have been born 604 B.C.) is somewhat elusive.

Before Confucius (551–478 B.C.), it is evident, there had been a slackening in religious belief among the governing classes. It is claimed for the Chinese, as for so many other races, that they had anciently a “pure” monotheism;162 but the ascription, as usual, is misleading. They saw in the expanse of heaven the “Supreme” Power, not as a result of reflection on the claims of other deities among other races, but simply as expressing their primordial tribal recognition of that special God, before contact with the God-ideas of other peoples. Monotheistic in the modern sense they could not be. Concerning them as concerning the Semites we may say that the claim of a primary monotheism for them “is also true of all primitive totemistic or clannish communities. A man is born into a community with such a divine head, and the worship of that God is the only one possible to him.”163 Beside the belief in the Heaven-God, there stood beliefs in heavenly and earthly spirits, and in ancestors, who were worshipped with altars.164

As regards ancestral worship, we have record of a display of disregard for it by the lords of LÛ in Confucius’s time;165 and the general attitude of Confucius himself, religious only in his adherence to old ceremonies, is incompatible with a devout environment. It has been disputed whether he makes a “skeptic denial of any relation between man and a living God”;166 but an authority who disputes this complains that his “avoiding the personal name of TÎ, or God, and only using the more indefinite term Heaven,” suggests “a coldness of temperament and intellect in the matter of religion.”167 He was, indeed, above all things a moralist; and concerning the spirits in general he taught that “To give one’s self to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.”168 He would never express an opinion concerning the fate of souls,169 or encourage prayer;170 and in his redaction of the old records he seems deliberately to have eliminated mythological expressions.171 “I would say,” writes Dr. Legge (who never forgets to be a missionary), “that he was unreligious rather than irreligious; yet, by the coldness of his temperament and intellect in this matter, his influence is unfavourable to the development of true religious feeling among the Chinese people generally, and he prepared the way for the speculations of the literati of medieval and modern times, which have exposed them to the charge of atheism.”172

In the elder contemporary of Confucius, Lao-Tsze (“Old Philosopher”), the founder of Taouism, may be recognized another and more remarkable early freethinker of a different stamp, in some essential respects much less conservative, and in intellectual cast markedly more original. Where Confucius was an admirer and student of antiquity, Lao-Tsze expressly put such concern aside,173 seeking a law of life within himself, in a manner suggestive of much Indian and other Oriental thought. So far as our records go, he is the first known philosopher who denied that men could form an idea of deity, that being the infinite; and he avowedly evolved, by way of makeshift, the idea of a primordial and governing Reason (Tau), closely analogous to the Logos of later Platonism. Since the same idea is traceable in more primitive forms alike in the Babylonian and Brahmanic systems,174 it is arguable that he may have derived it from one of these sources; but the problem is very obscure. In any case, his system is one of rationalistic pantheism.175

His personal relation to Confucius was that of a self-poised sage, impatient of the other’s formalism and regard to prescription and precedent. Where they compare is in their avoidance of supernaturalism, and in the sometimes singular rationality of their views of social science; in which latter respect, however, they were the recipients and transmitters of an already classic tradition.176 Thus both had a strong bias to conservatism; and in Lao-Tsze it went the length of prescribing that the people should not be instructed.177 Despite this, it is not going too far to say that no ancient people appears to have produced sane thinkers and scientific moralists earlier than the Chinese. The Golden Rule, repeatedly formulated by Confucius, seems to be but a condensation on his part of doctrine he found in the older classics;178 and as against Lao-Tsze he is seen maintaining the practical form of the principle of reciprocity. The older man, like some later teachers, preached the rule of returning kindness for evil,179 without leaving any biographical trace of such practice on his own part. Confucius, dealing with human nature as it actually is, argued that evil should be met by justice, and kindness with kindness, else the evil were as much fostered as the good.180

Lao-Tsze, on his part, had reduced religion to a minimum. “There is not a word in the TÂo TÊh King [by Lao-Tsze] of the sixth century B.C. that savours either of superstition or religion.”181 But the quietist and mystical philosophy of Lao-Tsze and the practicality of Confucius alike failed to check the growth of superstition among the ever-increasing ignorant Chinese population. Says our Christian authority: “In the works of Lieh-Tsze and Chwang-Tsze, followers of Lao-Tsze, two or three centuries later, we find abundance of grotesque superstition, though we are never sure how far those writers really believed the things they relate.” In point of fact, Lieh-Tsze is now commonly held by scholars to be an imaginary personage, whose name is given to a miscellaneous collection of teachings and moral tales, much interpolated and added to long after the date assigned to him—circa 400 B.C.182 It contains a purely pantheistic statement of the cosmic problem,183 and among the apologues is one in which a boy of twelve years is made tersely and cogently to rebut the teleological view of things.184 The writers of such sections are not likely to have held the superstitions set forth in others. But that superstition should supervene upon light where the means of light were dwindling was a matter of course. It was but the old fatality, seen in Brahmanism, in Buddhism, in Egypt, in Islam, and in Christianity.

Confucius himself was soon worshipped.185 A reaction against him set in after a century or two, doctrines of pessimism on the one hand, and of universal love on the other, finding a hearing;186 but the influence of the great Confucian teacher Mencius (Meng-Tse) carried his school through the struggle. “In his teaching, the religious element retires still further into the background”187 than in that of Confucius; and he is memorable for his insistence on the remarkable principle of Confucius, that “the people are born good”; that they are the main part of the State; and that it is the ruler’s fault if they go astray.188 Some rulers seem to have fully risen to this view of things, for we have an account of a rationalistic duke, who lived earlier than 250 B.C., refusing to permit the sacrifice of a man as a scapegoat on his behalf; and in the year 166 B.C. such sacrifices were permanently abolished by the Han Emperor Wen.189 But Mencius, who, as a sociologist, excels not only Lao-Tsze but Confucius, put his finger on the central force in Chinese history when he taught that “it is only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart.”190 So clearly was the truth seen in China over two thousand years ago. But whether under feudalism or under imperialism, under anarchy or under peace—and the teachings of Lao-Tsze and Mencius combined to discredit militarism191—the Chinese mass always pullulated on cheap food, at a low standard of comfort, and in a state of utter ignorance. Hence the cult of Confucius was maintained among them only by recognizing their normal superstition; but on that basis it has remained secure, despite competition, and even a term of early persecution. One iconoclastic emperor, the founder of the Ch’in or Ts’in dynasty (221 or 212 B.C.), sought to extirpate Confucianism as a means to a revolution in the government; but the effort came to nothing.192

In the same way Lao-Tsze came to be worshipped as a God193 under the religion called Taouism, a title sometimes mistranslated as rationalism, “a name admirably calculated to lead the mind astray as to what the religion is.”194 It would seem as if the older notion of the Tau, philosophically purified by Lao-Tsze, remained a popular basis for his school, and so wrought its degradation. The Taoists or Tao-sse “do their utmost to be as unreasonable as possible.”195 They soon reverted from the philosophic mysticism of Lao-Tsze, after a stage of indifferentism,196 to a popular supernaturalism,197 which “the cultivated Chinese now regard with unmixed contempt”;198 the crystallized common-sense of Confucius, on the other hand, allied as it is with official ceremonialism, retaining its hold as an esoteric code for the learned. The evolution has thus closely resembled that which took place in India.

Nowhere, perhaps, is our sociological lesson more clearly to be read than in China. Centuries before our era it had a rationalistic literature, an ethic no less earnest and far more sane that that of the Hebrews, and a line of known teachers as remarkable in their way as those of ancient Greece who flourished about the same period. But where even Greece, wrought upon by all the other cultures of antiquity, ultimately retrograded, till under Christianity it stayed at a Chinese level of unprogressiveness for a thousand years, isolated China, helped by no neighbouring culture adequate to the need, has stagnated as regards the main mass of its life, despite some political and other fluctuations, till our own day. Its social problem, like that of India, is now more or less dependent, unfortunately, on the solutions that may be reached in Europe, where the problem is only relatively more mature, not fundamentally different.

In the religions of pre-Christian Mexico and Peru we have peculiarly interesting examples of “early” religious systems, flourishing at some such culture-level as the ancient Akkadian, in full play at the time of the European Renaissance. In Mexico a partly “high” ethical code, as the phrase goes, went concurrently with the most frightful indulgence in human sacrifice, sustained by the continuous practice of indecisive war for the securing of captives, and by the interest of a vast priesthood. In this system had been developed all the leading features of those of the Old World—the identification of all the Gods with the Sun; the worship of fire, and the annual renewal of it by special means; the conception of God-sacrifice and of communion with the God by the act of eating his slain representative; the belief in a Virgin-Mother-Goddess; the connection of humanitarian ethic with the divine command; the opinion that celibacy, as a state of superior virtue, is incumbent on most priests and on all would-be saints; the substitution of a sacramental bread for the “body and blood” of the God-Man; the idea of an interceding Mother-Goddess; the hope of a coming Saviour; the regular practice of prayer; exorcism, special indulgences, confession, absolution, fasting, and so on.199 In Peru, also, many of those conceptions were in force; but the limitation of the power and numbers of the priesthood by the imperial system of the Incas, and the state of peace normal in their dominions, prevented the Mexican development of human sacrifice.

It seems probable that the Toltecs, who either fled before or were for the most part subdued or destroyed by the barbarian Chichimecs (in turn subdued by the Aztecs) a few centuries before Cortes, were on the whole a less warlike and more civilized people, with a less bloody worship.200 Their God, Quetzalcoatl, retained through fear by the Aztecs,201 was a comparatively benign deity opposed to human sacrifice, apparently rather a late purification or partial rationalization of an earlier God-type than a primitively harmless conception.202 Insofar as they were sundered by quarrels between the sectaries of the God Quetzalcoatl and the God Votan, though their religious wars seem to have been as cruel as those of the early Christians of North Africa, there appears to have been at work among them a movement towards unbloody religion. In any case their overthrow seems to stand for the military inferiority of the higher and more rational civilization203 to the lower and more religious, which in turn, however, was latterly being destroyed by its enormously burdensome military and priestly system, and may even be held to have been ruined by its own superstitious fears.204

Among the recognizable signs of normal progress in the ordinary Aztec religion were (1) the general recognition of the Sun as the God really worshipped in all the temples of the deities with special names;205 (2) the substitution in some cults of baked bread-images for a crucified human victim. The question arises whether the Aztecs, but for their overwhelming priesthood, might conceivably have risen above their system of human sacrifices, as the Aryan Hindus had done in an earlier age. Their material civilization, which carried on that of the kindred Toltecs, was at several points superior to that which the Spaniards put in its place; and their priesthood, being a leisured and wealthy class, might have developed intellectually as did the Brahmans,206 if its economic basis had been changed. But only a conquest or other great political convulsion could conceivably have overturned the vast cultus of human sacrifice, which overran all life, and cherished war as a means of procuring victims.

In the kindred State of Tezcuco, civilization seems to have gone further than in Aztec Anahuac; and about the middle of the fifteenth century one Tezcucan king, the conqueror Netzahualcoyotl, who has left writings in both prose and verse, is seen attaining to something like a philosophic creed, of a monotheistic stamp.207 He is said to have rejected all idol-worship, and erected, as aforesaid, an altar “to the Unknown God,”208 forbidding all sacrifices of blood in that worship. But among the Tezcucans these never ceased; three hundred slaves were sacrificed at the obsequies of the conqueror’s son, Netzahualpilli; and the Aztec influence over the superior civilization was finally complete.

In Peru, again, we find civilization advancing in respect of the innovation of substituting statuettes for wives and slaves in the tombs of the rich; and we have already noted209 the remarkable records of the avowed unbelief of several Incas in the divinity of the nationally worshipped Sun. For the rest, there was the dubious quasi-monotheistic cult of the Creator-God, Pachacamac, concerning whom every fresh discussion raises fresh doubt.210

But the outstanding sociological fact in Incarial Peru was the absolute subjection of the mass of the people; and though its material development and political organization were comparable to those of ancient Persia under the AkhamenidÆ, so that the Spanish Conquest stood here for mere destruction, there is no reason to think that at the best its intellectual life could have risen higher than that of pre-Alexandrian Egypt, to which it offers so many resemblances. The Incas’ schools were for the nobility only.211 Rationalistic Incas and high priests might have ruled over a docile, unlettered multitude, gradually softening their moral code, in connection with their rather highly-developed doctrine (resembling the Egyptian) of a future state. But these seem the natural limits, in the absence of contact with another civilization not too disparate for a fruitful union.

In Mexico, on the other hand, an interaction of native cultures had already occurred to some purpose; and the strange humanitarianism of the man-slaying priests, who made free public hospitals of part of their blood-stained temples,212 suggests a possibility of esoteric mental culture among them. They had certainly gone relatively far in their moral code, as apart from their atrocious creed of sacrifice, even if we discount the testimony of the benevolent priest Sahagun;213 and they had the beginnings of a system of education for the middle classes.214 But unless one of the States which habitually warred for captives should have conquered the others—in which case a strong ruler might have put an end to the wholesale religious slaughter of his own subjects, as appears to have been done anciently in Mesopotamia—the priests in all likelihood would never have transcended their hideous hallucination of sacrifice. Their murdered civilization is thus the “great perhaps” of sociology; organized religion being the most sinister factor in the problem.

It is implied more or less in all the foregoing summaries that there is an inherent tendency in all systematized and instituted religion to degenerate intellectually and morally, save for the constant corrective activity of freethought. It may be well, however, to note specifically the forms or phases of the tendency.

1. Dogmatic and ritual religion being, to begin with, a more or less general veto on fresh thinking, it lies in its nature that the religious person is as such less intelligently alive to all problems of thought and conduct than he otherwise might be—a fact which at least outweighs, in a whole society, the gain from imposing a terrorized conformity on the less well-biassed types. Wherever conduct is a matter of sheer obedience to a superhuman code, it is ipso facto uncritical and unprogressive. Thus the history of most religions is a record of declines and reformations, each new affirmation of moral freethought ad hoc being in turn erected into a set of sheer commands. To set up the necessary ferment of corrective thought even for a time, there seems to be needed (a) a provocation to the intelligence, as in the spectacle of conflict of cults; and (b) a provocation to the moral sense and to self-interest through a burdensome pressure of rites or priestly exactions. An exceptional personality, of course, may count for much in the making of a movement; though the accident of the possession of kingly power by a reformer seems to count for much more than does genius.

2. The fortunes of such reactions are determined by socio-economic or political conditions. They are seen to be at a minimum, as to energy and social effect, in the conditions of greatest social invariability, as in ancient Egypt, where progress in thought, slow at best, was confined to the priestly and official class, and never affected popular culture.

3. In the absence of social conditions fitted to raise popular levels of life and thought, every religious system tends to worsen intellectually in the sense of adding to its range of superstition—that is, of ignorant and unreasoning belief. Credulity has its own momentum. Even the possession of limitary sacred books cannot check this tendency—e.g., Hinduism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Mazdeism, Christianity up till the age of doubt and science, and the systems of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and post-Confucian China. This worsening can take place alongside of a theoretic purification of belief within the sphere of the educated theological class.

4. Even primary conditions of material well-being, if not reacted upon by social science or a movement of freethought, may in a comparatively advanced civilization promote religious degeneration. Thus abundance of food is favourable to multiplication of sacrifice, and so to priestly predominance.215 The possession of domesticated animals, so important to civilization, lends itself to sacrifice in a specially demoralizing degree. But abundant cereal food-supply, making abundant population, may greatly promote human sacrifice—e.g., Mexico.

5. Even scientific knowledge, while enabling the thoughtful to correct their religious conceptions, in some forms lends itself easily to the promotion of popular superstition. Thus the astronomy of the Babylonians, while developing some skepticism, served in general to encourage divination and fortune-telling; and seems to have had the same effect when communicated to the Chinese, the Hindus, and the Hebrews, all of whom, however, practised divination previously on other bases.

6. Finally, the development of the arts of sculpture and painting, unaccompanied by due intellectual culture, tends to keep religion at a low anthropomorphic level, and worsens its psychology by inviting image-worship.216 It is not that the earlier and non-artistic religions are not anthropomorphic, but that they give more play for intellectual imagination than does a cult of images. But where the arts have been developed, idolatry has always arisen save when resisted by a special activity or revival of freethought to that end; and even in Protestant Christendom, where image-worship is tabooed, religious pictures now promote popular credulity and ritualism as they did in the Italian Renaissance.217 So manifold are the forces of intellectual degeneration—degeneration, that is, from an attained ideal or stage of development, not from any primordial knowledge.

1 Cp. Lang (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 91) as to the contemptuous disbelief of savages in Christian myths. Mr. Lang observes that this shows savages and civilized men to have “different standards of credulity.” That, however, does not seem to be the true inference. Each order of believer accepts the myths of his own creed, and derides others.?

2 Cp. Decharme, La Critique des trad. relig. chez les Grecs, 1904, p. 121.?

3 The same process will be recorded later in the case of the intercourse of Crusaders and Saracens; and in the seventeenth century it is noted by La BruyÈre (CaractÈres, ch. xvi, Des esprits forts, par. 3) as occurring in his day. The anonymous English author of an essay on The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indians with those of the Jews (1705, pp. 152–53) naÏvely endorses La BruyÈre. Macaulay’s remark to the Edinburgh electors, on the view taken of sectarian strifes by a man who in India had seen the worship of the cow, is well known.?

4 Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 96, 121–22; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 74; Tiele, Egyptian Religion, p. 36; and Outlines, p. 52.?

5 Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 109–110, and Fischer, Heidenthum und Offenbarung, p. 59. Professor Max MÜller’s insistence that the lines of Vedic religion could not have been “crossed by trains of thought which started from China, from Babylon, or from Egypt” (Physical Religion, p. 251), does not affect the hypothesis put above. The Professor admits (p. 250) the exact likeness of the Babylonian fire-cult to that of Agni.?

6 But cp. MÜller, Anthropolog. Relig., p. 164, as to possible later developments; and see above, pp. 45–47, as to the many cases in which conquering races have actually adopted the Gods of the conquered.?

7 Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, ii (2nd ed.), 372, 379, 384.?

8 Id. p. 395.?

9 Max MÜller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 207–208.?

10 Cp. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, 1894, pp. 94, 98–99; Ghosha, Hist. of Hindu Civ. as illust. in the Vedas, Calcutta, 1889, pp. 190–91; Max MÜller, Phys. Relig., 1891, pp. 197–98.?

11 Max MÜller, Selected Essays, ii, 237.?

12 Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, v, 268.?

13 Max MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 302, citing R. V., viii, 100, 3; and ii, 12, 5. The first passage runs: “If you wish for strength, offer to Indra a hymn of praise: a true hymn, if Indra truly exist; for some one says, Indra does not exist! Who has seen him? Whom shall we praise?” The hymn of course asseverates his existence.?

14 Cp. Rig-Veda, i, 164, 46; x, 90 (cited by Ghosa, pp. 191, 198); viii, 10 (cited by MÜller, Natural Religion, pp. 227–29); and x, 82, 121, 129 (cited by Romesh Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in Anc. India, ed. 1893, i, 95–97); Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v, 353 sq.; Tiele, Outlines, p. 125; Weber, Hist. of Ind. Lit., Eng. trans., p. 5; Max MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1880, pp. 298–304, 310, 315; Phys. Relig., p. 187; Barth, Religions of India, Eng. trans., p. 8; Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 354.?

15 Barth, Religions of India, pp. 26, 31, citing Rig-Veda, v, 3, 1; i, 164, 46; viii, 68, 2. The phrase as to Agni is common in the BrÂhmanas, but is not yet so in the Vedas. The second text cited is rendered by MÜller: “That which is one the sages speak of in many ways—they call it Agni, Yama, MÂtarisvan” (Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 240).?

16 Colebrooke’s Miscellaneous Essays, ed. 1873, i, 375–76. Weber (Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 137, 236, 284–85) has advanced the view that the adherents of this doctrine, who gradually became stigmatized as heretics, were the founders or beginners of Buddhism. But the view that the universe is a self-existent totality appears to enter into the Brahmans’ Sankhya teaching, which is midway between the popular Nyaya system and the esoteric VedÂnta (Ballantyne, Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy, 1859, pp. xviii, 59, 61). As to the connection between the Sankhya system and Buddhism, see Oldenberg, Der Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, 3te Aufl., Excurs, pp. 443.?

17 H. H. Wilson, Works, 1862–71, ii, 346.?

18 Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 236.?

19 Ballantyne, pp. 58, 61; Major Jacob, Manual of Hindu Pantheism, 1881, p. 13.?

20 Cp. Max MÜller, Chips from a German Workshop, ed. 1880, i, 228–232, and Banerjea’s Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy, p. 73, cited by Major Jacob, Hindu Pantheism, p. 13.?

21 Jacob, as cited, p. 3.?

22 Max MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 340–41. Cp. Barth, Religions of India, p. 81.?

23 MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139.?

24 Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 28.?

25 Id. pp. 28, 220–22.?

26 Max MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139, note, citing Panini, iv, 4, 60.?

27 Apparently belonging to the later or middle Buddhist period. MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 141.?

28 On these cp. MÜller, p. 139, note; Garbe, Philos. of Anc. India, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1899, p. 25; and Weber, Ind. Lit. p. 246, note, with the very full research of Professor Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, pp. 166–72.?

29 MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 140–41. Cp. Garbe. p. 28.?

30 Garbe, as cited.?

31 Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 171.?

32 Id. pp. 169–71.?

33 Id. p. 172.?

34 Id. ib.?

35 Trans. in English by Cowell and Gough, 1882.?

36 Garbe, as cited, p. 25.?

37 See MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 141–42, citing Burnouf.?

38 MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 310.?

39 Bk. I, Stories ii, 7, 8, 16; vii. 180.?

40 Bk. I, 11, 40; St. ii, 32.?

41 St. vi. 162.?

42 Major Jacob, as cited, preface.?

43 MÜller, Psychol. Relig., pp. 95, 97, 126; Lect. on the VedÂnta Philos., 1894, p. 32.?

44 Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in Anc. India, as cited, i, 112–13.?

45 Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 166. Cp. his Buddhism, p. 143, as to Buddhist censures of an extravagant skepticism which denied every religious theory. In one of the Dialogues (ii, 25, p. 74) a contemporary sophist is cited as flatly denying a future state. Mr. Lillie, however (Buddhism in Christendom, 1887, p. 187), contends as against Professor Rhys Davids that the Upanishads were only “whispered to pupils who had gone through a severe probation.”?

46 Prof. Weber (Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 4) says the peoples of the Punjaub never at all submitted to the Brahmanical rule and caste system. But the subject natives there must at the outset have been treated as an inferior order. Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 120 and refs.; and Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 23.?

47 Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 236, 284–85; Max MÜller, Chips, i, 228–32; Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 258–64; and the general discussion of the problem in the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 239–63.?

48 Brahmanism had itself been by this time influenced by aboriginal elements, even to the extent of affecting its language. Weber, as cited, p. 177. Cp. MÜller, Anthrop. Relig., p. 164.?

49 Major Jacob, as cited, p. 12.?

50 I.e., “the enlightened,” a title given to sages in general. Weber, p. 284.?

51 Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 179, 299; MÜller, Natural Religion, p. 299.?

52 See Senart, Essai sur la lÉgende de Buddha, 2e Édit., p. 297 ff.?

53 Cp. Weber, pp. 286–87, 303.?

54 See Weber, pp. 301, 307; also Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 43, 83, etc.?

55 Tiele, Outlines, p. 117.?

56 Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 284–87; Max MÜller, Natural Religion, p. 555; Jacobi, as there cited; Tiele, Outlines, pp. 135–36; Rhys Davids, American Lectures on Buddhism, pp. 115–16; Buddhism, p. 84; and the author’s Pagan Christs, pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 8–13.?

57 Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 4, 39.?

58 Barth, Religions of India, p. 146.?

59 Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 35, 79, 99.?

60 Cp. Pagan Christs, pp. 248–50.?

61 Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues, pp. 188–89; Amer. Lec. on Buddhism, 1896, pp. 127–34; Hibbert Lectures, 1881, p. 109; Buddhism, pp. 95, 98–99.?

62 Max MÜller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 295.?

63 As the context in Professor MÜller’s work shows, these phrases are inaccurate.?

64 Cp. Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 289, note; and Banerjea, Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy, p. 520, cited by Major Jacob, pp. 29–30.?

65 See Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv, 50 (cited by Jacob, pp. 30–31), as to the Brahman view of the licence ascribed to Krishna. And see iii, 32 (cited by Jacob, p. 14), as to a remarkable disparagement of Vedism in the Bhagavat Gita.?

66 MÜller, Selected Essays, ii, 363: H. H. Wilson, as last cited, ii, 368 sq.?

67 See this brought out in a strikingly dramatic way in Mr. Dennis Hird’s novel, The Believing Bishop.?

68 Cp. Dr. A. Jeremias, Monotheistische StrÖmungen innerhalb der Babylonischen Religion, 1904, p. 44—a very candid research.?

69 The Hammurabi Code, by Chilperic Edwards, 1904, pp. 67, 68, 70 (§§ 240, 249, 266). The invocations of named Gods by Hammurabi at the close of the code, however, suggest that the force of the word was “a God.” Cp. p. 76 with what follows; and see note on p. 93. On this question compare Jeremias, as cited, pp. 39, 43.?

70 Maspero, Hist. anc. des peup. de l’orient, 4e Éd. p. 139; Sayce, Hib. Lect., pp. 121, 213, 215; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i (1884), 161 (§ 133); iii (1901), 167 sq. (§ 103).?

71 Sayce, pp. 219, 344; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. ed. p. 127.?

72 Jastrow, Religions of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 318.?

73 Jastrow, p. 187; Sayce, pp. 128, 267–68. Cp. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. tr., i, 91; Menzies, History of Religion, 1895, p. 171; Gunkel, Israel und Babylonien, 1903, p. 30; Jeremias, as cited, pp. 5–6.?

74 Meyer, iii, 168; Jastrow, p. 79; Sayce, p. 331 sq., 367 sq.; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 112; Jeremias, pp. 7–23.?

75 Sayce, p. 305. Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 452.?

76 Jastrow, p. 190, note, p. 319; Sayce, pp. 191–92, 367; Lenormant, pp. 112, 113, 119, 133; Jeremias, p. 26.?

77 Tiele, Outlines, p. 78; Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, pp. 152–53; Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, 2nd ed. iii, 13; Maspero, p. 139.?

78 Strabo, xvi, c. 1, § 6.?

79 Cp. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, i, 110; iii, 12–13.?

80 Hibbert Lectures, p. 385.?

81 Meyer, iii, § 103; Sayce, pp. 192, 345.?

82 Cp. Jastrow, p. 662; Sayce, p. 78; and Tiele, Hist. ComparÉe, p. 209. It seems probable that human sacrifice was latterly restricted to the case of criminals.?

83 Cp. Meyer, iii, 173.?

84 Meyer, i, 187, and note.?

85 Cp. T. G. Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light of the Hist. Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 1902, pp. 161–63.?

86 Jastrow, pp. 187, 256; Sayce, pp. 316, 320, 322, 327; Meyer, i, 183; Lenormant, p. 110; Jeremias, p. 5.?

87 Sayce, pp. 326, 341; cp. Jastrow, p. 317.?

88 Meyer, i, 599; Sayce, Hib. Lect., pp. 85–91; Anc. Emp. of the East, p. 245.?

89 Meyer, iii, § 57.?

90 Herod. i, 131.?

91 Jer. xi, 13, etc.?

92 Ezek. chs. vi, viii.?

93 Cp. the recent literature on the recovered Code of Hammurabi.?

94 Herod. i, 101.?

95 Id. iii, 79.?

96 Cp. Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii, ch. 33 (ed. 1888, iii, 442), note.?

97 Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i, 505 (§ 417), 542 (§ 451), 617 (§ 515); Tiele, Outlines, p. 164.?

98 Herod. i, 130.?

99 Cp. Herod. iii, 94, 98; Grote, vol. iii, p. 448.?

100 Meyer, as cited, i, 505, 530 (§ 439); Tiele, Outlines, pp. 163, 165.?

101 Meyer, i, 528 (§ 438).?

102 Darmesteter, The Zendavesta (S. B. E. ser.), vol. i, introd., p. lx (1st ed.).?

103 Rawlinson, Religions of the Anc. World, p. 105; Meyer, §§ 417, 450–51.?

104 Meyer, i, 507 (§ 418).?

105 Cp. Meyer, i, 506–508; Renan, as cited by him, p. 508; Darmesteter, as cited, cc. iv-ix, 2nd ed.; Tiele, Outlines, p. 165.?

106 Meyer, i, 520 (§ 428).?

107 Meyer, i, 524 (§ 433); Tiele, Outlines, p. 178; Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, 1877, pp. 7–18.?

108 Meyer, i, § 450 (p. 541).?

109 Tiele, Outlines, p. 167. Cp. Lenormant (Chaldean Magic, p. 229), who attributes the heresy to immoral Median Magi; and Spiegel (Avesta, 1852, i, 271), who considers it a derivation from Babylon.?

110 Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures on Relig. of Anc. Egypt, 2nd ed. p. 92; Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, Eng. tr. 1897, p. 109. Cp. p. 260. Renouf (pp. 93–103) supplies an interesting analysis.?

111 Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 83; Wiedemann, as cited, p. 103 sq.?

112 Cp. Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 354, 417, 433.?

113 Wiedemann, as cited, p. 136.?

114 Meyer, p. 81 (§ 66); Tiele, Hist. of the Egypt. Relig. Eng. tr., pp. 119, 154.?

115 Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 240.?

116 Meyer, Geschichte des Alten Egyptens, in Oncken’s series, 1877, B. iii, Kap. 3, p. 249; Gesch. des Alt. i. 109; Tiele, Egypt. Relig. pp. 149, 151, 157; Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4É ed., pp. 278–80; Le Page Renouf, as cited, pp. 215–30; Wiedemann, pp. 12, 13, 301; Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Eng. tr. 1907, p. 57.?

117 Erman, pp. 59, 60.?

118 Tiele, Egypt. Rel. pp. 153, 155, 156.?

119 Tiele, p. 157.?

120 Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, 1884; 1 HÄlfte, pp. 90–91; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. trans. i, 395–97; Tiele, pp. 226–30; Erman, pp. 71, 103–105.?

121 Cp. Wiedemann, p. 302.?

122 Tiele, pp. 114, 118, 154. Cp. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 101–102 (§ 85). Wiedemann, p. 260.?

123 Dr. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, 1899, end.?

124 Tiele, p. 157. Cp. p. 217.?

125 Cp. Maspero, as cited, pp. 274–76.?

126 Meyer, i, 72.?

127 Maspero’s spelling.?

128 Von Bissing’s spelling.?

129 De Garis Davies, The Tombs of Amarna.?

130 Maspero (Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, ed. 1905, p. 251) says he respected also Osiris and Horus.?

131 Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, ed. 1891, p. 216. Maspero (as cited, p. 250) recognizes no such revolt.?

132 Maspero, Hist. anc. de l’orient, 7e Éd. pp. 248–54; Brugsch, Hist. of Egypt under the Pharaohs, Eng. trans. ed. 1891, ch. x; Meyer, Geschichte des alten Aegyptens, B. iii, Kap. 4, 5; Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 271–74; Tiele, pp. 161–65; Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, iii (1905), 10; Wiedemann, pp. 35–39; Erman, pp. 61–70; L. W. King and H. H. Hall, Egypt and Western Asia in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 1907, pp. 383–87; F. W. von Bissing, Geschichte Aegyptens in Umriss, 1904, pp. 52–53.?

133 Tiele, p. 144; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 135.?

134 “We do not find magic predominant [in the tales] until the Ptolemaic age. At that time the physical magic of the early times reappears in full force” (Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, 1898, p. 29. Cp. Maspero, p. 286; Budge, Egyptian Magic, pp. 64, 233).?

135 Petrie, Hist. iii, 174–75, 180.?

136 Tiele, pp. 180–82; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 140–43.?

137 Tiele, pp. 184–85, 196, 217.?

138 Herodotos, ii, 48, 60–64, etc. Cp. Maspero, p. 286.?

139 “The Osiride and Cosmic Gods rose in importance as time went on, while the Abstract Gods continually sank on the whole. This agrees with the general idea that the imported Gods have to yield their position gradually to the older and more deeply-rooted faiths” (Petrie, as last cited, p. 95).?

140 The familiar narrative of Herodotos is put in doubt by the monuments. Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 246. But cp. Meyer, i, 611 (§ 508).?

141 Tiele, p. 158.?

142 See figures 209, 212, 221, 235, 242, 249, 250, in Sharpe’s Hist. of Egypt, 7th ed.?

143 Cp. Sharpe, ii, 287–95; Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 64.?

144 Compare the orthodox view of Bishop Westcott, Essays in the History of Religious Thought in the West, 1891, pp. 197–200.?

145 These fights had not ceased even in the time of Julian (Sharpe, ii, 280). Cp. Juvenal, Sat. xv, 33 sq.?

146 Metamorphoses, B., xi.?

147 Cp. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, passim.?

148 Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 232–33.?

149 Meyer, i, 237.?

150 Put by Canon Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, 1889, p. 321.?

151 As to the universality of this tendency, see Meyer, ii, 97.?

152 Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 251, § 209; Tiele, Outlines, p. 84; Histoire comparÉe des anciennes religions, Fr. tr. pp. 320–21.?

153 Rawlinson, Phoenicia, p. 340; Sayce, Anc. Emp. p. 204; Menzies, Hist. of Relig. p. 168.?

154 PrÆparatio Evangelica, B. i, c. 9–10.?

155 Meyer, i, 249.?

156 Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 159, as to Persian methods of the same kind.?

157 Div. Inst. i, 23.?

158 E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 104, 105.?

159 As to Greek instances, cp. Bury, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. 53, 55, 65, 92, 104; and as to Roman, see Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. trans. 1906, ch. x, where it is shown that Virginia and Lucretia are primarily ancient Latin divinities; and (ch. vii) that both Numa and Servius Tullius are probably in the same case, Servius Rex being in all likelihood the servus rex Nemorensis of the Arician grove, round whom turns the research of Dr. J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough; while tullius is an old Latin word for a spring. See also ch. iv as to Acca Larentia, another Goddess reduced by the historians to the status of a hetaira, as was Flora. Horatius Cocles (id. p. 157) is also a God reduced to a hero.?

160 So Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 204.?

161 Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 202.?

162 Legge, Religions of China, 1880, pp. 11, 16; Douglas, Confucianism and Taouism, 1879, pp. 12, 82.?

163 Menzies, History of Religion, p. 158.?

164 Legge, pp. 12, 19, 23, 25, 26; Tiele, Outlines, p. 27; Douglas, p. 79.?

165 Legge, Religions of China, p. 142.?

166 See the citations made by Legge, p. 5.?

167 Id. p. 139; cp. Menzies, p. 109.?

168 Legge, p. 140; cp. p. 117; Douglas, p. 81.?

169 Legge, Religions, p. 117; Life and Teachings of Confucius, 4th ed. p. 101; Douglas, p. 68; Tiele, Outlines, p. 29.?

170 Tiele, p. 31; Legge, Religions, p. 143.?

171 Tiele, pp. 31–32; Douglas, pp. 68, 84. But cp. Legge, Religions, pp. 123, 127.?

172 Legge, Life and Teachings, pp. 100–101.?

173 Douglas, pp. 179, 184.?

174 See the author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 214–22.?

175 Pauthier, Chine Moderne, p. 351. There is a tradition that Lao-Tsze took his doctrine from an ancient sage who flourished before 1120 B.C.; and he himself (Tau Teh King, trans. by Chalmers, The Speculations of Lao-Tsze, 1868, ch. 41) cites doctrine as to Tau from “those who have spoken (before me).” Cp. cc. 22, 41, 62, 65, 70.?

176 Cp. E. J. Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, 1894, ii, 18.?

177 Pauthier, p. 358; Chalmers, pp. 14, 37.?

178 Legge, Religions, p. 137.?

179 Tau Teh King, as cited, pp. 38. 49, ch. 49, 63; Pauthier, p. 358; Legge, p. 223.?

180 Analects, xxv, 36; Legge, Religions, p. 143; Life and Teachings, p. 113; Douglas, p. 144.?

181 Legge, Religions, p. 164. We do find, however, an occasional allusion to deity, as in the phrase “the Great Architect” (Chalmers’ trans. 1868. ch. lxxiv, p. 57), and “Heaven” is spoken of in a somewhat personalized sense. Still, Mr. Chalmers complains (p. xv) that Lao-Tsze did not recognize a personal God, but put “an indefinite, impersonal, and unconscious Tau” above all things (ch. iv).?

182 F. H. Balfour, Art. “A Philosopher who Never Lived,” in Leaves from my Chinese Scrap-book, 1887, p. 83 sq.?

183 Id. pp. 86–90.?

184 Id. p. 134.?

185 Legge, Religions of China, p. 147; Tiele, Outlines, p. 33.?

186 Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, 1875, pp. 29, 50, 77, etc.?

187 Tiele, p. 33.?

188 Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, pp. 44, 47, 56, 57, etc.?

189 Miss Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, ii, 36–37, following Chavannes.?

190 Legge’s Mencius, p. 49; cp. p. 48.?

191 Cp. Legge’s Mencius, pp. 47, 131; Chalmers’ Lao-Tsze, pp. 23, 28, 53, 58 (chs. xxx, xxxi, xxxvi, lxvii, lxxiv); Douglas, Taouism, chs. ii, iii.?

192 Legge, Religions of China, p. 147. The ruler in question seems to have been of non-Chinese descent. E. H. Parker, China, 1901, p. 18.?

193 Legge, Religions of China, p. 159.?

194 Id. p. 60.?

195 Tiele, p. 37.?

196 Douglas, p. 222.?

197 Id. p. 239.?

198 Tiele, p. 35; Douglas, p. 287. Taouism, however, has a rather noteworthy ethical code. See Douglas, ch. vi. It has to be noted that the translations of the TÂo TÊh King have varied to a disquieting degree. Cp. Drews, Gesch. des Monismus, p. 121.?

199 Details are given in the author’s Pagan Christs, pt. iv.?

200 Nadaillac (L’AmÉrique prÉhistorique, 1883, pp. 273–84) gives them little of this credit, pronouncing them at once cruel and degenerate. He credits them, however, with being the first makers of roads and aqueducts in Central America, and cites the record of their free public hospitals, maintained by the sacerdotal kings. Prescott, on the other hand, overstated the bloodlessness of their religion (Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed. 1890, p. 41 and ed. note).?

201 RÉville, Hibbert Lectures, On the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru, 1884, pp. 62–67.?

202 J. G. MÜller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, ed. 1867, pp. 577–90; H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, iii, 279. (Passage cited in author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 402–403; where is also noted Dr. Tylor’s early view, discarded later, that Quetzalcoatl was a real personage.)?

203 Cp. Prescott, as cited.?

204 RÉville, p. 66.?

205 J. G. MÜller, as cited, pp. 473–74; RÉville, p. 46. Dr. RÉville speaks of the worship of the unifying deity as pretty much “effaced” by that of the lower Gods. It seems rather to have been a priestly effort to syncretize these. Still, such an effacement did take place, as we have seen, in Central Asia in ancient times, after a syncretic idea had been reached (above, p. 45). As to the alleged monotheism of King Netzahuatl (or Netzahualcoyotl), of Tezcuco, mentioned above, p. 39, see Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270, note, and p. 282; Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, as cited, p. 92; and J. G. MÜller, as cited, pp. 473–74, 480.?

206 As to the capabilities of the Aztec language, see Bancroft, Native Races, ii, 727–28 (quoted in Pagan Christs, p. 416, note).?

207 Refs. above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270, note, and p. 282; J. G. MÜller, as cited, pp. 473–74; and Nadaillac, as cited, p. 289.?

208 The Christianized descendant of the Tezcucan kings, Ixtilxochitl, who wrote their history, adds the words, “Cause of Causes”—a very unlikely formula in the place and circumstances.?

209 Above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, as last cited, pp. 263, 282.?

210 Cp. Kirk’s ed. of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, 1889, p. 44; RÉville, p. 189–90; Lang, as cited below.?

211 RÉville, p. 152, citing Garcilasso. See same page for a story of resistance to the invention of an alphabet.?

212 RÉville, p. 50. citing Torquemada, 1. viii, c. 20. end.?

213 History of the Affairs of New Spain, French trans. 1880, 1. vi, ch. 7, pp. 342–43. Cp. Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed. pp. 31, 33.?

214 Prescott, p. 34.?

215 “The priest says, ‘the spirit is hungry.’ the fact being that he himself is hungry. He advises the killing of an animal” (Max MÜller, Anthropological Religion, p. 307).?

216 On the general tendency cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, pp. 77–84.?

217 In the windows of the shop of the S. P. C. K., in London, may be often seen large displays of reproduced Madonna-pictures, by Catholic artists, at popular prices.?