LITMIR.BIZ

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      I need not point out how precarious all such attempts must necessarily be. There is nothing harder than to determine the real character of the religion of a people, even when the religion is still living. We may describe its outward characteristics, though even these are not unfrequently a matter of dispute; but the religious ideas themselves, which constitute its essence, are far more difficult to grasp and define. Indeed, it is not always easy for the individual himself to state with philosophical or scientific precision the religious beliefs which he may hold. Difficult as it is to know what another man believes, it is sometimes quite as difficult to know exactly [pg 004] what one believes one's self. Our religious ideas and beliefs are a heritage which has come to us from the past, but which has also been influenced and modified by the experiences we have undergone, by the education we have received, and, above all, by the knowledge and tendencies of our age. We seldom attempt to reduce them into a harmonious whole, to reconcile their inconsistencies, or to fit them into a consistent system. Beliefs which go back, it may be, to the ages of barbarism, exist with but little change by the side of others which are derived from the latest revelations of physical science; and our conceptions of a spiritual world are not unfrequently an ill-assorted mixture of survivals from a time when the universe was but a small tract of the earth's surface, with an extinguisher-like firmament above it, and of the ideas which astronomy has given us of illimitable space, with its millions of worlds.

      If it is difficult to understand and describe with accuracy the religions which are living in our midst, how much more difficult must it be to understand and describe the religions that have gone before them, even when the materials for doing so are at hand! We are constantly told that the past history of the particular forms of religion which we profess, has been misunderstood and misconceived; that it is only now, for example, that the true history of early Christianity is being discovered and written, or that the motives and principles underlying the Reformation are being rightly understood. The earlier phases in the history of a religion soon become unintelligible to a later generation. If we would understand them, we must have not only the materials in which the record of them has been, as it were, embodied, but also the seeing eye and the sympathetic mind which will enable us to throw ourselves back into the past, to see the world as our forefathers saw it, and to share for a time [pg 005] in their beliefs. Then and then only shall we be able to realise what the religion of former generations actually meant, what was its inner essence as well as its outer form.

      When, instead of examining and describing a past phase in the history of a still existing form of faith, we are called upon to examine and describe a form of faith which has wholly passed away, our task becomes infinitely greater. We have no longer the principle of continuity and development to help us; it is a new plant that we have to study, not the same plant in an earlier period of its growth. The fundamental ideas which form, as it were, its environment, are strange to us; the polytheism of Babylonia, or the animal-worship of Egypt, transports us to a world of ideas which stands wholly apart from that wherein we move. It is difficult for us to put ourselves in the place of those who saw no underlying unity in the universe, no single principle to which it could all be referred, or who believed that the dumb animals were incarnations of the divine. And yet, until we can do so, the religions of the two great cultured nations of the ancient world, the pioneers of the civilisation we enjoy to-day, will be for us a hopeless puzzle, a labyrinth without a clue.

      Before that clue can be found, we must divest ourselves of our modernism. We must go back in thought and sympathy to the old Orient, and forget, so far as is possible, the intervening ages of history and development, and the mental and moral differences between the East and the West. I say so far as is possible, for the possibility is relative only. No man can shake off the influences of the age and country of which he is the child; we cannot undo our training and education, or root out the inherited instincts with which we were born. We cannot put back the hand of time, nor can the [pg 006] Ethiopian change his skin. All we can do is to suppress our own prejudices, to rid ourselves of baseless assumptions and prepossessions, and to interpret such evidence as we have honestly and literally. Above all, we must possess that power of sympathy, that historical imagination, as it is sometimes called, which will enable us to realise the past, and to enter, in some degree, into its feelings and experiences.

      The first fact which the historian of religion has to bear in mind is, that religion and morality are not necessarily connected together. The recent history of religion in Western Europe, it is true, has made it increasingly difficult for us to understand this fact, especially in days when systems of morality have been put forward as religions in themselves. But between religion and morality there is not necessarily any close tie. Religion has to do with a power outside ourselves, morality with our conduct one to another. The civilised nations of the world have doubtless usually regarded the power that governs the universe as a moral power, and have consequently placed morality under the sanction of religion. But the power may also be conceived of as non-moral, or even as immoral; the blind law of destiny, to which, according to Greek belief, the gods themselves were subject, was necessarily non-moral; while certain Gnostic sects accounted for the existence of evil by the theory that the creator-god was imperfect, and therefore evil in his nature. Indeed, the cruelties perpetrated by what we term nature have seemed to many so contrary to the very elements of moral law, as to presuppose that the power which permits and orders them is essentially immoral. Zoroastrianism divided the world between a god of good and a god of evil, and held that, under the present dispensation at all events, the god of evil was, on the whole, the stronger power.

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      It is strength rather than goodness that primitive man admires, worships, and fears. In the struggle for existence, at any rate in its earlier stages, physical strength plays the most important part. The old instinctive pride of strength which enabled our first ancestors to battle successfully against the forces of nature and the beasts of the forest, still survives in the child and the boy. The baby still delights to pull off the wings and legs of the fly that has fallen into its power; and the hero of the playground is the strongest athlete, and not the best scholar or the most virtuous of schoolboys. A sudden outbreak of political fury like that which characterised the French Revolution shows how thin is the varnish of conventional morality which covers the passions of civilised man, and Christian Europe still makes the battlefield its court of final appeal. Like the lower animals, man is still governed by the law which dooms the weaker to extinction or decay, and gives the palm of victory to the strong. In spite of all that moralists may say and preach, power and not morality still governs the world.

      We need not wonder, therefore, that in the earliest forms of religion we find little or no traces of the moral element. What we term morality was, in fact, a slow growth. It was the necessary result of life in a community. As long as men lived apart one from the other, there was little opportunity for its display or evolution. But with the rise of a community came also the development of a moral law. In its practical details, doubtless, that law differed in many respects from the moral law which we profess to obey to-day. It was only by slow degrees that the sacredness of the marriage tie or of family life, as we understand it, came to be recognised. Among certain tribes of Esquimaux there is still promiscuous intercourse between the two sexes; and wherever Mohammedanism [pg 008] extends, polygamy, with its attendant degradation of the woman, is permitted. On the other hand, there are still tribes and races in which polyandry is practised, and the child has consequently no father whom it can rightfully call its own. Until the recent conversion of the Fijians to Christianity, it was considered a filial duty for the sons to kill and devour their parents when they had become too old for work; and in the royal family of Egypt, as among the Ptolemies who entered on its heritage, the brother was compelled by law and custom to marry his sister. Family morality, in fact, if I may use such an expression, has been slower in its development than communal morality: it was in the community and in the social relations of men to one another that the ethical sense was first developed, and it was from the community that the newly-won code of morals was transferred to the family. Man recognised that he was a moral agent in his dealings with the community to which he belonged, long before he recognised it as an individual.

      Religion, however, has an inverse history. It starts from the individual, it is extended to the community. The individual must have a sense of a power outside himself, whom he is called upon to worship or propitiate, before he can rise to the

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