25126	----	None 
20137	----	Making of America collection of the University of Michigan Libraries (http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/) Note: Images of the original pages are available through the Making of America collection of the University of Michigan Libraries. See http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=AJF2939.0001.001 A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF RELIGIONS. Translated from the Dutch of J. H. SCHOLTEN, Professor at Leyden, by Francis T. Washburn. Reprinted by permission from "The Religious Magazine and Monthly Review." Boston: Crosby & Damrell, 100 Washington St. 1870. A COMPARATIVE VIEW OF RELIGIONS. INTRODUCTION.[1] The conception of religion presupposes, _a_, God as object; _b_, man as subject; _c_, the mutual relation existing between them. According to the various stages of development which men have reached, religious belief manifests itself either in the form of a passive feeling of dependence, where the subject, not yet conscious of his independence, feels himself wholly overmastered by the deity, or the object of worship, as by a power outside of and opposed to himself; or, when the feeling of independence has awakened, in a one-sided elevation of the human, whereby man in worshiping a deity deifies himself. In the highest stage of religious development, the most entire feeling of dependence is united in religion with the strongest consciousness of personal independence. The first of these forms is exhibited in the fetich and nature-worship of the ancient nations; the second in Buddhism, and in the deification of the human, which reaches its full height among the Greeks. The true religion, prepared in Israel, is the Christian, in which man, grown conscious of his oneness with God, is ruled by the divine as an inner power of life, and acts spontaneously and freely while in the fullest dependence upon God. Since Christ, no more perfect religion has appeared. What is true and good in Islamism was borrowed from Israel and Christianity. Although it is probable that every nation passed through different forms of religious belief before its religion reached its highest development, yet the earlier periods lie in great part beyond the reach of historical investigation. The history of religion, therefore, has for its task the review of the various forms of religion with which we are historically acquainted, in the order of psychological development. CHAPTER I. FETICHISM. THE CHINESE. THE EGYPTIANS. 1. FETICHISM. The lowest stage of religious development is fetichism, as it is found among the savage tribes of the polar regions, and in Africa, America, and Australia. In this stage, man's needs are as yet very limited and exclusively confined to the material world. Still too little developed intellectually to worship the divine in nature and her powers, he thinks he sees the divinity which he seeks in every unknown object which strikes his senses, or which his imagination calls up. In this stage, religion has no higher character than that of caprice and of love of the mysterious and marvelous, mixed with fear and a slavish adoration of the divine. The worship and the priest's office (Shaman, Shamanism) consist here chiefly in the use of charms, to exorcise a dreaded power. From this savage fetichism the nature-worship found among the Aztecs in Mexico, and the worship of the sun in Peru, are distinguished by the greater definiteness and order of their religious conceptions and usages. In them the gods have names, and an ordained priesthood cares for the religious interests of the people. The highest form to which fetichism has attained is the worship of Manitou, the great spirit, which is found among the ancient tribes of North America. 2. THE CHINESE. When man reaches a higher development, caprice and chance disappear from religion. Having outgrown fetichism, man begins, as is the case among the Chinese, to distinguish in the world around him an active and a passive principle, force and matter (Yang and Yn), heaven and earth (Kien and Kouen). We have here nature-worship in its beginnings. In this stage, even less than in fetichism, is there a definite idea of God, much less a conception of him as personal and spiritual lord. The Chinese, from the practical, empirical point of view peculiar to him, recognizes the spiritual only in man and chiefly in the state. His religion, therefore, is confined exclusively to the faithful keeping of the laws of the state (the Celestial Kingdom), in which he sees the reflection of heaven, to the recognition of the Emperor as the son and representative of heaven, and to the worship of the forefathers, especially of the great men and departed emperors, to whose memory the Chinese temples, or pagodas, are dedicated. The origin of this religion dates, according to the tradition, from Fo-hi (2950 B.C.), the founder of the Chinese state. In the fifth century before Christ, Kong-tse, or Kong-fu-tse (Confucius), appeared as a reformer of the religion of his countrymen, and gathered the ancient records and traditions of his people into a sacred literature, which is known by the name of the "King" (the books), "Yo-King" (the book of nature), "Chu-King" (the book of history), "Chi-King" (the book of songs). The contents of the "King" became later with the Chinese sages Meng-tse (360 B.C.) and Tschu-tsche (1200 A.D.) an object of philosophical speculation. The doctrine of Lao-tse, the younger contemporary of Kong-tse, which lays down as the basis of the world, that is of the unreal or non-existent, a supreme principle, _Tao_, or _Being_, corresponds with the Brahma doctrine of the Indians, among whom he lived for a long time; but this doctrine never became popular in China. 3. THE EGYPTIANS. The worship of nature, which is seen in its beginnings among the Chinese, exhibits itself among the Egyptians in a more developed form as theogony. Here also the reflecting mind rose to the recognition of two fundamental principles, the producing and the passive power of nature, Kneph and Neith, from which sprang successively the remaining powers of nature, time, air, earth, light and darkness, personified by the fantasy of the people into as many divinities. The Egyptian mythology also (none has as yet been discovered among the Chinese) exhibits a like character. Fruitfulness and drought, the results of the Nile's overflowing and receding, are imaged in the myth of _Osiris_, _Isis_, and _Typhon_. The visible form under which the divine was worshiped in Egypt was the sacred animal, the bull _Apis_, dedicated to _Osiris_, the cow, dedicated to _Isis_, as symbols of agriculture; the bird _Ibis_, the crocodile, the dog _Anubis_, and other animals, whose physical characteristics impressed the as yet childish man, who saw in them the symbol, either of the beneficent power of nature which moved him to thankfulness, or of a destructive power which he dreaded and whose anger he sought to avert. The religion of Egypt was not of a purely spiritual character. To the man whose eye is not yet open to the manifestation of the spiritual around him and in him, the divine is not spirit, but as yet only nature. The animal, although in the form of the sphinx approaching the human, holds in Egyptian art a place above the human as symbol of the divine. CHAPTER II. THE ARIAN NATIONS. 1. THE EAST ARIANS. THE INDIANS. In the development of religion among the Indians, the following periods may be distinguished:-- _a._ The original Veda-religion. _b._ The priestly religion of the Brahmins. _c._ The philosophical speculation. _d._ Buddhism. _e._ The modified Brahminism after Buddha, in connection with the worship of Vishnu and Siva. _a. The original Veda-religion._ The original religion of Arya originated in Bactria. From thence, before the time of Zoroaster, it was brought over, with the great migration of the people, to the land of the seven rivers, which they conquered, and which stretched from the Indus to the Hesidrus. It consisted, according to the oldest literature of the Veda, in a polytheistical worship of the divine, either as the beneficent or the baneful power of nature. The clear, blue sky, the light of the sun, the rosy dawn, the storm that spends itself in fruitful rain, the winds and gales which drive away the clouds, the rivers whose fruitful slime overspreads the fields,--these moved the inhabitants of India to the worship of the divine as the beneficent power of nature which blesses man. On the other hand, he changed under the impression of the harmful phenomena of nature, the dark and close-packed clouds which hold back the rain and intercept the sunshine, the parching heat of summer, which dries up the rivers and hinders growth and fruitfulness, and these also he erected into objects of awe and religious adoration. From this view of nature sprang the Indian mythology. The oldest divinity (Deva) of the Indians is Varuna, the all-embracing heaven, who marks out their courses for the heavenly luminaries, who rules the day and the night, who is lord of life and death, whose protection is invoked, whose anger deprecated. After him, the great ruler of nature, there appear, in the Veda hymns, Indra, the blue sky, god of light and thunder, the warrior who in battle stands beside the combatants; Vayu, the god of the wind, the chief of the Maruts, or the winds; Rudra, the god of the hurricane; Vritra, the hostile god of the clouds; Ahi, the parching heat of summer. In the mythology of the people, Indra, god of light, aided by Vayu and Rudra, wages war with Vritra,--who, as god of the clouds, holds back the rain and the light,--and appears as opponent of the destructive Ahi. The other divinities also which appear in the Vedas are personified powers of nature,--the twin brothers Aswins (equites), or the first rays of the sun, Ushas the maiden, or the rosy dawn, Surya, Savitri, the god of the sun. Great significance is given in the Indian mythology to Agni, the god of fire, who burns the sacrifice in honor of the gods, who conveys the offerings and prayers of men to gods and their gifts to men, who gladdens the domestic hearth, lights up the darkness of night, drives away the evil spirits, the Ashuras and Rakshas, and purges of evil the souls of men. Religion, still wholly patriarchal in form, and free from hierarchical constraint and from the later dogmatic narrowness, bore in this earlier stage of its development the character of the still free and warlike life of a nomadic people living in the midst of a sublime nature, where everything, the clear sky, sunshine, and boisterous storm, mountains and rivers, disposed to worship. As yet the Indian knew no close priestly caste. Worship consisted in prayers and offerings, especially in the Soma-offering, which was offered as food to the gods. No fear of future torment after death as yet embittered the enjoyment of life and made dying fearful. Yama was the friendly guide of the souls of heroes to the heaven of Indra or Varuna, and not yet the inexorable prince of hell who tormented the souls of the ungodly in the kingdom of the dead. Of later barbarous usages also, such as the widow's sacrificing herself on the funeral pile of her departed husband, there was as yet no trace; and in the heroic poetry, as yet not disfigured by later Brahminical alterations and additions, the heroes Krishna and Rama appear as types of courage and self-sacrifice, and not, as later, as avatars, or human incarnations, of the deity. _b. Brahminism._ When the nomadic and warlike life of the nations of India in the land of the seven rivers, in connection with their removal to the conquered land of the Ganges (1300 B.C.), gave place to a more ordered social constitution, a priestly class formed itself, which began to represent the people before the deity, and from its chief function, _Brahma_, or prayer, took the name of _Brahmins_, i.e., the praying. This Brahma, before whose power even the gods must yield, was gradually exalted by the Brahmins to the highest deity, to whom, under the name of Brahma, the old Veda divinities were subordinated. Brahma is no god of the people, but a god of the priests; not the lord of nature, but the abstract and impersonal _Being_, out of whom nature and her phenomena emanate. From Brahma the priest derives his authority; and the system of caste, by which the priesthood is raised to the first rank, its origin. The worship of Brahma consists in doing penance and in abstinence. Yama, once a celestial divinity, now becomes the god of the lower world, where he who disobeys Brahma is tormented after death. Immortality consists in returning to Brahma; but is the portion only of the perfectly godly Brahmin, while the rest of mankind can rise to this perfect state only after many painful new births. The Brahmin, in the exclusive possession of religious knowledge, reads and expounds the Vedas (knowledge), exalted to infallible scripture, and on them constructs his doctrine. Thus the once vigorous, natural life of the Indians gave place to a conception of the world which repressed the soul, and annihilated man's personality. The many-sidedness of the earlier theology resolved itself into the abstract unity of an impersonal All, and thus the glory of nature passed by unmarked, as nought or non-existent, and lost its charm. At the same time, the old heroic sagas were displaced by legends of saints, and the heroic spirit of the olden epic by an asceticism which repressed the human, and before whose power even the gods stood in awe. With Brahminism the religion lost its original and natural character, and became characterized by a slavish submission to a priesthood, which abrogated the truly human. _c. The Speculative Systems._ The doctrine of the Brahmins occasioned the rise of various theological and philosophical systems. To these belong, first, the "Vedanta," (end of the Veda) or the dogmatic-apologetic exposition of the Veda. This contains (1) the establishment of the authority of the Veda as holy scripture revealed by Brahma, and also of the relation in which it stands to tradition; (2) the proof that everything in the Veda has reference to Brahma; (3) the ascetic system, or the discipline. To explain contradictory statements in the older and later parts of the Veda, Brahminical learning makes use of the subtleties of an harmonistical method of interpretation. Second, the "Mimansa" (inquiry), devoted to the solution of the problem, How can the material world spring from Brahma, or the immaterial? According to this system, there is only one Supreme Being, Paramatma, a name by which Brahma himself had been already distinguished in Manu's book of law. Outside of this highest _Being_, there is nothing real. The world of sense, or nature, (Maya, the female side of Brahma), is mere seeming and illusion of the senses. The human spirit is a part of Brahma, but perverted, misled by this same illusion to the conceit that he is individual. This illusion is done away with by a deeper insight, by means of which the dualism vanishes from the wise man's view, and the conceit gives place to the true knowledge that Brahma alone really exists, that nature, on the contrary, is nought, and the human spirit nothing else than Brahma himself. Third, the "Sankya" (criticism) originating with Kapila, in which, in opposition to the "Mimansa," the individual being and the real existence of nature, in opposition to spirit, is laid down as the starting-point, and the result reached is the doctrine of two original forces, spirit and nature, from whose reciprocal action and reaction upon each other the union of soul and body is to be explained. Is this union unnatural, then the effort of the wise man should be to free himself, through the perception that the soul is not bound to the body, from the dominion of matter. In this system, there is no room for an infinite being, for, if a material world exist, then must God be limited by its existence, and therefore cease to be infinite, that is God. The Sankya philosophy here came in conflict with the orthodox doctrine of the Brahmins, and prepared the way for Buddhism. _d. Buddhism._ Against Brahminism Buddhism arose as a reaction. Siddharta, son of Suddhodana, the King of Kapilavastu, of the family of the Sakya, (about 450 B.C.) moved by the misery of his fellow-countrymen, determined to examine into the causes of it, and, if possible, to find means of remedying it. Initiated into the wisdom of the Brahmins, but not satisfied with that, after years of solitary retirement and quiet meditation, penetrated with the principles of the Sankya, he traversed the land as pilgrim (Sakya-muni, Sramana, Gautama) and opened to the people of India a new religious epoch. The tendency of the new doctrine was to break up the system of caste, and free the people from the galling yoke of the Brahminical hierarchy and dogmas. While in Brahminism man was deprived of his individuality, and regarded only as an effluence from Brahma, and tormented by the fear of hell, and by the thought of a ceaseless process of countless new births awaiting him after death, whence the necessity of the most painful penances and chastisements, Sakya-muni began with man as an individual, and in morals put purity, abstinence, patience, brotherly love, and repentance for sins committed above sacrifice and bodily mortification, and opened to his followers the prospect, after this weary life, no more to be exposed to the ever-recurring pains of new birth, but released from all suffering to return to Nirvana, or nothingness. While Brahminism drew a distinction between man and man, and with hierarchical pride took no thought of the Sudra or lower class of the people, and limited wisdom to the priestly caste, Sakya-muni preached the equality of all men, came forward as a preacher to the people, used the people's language, and chose his followers out of all classes, even from among women. Both of these opposed systems are one-sided. In Brahminism, God is all, and man, as personal being, nothing; in Buddhism, man is recognized as an individual, but apart from God, while in both systems, the highest endeavor is to be delivered from, according to Brahminism a seeming, according to Sakya-muni a really existing individuality, the source of all human woe, and to lose one's self either in Brahma or in the Nirvana. Less on account of his doctrine, in which there is found neither a God nor a personal immortality, than on account of the universal character of his words and of his life, Sakya-muni continued in honor after his death, as the benefactor of the people and as the Buddha, the wise, pre-eminently; and afterwards was deified, and took his place in the ranks of the recognized gods as their superior. Thus there arose in Buddhism, by a departure from the doctrine of the master, a new polytheism. This was afterwards, through the influence of the Brahminical priestly caste, suppressed in India, but spread over other parts of Asia, to the islands of the Indian Archipelago, and also to China. _e. Later modification of Brahminism in connection with the worship of Siva and Vishnu._ While Brahminism saw itself menaced by the steadily increasing influence of Buddhism, the former nature-religion, dispossessed by the Brahmins, asserted its rights in the worship of Siva in the valleys of the Himalaya Mountains, and in that of Vishnu on the banks of the Ganges. Siva is the Rudra of the Veda, the boisterous god of storms, the giver of rain and growth. Vishnu is the same divinity among other races, conceived under the influence of a softer climate in a modified form as the blue sky. Both divinities, originally belonging to different parts of India, were afterwards taken, first Vishnu, and then also Siva, into the theological system of the Brahmins, and formed with Brahma, but not until the fourth century after Christ, the trimurti, according to which the one supreme being Parabrama is worshiped in the threefold form of Brahma the creating, Vishnu the sustaining, and Siva the destroying power of nature. To this later period of Brahminism belongs also the alteration of the old epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, by which the heroes Rama and Krishna are represented as avatars, that is incarnations or human impersonations, of Vishnu. In this also there is evidently an effort to bring the deity, conceived as the abstract One, into closer union with man, an effort which is likewise visible in the later Yoga system of the Brahmins, in which, by the admission of Buddhistic elements, the visible world is recognized as real, the old rigid asceticism mitigated, Vishnu represented as the soul of the world, and immortality taught as a return of the individual soul to Brahma. 2. THE WEST ARIANS, IRANIANS. [THE BACTRIANS, MEDES, PERSIANS.] The ancient religion of the Bactrians in the period before Zoroaster was patriarchal, and consisted in the worship of fire, as the beneficent power of nature, and of Mithras, the god of the sun, combined with that of the good spirits (Ahuras), among which were Geus-Urva (the spirit of the earth), Cpento-mainyus (the white spirit), Armaiti (the earth, or also the spirit of piety), and of the hero-spirits Sraosha, Traetona, which as light and darkness are distinguished from Angro (the black spirit). Later, as it seems, the theology and worship of the neighboring nomadic Arya penetrated to these nations, and caused a religious conflict which ended with the migration of Arya to the south. At this period Zarathustra[2] (Zoroaster) came forward under the Bactrian priest and King Kava Vistaspa, as defender and reformer of the religion of the fathers against the encroachments of a strange doctrine. The Devas (Zend, Dews) or the gods of the Indian Veda appear with Zarathustra as evil spirits. Not Indra, but the hero Traetona, wages war with Ahi (Zend, Azhi), while the kavis, or priests, are attacked by him as deceivers and liars. From the belief in good spirits (Ahuras, i.e., the living, and Mazdas, i.e., the wise), the ancient genii of the country, Zarathustra developed the belief of one highest God, Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd, Greek, [Greek: Osompzês]), a doctrine which he received by divine inspiration through the mediation of the spirit Srasha. Ahura-Mazda, surrounded by the Amesha-Spenta (Amshaspands), or the holy immortals, not until later reduced to seven, is the creator of light and life. The hurtful and evil, on the contrary, is non-existence (akem), and in the oldest parts of the Avesta, the Gathas, which go back to Zarathustra and his first followers, is not yet conceived as a personal being. First in the Vendidad, written after Zarathustra, does Angro-mainyus (Ahriman), or the evil one, with his Dews, although subordinated to Ahura-Mazda, gain a place in the Iranian conception of the universe, as the adversary of Ahura-Mazda, and as the cause of evil in the natural and spiritual world. From these conceptions there was developed in the later Parsism the system of the four periods of the world, each of three thousand years, in the book "Bundehesh." In the first period, Ahura-Mazda appears as creator of the world and as the source of good. The creation, completed by Ahura-Mazda in six days by means of the word (Honover), is in the second period destroyed by Angro-mainyus, who, appearing upon the earth in the form of a serpent, seduces the first human pair, created by Ahura-Mazda. In the third period, which begins with the revelation given to Zarathustra, Ahura-mazda and Angro-mainyus strive together for man. After this follows, in the fourth period, the victory gained by Ahura-Mazda. Sosiosh (Saoshyas), the deliverer already foretold in the Vendidad, appears. The resurrection of the dead, not taught by Zarathustra or in the Vendidad, takes place. The judgment of the world begins; the good are received into paradise and the sinners banished to hell. At last, all is purified, and Angro-mainyus himself and his Dews submit themselves to Ahura-Mazda, whose victory is celebrated in heaven with songs of praise. Thus among the Iranian races, out of the old patriarchal worship of fire and light, on the occasion of the religious struggle with the Indian Arya, and under the influence of Zarathustra, there was developed the doctrine of one supreme God,[3] who, surrounded by the good spirits of heaven, wages war against evil, whence arose later the moral opposition between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-mainyus resulting in the victory of the good principle over the bad. The old dualism of force and matter, beneficent and destructive powers of nature, light and darkness, becomes in Parsism moral. The deity, no longer identified with nature, becomes a personal, spiritual being, the creator of mankind; and the end of the world's development is conceived as the triumph of the good. Hence the high rank which the doctrine of Zarathustra and its further development holds in the history of religion. 3. THE GREEKS. As man rises in spiritual development, nature becomes to him a revelation ever more and more manifold of the divine. To the Greek (Pelasgi, Hellenes) the whole of nature was living, and his imagination peopled her everywhere with divine beings, who in wood and field, in rivers and on mountains (Oreads, Dryads, Naiads, Sileni, &c.), hovered friendly round him. The Greek was indeed distinguished from other nations by this richer and more elevated view of nature; but he excelled them most of all in this, that the divine object which he worshiped was conceived both in form and character after the human. Zeus, Phoebus Apollo, Pallas Athene, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hestia, Hermes, Artemis, were originally powers of nature personified, as some epithets in Homer[4] still indicate; but they became, sometimes under the same names, types of power and lordship, science and art, courage and sensuous beauty. While Dionysus, Demeter, Hades, and Persephone remained earthly, and Helios, Eos, Iris, and Hecate, heavenly divinities, and Oceanus, Poseidon, Amphitrite, Proteus, and Nereus ruled the waters, Zeus was conceived as the god of the sky and of thunder, who hurled the bolts, the great king and lawgiver, the father of men, and Hera, originally the air, became the protecting goddess of married life; Apollo, the god of light, who shot forth his arrows, not at first identified with Helios, became the god of divination and poetry, who led the choir of the muses; the goddess of light, Athene, became the contentious goddess of wisdom; Aphrodite, born of the foam of the sea, once the symbol of the fruitful power of nature, later, encircled by the Graces, became the type of womanly beauty and charm, to which the strength of man, personified in Ares, corresponds. In like manner in the later mythology, Hephaestus, the god of fire, appeared as the god of the forge, Hestia, the goddess of fire, as the protector of the household hearth, and Hermes, the god of the storm and of rain, as the messenger of the gods, the type of cunning and craftiness, while Artemis, the goddess of the moon, the fruitful mother of nature, took the character of the chaste maiden, the goddess of hunting, who with her nymphs and hounds nightly roamed the fields and woods. The monsters, the Sphinx, the Minotaur, the Cyclops, the Centaurs, symbols of a yet unhuman or half human power of nature, were overcome by the Greek heroes, Perseus, Hercules, Jason, Theseus, OEdipus, the types of human strength and valor. The religious festivals were enlivened by trials of men's strength and skill in games, and the historian and poet offered to the gods the products of human genius. In the religion of the Greeks, however, the moral element, although not passed over and in the Greek epic and tragedy not seldom expressed in grand characters, stood nevertheless too little in the foreground, so that the worship of the divine, as in the older nature-worship, especially in the feasts in honor of Dionysus and Aphrodite, was marked by immoral practices. The conception of a future life, which taken in connection with a future retribution has a moral tendency, had but little attraction for the Greek, who rejoiced in the glory of the earth, and saw in nature and in man the kingdom of the divine. The passage from the earlier poetical nature-worship to the worship of the divine in human form seems to be indicated in the war which Olympian Zeus waged with Cronos and the Titans. The origin and development of the various elements and powers of nature, Chaos, Eros, Uranus, Gæa, the Giants, Styx, Erebus, Hemera, �ther, &c, became, with the poets and philosophers after Homer, matters of speculation, of which the theogonies of Hesiod, Orpheus, Pherecydes, and others furnish proof. 4. THE ROMANS. In the religion of the Greeks, the æsthetic and moral character of the Grecian people was deified, and in the Romans also we see how that which men value most exerts an influence upon their worship of the divine. The primitive religion of the Romans, borrowed from the Sabines and Etruscans, bears everywhere, in distinction to that of the Greeks, the marks of the practical and political character of the Roman people. The oldest national divinities are, first, Jupiter or Jovis, the god of the heavens, Mars or Mavors, the god of the field and of war, Quirinus (Janus?) the protector of the Quirites, afterwards, together with Juno (Dione) and Minerva, worshiped in the Capitol, (Dii Capitolini); second, Vesta, and the gods of the house and family, the Lares and Penates; third, the rural divinities, Saturnus, Ops, Liber, Faunus, Silvanus, Terminus, Flora, Vertumnus, and Pomona; fourth and last, personifications, in part of the powers of nature, Sol, Luna, Tellus, Neptunus, Orcus, Proserpina, in part of moral and social qualities and states, such as Febris, Salus, Mens, Spes, Pudicitia, Pietas, Fides, Concordia, Virtus, Bellona, Victoria, Pax, Libertas, and others. Peculiarly Roman also is the conception of the _manes_, or shades of the departed, who hover as protecting genii about the living. Afterwards, along with the culture of the Greeks, their gods also were taken, although rather outwardly than inwardly, into the spirit of the people, and the original character of the gods of Latium was modified after the new mythology. Notwithstanding this, however, the worship of the Romans retained its political and practical character. The priests (sacerdotes) Flamines, Salii, Feciales, the Pontifices with the Pontifex Maximus at their head, the Augurs, were likewise officers of the state, and did not form a hierarchy apart from the state and alongside of it. 5. THE CELTS. Among the Celtic tribes in Brittany, Ireland, and Gaul, and on both banks of the Rhine, out of an aboriginal life of nature characterized by wildness and license, religion developed itself in the form of the worship of two chief divinities, a male divinity, Hu, the begetting, and a female, Ceridwen, the bearing, power of nature. The priesthood busied itself with speculations about the divine, the origin of the world, and the continued existence of man after death, conceived in the form of the transmigration of souls. Nor did the people's faith lack the conception of good and evil spirits, fairies, dwarfs, elves, which to the still childish fancy are objects of fear or superstitious veneration. To the service of these divinities the priesthood, the Druids, were consecrated, and beside them the bards, or poets, held a more independent place. 6. THE GERMANS AND SCANDINAVIANS. More developed intellectually is the nature-religion of the ancient Germans (Teutons) and Scandinavians, which betrays thereby the character of the Aryan race to which these nations, like the Celts, originally belonged. The highest god of the Germans is Wodan, called Odhin among the Norsemen, the god of the heavens, and of the sun, who protects the earth, and is the source of light and fruitfulness, the spirit of the world, and the All-father (Alfadhir). From the union of heaven and earth, there springs the god Thunar or Donar among the Germans, Thor among the Norsemen, the bold god of thunder who wages war against the enemies of gods and men. Besides these there are the sons of Wodan, Fro (German), Freyx (Norse), the god of peace, Zio (German), Tyx (Norse), the god of war, Aki (German), Oegir (Norse), god of the sea, Vol (German), Ullr (Norse), god of hunting, and others, to whom are joined female divinities, such as Nerthus (German), Jördh (Norse), the fruitful goddess of the earth, Holda (German), Freiya (Norse), the goddess of love, Nehalennia, goddess of plenty, Frikka (German), Frigg (Norse), the wife of Wodan, mother of all the living, Hellia (German), Hel (Norse), the inexorable goddess of the lower world. Opposed to these divinities (Asen and Asinnen) stands Loko (German), Loki (Norse), enemy of the divine. In addition to these there appear in the Norse and German Sagas, besides the heroes, a multitude of spirits, good and hostile, giants, elves, Elfen (German), Alfen (Norse), white spirits of light, and black dwarfs, house, forest, and water spirits. The worship was most simple, and, as was the case with the ancient Semites, the Indians of the Veda, and the Greeks, as yet independent of temple service and priestly constraint. The holy places of the Germans were woods, and hills, and fountains, and in the mysterious rustling of the leaves and in the murmuring of the waters the pious spirit caught the breathing of the deity.[5] The father of the house is priest, and the recognition by these races more than elsewhere of worth in woman is apparent also in their religion. In the description of the kingdom of the dead in the German-Norse mythology, Walhalla is the abode of the heroes, hell the gathering place of the other dead. Notwithstanding these still childish conceptions, there was revealed in the moral character and heroic spirit of the German forefathers the germ of a higher development, which makes the nations of Germany and Northern Europe capable beyond others of a constantly higher conception and estimation of the Christian religion.[6] CHAPTER III. THE RELIGION OF THE SEMITES. I. THE PHOENICIANS, SYRIANS, BABYLONIANS, CARTHAGINIANS, AND ARABIANS. In the Semitic races the religious spirit rose above nature-worship in the effort to separate God from nature, and to elevate him above nature as Lord, Baal (plural Baalim, either from the different places where he was worshiped, or the various names under which he was worshiped), Bel, El, Adon (Adonis). Thus Bel among the Babylonians, Baal among the Ammonites and Moabites, was the god of light, the lord of heaven, the creator of mankind, who had his throne above the clouds and was invoked on mountains.[7] Also the title Molech and Baal Molech to designate the Supreme Being among the ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and the nations nearest related to Israel, the Moabites and Ammonites, as well as the derived names Milcom (Kamos) [Chemosh, Eng. ver.], among the Ammonites, and Melkartht at Tyre and Carthage, indicate, like Baal, an original effort to conceive God as the ruler of nature. Agreeing with this conception of the Deity, there is manifest, as well in the worship of Baal as of Molech and the female Astarte (Melecheth)[8] [Ashtaroth, Eng. ver.], worshiped with him, partly in the abstinence from marriage, partly in the human sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of the first-born, the aim, through abnegation of the life of sense, and through the sacrifice, even though unnatural, of what is dearest to man, to appease a divinity who as lord and governor rules and subjects to himself the power of nature and every propensity of sense.[9] In spite of the effort to elevate the Deity as Lord and King above nature, most of the Semitic nations gradually sank back into the old nature-worship, and, uniting with the worship of the highest God, Baal and Bel, that of a female divinity under the names of Baaltis, Beltis, Aschera, Mylitta, they made religion to consist in the sacrifice of chastity to the will of the Deity, as the fruitful, productive power of nature, and thus fell into gross immorality.[10] Religion appears in another form among the Semites in the worship of the stars among the Babylonians and ancient Arabians. This astrolatry, originally a kind of fetichism, became nature-worship, and gradually rose to the worship of the intelligence manifested to our contemplation in the movement of the heavenly luminaries. Astrology arose, and religion no longer expressed itself in passive acquiescence, but was united with the effort to guide the life by the knowledge to be drawn, as men imagined, from the motion of the stars. ISRAELITISH RELIGION. _a. Its origin. The patriarchal religion. Mosaism. Prophetism._ While most of the Semitic nations, in opposition to the effort to elevate God above nature as lord and governor, returned to the old nature-religion with its grossly sensual worship of the divine, and others got no farther than to the conception of a deity, who, like a consuming fire, stood opposed to nature, and was to be appeased and propitiated by human sacrifices, there was developed among the Israelitish people, gradually and in constantly higher measure, in connection with a higher moral and religious disposition, the worship of God as a being who, though distinct from nature, is yet not opposed to it, and thus no longer demands human sacrifices, but obedience and moral consecration. The common origin of the religion of the Israelites and that of their Semitic relations, though hardly evident even in the oldest monuments of the Hebrew literature, appears from the following facts and particulars: firstly, the composition of Israelitish names not only with El, but also with Baal, such as Jerubbaal (adversary of Baal), (Gideon),[11] Esbaal,[12] Meribbaal,[13] names which afterwards, on account of the aversion which the ever-increasing distance in religion between the Israelitish nation and the nations related to it must, from the nature of the case, have inspired against the name of Baal, are changed into Jerubboseth,[14] Isboseth,[15] and Mephiboseth[16], as also the interchanging of El and Baal,[17] of Baal-jada[18] and Eljada,[19] seem to point to an ancient period when the name Baal (Lord) was used, like El, Elohim, El Eljon, El Schaddai, Adonai, even among the Israelites, to designate the Supreme Being. Secondly, the God of Abraham (Elohim), although he desires no human sacrifices, nevertheless praises the willingness of the father to offer up his first-born, and sees in that the highest proof of devotedness and obedience.[20] Thirdly, circumcision, already before Moses[21] the bloody symbol of consecration to God,[22] and also the right of Jahveh to the first-born, and the necessity of ransoming them from him,[23] imply an earlier conception of the deity as a being, who, although on a higher development of the religion he is not indeed any longer thought to desire human sacrifice, nevertheless has a right to such a sacrifice, and thus demands indemnity for remitting it. Fourthly, the later conception, of Jahveh as a destroying fire, and the way in which the God of Israel is conceived in connection with fire, and as manifesting himself in fire,[24] betray, even in the midst of a more advanced religious development, an original relationship with the like conceptions of the other Semites. Fifthly, even in the orthodox Jahveh-worship, some symbols, as the twelve oxen in the porch of the temple,[25] the horns of the altar for burnt-offerings,[26] perhaps also the in part oxlike form of the cherubim,[27] point to an earlier worship of the deity under the form of an ox, the symbol of the highest might, especially among the Semitic races.[28] In confirmation of the supposition thus suggested of a community of origin in the religion of the Israelites and in that of the nations related to them, there is also to be remarked, firstly, the sympathy always felt among the people of Israel for the worship of Baal and Molech, in face of the strongest opposition on the part of the prophets;[29] secondly, the statement of Amos,[30] that even in the wilderness the Israelites worshiped Molech; thirdly, the fact that in the time of the Judges, Jephthah offered his daughter to Jahveh,[31] and still later the feeling, not driven out even by Mosaism, that the wrath of Jahveh must be appeased by human blood,[32] a necessity which David recognizes;[33] fourthly, the ancient custom in Israel, as in the nations related to them, of worshiping the deity on mountains and heights,[34] against which the priestly legislation strove in the interest of the pure worship of Jahveh;[35] fifthly, the heterodox worship of Jahveh in the kingdom of the ten tribes under the form of a calf.[36] From all this it seems fair to conclude that the religion of the oldest forefathers of Israel had its root originally in one and the same soil with the religion of the other Semites. Out of an earlier nature-religion there developed among the Semites the conception of Baal, the lord of nature, and of Molech with his inhuman worship. While, however, the other Semites remained in this lower stage, or rather sank back more and more into the immorality of the nature-religion,--an hypothesis suggested by a comparison of the religious state of the nations of Canaan in Abraham's time with their state at the time of the conquest of the land by Joshua and afterwards,--in the family of Abraham, religious consciousness rose to the recognition of a deity, who, although he had a right to human sacrifices, yet did not claim such sacrifices, but was satisfied with men's willingness to bring them to him. With this higher development of religion, the names of the Supreme Being, Baal and Molech, originally common to the whole race, came more and more into contempt, and were regarded as the expression of abominable idolatry,[37] while even the worship of Jahveh under the form of a calf, originally permitted, was later branded by the prophets as heresy. Though it was in the family of Abraham that even in Mesopotamia[38] the beginning of this higher development of the Semitic religion showed itself, which, after his migration to Canaan became the heritage of his family, yet the patriarch of Israel did not stand alone in this respect among the Semites. The old Canaanitish chieftains also of the patriarchal period, Melchizedek and Abimelech, worship the same God as he,[39] while on the other hand in his own family not all traces of polytheistic superstition have disappeared,[40] and these traces are also visible still later in Israel.[41] The patriarchal religion, which afterwards with the great majority fell into oblivion, was recalled afresh to men's minds by Moses, and the God of the fathers was preached by him under the name before unknown of Jahveh,[42] to whom, with the exclusion of all other gods, religious worship is due.[43] The Jahveh of Moses, like the El Eljon of the patriarchs, is the one only object of worship (Deus Unus), yet without excluding the possibility of other gods existing.[44] Not until later did the more developed conception of Jahveh arise as the one only God (Deus unicus),[45] who is throned in heaven, and like the Elohim of the patriarchs, encircled by celestial beings (Bene Elohim, Malakim, Angels), who execute his commands, yet are not objects of religious adoration. The religious standpoint of Moses is the legal. Jehovah stands related to his people as the Holy, as lawgiver and judge; and the true moral consecration to God is symbolically expressed in the ritual, especially in the sacrifice, while the relation of the people to God is based upon the mediation of the priests. Along with this, and out of Mosaism, after the time of Samuel, prophetism was developed, in which independent religious conviction, outside the limits of the priesthood, and without distinction of rank or birth,[46] awoke among the people. Prophetism, in the domain of religion, is the development of the religious spirit to individual independence and freedom. The prophet, rising above the legal standpoint and outward ceremonial, puts the essence of true worship in morality,[47] but recognizes also along with the deepest feeling of dependence upon God, in the independence[48] and spontaneity of the religious and moral life, the irresistible power of the divine spirit, by which the Most High, though apart from the world and throned in heaven, puts himself into the closest and most intimate communion with the true worshiper. Thus the gulf which divided Jahveh, as a God afar off, from the world and his worshipers, closed up more and more. With the conviction of the pureness and truth[49] of her religion, Israel felt the calling to raise it to the religion of the world, and in the realization of this she saw the ideal of the future.[50] _b. The Israelitish religion after the Captivity._ The free character which distinguished prophetism in the religion of Israel changed, after the return of the people from captivity, especially with the party of the Pharisees, to literalness and formalism. The prophets gave place to the synagogue, the living proclamation of the truth to scriptural erudition, the spirit of freedom to slavish subjection to Scripture and tradition. As the ancient productions of the Indian literature, originally the expression of the popular thought of India, were elevated by the Brahmins into Veda, holy, inspired scripture, so also the religious literature of Israel took on the character of a closed Canon, so that what was once the expression of religious life became now rule of faith. The standpoint of the law which prophetism had already overcome was again strongly maintained, the law enriched with a number of new ordinances, and the essence of religion made to consist partly in dogmatic speculation, partly in a merely outward service, devoid of inner life. The Messianic prediction, or the expectation that the kingdom, divided in Rehoboam's reign, once more united under a prince of the house of David, should be exalted to new bloom and lustre,--which in the older prophets was the natural and historically explicable form in which the ideal of Israel's future presented itself to the seer, but which, under the influence of the changed political conditions, had already been replaced in the later prophecy by the more general conception of a future triumph of the true religion of which Israel was the bringer,--[51]returned, yet not as the ideal of the prophetic spirit, but as a dogma, the product of scriptural interpretation. The pure monotheism, by which formerly a place in the Providence of God had been allotted to everything, even to moral evil,[52] became corrupted, under the influence of Parsism, by the conception of two kingdoms, of God and of the Devil. The angels, originally the messengers of Providence, became under mythological names, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, &c., so many middle beings who filled the space between the Deity, existing apart from the world, and the world. The lower world (sheol, [Greek: aidês]), formerly the general abode of the dead, of bad and good without distinction, was split into two parts, paradise and gehenna, and became a place of recompense, and, along with this, religion, once an end, became the means of warding off a dreaded punishment, or of gaining a future of bliss. The doctrine of immortality, as the continuation of man's moral development, which was formerly unknown in Israel, appeared, as in the later Parsism, in the form of a bodily resurrection of the dead, at first of the righteous only, but afterwards in the form of a general resurrection, by mediation of the Messiah, at whose appearing, which was expected just before the end of the present state of things, the great judgment of the world, of living and dead, was to be held, heaven and earth renewed, and the kingdom of God founded. Beside the learned party of the Pharisees stood the Sadducees, who subordinated religion to politics, rejected the Messianic idea and the authority of tradition, and, in denying immortality in the form of a bodily resurrection, failed to perceive the truth of immortality, for whose recognition the premises and germs existed in the religion of Israel, though not as yet developed. The third party, that of the Essenes, was marked by quiet piety, and in many respects also by excessive asceticism. In the midst of the Pharisaic formalism, the unbelief of the Sadducees, and the pietism of the Essenes, there was yet in Israel a seed of true worshipers, who, though not above the dogmatic prejudices of their time, had heart and mind open for the true religion, and who set the true blessing to be looked for from the Messiah in the satisfying of their religious and moral needs. 3. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. The Israelitish religion, which reached its highest stage of development in prophetism, but which among the later Jews after Ezra degenerated, with the Pharisees into formalism and worship of the letter, with the Essenes into mysticism and asceticism, and which with the Sadducees, along with the sacrifice of the prophetic ideal of the future, was subordinated to politics, developed in Christianity, but freed from once cherished national expectations and outward forms, into a purely spiritual knowledge and worship of God. Jesus fathomed the deep meaning of the religion of his people, and its original fitness to become, through higher development, the religion of the world. Jesus devoted himself to the end of forming the human race into one great society (the kingdom of heaven), of which religion should be the soul and life, and, convinced of his calling, proclaimed himself as the Son of man, who, as such, belonged not to Israel alone, but to mankind. Jesus combated both the formalism and exclusiveness of the Pharisees, and the unbelief of the Sadducees, and with word and deed preached a religion which, independent of all outward form, took hold of the human heart, and which, developing into an independent principle in man, was to find its commission, not in the authority of Scripture or tradition, not even in that of his name, but in its own power and truth. In him religion appeared as the power of self-sacrificing love, which fears not even death, and to which dying is not the losing of life, but the development of life. In distinction from other religions, in which either God and man are strangers to each other, and opposed to each other, or man's personality is, as it were, sunk in God, Christianity is the religion by which man, in the full enjoyment of individual development, and with the sense of his own strength, lives in the consciousness of the most entire dependence upon God. Religion in its highest form, conceived as the oneness of man with God, is realized in Christianity.[53] 4. ISLAMISM. The religion of the ancient nomadic tribes of the Arabian peninsula originally exhibited a polytheistical character, in the form of the worship, in part of sacred stones, in part of the powers of nature, especially of the stars, whose position and motion were thought to exert an influence, beneficent or baneful, upon the destinies of men. With these conceptions was combined a certain leaning toward monotheism, which manifested itself especially in the common worship of Allah taala (equivalent to El Eljon), which was afterwards quickened and strengthened by association with the Jewish tribes, with whom they held themselves to be related by descent from Abraham. The Parsee doctrine of demons, also, was not unknown in Arabia, after the conquest of the Persians in the fifth century. After the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, Christianity also, though in a corrupt form, or, definitely, in the form of Monophysitism and Nestorianism, which had been condemned by the church, became established in Arabia. Amid such diverse elements, there was need of unity in the domain of religion, a need for which Mohammed, after the example of others of his family, sought to provide. He was born at Mecca (571) of an honorable family, belonging to the Koreish tribe. Finding no satisfaction for his restless spirit in the trade to which after his parents' death he had at first devoted himself, he gave himself up, in solitary retirement, to quiet meditation, and became more and more convinced of his calling to put an end, by means of a better religion, to the confusion existing among his countrymen with regard to religion. The religious idea which overmastered him presented itself to his powerful Oriental imagination in the form of a vision as a revelation of Allah taala, made to him in the fortieth year of his life by mediation of the angel Gabriel. His conviction, thus acquired, was confirmed by revelations afterwards received; and, shared at first with a small circle of trusted friends, gradually spread wider, until at last Mohammed came forward in the ancient sanctuary, the Kaaba, at Mecca, as prophet of Allah. For this he was pursued by his countrymen, and fled from thence to Medina, in the year 622, the beginning of the Moslem era. The number of his followers increasing, he had recourse to arms. He conquered Mecca in 630, and made the Kaaba, after destroying the idols in it, the sanctuary of the new religion. The doctrine of Mohammed (Islam, submission to God, whence his followers take the name of Moslems), is contained in the Koran. The various Suras, or divisions, originally the revelations received by the prophet at different periods of his life reduced to writing, were, soon after his death, united by Abu Bekr into one holy book, under the name of the Koran (al Kitab, the book), which, like the Bible among the later Jews and Christians, was clothed with divine authority. The central doctrine of Mohammed is the belief in one God, Allah, who, as the Creator and Lord of all things, in strictest isolation from the world, is throned in heaven. All that takes place upon the earth befalls according to the eternal decree of God, a conception in which, at least among the Orthodox Moslems, the Sunnites, who are distinguished in this respect, as in others, from the dissenting Shiites, there is no place left for human freedom. This God has from the earliest times revealed himself to some privileged men, Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus (Isa). To the last is due the honor of having been the reformer of degenerate Judaism. He is not, as the Christians of Mohammed's time taught, the Son of God in a metaphysical sense, much less God himself,--Allah is one, he neither begets nor is begotten,--but a prophet of human descent. The greatest and last prophet is Mohammed himself, in whom prophetism reached its fulfillment. Along with the doctrine regarding God and his relation to the world, prayer, hospitality, and benevolence occupy a prominent place in the teaching of Mohammed, looked at from its practical side, and also the belief in a future life, in the Jewish-Parsee form of the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of the world, future reward and punishment, paradise and hell. The truth of this divine revelation rests upon the very fact of its having been revealed, and, according to Mohammed, it no more needs scientific proof than confirmation by miracles, to which Islamism did not appeal until later. The opinion which formerly prevailed among Christians that Mohammed was an impostor, a false prophet, was bound up with the conception that God, to the exclusion of other nations, had revealed himself immediately and supernaturally first to Israel, and afterwards through Christ to all mankind. Hence it followed that Christianity was not prized as the highest religion, existing along with less developed forms of religion, but was opposed as the only true religion to all others, which were regarded as the fruit of imposture and error, an opinion to which the religious and political struggles in which Islam and Christendom have been involved also richly contributed. Mohammed was seer and prophet, filled with fiery zeal for religion, and, while he stands indeed in this respect, both personally and with regard to the contents of his preaching and the means by which he sought to gain admission for his doctrine, below the seers of Israel, and far below the founder of Christianity, yet, on the other hand, his monotheism, abstract as it is, must be regarded as a wholesome reaction against the ever-increasing polytheistical superstition to which in his time the Christian church of the East especially had sunk. Islamism stands, however, below original Christianity, the religion of Jesus and the Apostles, in that, by separating God, as the abstract one Supreme Being, from the world, it leaves no place for the doctrine of God's immanence, or the indwelling of the Spirit of God in man. Hence in Islamism the divine revelation remains purely mechanical, with no natural point of connection in man, and therefore there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism, which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its abstract and fatalistic character, whereby man, instead of being regarded as a being in whose free activity God's power and life are glorified, is conceived as a passive instrument of a higher power. To true moral independence, therefore, the Moslem does not attain. His religion is legal and external, and therefore intolerant and exclusive; and when Islamism, led by excited passion and a heated imagination, disregarded the sanctity of marriage, and held up as a reward before the faithful Moslem a paradise characterized by sensual enjoyment, it missed at once the deep moral and spiritual character of Christianity. To these defects must be ascribed the fact that Islamism, adapted to the need of the East, and therefore spread over a large part of Asia and Africa, has not, with the exception of the empire of Turkey, and for a time also of Spain, penetrated Europe; and, overshadowed by a higher development of humanity, has reached its highest bloom, while Christianity, brought back to its original purity, remains the religion of the civilized world. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Translated from the Dutch of Prof. J.H. Scholten, by F.T. Washburn. This constitutes the first part of Prof. Scholten's History of Religion and Philosophy. (_Geschiedenis der Godsdienst en Wijsbegeerte._) Third edition. Leyden, 1863. Of this work there is a translation in French by M. Albert Réville (Paris, 1861); but this translation, which was made from an earlier edition, is very defective in the first part, Prof. Scholten having added a great deal in his last edition. There is also a translation of it in German, by D.E.R. Redepenning (Elberfeld, 1868). This German translation has been revised and enlarged by Prof. Scholten, and is therefore superior in some respects to the original Dutch. The present translation has been revised upon it.] [Footnote 2: According to Buusen 3000 or 2500 B.C., Haug 2000 B.C., Max Müller 1200 B.C., Max Duncker 1300 or 1250 B.C., and according to Roeth. I. p. 348, who still puts Vistaspa before Darius Hystaspes, between 589 and 512 B.C.] [Footnote 3: The doctrine of the _Zervana akarana_ (infinite time) as the original One, from which the opposition between Ormuzd and Ahriman was held to spring, dates from a later period.] [Footnote 4: [Greek: Zeus kelainephês, ahidheri nahiôn, nephelêgerheta Zeus, Herê bohôpis, glaukhôpis Hathhênê].] [Footnote 5: Of the Germans Tacitus writes, _Germ._, c. 9, "Eos nec cohibere parietibus Deos neque in ullam humanioris speciem assimilare, ex magnitudine coelestium arbitrantur. Lucos ac nemora consecrant deorumque nominibus appellant secretum illud, quod sola reverentia vident."] [Footnote 6: Among the Roman writers who furnish us with information upon the religion of the Germans, Tacitus deserves mention, in his "Germania," as well as in his "Annales" _passim_. The chief source with regard to the Norse religion is the older Edda, under the title "Edda Sæmundar hin Froda."] [Footnote 7: Numb. xxii. 41; xxiii. 28; 2 Kings, xxiii. 5.] [Footnote 8: Judges, ii. 13; 1 Sam. vii. 4; xii. 10; 1 Kings, xi. 5, 7, 33; 2 Kings, xxiii. 13; Jer. vii. 18; xliv. 17, 19.] [Footnote 9: Levit. xviii. 21; xx. 2; 2 Kings, iii. 26, 27; xvi. 3; xxiii. 10; Ps. cvi. 38; Jer. vii. 31; xix. 5; xxxii. 35; Micah, vi. 7; Ezek. xv. 4, 6; [?] xvi. 20, Comp. I Kings, xviii: 28.] [Footnote 10: Numb. xxv. I, _et seq_; Josh. xxii. 17; Baruch, vi. 41, 43.] [Footnote 11: Judges, vi. 32. and elsewhere.] [Footnote 12: 1 Chron. viii. 33; ix. 39.] [Footnote 13: 1 Chron. viii. 34; ix. 40.] [Footnote 14: 2 Sam. xi. 21.] [Footnote 15: 2 Sam. ii. 8, and elsewhere.] [Footnote 16: 2 Sam. iv. 4, and elsewhere.] [Footnote 17: Judges, viii. 33; ix. 4. Comp. with ix. 46.] [Footnote 18: 1 Chron. xiv. 7.] [Footnote 19: 1 Chron. iii. 8; 2 Sam. v. 16.] [Footnote 20: Gen. xxii.] [Footnote 21: Gen. xvii. 23-27.] [Footnote 22: Ex. iv. 24-26.] [Footnote 23: Ex. xiii. 2, 12-16; xxii. 28, 29; xxx. 11-16; xxxiv. 19, 20.] [Footnote 24: Gen. xv. 17; Ex. iii. 2; xix. 16-18; xxiv. 17; xl. 38; Levit. x. 2; Numb. xvi. 35; Deut. iv. 15, 24; v. 24, 25.] [Footnote 25: 1 Kings, vii. 25, 29.] [Footnote 26: Ex. xxvii. 2.] [Footnote 27: Comp. Ezek. i. 10; x. 14.] [Footnote 28: 1 Kings, xviii. 23.] [Footnote 29: 1 Kings, xi. 5; 2 Kings, xvi. 3; xxi. 3; xxiii. 4, _et seq_; 2 Chron. xxxiii. 3; Ezek. xvi. 20, 21; Jer. xix. 5.] [Footnote 30: Amos. v. 25, 26.] [Footnote 31: Judges, xi. 30-40.] [Footnote 32: Ex. xxxii. 27-29; Numb. xxv. 4.] [Footnote 33: 2 Sam. xxi. 1-14.] [Footnote 34: 1 Kings, iii. 2; xi. 7; 2 Kings, xii. 3; xiv. 4; xvii. 11; xviii. 4; xxiii. 5, 19; 2 Chron. xxi. 11.] [Footnote 35: 2 Chron. xxxiv. 3; Ezek. vi. 3; xx. 28.] [Footnote 36: 1 Kings, xii. 28, 33. Comp. Ex. xxxii. 4, 19.] [Footnote 37: Levit. xviii. 21; xx. 2; Deut. xii. 31.] [Footnote 38: Gen. xxiv, xxviii.] [Footnote 39: Gen. xiv. 18-20; xx. 3, 4.] [Footnote 40: Gen. xxxi. 19, 30, _et seq_; xxxv. 2-4; Joshua, xxiv. 2, 14.] [Footnote 41: Judges, xviii. 14, _et seq_; 1 Sam. xix. 13; 2 Kings, xviii. 4; Ezek. xx. 7.] [Footnote 42: Ex. iii. 13, _et seq_; vi. 2.] [Footnote 43: Ex. xx. 2, 3.] [Footnote 44: Ex. viii. 10; xv. 11; xviii. 11; xx. 3.] [Footnote 45: Deut vi. 4; iv. 28, 35; xxxii. 39; Isaiah, xliv. 6, 8; xlv. 5, 6.] [Footnote 46: Amos, vii. 14.] [Footnote 47: Isa. i. 11-18; Jer. vii. 21-23.] [Footnote 48: Dutch, _zelfstandigheid_, literally, self-existence; without an equivalent, as far as I know, in vernacular English.--Tr.] [Footnote 49: _Zelfstandigheid_, again, expressing objective existence, reality, independent of subjective thought or feeling.--Tr.] [Footnote 50: Jer. xxxi. 31, _et seq_; Isa. ii. 2-4; Amos, ix. 12; Isa. xxv. 6; lii. 15; lvi. 6, 7; lxvi. 23; Zech. viii. 23; xiv. 9, 16.] [Footnote 51: Isa. liii.] [Footnote 52: Job i, ii.--Tr.] [Footnote 53: The most original sources of the Christian religion are the Synoptic Gospels, in which, however, criticism must distinguish between the older and later portions. The fourth Gospel is marked by a more profound speculation upon the person and the work of Christ, by which the Christian mind freed itself entirely from the Jewish forms in which Jesus, as a popular teacher in Israel, had set forth his doctrine.] 
31608	----	Transcriber's Note: Footnotes are placed at the end of the relevant paragraph. In Chapters I and II, the printed "Mitra" was changed to "Mithra" to match other occurrences in the text, which predominate. In Chapter II, the notation [)a] represents the letter a with breve. Also, an instance in the original text of the word "JHVH" in the Hebrew alphabet has been changed to the Roman. THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND _A History of the Ideal_ By EDGAR SALTUS "Errons, les doigts unis, dans l'Alhambra du songe." Renée Vivien NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY MCMVII COPYRIGHT, 1907 BY EDGAR SALTUS _The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. USA._ _By Mr. Saltus_ HISTORIA AMORIS IMPERIAL PURPLE MARY MAGDALEN THE POMPS OF SATAN THE PERFUME OF EROS VANITY SQUARE THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND I Brahma 7 II Ormuzd 39 III Amon-Râ 60 IV Bel-Marduk 81 V Jehovah 109 VI Zeus 140 VII Jupiter 166 VIII The Nec Plus Ultra 189 THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND I BRAHMA The ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language. Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream that they remain. "Mortal has made the immortal," the _Rig-Veda_ explicitly declares. The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it has been found that its root was fear. The root, dispersed by light, ultimately dissolved. But, meanwhile, it founded religion, which, revealed in storm and panic, for prophets had ignorance and dread. The gods were not then. There were demons only, more exactly there were diabolized expressions invented to denominate natural phenomena and whatever else perturbed. It was in the evolution of the demoniac that the divine appeared. Through one of time's unmeasurable gaps there floated the idea that perhaps the phenomena that alarmed were but the unconscious agents of superior minds. At the suggestion, irresistibly a dramatization of nature began in which the gods were born, swarms of them, nebulous, wayward, uncertain, that, through further gaps, became concrete, became occasionally reducible to two great divinities, earth and sky, whose union was imagined--a hymen which the rain suggested--and from which broader conceptions proceeded and grander gods emerged. The most poetic of these are perhaps the Hindu. At the heraldings of newer gods, the lords of other ghostlands have, after battling violently, swooned utterly away. But though many a fresher faith has been brandished at them, apathetically, in serene indifference, the princes of the Aryan sky endure. It is their poetry that has preserved them. To their creators poetry was abundantly dispensed. To no other people have myths been as frankly transparent. To none other, save only their cousins the Persians, have fancies more luminous occurred. The Persians so polished their dreams that they entranced the world that was. Poets can do no more. The Hindus too were poets. They were children as well. Their first lisp, the first recorded stammer of Indo-European speech, is audible still in the _Rig-Veda_, a bundle of hymns tied together, four thousand years ago, for the greater glory of Fire. The worship of the latter led to that of the Sun and ignited the antique altars. It flamed in Persia, lit perhaps the shrine of Vesta, afterward dazzled the Incas, igniting, meanwhile, not altars merely, but purgatory itself. In Persia, where it illuminated the face of Ormuzd, its beneficence is told in the _Avesta_, a work of such holiness that it was polluted if seen. In the _Rig-Veda_, there are verses which were subsequently accounted so sacred that if a soudra overheard them the ignominy of his caste was effaced. The verses, the work of shepherds who were singers, are invocations to the dawn, to the first flushes of the morning, to the skies' heightening hues, and the vermillion moment when the devouring Asiatic sun appears. There are other themes, minor melodies, but the chief inspiration is light. To primitive shepherds the approach of darkness was the coming of death. The dawn, which they were never wholly sure would reappear, was resurrection. They welcomed it with cries which the _Veda_ preserves, which the _Avesta_ retains and the _Eddas_ repeat. The potent forces that produced night, the powers potenter still that routed it, they regarded as beings whose moods genuflexions could affect. In perhaps the same spirit that Frenchmen assisted at a _lever du roi_, and Englishmen attend a prince's levee, the Aryan breakfasted on song and sacrifice. It was an homage to the rising sun. The sun was _deva_. The Sanskrit root _div_, from which the word is derived, produced deus, devi, divinities--numberless, accursed, adored, or forgot. The common term applied to all abstractions that are and have been worshipped, means _That which shines_ and the name which, in the early Orient, signified a star, designates the Deity in the Occident to-day. Apologetically, Tertullian, a Christian Father, remarked: "Some think our God is the Sun." There were excuses perhaps for those that did. Adonai, a Hebrew term for the Almighty, is a plural. It means lords. But the lords indicated were Baalim who were Lords of the Sun. Moreover, when the early Christians prayed, they turned to the East. Their holy day was, as the holy day of Christendom still is, Sunday, day of the Sun, an expression that comes from the Norse, on whom also shone the light of the Aryan deva. To shepherds who, in seeking pasture for their flocks, were seeking also pasture for their souls, the deva became Indra. They had other gods. There was Agni, fire; Varuna, the sky; Maruts, the tempest. There was Mithra, day, and Yama, death. There were still others, infantile, undulant, fluid, not infrequently ridiculous also. But it was Indra for whom the dew and honey of the morning hymns were spread. It was Indra who, emerging from darkness, made the earth after his image, decorated the sky with constellations and wrapped the universe in space. It was he who poured indifferently on just and unjust the triple torrent of splendour, light, and life. Indra was triple. Triple Indra, the _Veda_ says. In that description is the preface to a theogony of which Hesiod wrote the final page. It was the germ of sacred dynasties that ruled the Aryan and the Occidental skies. From it came the grandiose gods of Greece and Rome. From it also came the paler deities of the Norse. Meanwhile ages fled. Life nomad and patriarchal ceased. From forest and plain, temples arose; from hymns, interpretations; from prayer, metaphysics; for always man has tried to analyze the divine, always too, at some halt in life, he has looked back and found it absent. In meditation it was discerned that Indra was an effect, not the cause. It was discerned also that that cause was not predicable of the gods who, in their undulance and fluidity, suggested ceaseless transformations and consequently something that is transformed. The idea, patiently elaborated, resulted in a drainage of the fluid myths and the exteriorisation of a being entirely abstract. Designated first as Brahmanaspati, Lord of Prayer, afterward more simply as Brahma, he was assumed to have been asleep in the secret places of the sky, from which, on awakening, he created what is. The conception, ideal itself, was not, however, ideal enough. The labour of creating was construed as a blemish on the splendour of the Supreme. It was held that the Soul of Things could but loll, majestic and inert, on a lotos of azure. Then, above Brahma, was lifted Brahm, a god neuter and indeclinable; neuter as having no part in life, indeclinable because unique. There was the apex of the world's most poetic creed, one distinguished over all others in having no founder, unless a heavenly inspiration be so regarded. But the apex required a climax. Inspiration provided it. The forms of matter and of man, the glittering apsaras of the vermillion dawns, Indra himself, these and all things else were construed into a bubble that Brahm had blown. The semblance of reality in which men occur and, with them, the days of their temporal breath, was attributed not to the actual but to Mâyâ--the magic of a high god's longing for something other than himself, something that should contrast with his eternal solitude and fill the voids of his infinite ennui. From that longing came the bubble, a phantom universe, the mirage of a god's desire. Earth; sea and sky; all that in them is, all that has been and shall be, are but the changing convolutions of a dream. In that dream there descended a scale of beings, above whom were set three great lords, Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the Destroyer, collectively the Tri-murti, the Hindu trinity expressed in the mystically ineffable syllable Om. Between the trinity and man came other gods, a whole host, powers of light and powers of darkness, the divine and the demoniac fused in a hierarchy surprising but not everlasting. Eventually the dream shall cease, the bubble break, the universe collapse, the heavens be folded like a tent, the Tri-murti dissolved, and in space will rest but the Soul of Things, at whose will atoms shall reassemble and forms unite, dis-unite and reappear, depart and return, endlessly, in recurring cycles. That conception, the basis perhaps of the theory of cosmological days, is perhaps also itself but a dream, yet one that, however defective, has a beauty which must have been too fair. Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, originally regarded as emanations of the ideal, became concrete. Consorts were found for them. From infinity they were lodged in idols. A worship sensuous when not grotesque ensued, from which the ideal took flight. That was the work of the clergy. Brahmanism is also. The archaic conflict between light and darkness, the triumph of the former over the latter, diminished, at their hands, into the figurative. That is only reasonable. It was only reasonable also that they should claim the triumph as their own. Without them the gods could do nothing. They would not even be. In the _Rig-Veda_ and the _Vedas_ generally they are transparent. The subsequent evolution of the Paramâtmâ, the Tri-murti and the hierarchy, had, for culmination, the apotheosis of a priesthood that had invented them and who, for the invention, deserved the apotheosis which they claimed and got. They were priests that were poets, and poets that were seers. But they were not sorcerers. They could not provide successors equal to themselves. It was the later clergy that pulled poetry from the infinite, stuffed it into idols and prostituted it to nameless shames. In the _Bhagavad-Gita_ it is written: "Nothing is greater than I. In scriptures I am prayer. I am perfume in flowers, brilliance in light. I am life and its source. I am the soul of creation. I am the beginning and the end. I am the Divine." That is Brahm. Ormuzd has faded. Zeus has passed. Jupiter has gone. With them the divinities of Egypt and the lords of the Chaldean sky have been reabsorbed and forgot. Brahm still is. The cohorts of Cyrus might pray Ormuzd to peer where he glowed. There, the phalanxes of Alexander might raise altars to Zeus. Parthians and Tatars might dispute the land and the god. Muhammadans could bring their Allah and Christians their creed. Indifferently Brahm has dreamed, knowing that he has all time as these all have their day. The conception of that apathy, grandiose in itself and marvellous in its persistence, was due to unknown poets that had in them the true _souffle_ of the real ideal. But that also demanded a climax. They produced it in the theory that the afflictions of this life are due to transgressions in another. From afflictions death, they taught, is not a release, for the reason that there is no death. There is but absorption in Brahm. Yet that consummation cannot occur until all transgressions, past and present, have been expiated and the soul, lifted from the eddies of migration, becomes Brahm himself. To be absorbed, to be Brahm, to be God, is an ambition, certainly vertiginous yet as surely divine. But to succeed, consciousness of success must be lost. A mortal cannot attain divinity until annihilation is complete. To become God nothing must be left of man. To loose, then, every bond, to be freed from every tie, to retire from finite things, to mount to and sink in the immutable, to see Death die, was and is the Hindu ideal. Of the elect, that is. Of the higher castes, of the priest, of the prince. But not of the people. The ideal was not for them, salvation either. It was idle even to think about it. Set in hell, they had to return here until in some one of the twenty-four lakhs of birth which the chain of migrations comports, and which to saint and soudra were alike dispensed, they arrived here in the purple. Then only was the opportunity theirs to rescale a sky that was reserved for prelates and rajahs. Suddenly, to the pariah, to the hopeless, to those who outcast in hell were outcast from heaven, an erect and facile ladder to that sky was brought. The Buddha furnished it. If he did not, a college of dissidents assumed that he had, and in his name indicated a stairway which, set among the people, all might mount and at whose summit gods actually materialized. To those who believe in the Dalai Lama--there are millions that have believed, there are millions that do--he is not a vicar of the divine, he is himself divine, a god in a tenement of flesh who, as such, though he die, immediately is reincarnated; a god therefore always present among his people, whose history is a continuous gospel. In contemporaneous Italy, a peasant may aspire to the papacy. In the uplands of Asia, men have loftier ambitions. There they may become Buddha, who perhaps never was, except in legend. In the _Lalita Vistâra_ the legend unfolds. In the strophes of the poem one may assist at the Buddha's birth, an event which is said to have occurred at Kapilavastu. Oriental geography is unacquainted with the place. With the thing even Occidental philosophy is familiar. Kapilavastu means the substance of Kapila. The substance is atheism. History has its hesitancies. Often it stammers uncertainly. But its earliest pages agree in representing Kapila as the initial religious rebel. Kapila was the first to declare the divine a human and invalid conjecture. The announcement, with its prefaces and deductions, is contained in the _Sankhya Karika_, a system of rationalism, still read in India, where it is known as the godless tract. In the Orient, existence is usually a sordid nightmare when it does not happen to be a golden dream. Kapila taught that it was a prison from which release could be had only through intellectual development. That is Kapilavastu, the substance of Kapila, where the Buddha was born. In the _Lalita Vistâra_ it is fairyland. There, Gotama the Buddha is the Prince Charming of a sovereign house. But a prince who developed into a nihilist prior to re-becoming the god that anteriorly he had been. It was while in heaven that he selected Mâyâ, a ranee, to be his mother. It was surrounded by the heavenly that he appeared. The fields foamed with flowers. The skies flamed with faces. In the air apsaras floated, fanning themselves with peacocks' tails. The galleries of the palace festooned themselves with pearls. On the terraces a rain of perfume fell. In the parterres Mâyâ strolled. A tree bent and bowed to her. Touching a branch with her hand she looked up and yawned. Painlessly from her immaculate breast Gotama issued. An immense lotos sprouted to receive him. To cover him a parasol dropped from above. He, however, already occupied, was contemplating space, the myriad worlds, the myriad lives, and announced himself their saviour. At once a deluge of roses descended. The effulgence of a hundred thousand colours shone. A spasm of delight pulsated. Sorrow and anger, envy and fear, fled and fainted. From the zenith came a murmur of voices, the sound of dancing, the kiss of timbril and of lute. That is Oriental poetry. Oriental philosophy is less ornate. From the former the Buddha could not have come. From the latter he probably did, if not in flesh at least in spirit. To that spirit antiquity was indebted, as modernity is equally, for the doctrines of a teacher known variously as Gotama the Enlightened and Sakya the Sage. Whether or not the teacher himself existed is, therefore, unimportant. The existence of the Christ has been doubted. But the doctrines of both survive. They do more, they enchant. Occasionally they seem to combine. The Gospels have obviously nothing in common with the _Lalita Vistâra_, which is an apocryphal novel of uncertain date. The resemblance that is reflected comes from the _Tripitaka_, the Three Baskets that constitute the evangels of the Buddhist faith. In an appendix to the _Mahâvaggo_, it is stated that disciples of Gotama, who knew his sermons and his parables by heart, determined the canon "after his death." The expression might mean anything. But a ponderable antiquity is otherwise shown. Asoko, a Hindu emperor, sent an embassy to Ptolemy Philadelphos. The circumstance was set forth bilingually on various heights. In another inscription Asoko recommended the study of the _Tripitaka_ and mentioned titles of the books. Ptolemy Philadelphos reigned at Alexandria in the early part of the third century B.C. The _Tripitaka_ must therefore have existed then. But the thirty-seventh year of Asoko's reign was, in a third inscription, counted as the two hundred and fifty-seventh from the Buddha's death, a reckoning which makes them much older. Their existence, however, as a fourth inscription shows, was oral. Transmitted for hundreds of years by trained schools of reciters, it was during a synod that occurred in the first quarter of the first century before Christ that, finally, they were written. In them it is recited that Mâyâ, the mother of Gotama, was immaculate. According to St. Matthew, Maria, the mother of Jesus, was also. Previously, in each instance, the coming of a Messiah had been foretold. The infant Jesus was visited by magi. The infant Buddha was visited by kings. Afterward, neither Jesus or Gotama wrote. But both preached charity, chastity, poverty, humility, and abnegation of self. Both fasted in a wilderness. Both were tempted by a devil. Both announced a second advent. Both were transfigured. Both died in the open air. At the death of each there was an earthquake. Both healed the sick. Both were the light of a world which both said would cease to be. According to _Luke_, a courtesan visited Jesus and had her sins remitted. According to the _Mahâvaggo_, Gotama was visited by a harlot whom he instructed in things divine.[1] In _Matthew_, Jesus is depicted as a glutton and a wine-bibber. In the _Mahâvaggo_, the picture of Gotama is the same.[2] In _Matthew_ it is written; "Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth consume and where thieves break through and steal." The _Khuddakapatho_ says: "Righteousness is a treasure which no man can steal. It is a treasure that abideth alway."[3] In _Luke_ it is written: "As ye would that men should do unto you, do ye also unto them." The _Dhammaphada_ say: "Put yourself in the place of others, do as you would be done by."[4] [Footnote 1: Luke vii. 37-50. Sacred Books of the East, xi. 30.] [Footnote 2: Matthew xi, 19. S. B. E. xiii. 92.] [Footnote 3: Matthew vi. 19. S. B. E. x. 191.] [Footnote 4: Luke vi. 31. S. B. E. x. 36.] The miracle of walking on the water, that of the money-bearing fish, the story of the Woman at the Well, the proclamation of an unpardonable sin, even the mediæval myth of the Wandering Jew, may have originated in Buddhist legend.[5] [Footnote 5: _Cf._ Edmunds: Buddhist and Christian Gospels.] Pious minds have been disturbed by these similitudes. The resemblance between Mâyâ and Maria has perplexed. The perhaps uncertain likeness of Gotama to Jesus has occasioned irreverent doubts. But the parallelisms may be fortuitous. Probably they are. Even otherwise they but enhance the sororal beauties of faiths which if cognate are quite distinct. Then too the penetrating charm of the parables and sermons of the Buddha fades before the perfection of the sermons and parables of the Christ. The birth, ministry, transfiguration, and passing of Gotama are marvels which, however exquisite, the wholly spiritual apparitions of the Lord efface. Other similarities, such as they are, may without impropriety, perhaps, be attributed to the ideals progressus. Hindu and Chaldean beliefs constitute the two primal inspirational faiths. From the one, Buddhism and Zoroasterism developed. From the other the creed of Israel and possibly that of Egypt came. Religions that followed were afterthoughts of the divine. They were revelations sometimes more intelligible, in one instance inexpressibly more luminous, yet invariably reminiscent of an anterior light. The light of contemporaneous Buddhism is that of Catholicism--heaven deducted, a heaven, that is, of ceaseless Magnificats. The latter conception is Christian. But it was Persian first. Otherwise, in common with the Church, Buddhism has saints, censers, litanies, tonsures, holy water, fasts, and confession. Barring confession, the extreme antiquity of which has been attested, the other rites and ceremonies are, it may be, borrowed, but not the high morality, the altruism, the renunciation and effacement of self, which Buddhists no longer very scrupulously observe, perhaps, but which their religion was the first to instil. Buddhism originally had neither rites nor ritual. It was merely a mendicant order in which one tried to do what is right, with, for reward, the hope of Pratscha-Parâmita, the peace that is beyond all knowledge and which Nirvana provides. That peace is--or was--the complete absence of anything, extinction utter and everlasting, a state of absolute non-existence which no whim of Brahm may disturb. Buddhism denied Brahm and every tenet of Brahmanism, save only that which concerned the immedicable misery of life. Of final deliverance there was in Brahmanism no known mode. None at least that was exoteric. Brahmanism rolled man ceaselessly through all forms of existence, from the elementary to the divine, and even from the latter, even when he was absorbed in Brahm, flung him out and back into a fresh circle of unavoidable births. The theory is horrible. In the horrible occasionally is the sublime. To Gotama it was merely absurd. He blew on it. Abruptly, the categories of the infinite, the infant gods, shapes divine and demoniac, the entire phantasmagoria of metempsychosis, seemed really absorbed and Brahm himself ablated. For a moment the skies, sterilized by a breath, seemingly were vacant. Actually they were never more peopled. Behind the pall, tossed on an antique faith, new gods were crouching and waiting. Buddhistic atheism had resulted but in the production of an earlier New Testament. From the depths of the ideal, swarms of bedecked and bejewelled divinities escorted Brahm back to a lotos of azure. Coincidentally Gotama, enthroned in the zenith, contemplated clusters of gods that dangled through twenty-eight abodes of bliss which other poets created. In demonstrable triumph the Buddha was then, as he has been since, even if previously his existence had been omitted. But though he never were, there nevertheless occurred a social revolution of which he was the nominal originator and which, had it not been diverted into other realms, might have resulted in Brahm's entire extinction. Wolves do not devour each other. Ideals should not either. The Oriental heavens were wide enough to serve as fastnesses for two sets of hostile, germane, and ineffably poetic aberrations. There was room even for more. There always should be. Of the divine one can have never enough. The gospel according to Sakya the Eremite is divine. It is divine in its limitless compassion, and though compassion, when analyzed, becomes but egotism in an etherialized form, yet the gospel had other attractions. In demonstrating that life is evil, that rebirth is evil too, that to be born even a god is evil still,--in demonstrating these things, while insisting that all else, Buddhism included, is but vanity, it fractured the charm of error in which man had been confined. Sakya saw men born and reborn in hell. He saw them ignorant, as humanity has always been, unaware of their abjection as men are to-day, and over the gulfs of existence, through the torrents of rebirth, he offered to ferry them. But in the ferrying they had to aid. The aid consisted in the rigorous observance of every virtue that Christianity afterward professed. Therein is the beauty of Buddhism. Its profundity resided in a revelation that everything human perishes except actions and the consequences that ensue. To orthodox India its tenets were as heretical as those of Christianity were to the Jews. Nonetheless the doctrine became popular. But doctrines once popularized lose their nobility. The degeneracy of Buddhism is due to Cathay. To the Hindu life was an incident between two eternities, an episode in the string of deaths and rebirths. To Mongolians it was a unique experience. They had no knowledge of the supersensible, no suspicion of the ideal. Among them Buddhism operated a conversion. It stimulated a thirst for the divine. The thirst is unquenchable. Buddhism, in its simple severity, could not even attempt to slake it. But on its simplicity a priesthood shook parures. Its severity was cloaked with mantles of gold. The founder, an atheist who had denied the gods, was transformed into one. About him a host of divinities was strung. The most violently nihilistic of doctrines was fanned into an idolatry puerile and meek. Nirvana became Elysium, and a religion which began as a heresy culminated in a superstition. That is the history of creeds. II ORMUZD "The purest of thoughts is that which concerns the beginning of things." So Ormuzd instructed Zarathrustra. "And what was there at the beginning?" the prophet asked. "There was light and the living Word."[6] Long later the statement was repeated in the Gospel attributed to John. Originally it occurred in the course of a conversation that the _Avesta_ reports. In a similar manner _Exodus_ provides a revelation which Moses received. There Jehovah said: _'ehyèh '[)a]sher 'ehyèh_. In the _Avesta_ Ormuzd said: _ahmi yad ahmi_.[7] Word for word the declarations are identical. Each means _I am that I am_.[8] [Footnote 6: Avesta (Anquetil-Duperron), i. 393]. [Footnote 7: Avesta, Hormazd Yasht.] [Footnote 8: Exodus iii. 14.] The conformity of the pronouncements may be fortuitous. Their relative priority uncertain chronology obscures. The date that orthodoxy has assigned to Moses is about 1500 B.C. Plutarch said that Zarathrustra lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy. Both dates are perhaps questionable. But a possible hypothesis philology provides. The term Jehovah is a seventeenth-century expansion of the Hebrew Jhvh, now usually written Jahveh and commonly translated: _He who causes to be._ The original rendering of Ormuzd is Ahura-mazda. Ahura means _living_ and mazdaô _creator_. The period when _Exodus_ was written is probably post-exilic. The period when the _Avesta_ was completed is assumed to be pre-Cyrian. It was at the junction of the two epochs that Iran and Israel met. But, however the pronouncements may conform, however also they may confuse, the one reported in _Exodus_ is alone exact. In subsequent metamorphoses the name might fade, the deity remained. Whereas, save to diminishing Parsis, Ormuzd, once omnipotent throughout the Persian sky, has gone. A time, though, there was, when from his throne in the ideal he menaced the apathy of Brahm, the majesty of Zeus, when even from the death of deaths he might have ejected Buddha and, supreme in the Orient, ruled also in the West. Salamis prevented that. But one may wonder whether the conquest had not already been effected, whether for that matter the results are not apparent still. Brahma, Ormuzd, Zeus, Jupiter, are but different conceptions of a primal idea. They are four great gods diversely represented yet originally identical, and whose attributes Jahveh, in his ascensions, perhaps absorbed. Ormuzd represented purity and light. For his worship no temple was necessary, barely a shrine, never an image. In his celestial court were parikas, the glittering bayaderes of love that a later faith called peris, but his sole consorts were Prayers. About him and them gathered amshaspands and izeds, angels and seraphs, the winged host of loveliness that in Babylon enthralled the Jews who returned from captivity escorted by them. The allurement of their charm, enchanting then, enchants the world to-day. There has been little that is more poetic, except perhaps Ormuzd himself, who symbolized whatever is blinding in beauty, particularly the sun's effulgence, the radiance of light. The light endures, though the god has gone. Yet at the time, aloof in clear ether and aloft, he resplended in a sovereignty that only Ahriman disputed. Ahriman has been more steadfast than Ormuzd. He too captivated the captive Hebrews. The latter adopted him and called him Satan, as they also adopted one of his minor legates, Ashmodai--transformed by the Vulgate into Asmodeus--a little jealous devil who, in the apocryphal _Tobit_, strangled husbands on their bridal nights. Ahriman, his master, represented everything that was the opposite of Ormuzd. Ahriman dwelt in darkness, Ormuzd in light. Ormuzd was primate of purity; Ahriman, prince of whatever is base. One had angels and archangels for aids, the other fiends and demons. Between their forces war was constant. Each strove for the soul of man. But after death, when, in the balance, the deeds of the defunct were weighed, there appeared a golden-eyed redeemer, Mithra, who so closely resembled the Christ that the world hesitated, for a moment, between them. It was because of these conceptions that Persia dreamed of conquering the West. At Marathon and at Salamis that illusion was looted. History tells of the cohorts that descended there. It relates further what they did. But of what they thought there is no record. It was, perhaps, too obvious. Ormuzd, god of light and, in the Orient, god of the day, was, in the darker and duller Occident, menaced there also by Ahriman. Politically the expedition is not very explicable. Considered from a religious standpoint the motive is clear. But though the Persian forces could not uphold their light in Greece, higher forces projected it far beyond, to the remote north, to a south that was still remoter. Originally the light was Vedic. It was identical with that of Agni, of Indra and of Varuna. But while these, without subsidence, passed, absorbed by Brahm, the light of Iran, deflecting, persisted, and so potently that it lit the Teutonic sky, glows still in Christendom, after refracting perhaps in Inca temples. Its revelation is due to Zarathrustra. Zarathrustra, commonly written Zoroaster, is a name translatable into "star of gold" and also into "keeper of old camels." Probably it was first employed to designate an imaginary prophet, and then a series of spiritual though actual successors by whom, in the course of centuries, the _Avesta_ was evolved. Otherwise Zarathrustra and Gotama are brothers in Brahmanaspati. Both had virgin mothers. In the lives of both miracles are common. The advent of Zarathrustra was accounted the ruin of demons. When he was born he laughed aloud. As a child he slept in flames. As a man he walked on water. Before prodigies such as these fiends fell like autumn leaves. Hence, on the part of the devil, an attempt to seduce him from the divine. Mairya, the demon of death, offered him, as Mara offered Gotama, as Satan offered Jesus, the empire of the earth. Zarathrustra rebuked the devil first with stones, then with pious words. From him, as from the Buddha and the Christ, abashed the tempter retreated.[9] [Footnote 9: Darmestetter: Ormazd et Ahriman.] That victory over evil, the Parsis to-day regard as the capital event in the history of the world. It was the immediate prelude to the revelation of the Law which Ormuzd vouchsafed to his prophet. The revelation occurred on a mountain, in the course of conversations, during which Zarathrustra questioned and Ormuzd, in the voice of heaven, replied. So was the Law proclaimed in India. There Mithra and Varuna sang it through the sky.[10] The expression is notable, for the song of the sky is thunder and the theophany that of Sinai. There is another _rapprochement_ in Babylonian lore and a third in the _Eddas_, where it is related that to Sigurd the secret of the runes was sung. [Footnote 10: Rig-Veda, i. 151.] Meanwhile, the revelation completed and proclaimed, Zarathrustra died as miraculously as he was born, foretelling, as he went, the coming of a messiah, his own son, Coshyos--the delayed fruit of an immaculate hymen that is not to be fecund until the end of time--but who, at the consummation of the ages, will rejuvenate the world, affranchise it from death, vanquish Ahriman, terminate the struggle between good and evil, purify hell and fill it full with glory. Then the dead shall rise and immortality be universal.[11] [Footnote 11: Zamyad Yasht. xix. 89 _sq._] Zoroaster is obviously mythical. The Buddha is also. But precisely as the Buddhist scriptures exist, so also do the Zoroastrian. They do more. Frequently they enlighten, occasionally they exalt. Written in gold on perfumed leather, the original edition, limited to two copies, was so sacred that it was sullied if seen. Burned with the palace of Persepolis--which Alexander, the Great Sinner, in a drunken orgy, destroyed--only fragments of the fargards remain. These tell of creation, effected in six epochs, and of a _pairi-daêza_. Delitzsch voluminously asked: _Wo lag das Paradies?_ There it is. There is the primal paradise. In it Ormuzd put Mashya, the first man, and Mashyana, the first woman, whom Ahriman, in the form of a serpent, seduced. Thereafter ensued the struggle in which all have or will participate, one that, extending beyond the limits of the visible world, arrays seasons and spirits and the senses of man in a conflict of good and evil that can end only when, from the depths of the dawn, radiant in the vermillion sky, Coshyos, hero of the resurrection, triumphantly appears. The parallel between this romance and subsequent poetry is curious. In Chaldea, before the fargards were, the story of Creation, of Eden, and of the fall had been told. In Egypt, before the _Avesta_ was written, the resurrection and the life were known. Similar legends and prospects may or may not represent an autonomous development of Iranian thought. The successors of the problematic Zarathrustra, the line of magi who wrote and taught in his name, may have gathered the tales and theories elsewhere. In the creed which they instituted there is a trinity. India had one, Egypt another, Babylonia a third. Babylonia had even three of them. But in Mithra, Iran had a redeemer that no other creed possessed. In Coshyos was a saviour, virgin born, who nowhere else was imagined. In Mara, Buddhism had a Satan. The Persian Ahriman is Satan himself. Babylon had angels and cherubs. In Iran there were guardian angels, there were archangels with flaming swords, there were fairies, there were goblins, the celestial, the poetic, the demoniac combined. Zoroasterism may or may not have had a past, it is perhaps evident that it had a future. An inscription chiselled in the red granite of Ekbatana describes Ormuzd as creator of heaven and earth. In the _Veda_ the description of Indra is identical.[12] It was applied equally to Jahveh in Judea. But above Jahveh, Kabbalists discerned En Soph. Above Indra metaphysicians discovered Brahma. Similarly the Persian magi found that Ormuzd, however perfect, was not perfect enough and, from the depths of the ideal, they disclosed Zervan Akerene, the Eternal, from whom all things come and to whom all return. [Footnote 12: R. V. x. 3. "Indra created heaven and earth."] That conception is not reached in the _Avesta_. It is in the _Bundahish_, a work which, while much later, is based on earlier traditions, memories it may be, of antediluvian legends brought from the summits of upper Asia by Djemschid, the fabulous Abraham of the Persians of whom Zarathrustra was the Moses. But in default of the Eternal, the Avesta contains pictures of enduring charm. Among these is a highly poetic pastel that displays the soul of man surprised in the first post-mortem ambuscades. There a figure, beautiful or revolting, cries at him: "I am thyself, the image of thine earthly life." If that life has been beautiful, the soul of man, led by itself, is conducted to heaven. Otherwise, led still by itself, it descended to Drûjô-demâna, the House of Destruction, where, fed on insults and offal, it waited till its sins were destroyed. The waiting might be long. It was not everlasting. There was Mithra to intercede. Besides, evil was regarded but as a shadow on the surface of things. In the seventh epoch of creation, a period yet to be, the age which Coshyos is to usher, the shadow will fade. The wicked, purified of their wickedness, will be received among the blessed. Even Ahriman is to be converted. In that definite triumph of light over darkness is the resurrection and the life, life in Garô-demâna, literally House of Hymns, a pre-Christian heaven, yet strictly Christian, where, to the trumpetings of angels, hosannahs are ceaselessly sung.[13] [Footnote 13: Yasht. xxviii. 10, xxxiv. 2.] John--or, more exactly, his homonym--was perhaps acquainted with that idea, as he may have been with other theories that the _Avesta_ contains. But the possibility is a detail. It is the idea that counts. Behind it is the unique character of this doctrine which, in eliminating evil, converted even Satan. Satan seldom gets his due. He was the first artist and has remained the greatest. In creating evil he fashioned what is a luxury and a necessity combined. Evil is the counterpart of excellence. Both have their roots in nature. One could not be destroyed without the other. For every form of evil there is a corresponding form of good. Virtue would be meaningless were it not for vice. Honour would have no nobility were it not for shame. If ever evil be banished from the scheme of things, life could have no savour and joy no delight. Happiness and unhappiness would be synonymous terms. It is for this reason that scoffers have mocked at heaven. Heaven may be very different from what has been fancied. But the theory of it, however unphilosophic, which Zoroasterism supplied, carried with it a creed not of tears but of smiles, a religion of lofty tolerance, one in which the demonology barely alarmed, for redemption was assured, and so fully that on earth melancholy was accounted a folly. Though tolerant, it could be austere. Meanness, thanklessness, loquaciousness, jealousy, an unbecoming attire, evil thoughts, whatever is sensual, whatever is coarse, any promenade in mud actual or metaphorical, severely it condemned. Particularly was avarice censured. "There are many who do not like to give," Ormuzd, in the _Vendidad_, confided to Zarathrustra. The high god added: "Ahriman awaits them." Ahriman awaited also the harlot who, elsewhere, at that period, was holy. Yet in lapses, confession and repentance sufficed for remission, provided that in praying for forgiveness the sinner forgave those that had sinned against him. If he lacked the time, were he dying, a priest might yet save him with words whispered in the ear. That was the extreme unction, hardly administrable, however, in case of wilful omission of the _darûn_, which was communion. This sacrament, the most mystic of the Church, was observed by the Incas, who also confessed, also atoned, who, like the Buddhists, were baptized, but who, like the Persians, worshipped the sun and, with perhaps a finer instinct of what the beautiful truly is, worshipped too the rainbow.[14] [Footnote 14: Garcilasso: Commentarios reales.] Huraken, the winged and feathered serpent-god of the Toltecs, was adored in temples that upheld a cross. The Incas lacked that symbol. But they had a Satan. They had also the expectation of a saviour, belief in whom could alone have consoled for the advent of Pizarro. Over what highways of sea or sky, the living Word, which Ormuzd spoke, reached them, there has been no somnambulist of history to divine. But in the splendour that Cuzco was, in the golden temples of the town of gold, along the scarlet lanes where sacred peacocks strolled and girls more sacred still--vestals whom Pizarro's soldiers raped--in that City of the Sun, the Word re-echoed. The mystery of it, reported back to the Holy Office, was declared an artifice of the devil. Less mysteriously, through the obvious vehicle of cognate speech, it reached the Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated it in the Eddie sagas. Loki and his inferior fiends are, as there represented, quite as black as Ahriman and his cohorts. The conflict of good and evil is almost as fully dire. But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd. The æsir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garô-demâna, was more trite in its wassails than the latter in its hymns. What these abstractions lacked was not the Logos but the light. However brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, in the sullen north its rays were lost. The mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim and set the gods in twilight. It stirred the scalds to runes but not to inspiration. There is none in the _Eddas_. Nor was there any in the _Nibelungen_, until the light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in the flaming scores of Wagner. Transformed by ages and by man, yet lifted at last from their secular slumber, the Persian myths achieved there their Occidental apotheosis, and, it may be, on steps of song, mounted to the ideal where Zervan Akerene muses. III AMON-RÂ "I am all that is, has been and shall be. No mortal has lifted my veil." That pronouncement, graven on the statue of Isis, confounded Egypt, condemning her mysteriously for some sin, anterior and unknown, to ignorance of the divine, leaving her, in default of revelation, to worship what she would, jackals, hyenas, cats, hawks, the ibis; beasts and birds. Yet to the people, whose minds were as naked as their bodies, and who, in addition, were slaves, there must have been something very superior in the lords of the desert and the air. Obviously they were wise. Among them were some that knew in advance the change of the seasons. Others, indifferent to man and independent of him, migrated over highways known but to them. The senses of all were keyed to vibrations. They heard the inaudible, saw the invisible, and, though they had a language of their own, when questioned never replied. To slaves, clearly they were gods. Not to the priests, however. They knew better. They but affected belief in divinities that had perhaps emigrated from the enigmas of geography and who were polychrome as the skies they had crossed. Fashioned in stone, these gods were dog-headed or longly beaked. Some, though, were alive. In temples were saurians on purple carpets, bulls draped with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmering perches, that little gold chains detained. Among gods of this character, the Sphinx, in its role of eternal spectre, must have seemed the ideal. Others were nearly sublime. Particularly there was Ausar. Ausar, called commonly Osiris, died for man. In an attempt to preserve harmony, in a struggle with the real spirit of actual evil which discord is, Osiris was slain. Being a god he arose from the dead. The latter thereafter he judged. The people knew little, if anything, concerning him. They knew little if anything at all. They had a menagerie and a full consciousness of their own insignificance. That sufficed. In all of carnal Africa, the priest alone possessed what then was truth and of which a part is theology now. Egypt, in which the evangels began, millennia before they were written, knew no genesis. Her history, sculptured in hieroglyphics, was cut on pages of stone. It awoke in the falling of cataracts. It ended with simoons in sand. The books that tell of it are pyramids, obelisks, necropoles; constructions colossal and enigmatic; the granite epitaphs of finite things. To-day, in the shattered temples, from which all other gods are gone, one divinity still lingers. It is Silence. In Iran sorrow was a folly. In Egypt speech was a sin. Apis could bellow, Anubis bark; man might not even stutter. It was in the submission of dumb obedience that the palpable eternities of the pyramids were piled. Yet in that darkness was light, in silence was the Word. But to behold and to hear was possible only in sanctuaries reserved to the elect. The gods too had their castes. The lowest only were fellahin fit to worship. On the lips of the others the priests held always a finger. Crocodiles were less distant, hyenas more approachable, and the Egyptian, barred from the divine, found it on earth. He prayed to scorpions, sang hymns to scarabs, coaxed the jackal with psalms; with dances he placated the ibis. It was ridiculous but human. He too would have a part, however insensate, in the dreams of all mankind. Yet, had he looked not down but up, he would have lifted at least a fringe of the Isian veil. The sun, taken as a symbol only, the symbol of life, death, and resurrection--phases which its rising, setting, and return suggest--was the deity, the one really existing god. Nominally, figuratively, even concretely, there were others; a whole host, a hierarchy vaster than the Aryans knew; a great crowd of divinities less grandiose than gaudy, that swarmed in space, strolled through the dawns and dusk, thronged the temples, eyed the quick, confronted the dead. They were but appearances, mere masks, expressions, hypostases, eidolons of Râ. Râ was the celestial pharaoh. But not originally. Originally he was part of a triad which itself was part of a triple trinity. Râ then was but one divinity among many gods. These ultimately lost themselves in him so indistinguishably that there are litanies in which the names of seventy-five of them are used in addressing him. Regarded as the unbegotten begetter of the first beginning, he succeeded in achieving the incomprehensible. He became triune and remained unique. He was Osiris, he was Isis, he was Horus. At once father, mother, and son, he fecundated, conceived, produced, and was. From him gods and goddesses emanated in sidereal fireworks that illuminated the heavens, dazzled the earth, then melted into each other, faded away or, occasionally, flared afresh in a glare dispelling and persistent. Among these latter was Amon. Glimmering primarily in provincial obscurity at Thebes, the thin fire of his shrine mounted spirally to Râ, fused its flames with his, expanding and uniting so inseparably with them, that the two became one. Amon means _hidden_; Amon-Râ, _the hidden light_. In the infinite, time is not. In heaven there is no chronology. The date of any god's accession to supremacy there is, consequently, apart from mortal ken. None the less that of Amon-Râ is known. At the beginning of the earthly reign of Amonhoteph III., an edict, scrupulously executed throughout Egypt, determined, on monument and wall, the substitution of Amon-Râ's name for that of previously superior gods. The pharaohnate of Amonhoteph began about 1500 B.C. It is from that period, therefore, that dates the divinity's accession to the pharaohnate of the skies. There is, or should be, a reason for all things. There is one for that. Amonhoteph regarded himself as Amon's son. It was one of the traits of the pharaohs, as it was also of the Incas, to believe, or at least to assert, that their fathers, therefore themselves, were divine. As a consequence of the idea they prayed to their own images and likened their palaces to inns. Originally foreigners, invaders from Akkad or Sumer, the pharaohs first conquered, then surprised. It was they that embanked the Nile, turned morasses into meadows and piled the pyramids. More exactly, it was by their commands that these miracles were contrived. To the neolithic people whom they subjugated their divinity was clear. So elsewhere was that of the kings of Akkad. Like them, like the Incas, the pharaohs were of the solar race and so remained from the first dynasty to the Greek conquest, when Alexander, to legitimatize his sovereignty, had himself acknowledged as Amon's son. The ceremony had its precedents. An inscription in eulogy of the great Rameses states that Amon, when possessing the pharaohs august mother, engendered him as a god. On a wall of the Temple of Luxor an earlier inscription sets forth that the god of Thebes, incarnating himself in the person of Thotmes IV., appeared in his divine form to the pharaoh's queen, who, at sight of his beauty, conceived. It was therefore not in the beast alone, but in man, that divinity revealed itself in Egypt. That in Judea a similar revelation should have been withheld until after the Roman occupation is hardly explicable on the theory, general among scholars, that Moses is not a historical character, for an identical revelation had been received in Babylonia where Israel twice loitered. Moreover, a curious parallelism exists between post-Mosaic prophecy and Egyptian clairvoyance. In a papyrus of the Thotmes III. epoch--about 1600 B.C.--it is written: "The people of the age of the son of man shall rejoice and establish his name forever. They shall be removed from evil and the wicked shall humble their mouths." In commenting the passage an Egyptologist noted that the words _son of man_ are a literal translation of the original _si-n-sa_.[15] But already in Akkad a similar prophecy had been uttered.[16] It may be, therefore, that it was in Babylon that Israel first heard it. [Footnote 15: Sayce: Guifford Lectures.] [Footnote 16: Jastrow: The Dibbara Epic.] The doctrine of a trinity, common to almost all antique beliefs, was a blasphemy to the Jews. The belief in immortality, also prevalent, though less general, was to them an abomination. The miracle of divine descent they were perhaps too practical to accept. There was no room in their creed for the dogma of future rewards and punishments, and that, together with other articles of the Christian faith, Egypt's elect professed. The slaves and mongrels that constituted the bulk of the population were not instructed in these things and would not have understood them if they had been. In Babylonia education was compulsory. In Egypt it was an art, a gift, mysterious in itself, reserved to the few. To the Egyptian, religion consisted in paraded symbols, in avenues of sphinxes, in forests of obelisks, in pharaohs seated colossally before the temple doors, in inscriptions that told indistinguishably of theomorphic men and anthropomorphic gods, and in a belief in the divinity of bulls and hawks. These latter had their uses. In transformations elsewhere effected, the sacred bull may have become a golden calf, the golden hawk a sacred dove. In Egypt they were otherwise serviceable. The worship of them, of other birds and beasts, of insects and vipers as well, ecclesiastically indorsed, hid the myth of metempsychosis. Of that the people knew nothing. When they died they ceased to be. Even mummification, usually supposed to have been general, was not for them. Down to an epoch relatively late it was a privilege reserved to priests and princes. When the commonalty were embalmed it was with the opulent design that, in a future existence, they should serve their masters as they had in this. Embalming was a preparation for the Judgment Day. Of that the people knew nothing either. It was even unlawful that concerning it they should be apprised. In the Louvre is a statue of Ptah-meh, high priest of Memphis. On it are the significant words: "Nothing was hidden from him." A passage of Zosimus states that what was hidden it was illicit to reveal, except, Jamblicus explained, to those whose discretion a long novitiate had assured. To such only was disclosed the secret that life is death in a land of darkness, and death is life in a land of light. It was because of this that the pharaohs seated themselves colossally before the temple doors. It was because of it that their palaces were inns and their tombs were homes. It was because of it that their sepulchres were built for eternity and the tenements of their souls placed there embalmed. It was because of this that the triumphs of men were inscribed in the halls of the gods. Instead of seeking to be absorbed, it was their own inextinguishable individuality that they endeavoured to assert. Tombs, tenements, triumphs, these all were preparations for the Land of Light. The land was Alu, the asphodel meadows of the celestial Nile that wound through the Milky Way. To reach it a passport, visé'd by Osiris, sufficed. The first draft of that passport was held to have been written on tablets of alabaster, in letters of lapis lazuli, by an eidolon of Râ, who, known in Egypt as Thoth, elsewhere was Hermes Thrice the Greatest. At Memphis, Hermes was regarded as representing the personification of divine wisdom, or, more exactly perhaps, the inventive power of the human mind. A little library of forty-two books--which a patricist saw, but not being initiate could not read--was attributed to him.[17] The books contained the entire hieratic belief. Fragments that are held to have survived in an extant Greek novel are obviously Egyptian, but as obviously Alexandrine and neo-platonic. In the _editio princeps_ Pheidias is mentioned. Mention of Michel Angelo would have been less anachronistic. The original books are gone, all of them, forever, perhaps, save one, chapters of which are as old as the fourth dynasty and, it may be, are still older. Pyramid texts of the fifth dynasty show that there then existed what to-day is termed _The Book of the Dead_, a copy of which, put in a mummy's arms, was a talisman for the soul in the Court of Amenti, a passport thence to the Land of Light. [Footnote 17: Clemens Alexandrinos: Stromata vi.] "There is no book like it, man hath not spoken it, earth hath not heard it"--very truthfully it recites of itself. One copy, known as the Louvre Papyrus, presents the _Divine Comedy_, as primarily conceived and illustrated by an archaic Doré. Text and vignettes display the tribunal where the souls of the dead are judged. In the foreground is an altar. Adjacent is a figure, half griffon, half chimera, the Beast of Amenti, perhaps too of the Apocalypse. Beyond, an ape poises a pair of scales. For balance is an ostrich feather. Above are the spirits of fate. At the left Osiris is enthroned. From a balcony his assessors lean. At the right is the entrance. There the disembodied, ushered by Truth, appears and, in homages and genuflections, affirms negatively the decalogue; protesting before the Master of Eternity that there is no evil in him; praying the dwellers in Amenti that he may cross the dark way; declaring to each that he has not committed the particular sin over which they preside. "O Eater of Spirits gone out of the windows of Alu! O Master of the Faces!" he variously calls. "O the One who associates the Splendours! O the Glowing Feet gone out of the Night! I did not lie. I did not kill. I have not been anxious. I did not talk abundantly. I made no one weep. No heart have I harmed." The assessors listen. "I have not been anxious. I made no one weep. No heart have I harmed." These abstentions, graces now, were virtues then, and so efficacious that they perhaps sufficed, as rightly they should, for absolution. But while the assessors listen and Osiris looks gravely on, no one accuses. It is conscience in its nakedness, conscience exposed there where all may see it, where for the first time perhaps it truly sees itself, and seeing realizes what there is in it of evil and what of good, it is that which protests. Still the assessors listen. Orthodoxy on the part of the respondent is to them a minor thing. What they require is that he shall have been merciful to his fellow creatures, true to himself. Only when it is proven that he has done his duty to man, is he permitted to show that he has done his duty to gods. The appeal continues: "I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, I gave water to them that thirsted. O ye that dwell in Amenti! I am unpolluted, I am pure." But is it true? The scales decide. The heart of the respondent is weighed. If heavy, out it is cast to pass with him again through life's infernal circles. But, if light as the feather in the balance and therefore equal with truth, it is restored to the body, which then resurrects and, in the bark of the Sun, sails the celestial Nile to Râ and the Land of Light. That singer gone out of Amenti, actually, like Osiris, rose from the dead. The picture which a papyrus forty centuries old presents, is the dream of a vision that Michel Angelo displayed, a sketch for a papal fresco. Such indeed was the conformity between the underlying conceptions, that, at almost the first monition, Isis, whose veil no mortal had raised, lifted it from her black breast and suckled there the infant Jesus. Then, presently, in temples that had teemed, the silence of the desert brooded. The tide of life retreated, an entire theogony vanished, exorcised, both of them, by the sign of the cross. At sight of the unimagined emblem, a priesthood who in secret sanctuaries had evolved nearly all but that, flung themselves into crypts beneath, pulled the walls down after them, burying unembalmed the arcana of a creed whose spirit still is immortal. In Egypt, then, only tombs and necropoles survived. But it is legendary that, in the solitudes of the Thebaïd, dispossessed eidolons of Râ, appearing in the shape of chimeras, terrified anchorites, to whom, with vengeful eyes, they indicated their ruined altars. IV BEL-MARDUK The inscriptions of Assyrian kings have, many of them, the monotony of hell. Made of boasts and shrieks, they recite the capture and sack of cities; the torrents of blood with which, like wool, the streets were dyed; the flaming pyramids of prisoners; the groans of men impaled; the cries of ravished women. The inscriptions are not all infernal. Those that relate to Assurbanipal--vulgarly, Sandanapallos,--are even ornate. But Assurbanipal, while probably fiendish and certainly crapulous, was clearly literary besides. From the spoil of sacked cities this bibliofilou took libraries, the myths and epics of creation, sacred texts from Eridu and Ur, volumes in the extinct tongues of Akkad and Sumer, first editions of the Book of God. These, re-edited in cuneiform and kept conveniently on the second floor of his palace, fell with Nineveh, where, until recently recovered, for millennia they lay. Additionally, from shelves set up in the days of Khammurabi--the Amraphel of Genesis--Nippur has yielded ghostly tablets and Borsippa treasuries of Babylonian ken. These, the eldest revelations of the divine, are the last that man has deciphered. The altars and people that heard them first, the marble temples, the ivory palaces, the murderous throngs, are dust. The entire civilization from which they came has vanished. Yet, traced with a wooden reed on squares of clay, are flights of little arrows, from which, magically, it all returns. Miraculously with these books a world revives. Fashioned, some of them, at an epoch that in biblical chronology is anterior to man, they tell of creation, of the serpent, the fall and the deluge. At the gates of paradise you see man dying, poisoned by the tree of life. Before Genesis was, already it had been written. In the Chaldean Book of the Beginnings creation was effected in successive acts. According to the epic of it, humanity's primal home was a paradise where ten impressive persons--the models, it may be, of antediluvian patriarchs--reigned interminably, agreeably also, finally sinfully as well. In punishment a deluge swept them away. From the flood there escaped one man who separated a mythical from an heroic age. In the latter epoch, beings descended from demons built Nineveh and Babylon; organized human existence; invented arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and the calendar; counted the planets; numbered the days of the year, divided them into months and weeks; established the Sabbath; decorated the skies with the signs of the zodiac, instituting, in the interim, colleges of savants and priests. These speculated on the origin of things, attributed it to spontaneous generation, the descent of man to evolution, entertaining the vulgar meanwhile with tales of gods and ghosts.[18] [Footnote 18: Lenormant: Les Origines. Schrader: Die Keilenschriften. Smith: Chaldean Genesis.] The cosmological texts now available were not written then. They are drawn from others that were. But there is a vignette that probably is of that age. It represents a man and a woman stretching their hands to a tree. Behind the woman writhes a snake. The tree, known as the holy cedar of Eridu, the fruit of which stimulated desire, is described in an epic that recites the adventures of Gilgames. Gilgames was the national hero of Chaldea. The story of his loves with Ishtar is repeated in the Samson and Delilah myth. Ishtar, described in an Assyrian inscription as Our Lady of Girdles, was the original Venus, as Gilgames was perhaps the prototype of Hercules. The legend of his labours is represented on a seal of Sargon of Akkad, a king who ruled fifty-seven hundred years ago. In the epic, Gilgames, betrayed by Ishtar, tried to find out how not to die. In trying he reached a garden, guarded by cherubim, where the holy cedar was. There he learned that one being only could teach him to be immortal, and that being, Adra-Khasis, had been translated to the Land of the Silver Sky. Adra-Khasis, was the Chaldean Noah. Gilgames sought him and the story of the deluge follows. But with a difference. On the seventh day, Adra-Khasis released from his ark a dove that returned, finally a raven that did not. Then he looked out, and looking, shrieked. Every one had perished. Noah was less emotional, or, if equally compassionate, the fact is not recited. Apart from that detail and one other, the story of the flood is common to all folklore. Even the Aztecs knew of it. Probably it originated in the matrix of nations which the table-land of Asia was. But only in Chaldean myth, and subsequently in Hebrew legend, was the flood ascribed to sin. Gilgames' quest, meanwhile, could not have been wholly vain. In an archaic inscription it is stated that the city of Erech was built in olden times by the deified Gilgames.[19] [Footnote 19: Proc. S. B. A. xvi. 13-15.] How old the olden times may have been is conjectural. Modern science has put the advent of man sixty million years ago. Chaldean chronology is less spacious. But its traditions stretched back a hundred thousand years. The traditions were probably imaginary. Even so, in the morning of the world, already there were ancient cities. There was Nippur, one of whose gods, El Lil, was lord of ghosts. There was Eridu, where Ea was lord of man. There was Ur, where Sin was lord of the moon. There were other divinities. There was Enmesara, lord of the land whence none return, and Makhir, god of dreams. There were many more like the latter, so many that their sanctuaries made the realm a holy land, but one which, administratively, was an aggregate of principalities that Sargon, nearly six thousand years ago, combined. Ultimately, from sheer age, the empire tottered. It would have fallen had not Khammurabi surged. What Sargon made, Khammurabi solidified. Between their colossal figures two millennia stretch. These giants are distinct. None the less, across the ages they seem to fuse, suggestively, not together, but into another person. Sargon has descended through time clothed in a little of the poetry which garments nation builders. But the poetry is not a mantle for the imaginary. In the British Museum is a marble ball that he dedicated to a god. Paris has the seal of his librarian.[20] Copies of his annals are extant.[21] In these it is related that, when a child, his mother put him in a basket of rushes and set him adrift on the Euphrates. Presently he was rescued. Afterward he became a leader of men. [Footnote 20: Collection de Clerq. pl. 5, no. 46.] [Footnote 21: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. iv. 34.] Khammurabi was also a leader. He was a legislator as well. Sargon united principalities, Khammurabi their shrines. From one came the nation, from the other the god. It is in this way that they fuse. To the composite, if it be one, history added a heightening touch. The Khammurabi legislation came from Bel, who, originally, was a local sun-god of Nippur. There he was regarded as the possessor of the Chaldean Urim and Thummin, the tablets of destiny with which he cast the fates of men. In the mythology of Babylonia these tablets were stolen by the god of storms, who kept them in his thunder fastness. Among the forked flames of the lightning there they were recovered by Bel, who revealed the law to Khammurabi. The theophany is perhaps similar to that of Sinai. But perhaps, too, it is better attested. A diorite block, found at Susa in 1902, has the law engraved on it. On the summit, a bas-relief displays the god disclosing the statutes to the king. There are other analogies. Sinai was named after Sin, who, though but a moon-god, was previously held supreme for the reason that, in primitive Babylonia, the lunar year preceded the solar. The sanctuary of the moon-god was Ur, of which Abraham was emir. He was more, perhaps. Sarratu, from which Sarai comes, was the title of the moon-goddess. In _Genesis_, Sarai is Abraham's wife. Abraham is a derivative of Aburamu, which was one of the moon's many names.[22] [Footnote 22: Sayce: Guifford Lectures.] Among these, one in particular has since been identified with Jahveh. In addition, a clay tablet of the age of Khammurabi, now in the British Museum, has on it: [Illustration] That flight of arrows, being interpreted, means: _Jave ilu_, Jahveh is god.[23] [Footnote 23: Delitzch: Babel und Bibel.] Other texts show that a title of Bel was Mâsu, a word that letter for letter is the same as the Hebrew Mosheh or Moses.[24] [Footnote 24: Records of the Past, i. 91.] It is in this way that Sargon and Khammurabi fuse. Meanwhile the title Mâsu, or hero, was not confined to Bel. It was given also to Marduk, the tutelary god of Babylon, from whom local monotheism proceeded. That monotheism, in appearance relatively modern, actually was archaic. The Chaldean savants knew of but one really existing god. To them, all others were his emanations. The deus exsuperantissimus was represented by a single stroke of the reed, a sign that in its vagueness left him formless and incommunicable, therefore unworshipable, hence without a temple, unless Bab-ili, Babylon, the Gate of God, may be so construed. The name of the deity, fastidiously concealed from the vulgar, was, in English, One. Not after, or beneath, or above, but before him, a trinity swung like a screen. From it, for pendant, another trinity dangled. From the latter fell a third. Below these glories were the coruscations of an entire nation of inferior gods. The latter, as well as the former, all of them, were but the fireworks of One. He alone was. The rest, like Makhir, were gods of dream. To the savants, that is; to the magi and seers. To the people the sidereal triads and planetary divinities throned in the Silver Sky augustly real, equally august, and in that celestial equality remained, until Khammurabi gave precedence to Bel, who as Marduk, Bel or Baal Marduk, Lord Marduk, became supreme. Before Bel, then, the other gods faded as the Elohim did before Jahveh, with the possible difference that there were more to fade--sixty-five thousand, Assurnatsipal, in an inscription, declared. Over that army Bel-Marduk acquired the title, perhaps significant, of Bel-Kissat, Lord of Hosts. Yet it was less as a usurper than as an absorber that the ascension was achieved. Bel but mounted above his former peers and from the superior height drew their attributes to himself. It was sacrilege none the less. As such it alienated the clergy and enraged the plebs. Begun under Khammurabi and completed under Nabonidos, it was the reason why, during the latter's reign, orthodox Babylon received Cyrus not as a foe but a friend. From the spoliation, meanwhile, no nebulousness resulted. Bel was distinctly anthropomorphic. His earthly plaisance was the Home of the Height, a seven-floored mountain of masonry, a rainbow pyramid of enamelled brick. At the top was a dome. There, in a glittering chamber, on a dazzling couch, he appeared. Elsewhere, in the vermillion recesses of a neighbouring chapel, that winged bulls guarded and frescoed monsters adorned, once a year he also appeared, and, above the mercy seat, on an alabaster throne, sat, or was supposed to sit, contemplating the tablets of destiny, determining when men should die. To the Greeks, the future lay in the lap of the gods. To the Babylonians the gods alone possessed it, as alone also they possessed the present and the past. They had all time as all men have their day. That day was here and it was brief. Death was a descent to Aralû, the land whence none return, a region of the underworld, called also Shualû, where the departed were nourished on dust. Dust they were and to dust they returned. Extinction was not a punishment or even a reward, it was a law. Punishment was visited on the transgressor here, as here also the piety of the righteous was rewarded. When death came, just and unjust fared alike. The Aryan and Egyptian belief in immortality had no place in this creed, and consequently it had none either in Israel, where Sheol was a replica of Shualû. To the Semites of Babylonia and Kanaan, the gods alone were immortal, and immortal beings would be gods. Man could not become divine while his deities were still human. Exceptionally, exceptional beings such as Gilgames and Adra-Khasis might be translated to the land of the Silver Sky, as Elijah was translated to heaven, but otherwise the only mortals that could reach it were kings, for a king, in becoming sovereign, became, _ipso facto_, celestial. As such, ages later, Alexander had himself worshipped, and it was in imitation of his apotheosis that the subsequent Cæsars declared themselves gods. Yet precisely as the latter were man-made deities, so the Babylonian Baalim were very similar to human kings. For their hunger was cream, oil, dates, the flesh of ewe lambs. For their nostrils was the perfume of prayers and of psalms; for their passions the virginity of girls. Originally the first born of men were also given them, but while, with higher culture, that sacrifice was abolished, the sacred harlotry, over which Ishtar presided, remained. Judaism omitted to incorporate that, but in Kanaan, which Babylonia profoundly influenced, it was general and, though reviled by Israel, was tempting even, and perhaps particularly, to Solomon.[25] [Footnote 25: 1 Kings xi. 5. "Solomon went after Ashtoreth."] The latter's temple was similar to Bel's, from which the Hebraic ritual, terms of the Law, the Torah itself, may have proceeded, as, it may be, the Sabbath did also. On a tablet recovered from the library of Assurbanipal it is written: "The seventh day is a fast day, a lucky day, a sabbatuv"--literally, a day of rest for the heart.[26] [Footnote 26: Cuneiform Insc. W. A. ii. 32.] In Aralû that day never ceased; the dead there, buried, Herodotos said, in honey, were unresurrectably dead, dead to the earth, dead to the Silver Sky. Yet though that was an article of faith, through a paradox profoundly poetic, there was a belief equally general, in ghosts, in hobgoblins, in men with the faces of ravens, in others with the bodies of scorpions, and in the post-mortem persistence of girls that died pure. These latter, in searching for someone whom they might seduce, must have afterward wandered into the presence of St. Anthony. Perhaps, too, it was they who, as succubi, emotionalized the dreams of monks. Yet, in view of Ishtar, they could not have been very numerous in Babylon where, however, they had a queen, Lilît, the Lilith of the _Talmud_, Adam's vampire wife, who conceived with him shapes of sin. In these also the Babylonians believed, and naïvely they represented them in forms so revolting that the sight of their own image alarmed them away. From these shapes or, more exactly, from sin itself, it was very properly held that all diseases came. Medicine consequently was a branch of religion. The physician was a priest. He asked the patient: Have you shed your neighbour's blood? Have you approached your neighbour's wife? Have you stolen your neighbour's garment? Or is it that you have failed to clothe the naked? According to the responses he prescribed.[27] [Footnote 27: IV. R. 50-53. _Cf._ Delitzch: _op. cit._] But the priest who was a physician was also a wizard. He peeped and muttered, or, more subtly, provided enchanted philters in which simples had been dissolved. These devices failing, there was a series of incantations, the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, in which the most potent conjuration was the incommunicable name. To that all things yielded, even the gods.[28] But like the Shem of the Jews, it was probably never wholly uttered, because, save to the magi, not wholly known. In the formulæ of the necromancers it is omitted, though in practice it may have been pronounced. [Footnote 28: Lenormant: La Magie chez les Chaldéens.] Even that is doubtful. A knowledge of it conferred powers similar to those that have been attributed to the Christ, and which the Sadducees ascribed to his knowledge of the tetragrammation. A knowledge of the Babylonian Shem was as potent. It served not only men but gods. Ishtar, for purposes of her own, wanted to get into Aralû. In the recovered epic of her descent, imperiously she demanded entrance: Porter, open thy door. Open thy door that I may enter. If thou dost not open thy door, I will attack it, I will break down the bars, I will cause the dead to rise and devour the living.[29] [Footnote 29: Records of the Past.] Ishtar was admitted. But Aralû was the land whence none return. Once in, she could not get out until, ultimately, the incommunicable name was uttered. The epic says that, in the interim, there was on earth neither love nor loving. In possible connection with which incantations have been found, deprecating "the consecrated harlots with rebellious hearts that have abandoned the holy places."[30] [Footnote 30: Lenormant: _op. cit._] In addition to the _Ritual of the Whispered Charm_, there was the _Illumination of Bel_, an encyclopædia of astrology in seventy-two volumes which the suburban library of Borsippa contained. During the captivity many Jews must have gone there. In the large light halls they were free to read whatever they liked, religion, history, science, the romance of all three. The books, catalogued and numbered, were ranged on shelves. One had but to ask. The service was gratis. Babylon, then, prismatic and learned, was the most respectable place on earth. For ten thousand years man had there consulted the stars. But though respectable, it was also equivocal. During a period equally long--or brief--the girls of the city had loosed their girdles for Ishtar and yielded themselves to anyone, stranger or neighbour, that asked. In the service of the goddess their brothers occasionally feigned that they too were girls. Meanwhile, from the summit of a seven-floored pyramid, mortals contemplated the divine. Beneath was cosmopolis, the golden cup that, in the words of Jeremiah, made the whole world drunk. Seated immensely on the twin banks of the Euphrates--banks that bridges above and tunnels beneath interjoined--Babylon more nearly resembled a walled nation than a fortified town. Within the gates, in an enclosure ample and noble, a space that exceeded a hundred square miles, an area sufficient for Paris quintupled, observatories and palaces rose above the roar of human tides that swept in waves through the wide boulevards, surged over the quays, flooded the gardens, eddied through the open-air lupanar, circled among statues of gods and bulls, poured out of the hundred gates, or broke against the polychrome walls and seethed back in the avenues, along which, to the high flourishes of military bands, passed armed hoplites, merchants in long robes, cloaked bedouins, Kelts in bearskins, priests in spangled dresses, tiara'd princes, burdened slaves, kings discrowned, furtive forms--prostitutes, pederasts, human wolves, vermin, sheep--the flux and reflux of the gigantic city. In that ocean, the captive Jews, if captive they were, rolled, lost as a handful of salt spilt in the sea. Yet, from the depths, a few had swum up and, filtering adroitly, had reached the dignity of high place. One was pontiff. Others were viceroys. In addition to being pontiff, Daniel was chancellor of the realm. Ezra was rector of the university. As pontiff of a college of wizards, Daniel may have known the future. As Minister of Wisdom, Ezra may have known, what is quite as difficult, the past. For the moment there was but the present. Over it ruled Belshazzar. Yet, ruler though he was, there were powers potenter than his own: Baalim, outraged at the elevation of a parvenu god; a priesthood consequently disaffected; and, without, at the gates, the foe. It would have been interesting to have assisted at the final festival when, beneath cyclopean arches, in the sunlight of clustered candelabra, amid the glitter of gold and white teeth, among the fair sultanas that were strewn like flowers through the throne-room of the imperial court, Belshazzar lay, smiling, amused rather than annoyed at the impudent menace of Cyrus. Babylon was impregnable. He knew it. But the subtle Jews, the indignant gods, the alienated priests to whom the Persian was a redeemer, of these he did not think. Daniel had indeed warned him and, vaguely, he had promised something which he had since forgot. Beyond, an orchestra was playing. Further yet, columns upheld a ceiling so lofty that it was lost. On the adjacent wall was a frieze of curious and chimerical beasts. Belshazzar was looking at them. In their dumb stupidity was a suggestion of the foe. The suggestion amused. Smiling still he raised a cup. Abruptly, before it could reach his lips, it fell with a clatter on the lapis lazuli of the floor beneath. Before him, on that wall, beneath those beasts, the necromancy of the priesthood had projected an armless, fluidic hand that mounted, descended, tracing with a forefinger the three luminous hierograms of his doom. The story, a little drama, was, with the tale concerning Nebuchadnezzar, that of Daniel, and other novels quite as strange, evolved long later in the wide leisures of Jerusalem. The fluidic hand did not appear. Even had it zigzagged there was no Belshazzar to frighten. Only the doom was real. Cyrus was clothed with it. To the trumpetings of heralds and the sheen of angels' wings, triumphantly he came. Then, presently, by royal decree, the Jews, manumitted and released, retraced their steps, burdened with spoil; with the lore of two distinct civilizations, which, fusing in the great square letters of the Pentateuch, was to become the poetry of all mankind. Babylon, ultimately, with her goblin gods and harlot goddess, sank into her own Aralû. Nourished there on dust, Lilît, with the sister vampires of eternal night, fed on her. V JEHOVAH A camel's-hair tent set in the desert was the first cathedral, the earliest cloister of latest ideals. Set not in one desert merely but in two, in the infinite of time as well as in that of space, there was about it a limitlessness in which the past could sleep, the future awake, and into which all things, the human, the divine, gods and romance, could enter. The human came first. Then the gods. Then romance. The divine was their triple expansion. It was an after growth, in other lands, that tears had watered. In the desert it was unimagined. Only the gods had been conceived. The gods were many and yet but one. Though plural they were singular. The subjects of impersonal verbs, they represented the pronoun in such expressions as: it rains; it thunders. "It" was Elohim. Already among nomad Semites monotheism had begun. Yet with this distinction. Each tribe had separate sets of Its that guided, guarded, and scourged. Omnipresent but not omnipotent, any humiliation to the family that they had in charge humiliated them. It made them angry, therefore vindictive, consequently unjust. It may be that they were not very ethical. Perhaps the bedouins were not either. Man fashions his god in proportion to his intelligence. That of the nomad was slender. He lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for mythological invention. The defect was due to his speech, which did not lend itself to the deification of epithets. Even had it done so, it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from place to place could not be cumbered with idols. The Elohim were, therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed. On the other hand, given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been the same. Mythology is the mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of art. Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown god. Had it been known and a fetish, they could not have become the practical people that they are. Even then they were shrewd. Their Elohim might alarm but never delude. Israel was uncheatable even in dream. Originally emigrants from Arabia, the nomads reached Syria, some directly, others circuitously, by way of Padan-Aram and across the Euphrates, whence perhaps their name of _Ibrim_ or Hebrews--_Those from beyond_. In the journey Babel and Ur must have detained. These cities, with their culture relatively deep and their observatories equally high, became, in after days, a source of legend, of wonder, of hatred, perhaps of revelation as well. At the time the nomads had no cosmogony or theories. The Chaldeans had both. There was a story of creation, another of antediluvian kings and of the punishment that overtook them. There was also a story of an emir of Ur, an old man who had benevolently killed an animal instead of his son. The story, like the others, must have impressed. In after years the old man became Abraham, a great person, who had conversed with the Elohim and whose descendants they were. The story of creation also impressed. It was enlightening and comprehensible. The parallel theory of spontaneous generation and the progressive evolution of the species which the magi entertained, they probably never heard. Even otherwise it was too complex for minds as yet untutored. The fables alone appealed. Mentally compressed into portable shape, carried along, handed down, their origin afterward forgotten, they became the traditions of a nation, which, eminently conservative, preserved what it found, among other things the name, perhaps inharmonious, of Jhvh.[31] [Footnote 31: Renan: Histoire du peuple d'Israël. Kuenen: De Godsdienst van Israël.] That name, since found on an inscription of Sargon, appears to have been the title of a local god of Sinai, whom the nomads may have identified with Elohim, particularly, perhaps, since he presided over thunder, the phenomenon that alarmed them most and which, in consequence, inspired the greatest awe. That awe they put into the name, the pronunciation of which, like the origin of their traditions, they afterward forgot. In subsequent rabbinical writings it became Shem, the Name; Shemhammephoresh, the Revealed Name, uttered but once a year, on the day of Atonement, by the high priest in the Holy of Holies. Mention of it by anyone else was deemed a capital offence, though, permissibly, it might be rendered El Shaddai, the Almighty. That term the Septuagint translated into [Greek: ho Kyrios], a Greek form, in the singular, of the Aramaic plural Adonai, which means Baalim, or sun lords. That form the Vulgate gave as Dominus and posterior theology as God. The latter term, common to all Teutonic tongues, has no known meaning. It designates that which, to the limited intelligence of man, has been, and must be, incomprehensible. But the original term Jhvh, which, in the seventeenth century, was developed into Jehovah, yet which, the vowels being wholly conjectural, might have been developed into anything else, clearly appealed to wayfarers to whom Chaldean science was a book that remained closed until Nebuchadnezzar blew their descendants back into the miraculous Babel of their youth. Meanwhile, apart from the name--now generally written Jahveh--apart too from the fables and the enduring detestation which the colossal city inspired, probably but one other thing impressed, and that was the observance of the Sabbath. To a people whose public works were executed by forced labour, such a day was a necessity. To vagrants it was not, and, though the custom interested, it was not adopted by them until their existence from nomad had become fixed. At this latter period they were in Kanaan. Whether in the interval a tribe, the Beni-Israel, went down into Egypt, is a subject on which Continental scholarship has its doubts. The early life of the tribe's leader and legislator is usually associated with Rameses II., a pharaoh of the XIX. dynasty. But it has been found that incidents connected with Moses must apparently have occurred, if they occurred at all, at a period not earlier than the XXVI. dynasty, which constitutes a minimum difference of seven hundred years. Yet, in view of the decalogue, with its curious analogy to the negative confession in the _Book of the Dead_; in view also of a practice surgical and possibly hygienic which, customary among the Egyptians, was adopted by the Jews; in view, further, of ceremonies and symbols peculiarly Egyptian that were also absorbed, a sojourn in Goshen there may have been. The spoiling of the Egyptians, a roguery on which Israel afterward prided herself, is a trait perhaps too typical to be lightly dismissed. On the other hand, if Moses were, which is at least problematic, and if, in addition to being, he was both the nephew of a pharaoh and the son-in-law of a priest, as such one to whom, in either quality, the arcana of the creed would be revealed, it becomes curious that nowhere in the Pentateuch is there any doctrine of a future life. Of the entire story, it may be that only the journey into the Sinaiatic peninsula is true, and of that there probably remained but tradition, on which history was based much later, by writers who had only surmises concerning the time and circumstances in which it occurred. Yet equally with the roguery, Moses may have been. Seen through modern criticism his figure fades though his name persists. To that name the Septuagint tried to give an Egyptian flavour. In their version it is always [Greek: Môusês], a compound derived from the Egyptian _mô_, water, and _usês_, saved from, or Saved-from-the-water.[32] Per contra, the Hebrew form Mosheh is, as already indicated, the same as the Babylonian Masû, a term which means at once leader and littérateur, in addition to being the cognomen of a god.[33] [Footnote 32: Josephus: Antiq. ii. 9.] [Footnote 33: Sayce: The Religion of the Babylonians.] Moses is said to have led his people out of bondage. He was the writer to whom the Pentateuch has been ascribed. But he was also a prophet. In Babylon, the god of prophecy was Nebo. It was on Mount Nebo that Jahveh commanded the prophet of Israel to die. Moreover, the divinity that had Masû for cognomen was, as is shown by a Babylonian text, the primitive god of the sun at Nippur, but the sun at noon, at the period of its greatest effulgence, at the hour when it wars with whatever opposes, when it wars as Jahveh did, or as the latter may be assumed to have warred, since Isaiah represented him as a mighty man, roaring at his enemies, exciting the fury of the fight, marching personally to the conflict, and, in the Fourth Roll of the Law (Numbers), there is mention of a book entitled: _The Wars of Jahveh_. Whether, then, Moses is but a composite of things Babylonian fused in an effort to show a link between a god and a people, is conjectural. But it is also immaterial. The one instructive fact is that, in a retrospect, the god, immediately after the exodus, became dictator. Yet even in the later age, when the retrospect was effected, conceptions were evidently immature. On one occasion the god met Moses, tried to kill him, but finally let him go. The picture is that of a personal struggle.[34] Again, the spectacle of his back which he vouchsafed to Moses is construable only as an _arrière-pensée_, unless it be profound philosophy, unless it be taken that the face of God represents Providence, to see which would be to behold the future, whereas the back disclosed the past. [Footnote 34: Exodus iv. 24-26.] It is, however, hardly probable that that construction occurred to the editors of the Pentateuch, who, elsewhere, represented Jahveh as a butcher, insatiable, jealous, vindictive, treacherous, and vain, one that consigned all nations other than Israel to ruin and whom a poet represented trampling people in anger, making them drunk with his fury, and defiling his raiment with blood.[35] [Footnote 35: Isaiah lxiii. 1-6.] But in the period related in _Exodus_, Jahveh was but the tutelary god of an itinerant tribe that, in its gipsy lack of territorial possessions, was not even a nation. Like his people he too was a vagrant. Like them he had no home. Other gods had temples and altars. He lacked so much as a shrine. In prefigurement of the Wandering Jew, each day he moved on. The threats of a land that never smiled were reflected in his face. The sight of him was death. Certainly he was terrible. This conception, corrected by later writers, was otherwise revised. In the interim Jahveh himself was transformed. He became El, the god; presently El Shaddai, God Almighty. In the ascension former traits disappeared. He developed into the deity of emphatic right. Morality, hitherto absent from religion, entered into it. Israel, who perhaps had been careless, who, like Solomon, had followed Ishtar, became austere. Thereafter, Judaism, of which Christianity and Muhammadanism were the after thoughts, was destined to represent almost the sum total of the human conscience. But in Kanaan, during the rude beginnings, though Jahveh was jealous, Ishtar, known locally as Ashtoreth, allured. Conjointly with Baal, the indigenous term for Bel, circumadjacently she ruled. The propitiatory rites of these fair gods were debauchery and infanticide, the loosening of the girdles of girls, the thrusting of children into fires. It may be that these ceremonies at first amazed the Hebrews. But conscientiously they adopted them, less perhaps through zeal than politeness; because, in this curious epoch, on entering a country it was thought only civil to serve the divinities that were there, in accordance with the ritual that pleased them. With the mere mortal inhabitants, Israel was less ceremonious. Commanded by Jahveh to kill, extermination was but an act of piety. It was then, perhaps, that the _Wars of Jahveh_ were sung, a pæan that must have been resonant with cries, with the death-rattle of kingdoms, with the shouts of the invading host. From the breast-plates of the chosen, the terror of Sinai gleamed. Men could not see their faces and live. The moon was their servant. To aid them the sun stood still. They encroached, they slaughtered, they quelled. In the conquest a nation was born. From that bloody cradle the God of Humanity came. But around and about it was vacancy. In emerging from one solitude the Jews created another. They have never left it. The desert which they made destined them to be alone on this earth, as their god was to be solitary in heaven. Meanwhile there had been no kings in Israel. With the nation royalty came. David followed Saul. After him was Solomon. It is presumably at this period that traditions, orally transmitted from a past relatively remote, were first put in writing. Previously it is conjectural if the Jews could write. If they could, it is uncertain whether they made any use of the ability other than in the possible compilation of toledoth, such as the _Book of the Generations of Adam_ and the _Wars of Jahveh_, works that, later, may have served as data for the Pentateuch. Even then, the compositions must have been crude, and such rolls as existed may have been lost when Nebuchadnezzar overturned Jerusalem. Presumably, it was not until the post-exilic period that, under the editorship perhaps of Ezra, the definitive edition of the Torah was produced. This supposition existing texts support. In Genesis (xxxvii. 31) it is written: "These are the kings of Edom before there reigned any king over the children of Israel." The passage shows, if it shows anything, that there were, or had been, kings in Israel at the time when the passage itself was written. It is, therefore, at least post-Davidic. In Genesis another passage (xlix. 10) says: "The sceptre shall not pass from Judah until Shiloh come." Judah was the tribe that became pre-eminent in Israel after the captivity. The passage is therefore post-exilic, consequently so is Genesis, and obviously the rest of the Pentateuch as well. Or, if not obviously, perhaps demonstrably. In II Esdras xiv. 22-48 it is stated that the writer, a candle of understanding in his heart, and aided by five swift scribes, recomposed the Law, which, previously burned, was known to none. The burning referred to is what may, perhaps, be termed religious fiction. Barring toledoth and related data that may have been lost, the Law had almost certainly not existed before, and this post-exilic romance concerning it was evolved in a laudable effort to show its Mosaic source. What is true of the Law is, in a measure, true of the Prophets. None of them anterior to Cyrus, all are later than Alexander. Spiritually very near to Christianity, chronologically they are neighbourly too. If not divinely inspired, they at least disclosed the ideal. Previously the ideal had not perhaps been very apparent. Apart from secessions, rebellions, concussions, convulsions that deified Hatred until Jahveh, in the person of Nebuchadnezzar, talked Assyrian, and then, in the person of Cyrus, talked Zend, the god of Israel, even in Israel, was not unique. He had a home, his first, the Temple, built gorgeously by Solomon, where invisibly, mysteriously, perhaps terribly, beneath the wings of cherubim that rose from the depths of the Holy of Holies, he dwelled. But the shrine, however ornate, was not the only one. There were other altars, other gods; the plentiful sanctuaries of Ashera, of Moloch and of Baal. On the adjacent hilltops the phallus stood. In the neighbouring groves the kisses of Ishtar consumed. The Lady of Girdles was worshipped there not by men and women only, but by girls with girls; by others too, not in couples, but singly, girls who in their solitary devotions had instruments for aid.[36] Religion, as yet, had but the slightest connection with morality, a circumstance explicable perhaps by the fact that it resumed the ethnical conscience of a race. Between the altar of El Shaddai and the shrines of other gods there were many differences, of which geography was the least. Jahveh, from a tutelary god, had indeed become the national divinity of a chosen people. But the Moabites were the chosen people of Chemos; the Ammonites were the chosen people of Rimmon; the Babylonians were the chosen people of Bel. The title conferred no distinction. As a consequence, to differentiate Jahveh from all other gods, and Israel from all other people, to make the one unique and the other pontiff and shepherd of the nations of the world, became the dream of anonymous poets, one that prophets, sometimes equally anonymous, proclaimed. It was the prophets that reviled the false gods, denounced the abominations of Ishtar, and purified the Israelite heart. While nothing discernible, or even imaginable, menaced, however slightly, the great empires of that day, the prophets were the first to realize that the Orient was dead. When the Christ announced that the end of the world was at hand, he but reiterated anterior predictions that presently were fulfilled. A world did end. That of antiquity ceased to be. [Footnote 36: _Cf._ Deut. xxiii. 17, where _'alâmôth_ (puellæ) is rendered in the Sapphist sense. Ezekiel xvi. 17. _Fecisti tibi imagines masculinas._] It was the prophets that foretold it. Gloomy, fanatic, implacable and, it may be, mad, yet inspired at least by genius which itself, while madness, is a madness wholly divine, they heralded the future, they established the past. Abraham they drew from allegory, Moses from myth. They made them live, and so immortally that one survives in Islam, the other in words that are a law of grace for all. If, in visions possibly ecstatic, they beheld heights that lost themselves in immensity, and saw there an ineffable name seared by forked flames on a tablet of stone; if that spectacle and the theophany of it were but poetry, the decalogue is a fact, one so solid that though ages have gone, though empires have crumbled, though the customs of man have altered, though the sky itself have changed, still is obeyed the commandment: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. From Chemos in Moab, from Rimmon among the Ammonites, no such edict had come. It felled them. Amon-Râ it tore from the celestial Nile, and Bel-Marduk from the Silver Sky. The Refaïm hid them in shadows as surely as they buried there the high and potent lords of Greece and Rome. These interments, completed by others, the prophets began. For it was they who, in addition to the command, revealed the commandant, creator of whatever is: the Being Absolute that abhorred evil, loved righteousness, punished the transgressor and rewarded the just; El Shaddai, then really Lord of Hosts. It may be that already in Israel there had been some prescience of this. But it lacked the authority of inspired text. The omission was one that only seers could remedy. It was presumably in these circumstances that an agreement was imagined which, construed as a condition of a covenant, assumed to have been made with Abraham, was further assumed to have been renewed to Moses. The resulting poetry was enveloped in a romance of which Continental scholarship has discovered two versions, woven together, perhaps by Ezra, into a single tale. "In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and earth." That abrupt declaration, presented originally in but one of the versions, had already been pronounced of Indra and also of Ormuzd. The Hebraic announcement alone prevailed. It emptied the firmament of its monsters, dislodged the gods from the skies, and enthroned there a deity at first multiple but subsequently unique. Afterward seraphs and saints might replace the evaporated imaginings of other creeds; Satan might create a world of his own and people it with the damned; theology might evolve from elder faiths a newer trinity and set it like a diadem in space; angels and archangels might refill the devastated heavens of the past; none the less, in the light of that austere pronouncement, for a moment Israel dwelled in contemplation of the Ideal. At the time it is probable that the story of the love of the sons of Jahveh for the daughters of men, together with the pastel of Eden as it stands to-day, were not contained in existing accounts of that ideal. These legends, which regarded as legends are obviously false, but which, construed as allegories, may be profoundly true, were probably not diffused until after the captivity, when Israel was not more subtle, that is not possible, but, by reason of her contact with Persia, more wise. The origin of evil these myths related but did not explain. Since then, from no church has there come an adequate explanation of the malediction under which man is supposed to labour because of the natural propensities of beings that never were. That explanation these myths, which orthodoxy has gravely, though sometimes reluctantly, accepted, both provide and conceal. They date possibly from the Ormuzdian revelation: "In the beginning was the living Word." John, or more exactly his homonym, repeated the pronouncement, adding: "The word was made flesh." But, save for a mention of the glory which he had before the world was, he omitted to further follow the thought of Ormuzd, who, in describing paradise to Zarathrustra, likened it, in every way, to heaven. There the first beings were, exempt from physical necessities, pure intelligences, naked as the compilers of Genesis translated, naked and unashamed, but naked and unashamed because incorporeal, unincarnate and clothed in light, a vestment which they exchanged for a garment of flesh, coats of skin as it is in Genesis, when, descended on earth, their intelligence, previously luminous, swooned in the senses of man. In Egypt, the harper going out from Amenti sang: "Life is death in a land of darkness, death is life in a land of light." There perhaps is the origin of evil. There too perhaps is its cure. But the view accepted there too is pre-existence and persistence, a doctrine blasphemous to the Jew as it was to the Assyrian, to whom the gods alone were immortal, and to whom, in consequence, immortal beings would be gods. In the creed of both, man was essentially evanescent. To the Hebrew, he lived a few, brief days and then went down into silence, where no remembrance is. There, gathered among the Refaïm to his fathers, he remained forever, unheeded by God. The conception, passably rationalistic and not impossibly correct, veiled the beautiful allegory that was latent in the Eden myth. It had the further defect, or the additional advantage, of eliminating any theory of future punishment and reward. In lieu of anything of the kind, there was a doctrine that evil, in producing evil, automatically punished itself. The doctrine is incontrovertible. But, for corollary, went the fallacy that virtue is its own reward. Against that idea Job protested so energetically that mediæval monks were afraid to read what he wrote. Yet it was perhaps in demonstration of the real significance of the allegory that a spiritualistic doctrine--always an impiety to the orthodox--was insinuated by the Pharisees and instilled by the Christ. The basis of it rested perhaps partially in the idealism of the prophets. The clamour of their voices awoke the dead. It transformed the skies. It transfigured Jahveh. It divested him of attributes that were human. It outlined others that were divine. It awoke not merely the dead, but the consciousness that a god that had a proper name could not be the true one. Thereafter mention of it was avoided. The vowels were dropped. It became unpronounceable, therefore incommunicable. For it was substituted the term vaguer, and therefore more exact, of Lord, one in whose service were fulfilled the words of Isaiah: "I am the first and I am the last, and beside me there is no God." In the marvel of that miraculous realization were altitudes hitherto undreamed, peaks from whose summits there was discernible but the valleys beneath, and another height on which stood the Son of man. Yet marvellous though the realization was, instead of diminishing, it increased. It did not pass. It was not forgot. Ceaselessly it augmented. In the Scriptures there are many marvels. That perhaps is the greatest. Amon, originally an obscure provincial god of Thebes, became the supreme divinity of Egypt. Bel, originally a local god of Nippur, became in Babylon Lord of Hosts. But Jahveh, originally the tutelary god of squalid nomads, became the Deity of Christendom. The fact is one that any scholarship must admit. It is the indisputable miracle of the Bible. VI ZEUS In Judea, when Jahveh was addressed, he answered, if at all, with a thunderclap. Since then he has ceased to reply. Zeus was more complaisant. One might enter with him into the intimacy of the infinite. The father of the Graces, the Muses, the Hours, it was natural that he should be debonair. But he had other children. Among them were Litai, the Prayers. In the _Vedas_, where Zeus was born, the Prayers upheld the skies. Lame and less lofty in Greece, they could but listen and intercede. The detail is taken from Homer. In his Ionian Pentateuch is the statement that beggars are sent by Zeus, that whoever stretches a hand is respectable in his eyes, that the mendicant who is repulsed may perhaps be a god[37]--suggestions which, afterward, were superiorly resumed in the dictum: "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." [Footnote 37: Odyssey, xviii. 485, v. 447, xiv. 56.] The Litai were not alone in their offices. There were the oracles of Delphi, of Trophonios and of Mopsos, where one might converse with any divinity, even with Pan, who was a very great god. But Olympos was neighbourly. It was charming too. There was unending spring there, eternal youth, immortal beauty, the harmonies of divine honey-moons, the ideal in a golden dream; a stretch of crystal parapets, from which, leaning and laughing, radiant goddesses and resplendent gods looked down, and to whom a people, adolescent still, looked up. In that morning of delight fear was absent, mystery was replaced by joy. The pageantry of the hours may have been too near to nature to know of shame, it was yet too close to the divine to know of hate. Man, then, for the first time, loved what he worshipped and worshipped what he loved. His brilliant and musical Bible moved his heart without tormenting it. It conducted but did not constrain. It taught him that in death all are equal and that in life the noble-minded are serene. In the Genesis of this Bible there is an account of a golden age and of a paradise into which evil was introduced by woman. The account is Hesiod's, to whom the Orient had furnished the details. It may be that both erred. If ever there were a golden age it must have been in those days when heaven was on earth and, mingling familiarly with men, were processions of gods, gods of love, of light, of liberty, thousands of them, not one of whom had ever heard an atheist's voice. Related to humanity, of the same blood, sons of the same Aryan mother, they differed from men only in that the latter died because they were real, while they were deathless because ideal. The ideal was too fair. Presently Pallas became the soul of Athens. But meanwhile from the East there strayed swarms of enigmatic faces; the harlot handmaids of her Celestial Highness Ishtar, Princess of Heaven; the mutilated priests of Tammuz her lover; dual conceptions that resulted in Aphrodite Pandemos, the postures of Priapos, the leer of the Lampsacene, and, with them, forms of worship comparable, in the circumadjacent beauty, to latrinæ in a garden, ignoble shapes that violated the candour of maidens' eyes, but with which Greece became so accustomed that on them moral aphorisms were engraved. "In the mind of Hellas, these things," Renan, with his usual unctuousness, declared, "awoke but pious thoughts." Pious at heart Hellas was. Even art, which now is wholly profane, with her was wholly sacred. The sanctity was due to its perfection. The perfection was such that imbeciles who fancy that it has been or could be surpassed show merely that they know nothing about it. At Athens, where Pheidias created a palpable Olympos, Pallas stood colossally, a torch in her hand, a lance at her shoulder, a shield at her side, a plastron of gold on her immaculate breast, a golden robe about her ivory form, and on her immortal brow a crown of gold, beneath which, sapphire eyes, that saw and foresaw, glittered. To-day the place where the marvellous creation stood is vacant. With the gorgeous host Pallas has departed. But the torch she held still burns. From the emptiness of her virginal arms, that never were filled, proceeds all civilization. Adjacently at Eleusis was Demeter. Pallas was the soul of Greece. Eleusis was the Jerusalem, Demeter the Madonna. Demeter--the earth, the universal mother--had, in a mystic hymen with her brother Zeus, conceived Persephone. The latter, when young and a maiden, beckoned perhaps by Eros, wandered from Olympos and was gathering flowers when Pluto, borne by black horses, erupted, raped her, and tore her away. The cries of the indignant Demeter sterilized the earth. To assuage her, Zeus undertook to have Persephone recovered, provided that in Hades, of which Pluto was lord, she had eaten nothing. But the girl had--a pomegranate grain. It was the irrevocable. Demeter yielded, as the high gods had to yield, to what was higher than they, to Destiny. Meanwhile, in the shadows below, Persephone was transfigured. Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh and that weep; For these give joy and sorrow: but thou, Proserpina, sleep.... O daughter of earth, of my mother, her crown and blossom of birth, I am also, I also, thy brother; I go as I came unto earth. In the night where thine eyes are as moons are in heaven, the night where thou art, Where the silence is more than all tunes, where sleep overflows from the heart, ... And the murmur of spirits that sleep in the shadow of gods from afar Grows dim in thine ears and deep as the deep dim soul of a star. In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun, Let my soul with their souls find place and forget what was done or undone. Thou art more than the gods that number the days of our temporal breath For these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death. Like Hesiod, Swinburne erred, though perhaps intentionally, as poets should, for the greater glory of the Muses. Persephone brought not death but life. The aisles of despair she filled with hope. Transfigured herself, Pluto she transformed. She changed what had been hell into what was to be purgatory. It was not yet Elysium, but it was no longer Hades. Plato said that those who were in her world had no wish at all for this. It is for that reason that Demeter is the Madonna of Greece, as her ethereal daughter was the saviour. The myth of it all, brought by Pythagoras from Egypt is very old. Known in Memphis, it was known too in Babylon, perhaps before Memphis was. But the legend of Isis and that of Ishtar--both of whom descended into hell--lack the transparent charm which this idyl unfolds and of which the significance was revealed only to initiate in epiphanies at Eleusis. Before these sacraments Greece stood, a finger to her lips. Yet the whispers from them that have reached us, while furtive perhaps, are clear. They furnished the poets with notes that are resonant still. They lifted the drama to heights that astound. Even in the fancy balls of Aristophanes, where men were ribald and the gods were mocked, suddenly, in the midst of the orgy, laughter ceased, obscenities were hushed. Afar a hymn resounded. It was the chorus of the Initiate going measuredly by. The original mysteries were Hermetic. Enterable only after a prolonged novitiate, the adept then beheld an unfolding of the theosophy of the soul. In visions, possibly ecstatic, he saw the series of its incarnations, the seven cycles through which it passed, the Ship of a Million Years on which the migrations are effected and on which, at last, from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, it sails to its primal home. That home was colour, its sustenance light. There, in ethereal evolutions, its incarnations began. At first unsubstantial and wholly ineffable, these turned for it every object into beauty, every sound into joy. Without needs, from beatitude to beatitude blissfully it floated. But, subjected to the double attraction of matter and of sin, the initiate saw the memories and attributes of its spirituality fade. He saw it flutter, and fluttering sink. He saw that in sinking it enveloped itself in garments that grew heavier at each descent. Through the denser clothing he saw the desires of the flesh pulsate. He saw them force it lower, still lower, until, fallen into its earthly tenement, it swooned in the senses of man. From the chains of that prison he learned that the soul's one escape was in a recovery of the memory of what it had been when it was other than what it had become. That memory the mysteries provided. Those of Eleusis differed from the Egyptian only in detail. At Eleusis, in lieu of visions, there were tableaux. Persephone, beckoned by desire, straying then from Olympos, afterward fainting in the arms of Pluto, but subsequently, while preparing her own reascension, saving and embellishing all that approach, was the symbol, in an Hellenic setting, of the fall and redemption of man. The human tragedy thus portrayed was the luminous counterpart of the dark dramas that Athens beheld. There, in the theatre--which itself was a church with the stage for pulpit--man, blinded by passions, the Fates pursued and Destiny felled. The sombre spectacle was inexplicable. At Eleusis was enlightenment. "Eskato Bebeloï"--_Out from here, the profane_--the heralds shouted as the mysteries began. "Konx ompax"--_Go in peace_--they called when the epiphanies were completed. In peace the initiate went, serenely, it is said, ever after. From them the load of ignorance was lifted. But what their impressions were is unrecorded. They were bound to secrecy. No one could learn what occurred without being initiated, or without dying. For death too is initiation. The mysteries were schools of immortality. They plentifully taught many a lesson that Christianity afterward instilled. But their drapery was perhaps over ornate. Truth does not need any. Truth always should be charming. Yet always it should be naked as well. About it the mysteries hung a raiment that was beautiful, but of which the rich embroideries obscured. The mysteries could not have been more fascinating, that is not possible, but, the myths removed, in simple nudity they would have been more clear. Doubtless it was for that very reason, in order that they might not be transparent, that the myths were employed. It is for that very reason, perhaps, that Christianity also adopted a few. Yet at least from cant they were free. Among the multiple divinities of Greece, hypocrisy was the unknown god. Consideration of the others is, to-day, usually effected through the pages of Ovid. One might as well study Christianity in the works of Voltaire. Christianity's brightest days were in the dark ages. The splendid glamour of them that persists is due to many causes, among which, in minor degree, may be the compelling glare of Greek genius. That glare, veiled in the mysteries, philosophy reflects. Philosophy is but the love of wisdom. It began with Socrates. He had no belief in the gods. The man who has none may be very religious. But though Socrates did not believe in the gods he did not deny them. He did what perhaps was worse. He ignored their perfectly poetic existence. He was put to death for it, though only at the conclusion of a long promenade during which he delivered Athenian youths of their intelligence. Facility in the operation may have been inherited. Socrates was the son of a midwife. His own progeny consisted in a complete transfiguration of Athenian thought. He told of an Intelligence, supreme, ethical, just, seeing all, hearing all, governing all; a creator made not after the image of man but of the soul, and visible only in the conscience. It was for that he died. There was no such god on Olympos. There was an additional indictment. Socrates was accused of perverting the _jeunesse dorée_. At a period when, everywhere, save only in Israel, the abnormal was usual, Socrates was almost insultingly chaste. The perversion of which he was accused was not of that order. It was that of inciting lads to disobey their parents when the latter opposed what he taught. "I am come to set a man against his father," it is written in _Matthew_. The mission of Socrates was the same. Because of it he died. He was the first martyr. But his death was overwhelming in its simplicity. Even in fairyland there has been nothing more calm. By way of preparation he said to his judges: "Were you to offer to acquit me on condition that I no longer profess what I believe, I would answer; 'Athenians, I honour and I love you, but a god has commanded me and that god I will obey, rather than you.'" In the speech was irony, with which Athens was familiar. But it also displayed a conception, wholly new, that of maintaining at any cost the truth. The novelty must have charmed. When Peter and the apostles were arraigned before the Sanhedrin, their defence consisted in the very words that Socrates had used: "We should obey God rather than man."[38] [Footnote 38: Acts v. 29.] Socrates wrote nothing. The Buddha did not either. Neither did the Christ. These had their evangelists. Socrates had also disciples who, as vehicle for his ideas, employed the nightingale tongue of beauty into which the Law and the Prophets were translated by the Septuagint and into which the Gospels were put. It would be irreverent to suggest that the latter are in any way indebted to Socratic inspiration. It would be irrelevant as well. For, while the Intelligence that Socrates preached differed as much from the volage and voluptuous Zeus as the God of Christendom differs from the Jahveh of Job, yet, in a divergence so wide, an idealist, very poor except in ideas; a teacher killed by those who knew not what they did; a philosopher that drained the cup without even asking that it pass from him; a mere reformer, though dangerous perhaps as every reformer worth the name must be; but, otherwise, a mere man like any other, only a little better, could obviously have had no share. For reasons not minor but major, Plato could have had none either. It is related that a Roman invader sank back, stricken with _deisidaimonia_--the awe that the gods inspired--at the sight of the Pheidian Zeus. It is with a wonder not cognate certainly, yet in a measure relative, that one considers what Socrates must have been if millennia have gone without producing one mind approaching that of his spiritual heir. It was uranian; but not disassociated from human things. Plato, like his master, was but a man in whom the ideal was intuitive, perhaps the infernal also. In the gardens of the Academe and along the banks of the Ilissus, he announced a Last Judgment. The announcement, contained in the _Phædo_, had for supplement a picture that may have been Persian, of the righteous ascending to heaven and the wicked descending to hell. In the _Laws_, the picture was annotated with a statement to the effect that whatever a man may do, there is an eye that sees him, a memory that registers and retains. In the _Republic_ he declared that afflictions are blessings in disguise. But his "Republic," a utopian commonwealth, was not, he said, of this world, adding in the _Phædo_, that few are chosen though many are called. The mystery of the catholicism of the Incas, reported back to the Holy Office, was there defined as an artifice of the devil. With finer circumspection, Christian Fathers attributed the denser mystery of Greek philosophy to the inspiration of God. Certainly it is ample. As exemplified by Plato it has, though, its limitations. There is no charity in it. Plato preached humility, but there is none in his sermons. His thought is a winged thing, as the thought of a poet ever should be. But in the expression of it he seems smiling, disdainful, indifferent as a statue to the poverties of the heart. That too, perhaps, is as it should be. The high muse wears a radiant peplum. Anxiety is banished from the minds that she haunts. Then, also, if, in the nectar of Plato's speech, compassion is not an ingredient, it may be because, in his violet-crowned city, it was strewn open-handed through the beautiful streets. There, public malediction was visited on anyone that omitted to guide a stranger on his way. Israel was too strictly monotheistic to raise an altar to Pity, the rest of antiquity too cruel. In Athens there was one. In addition there were missions for the needy, asylums for the infirm. If anywhere, at that period, human sympathy existed, it was in Greece. The aristocratic silence of Plato may have been due to that fact. He would not talk of the obvious, though he did of the vile. In one of his books the then common and abnormal conception of sexuality was, if not authorized, at least condoned. It is conjectural, however, whether the conception was more monstrous than that which subsequent mysticity evolved. Said Ruysbroeck: "The mystic carries her soul in her hand and gives it to whomsoever she wishes." Said St. Francis of Sales: "The soul draws to itself motives of love and delectates in them." What the gift and what the delectation were, other saints have described. Marie de la Croix asserted that in the arms of the celestial Spouse she swam in an ocean of delight. Concerning that Spouse, Marie Alacoque added: "Like the most passionate of lovers he made me understand that I should taste what is sweetest in the suavity of caresses, and indeed, so poignant were they, that I swooned." The ravishments which St. Theresa experienced she expressed in terms of abandoned precision. Mme. Guyon wrote so carnally of the divine that Bossuet exclaimed; "Seigneur, if I dared, I would pray that a seraph with a flaming sword might come and purify my lips sullied by this recital."[39] [Footnote 39: Relation sur le Quiétisme.] Augustin pleasantly remarked that we are all born for hell. One need not agree with him. In the presence of the possibly monstrous and the impossibly blasphemous, there is always a recourse. It is to turn away, though it be to Zeus, a belief in whom, however stupid, is ennobling beside the turpitudes that Christian mysticism produced. At Athens, meanwhile, the religion of State persisted. So also did philosophy. When, occasionally, the two met, the latter bowed. That was sufficient. Religion exacted respect, not belief. It was not a faith, it was a law, one that for its majesty was admired and for its poetry was beloved. In the deification of whatever is exquisite it was but an artistic cult. The real Olympos was the Pantheon. The other was fading away. Deeper and deeper it was sinking back into the golden dream from which it had sprung. Further and further the crystal parapets were retreating. Dimmer and more dim the gorgeous host became. In words of perfect piety Epicurus pictured them in the felicity of the ideal. There, they had no heed of man, no desire for worship, no wish for prayer. It was unnecessary even to think of them. Decorously, with every homage, they were being deposed. But if Epicurus was decorous, Evemerus was devout. It was his endeavour, he said, not to undermine but to fortify. The gods he described as philanthropists whom a grateful world had deified. Zeus had waged a sacrilegious war against his father. Aphrodite was a harlot and a procuress. The others were equally commendable. Once they had all lived. Since then all had died. Evemerus had seen their tombs. One should not believe him. Their parapets are dimmer, perhaps, but from them still they lean and laugh. They are immortal as the hexameters in which their loves unfold. Yet, oddly enough, presently the oracle of Delphi strangled. In his cavern Trophonios was gagged. The voice of Mopsos withered. That is nothing. On the Ionian, the captain of a ship heard some one calling loudly at him from the sea. The passengers, who were at table, looked out astounded. Again the loud voice called: "Captain, when you reach shore announce that the great god Pan is dead."[40] [Footnote 40: Plutarch: de Oracul. defect. 14.] It may be that it was true. It may be that after Pan the others departed. When Paul reached Athens he found a denuded Pantheon, a vacant Olympos, skies more empty still. VII JUPITER The name of the national deity of Israel is unpronounceable. The name of the national divinity of Rome is unknown. To all but the hierophants it was a secret. For uttering it a senator was put to death. But Tullius Hostilius erected temples to Fear and to Pallor. It may have been Fright. The conjecture is supported by the fact that, as was usual, Rome had any number of deified epithets, as she had also a quantity of little bits of gods. These latter greatly amused the Christian Fathers. Among them was Alemona, who, in homely English, was Wet-nurse. Tertullian, perhaps naïvely, remarked: "Superstition has invented these deities for whom we have substituted angels." In addition to the diva mater Alemona was the divus pater Vaticanus, the holy father Vatican, who assisted at a child's first cry. There was the equally holy father Fabulin, who attended him in his earliest efforts at speech. Neither of them had anything else to do. Pavor had. At thunder, at lightning, at a meteor, at moisture on a wall, at no matter what, at silence even, the descendants of a she-wolf's nursling quailed. They lived in a panic. In panic the gods were born. It is but natural, perhaps, that Fright should have been held supreme. The other gods, mainly divinities of prey and of havoc, were lustreless as the imaginations that conceived them. Prosaic, unimaged, without poetry or myth, they dully persisted until pedlars appeared with Hellenic legends and wares. To their tales Rome listened. Then eidolons of the Olympians became naturalized there. Zeus was transformed into Jupiter, Aphrodite into Venus, Pallas into Minerva, Demeter into Ceres, and all of them--and with them all the others--into an irritable police. The Greek gods enchanted, those of Rome alarmed. Plutarch said that they were indignant if one presumed to so much as sneeze. Worship, consequently, was a necessary precaution, an insurance against divine risks, a matter of business in which the devout bargained with the divine. Ovid represented Numa trying to elude the exigencies of Jove. The latter had demanded the sacrifice of a head. "You shall have a cabbage," said the king. "I mean something human." "Some hairs then." "No, I want something alive." "We will give you a pretty little fish." Jupiter laughed and yielded. That was much later, after Lucretius, in putting Epicurus into verse, had declared religion to be the mother of sin. By that time Fear and Pallor had struck terror into the very marrow of barbarian bones. Fright was a god more serviceable than Zeus. With him Rome conquered the world. Yet in the conquest Fright became Might and the latter an effulgence of Jove's. Jove was magnificent. In the Capitol he throned so augustly that we swear by him still. Like Rome he is immortal. But Pavor, that had faded into him, was never invoked. The reason was not sacerdotal, it was political. Rome never imposed her gods on the quelled. With superior tact she lured their gods from them. At any siege, that was her first device. To it she believed her victories were due. It was to avoid possible reprisals and to remain invincible, that her own national divinity she so carefully concealed that the name still is a secret. With the gods, Rome gathered the creeds of the world, set them like fountains among her hills, and drank of their sacred waters. Her early deity is unknown. But the secret of her eternity is in the religions that she absorbed. It was these that made her immortal. To that immortality the obscure god of an obscure people contributed largely, perhaps, but perhaps, too, not uniquely. Jahveh might have remained unperceived behind the veil of the sanctuary had not his altar been illuminated by lights from other shrines. In the early days of the empire, Rome was fully aware of the glamour of Amon, of the star of Ormuzd, Brahm's cerulean lotos and the rainbow heights of Bel-Marduk. But in the splendour of Jove all these were opaque. Jupiter, always imposing, was grandiose then. His thoughts were vast as the sky. In a direct revelation to Vergil he said of his chosen people: "I have set no limits to their conquest or its duration. The empire I have given them shall be without end."[41] Hebrew prophets had spoken similarly. Vergil must have been more truly inspired. The Roman empire, nominally holy, figuratively still exists. Yet fulfilment of the prophecy is due perhaps less to the God of the Gentiles than to the God of the Jews. Though perhaps also it may be permissible to discern in the latter a transfiguration of Jove, who originally Zeus, and primarily not Hellenic but Hindu, ultimately became supreme. After the terrific struggle which resulted in that final metamorphosis, Jerusalem, disinherited, saw Rome the spiritual capital of the globe. [Footnote 41: Æneid i. 278.] Jerusalem was not a home of logic. Rome was the city of law. That law, cold, inflexible, passionless as a sword and quite as effective, Rome brandished at philosophy. It is said that the intellectual gymnastics of Greece were displeasing to her traditions. It is more probable that augurs had foreseen or oracles had foretold that philosophy would divest her of the sword, and with it of her sceptre and her might. Ideas cannot be decapitated. Only ridicule can demolish them. Philosophy, mistress of irony, resisted while nations fell. It was philosophy that first undermined established creeds and then led to the pursuit of new ones. Yet it may be that a contributing cause was a curious theory that the world was to end. Foretold in the _Brahmanas_, in the _Avesta_ and in the _Eddas_, probably it was in the _Sibylline Books_. If not, the subsequent Church may have so assumed. Dies iræ, dies illa, Solvet sæclum in favilla, Teste David cum Sibylla. Not alone David and the Sibyl but Etruscan seers had seen in the skies that the tenth and last astronomical cycle had begun.[42] Plutarch, in his life of Sylla, testified to the general belief in an approaching cataclysm. Lucretius announced that at any moment it might occur.[43] That was in the latter days of the republic. In the early days of the empire the theory persisting may have induced the hope of a saviour. Suetonius said that nature in her parturitions was elaborating a king.[44] Afterward he added that such was Asia's archaic belief.[45] Recent discoveries have verified the assertion. In the Akkadian Epic of Dibbara a messiah was foretold.[46] That epic, anterior to a cognate Egyptian prophecy,[47] anterior also to the _Sibylline Books_, was anterior too to the Hebrew prophets and necessarily to those of Rome. [Footnote 42: Censorinus: De die nat. 17.] [Footnote 43: De rerum nat., v. 105.] [Footnote 44: In Augusto, 74.] [Footnote 45: In Vesp. 4.] [Footnote 46: Jastrow: _op. cit._] [Footnote 47: See back, Chapter III.] Among these was Vergil. In the fourth Eclogue he beheld an age of gold, preceded by the advent on earth of a son of Jove, under whose auspices the last traces of sin and sorrow were to disappear and a new race descend from heaven. "The serpent shall die," he declared, adding: "The time is at hand." The Eclogue was written 40 B.C., during the consulate of Pallio, whom the poet wished perhaps to flatter. Then presently Ovid sang the deathless soul and Tibullus gave rendezvous hereafter. The atmosphere dripped with wonders. The air became charged with the miraculous. At stated intervals the doors of temples opened of themselves. Statues perspired visibly. There was a book that explained the mechanism of these marvels. It interested nobody. Prodigies were matters of course. The people had a heaven, also a hell, both of them Greek, a purgatory that may have been Asiatic, and, pending the advent of the son of Jove, in Mithra they could have had a redeemer. Had it been desired, Buddhism could have supplied gospels, India the trinity, Persia the resurrection, Egypt the life. From Iran could have been obtained an Intelligence, sovereign, unimaged, and just. That was unnecessary. Long since Socrates had displayed it. In addition, Epicurus had told of an ascension of heavens, skies beyond the sky, worlds without number, the many mansions of a later faith. Meanwhile, austerity was an appanage of the stoics, in whose faultless code the dominant note was contempt for whatever is base, respect for all that is noble. A doctrine of great beauty, purely Greek, as was everything else in Rome that was beautiful, its heights were too lofty for the vulgar. It appealed only to the lettered, that is to the few, to the infrequent disciples of Zeno and of Cicero, his prophet, who, Erasmus said, was inspired by God. It may be that Cicero inspired a few of God's preachers. The latter were not yet in Rome. Christ had not come. At that period, unique in history, man alone existed. The temples were thronged, but the skies were bare. Cicero knew that. Elysium and Hades were as chimerical to him as the Epicurean heavens. "People," he said, "talk of these places as though they had been there." But that which was superstition to him he regarded as beneficial for others, who had to have something and who got it, in temples where a sin was a prayer. There was once a play of which there has survived but the title: _The Last Will and Testament of Defunct Jupiter._ It appeared in the days of Diocletian, but it might have appealed when Cicero taught. Faith then had fainted. Fright had ceased to build. Worship remained, but religion had gone. The gods themselves were departing. The epoch itself was apoplectic. The tramp of legions was continuous. Not alone the skies but the world was in a ferment. It was not until a diadem, falling from Cleopatra's golden bed, rolled to the feet of Augustus, that the gods were stayed and faith revived. In the interim, prisoners had been deported from Judea. At first they were slaves. Subsequently manumitted, they formed a colony that in the high-viced city resembled Esther in the seraglio of Ahasuerus. Rome, amateur of cults, always curious of foreign faiths, might have been interested in Judaism. It had many analogies with local beliefs. Its adherents awaited, as Rome did, a messiah. They awaited too a golden age. For those who were weary of philosophy, they had a religion in which there was none. For those to whom the marvellous appealed, they had a history in which miracles were a string of pearls. For those who were sceptic concerning the post-mortem, they offered blankness. In addition, their god, the enemy of all others, was adapted to an empire that recognized no sovereignty but its own. Readily might Rome have become Hebrew. But then, with equal ease, she might have become Egyptian. For those who were perhaps afraid of going to hell and yet may have been equally afraid of not going anywhere, Egypt held passports to a land of light. Then too, the gods of Egypt were friendly and accessible. They mingled familiarly with those of Rome, complaisantly with the deified Cæsars, as already they had with the pharaohs, a condescension, parenthetically, that did not protect them from Tiberius, who, for reasons with which religion had nothing whatever to do, persecuted the Egyptians, as he persecuted also the Jews. None the less, Rome, weary of local fictions, might have become converted to foreign ideas. In default of Syrian or Copt, she might have become Persian as already she was Greek. Augustus had other views. Divinities, made not merely after the image of man but in symbols of sin, he saluted. With a hand usually small, but in this instance tolerably large, he re-established them on their pedestals. A relapse to spiritual infancy resulted. It was what he sought. He wanted to be a god himself and he became one. His power and, after him, that of his successors, had no earthly limit, no restraint human or divine. It was the same omnipotence here that elsewhere Jupiter wielded. Jupiter had flamens who told him the time of day. He had others that read to him. For his amusement there were mimes. For his delectation, matrons established themselves in the Capitol and affected to be his loves. But then he was superb. Made of ivory, painted vermillion, seated colossally on a colossal throne, a sceptre in one hand, a thunderbolt in the other, a radiating gold crown on his august head, and, about his limbs, a shawl of Tyrian purple, he looked every inch the god. The Cæsars, if less imposing, were more potent. Their hands, in which there was nothing symbolic, held life and death, absolute dominion over everything, over every one. Jupiter was but a statue. They alone were real, alone divine. To them incense ascended. At their feet libations poured. The nectar fumes confused. Rome, mad as they, built them temples, raised them shrines, creating for them a worship that they accepted, as only their due perhaps, but in which their reason fled. In accounts of the epoch there is much mention of citizens, senators, patricians. Nominally there were such people. Actually there were but slaves. The slaves had a succession of masters. Among them was a lunatic, Caligula, and an imbecile, Claud. There were others. There was Terror, there was Hatred, there was Crime. These last, though several, were yet but one. Collectively, they were Nero. If philosophy ever were needed it was in his monstrous day. To anyone, at any moment, there might be brought the laconic message: Die. In republican Rome, philosophy separated man from sin. At that period it was perhaps a luxury. In the imperial epoch it was a necessity. It separated man from life. The philosophy of the republic Cicero expounded. That of the empire Seneca produced. The neo-stoicism of the latter sustained the weak, consoled the just. It was a support and a guide. It preached poverty. It condemned wealth. It deprecated honours and pleasure. It inculcated chastity, humility, and resignation. It detached man from earth. It inspired, or attempted to inspire, a desire for the ideal which it represented as the goal of the sage, who, true child of God,[48] prepared for any torture, even for the cross,[49] yet, essentially meek,[50] sorrowed for mankind,[51] happy if he might die for it.[52] [Footnote 48: De Provid. i.] [Footnote 49: _Cf._ Lactantius vi. 17.] [Footnote 50: Epit. cxx. 13.] [Footnote 51: Lucanus ii. 378.] [Footnote 52: Ibidem.] In iambics that caressed the ear like flutes, poets had told of Jupiter clothed in purple and glory. They had told of his celestial amours, of his human and of his inhuman vices. Seneca believed in Jupiter. But not in the Jove of the poets. That god dwelled in ivory and anapests. Seneca's deity, nowhere visible, was everywhere present.[53] Creator of heaven and earth,[54] without whom there is nothing,[55] from whom nothing is hidden,[56] and to whom all belongs,[57] our Father,[58] whose will shall be done.[59] [Footnote 53: Nemo novit Deum. Epit. xxxi. Ubique Deus. Epit. xli.] [Footnote 54: Mundum hujus operis dominum et artificem. Quæst. nat. i.] [Footnote 55: Sine quo nihil est. Quæst. nat. vii. 31.] [Footnote 56: Nil Deo Clausam. Ep. lxxxx.] [Footnote 57: Omnia habentem. Ep. xcv.] [Footnote 58: Parens noster. Ep. cx.] [Footnote 59: Placeat homini quidquid Deo placuit. Ep. lxxv.] "Life," said Seneca, "is a tribulation, death a release. In order not to fear death," he added, "think of it always. The day on which it comes judges all others."[60] Meanwhile comfort those that sorrow.[61] Share your bread with them that hunger.[62] Wherever there is a human being there is place for a good deed.[63] Sin is an ulcer. Deliverance from it is the beginning of health--salvation, _salutem_."[64] [Footnote 60: Ep. xxvi. 4.] [Footnote 61: De Clem. ii. 6.] [Footnote 62: Ep. xcv. 51.] [Footnote 63: De Vita Beata, 14.] [Footnote 64: Ep. xxviii. 9.] Words such as these suggest others. They are anterior to those which they recall. The latter are more beautiful, they are more ample, there is in them a poetry and a profundity that has rarely been excelled. Yet, it may be, that a germ of them is in Seneca, or, more exactly, in theories which, beginning in India, prophets, seers, and stoics variously interpreted and recalled. However since they have charmed the world, their effect on Nero was curious. Seneca was his preceptor. But so too was Art. The lessons of these teachers, fusing in the demented mind of the monster, produced transcendental depravity, the apogee of the abnormal and the epileptically obscene. What is more important, they produced Christianity. Christianity already existed in Rome, but obscurely, subterraneanly, among a class of poor people generally detested, particularly by the Jews. Christianity was not as yet a religion, it was but the belief of a sect that announced that the world was to be consumed. Presently Rome was. The conflagration, which was due to Nero, swept everything sacred away. Even for a prince that, perhaps, was excessive. Nero may have felt that he had gone too far. An emperor was omnipotent, he was not inviolable. Tiberius was suffocated, Caligula was stabbed, Claud was poisoned. Nero, it may be, in feeling that he had gone too far, felt also that he needed a scapegoat. Christian pyromania suggested itself. But probably it suggested itself first to the Jews, who, Renan has intimated, denounced the Christians accordingly. Such may have been the case. In any event, then it was that Christianity received its baptism of blood. All antiquity was cruel, but, barring perhaps the immense Asiatic butcheries, Nero contrived then to surpass anything that had been done. Bloated and hideous, his hair done up in a chignon, a concave emerald for monocle, in the crowded arena he assisted at the rape of Christian girls. Their lovers, their brothers and fathers were either eaten alive by beasts or, that night, dressed in tunics that had been soaked in oil, were fastened to posts and set on fire, in order that, as human torches, they might illuminate palace gardens, through which, costumed as a jockey, Nero raced. The spectacle in the amphitheatre, which fifty thousand people beheld; the succeeding festival at which all Rome assembled, were two acts in the birthday of a faith. Then, to the cradle, presently, Wise Men came with gifts--the gold, the frankincense, the myrrh, of creeds anterior though less divine. VIII THE NEC PLUS ULTRA It was after fastidious rites, the heart entirely devout and on his knees, that Angelico di Fiesole drew a picture of the Christ. The attitude is emulative. It is with brushes dipped in holy water that Jesus should be displayed, though more reverent still is the absence of any delineation. Reverence of that high character history formerly observed. There is no mention of the Saviour in the chronicles of those who were blessed in being his contemporaries. One indiscreet remark of Josephus has been recognized as the interpolation of a later hand, well-intentioned perhaps, but misguided. Jesus glows in the Gospels. Yet they that awaited the day when, in a great aurora borealis, the Son of man should appear, had passed from earth before one of the evangels was written. It was a hundred years later before the texts that comprise the New Testament were complete. It was nearly two hundred before they were definitive. In the interim many gospels appeared. Attributed indifferently to each of the Twelve, one was ascribed to Judas. There was a Gospel to the Hebrews, a Gospel to the Egyptians. There were evangels of Childhood, of Perfection and of Mary. These primitive memoirs were based on oral accounts of occurrences long anterior. Into them entered extraneous beauties, felicities of phrase and detail, which, with naïf effrontery, were put into the mouth of one apostle or another, even into that of Jesus. The ascription was regarded as highly commendable. It was but a way of glorifying the Lord. Besides, the scenarii of these pious evocations the prophets had traced in advance. "Rejoice, daughter of Zion; shout, daughter of Jerusalem, behold thy King cometh unto thee; he is just and having salvation, lowly and riding upon an ass." That king of the poor whom Zachariah had foreseen, the stumbling block of Israel that Isaiah had foretold, the Son, mentioned by Hosea, whom Jahveh had called out of Egypt, was the Saviour, ascending in glory as Elijah had done. A passage incorrectly rendered by the Septuagint indicated a virginal birth. That also was suggestive. The little biographies in which these developments appeared were intended for circulation only among an author's narrow circle of immediate friends, at most to be read aloud in devout reunions. If, ultimately, of the entire collection, four only were retained, it is probably because these best expressed existing convictions. Though, irrespective of their beauties, Irenæus said that there had to be four and could be but four, for the reason that there are four seasons, four winds, four corners of the earth, and the four revelations of Adam, Noah, Moses, and Jesus. It is not on that perhaps arbitrary deduction that their validity resides, but rather because the parables and miracles which they recite became the spiritual nourishment of a world. To their title of eternal verities they have other and stronger claims. They have consoled and they have ennobled. Elder creeds may have done likewise, but these lacked that of which Christianity was the unique possessor, the marvel of a crucified god. Saviours there had been. Mithra was a redeemer. Zoroaster was born of a virgin. Persephone descended into hell. Osiris rose from the dead. Gotama was tempted by the devil. Moses was transfigured. Elijah ascended into heaven. But in no belief is there a parallel for the crucifixion, although in Hindu legend, Krishna, a divinity whose mythical infancy a mythical prototype of Herod troubled, died, nailed by arrows to a tree. In Oriental lore Krishna is held to have been the eighth avatar of Vishnu, of whom Gotama was the ninth. Krishna was therefore anterior to the Buddha, at least in myth. But it would be a grave impropriety to infer that with the legend concerning him the narrative of the crucifixion has any other connection than the possible one of having suggested it. The _Bhagavad-Purana_, in which the legend occurs, is relatively modern, though the legend itself may, like the _Tripitaka_, have existed orally, for centuries, before it was finally committed to writing. There can, however, be no impropriety in recalling analogies that exist between the Saviour and one whom the Orient holds also divine. These analogies, set forth in the first chapter of the present volume, are, it may be, wholly fortuitous, though Pliny stated that, centuries before his day, disciples of Gotama were established on the Dead Sea and, from a passage in Josephus, it seems probable that the Essenes were Buddhists, in the same degree perhaps that the Pharisees were Parsis. But the point is also obscure. It is immaterial as well. The Gospels were not written in Jerusalem but mainly in Rome, where crucifixions were common, as they were, for that matter, throughout the East, but where, too, all religions were acclimated and the supernatural was at home. Rome had witnessed the _tours de force_ of Apollonios of Tyana. Those of Simon the Magician had also been beheld. Rome had seen, or, it may be, thought she believed she had seen, Vespasian cure the halt and the blind with a touch. The atmosphere then was charged with the marvellous. The temples were filled with prodigies, with strange gods, beckoning chimeras, credulous crowds. There was something superior. Rome was the depository of the legends and lore of the world. A haunt of the Muses, the sensual city was a hermitage of philosophy as well. These things collectively represented a great literary feast, of which not all the courses have descended to us, though, as is not impossible, a lost dish or two, transmuted, by the alchemy of faith, from dross into gold, the Gospels may perhaps contain. In that case there is cause for great thankfulness. Moreover, assuming the transmutation, no impiety can be implied. It was as usual and as indicated as were papyrus and the stylus. It is common to-day for a poet, before spreading his own wings, to contemplate those of another. Inspiration is infectious. A page of verse, whether Hindu, Persian, Egyptian, Greek, or Latin, was as useful then. Dante fed on the troubadours. They are lost and forgot. He divinely stands greater than the tallest of them all. In a measure the same may be true of those from whom the Gospels came. Yet with a very notable difference. The _Divina Commedia_ was written for all time. So too were the Gospels. But not intentionally. They were written to prepare man for the immediate termination of the world. With the most perfect propriety, therefore, anything serviceable could have been utilized and probably was. The devout had but to lift their eyes. In the words of Isaiah, there, before them, were the treasures of nations; there were the camels and dromedaries bearing from every side incense and gold; there were the sons of strangers to build up their walls. The sons were many, the treasures as great. Even otherwise there was the Law, there too were the Prophets. Moses fasted for forty days. Elisha performed a miracle of the loaves, if he did not that of the fishes. Job saw the Lord walking upon the sea. Jeremiah said: "Seek and ye shall find." Isaiah bid those that sorrowed come and be consoled. In the poem of that poet the servant of the Lord had vinegar when he thirsted, he was spat upon and for his garments lots were cast. In an effort to fill in a picture of which the central figure had passed from the real to the ideal, these things may have been suggestive. So also, perhaps, was the _Talmud_. The redaction of that chaos began in the second century. But the Vedas, the Homeric poems, the Tripitaka as well, existed in memory long before they were committed to writing. The same is true of the _Talmud_. Orally it existed prior to the Christ. Considered as literature, if it may be so considered, it is the reverse of endearing. But of the many maxims that it contains there are some of singular charm. Among others is the Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.[65] The origin of that, as already indicated, is traceable to the _Tripitaka_, which, parenthetically, were so well known in Babylon that Gotama was there regarded as a Chaldean seer. That abridgement of the Law which is called the Golden Rule is also in the _Talmud_,[66] as also, before the _Talmud_ was, it was in the _Tripitaka_. The injunction to love one's enemies is equally in both. So is the very excellent suggestion that one should consider one's own faults before admonishing a brother concerning his defects. But the perhaps subtle intimation that the desire to commit adultery is as reprehensible as the act, and the rather extravagant statement that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, these, originally, were perhaps uniquely Talmudic. Currently cited with multiple others they were all so many common sayings, which, strung together in the Gospels, became a rosary of most perfect pearls. [Footnote 65: Talmud Babli: Baba bathra, 11 _a_.] [Footnote 66: Schabbath, 37 _a_.] In a passage of Irenæus it is stated that the _Gospel according to St. Matthew_ was arranged by the Church for the benefit of the Jews who awaited a Messiah descended from David. A Syro-Chaldaic evangel, known as the _Gospel to the Hebrews_, had then appeared. So also had the _Gospel according to St. Mark_. But these offered no evidence that Jesus was the one they sought. Another was then prepared. Written in Greek and bearing the authoritative name of Matthew, it traced from David, Joseph's descent. The narrative continued: "Now the birth of Jesus Christ was in this wise. When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child by the Holy Ghost. Then Joseph her husband being a just man and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost." The genealogy completed, though perhaps inadequately, since Jesus, not being a son of Joseph, could not have descended from David, the Church continued: "Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet saying, Behold a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son and call his name Emmanuel." The prophecy mentioned occurs in Isaiah vii, 14. In the King James version it is as follows: "Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel." But the Aramaic reading is: "Behold an _'almâ_ shall conceive." _'Almâ_ means young woman. The Septuagint, in translating it, employed the term [Greek: parthenos], or maiden. In _Matthew_ the term was retained. Matthew, at the time, had long been dead. Even had he been living it is improbable that he could write in Greek. Unfortunately there were others who could not only write Greek but read Hebrew. In particular, there was a rabbi Aquila who retranslated Isaiah with no other purpose than the malign object of definitely re-establishing the exact expression which the old poet had used.[67] [Footnote 67: Renan: Les Evangiles.] It was presumably in these circumstances that the _Evangel of Mary_ was advanced. Among other elucidations, the work contained professional testimony of the immaculacy that was claimed. Additionally, in reparation of the earlier oversight, the Virgin was genealogically descended from the royal line. That, however, is apocryphal, and if, regarding the other genealogy, exegesis has since obscured the luminousness of the method adapted by the Church, the latter's intention was none the less irreproachable, and that alone imports. Before it, before the miracle of the nativity and the divine episodes of the transfiguration, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, reverently the Occident has knelt. They are indeed divine. If they did not occur in Judea, they have occurred ever since. Continuously, in the hearts of the devout, they are repeated. Unhappily there were heretics then as now. To the Gnostics, Jesus was an æon that had never been. To the Docetists, he was a phantasm. There are always brutes that can believe but in the reality of things. There are others to whom the symbolic is dumb. In the Gospels there is much that is figurative, there is more that is ineffable, there are suggestions sheerly ideal. "In my Father's house are many mansions," the Saviour declared. In his own ministry there are as many lights. He was a vagrant and he created pure sentiment. He was a nihilist and he inspired a new conception of life. He said he had not come to destroy and he changed the face of the earth. He remitted the sins of a harlot and condemned both marriage and love. There are other antitheses, deeper contradictions. These perhaps are more apparent than real. Behind them there may have been the co-ordination of a central thought. Of many gospels but few remain. Among the lost evangels was one that Valentinian said was imparted only to the more spiritual of the disciples. It may be that in it a main idea was elucidated and, perhaps, as a consequence, the meaning of the esoteric proclamation: "Before Abraham was I am." Yet though now the authoritative explanation be lacking, its significance seems to run beneath the texts. At the first apparition of Jesus, the chief preoccupation of those that stood about was what prophet of the old days had returned in the new. Some thought him Elijah. Others Jeremiah. Antipas feared that he was the Baptist revived. Jesus himself asked the disciples whom he was said to be. Later he assured them that the awaited return of Elijah had been accomplished in John. That assurance, together with the perplexities regarding him and the esoteric announcement which he made concerning himself, can hardly indicate anything else than a belief in reincarnation. The belief, common to all antiquity, though not necessarily valid on that account, is not discernible in Hebrew thought, perhaps for the reason that it is not perceptible in Babylonian. Yet the myth of Eden barely conceals it. It is almost obvious in the allegory of Beth-el. Solomon said: "I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning or ever earth was." If the idea contained in that statement was not a part of the philosophy attributed to the Christ, it might have been. The amount of beauty stored in it is more enormous than in any other. To the materialist the beauty is meaningless. To the mathematician it has the value of a zero from which the periphery has gone. But at the Pillars of Hercules early geographers put on their maps: _Hic deficit orbis_--Here ends the world. They had no suspicion that beyond that world there stretched another twice as great. Materialists may be equally naïf. On the other hand, they may not be. The theory of reincarnation is one that transcends the limits of experience. Of the many tenets of the belief there are but two with which the matter-of-fact agrees. One of them concerns the conservation of energy, the other the negation of death. Theory and practice unite in admitting that the supply of energy is invariable. Constantly it is transformed and as constantly transposed, but whether it enter into fungus or star, into worm or man, the loss of a particle never occurs. Death consequently is but the constituent of a change. When it comes, that which was living assumes a state that has in it the potentiality of another form. A tenement has crumbled and a tenant gone forth. Though just where is the riddle. In the thousand and one nights that were less astronomic than our own, it was thought that the riddle was answered. Poets had erected an edifice of verse and called it Creation. In the strophes of the epic the earth was a flat and stationary parallelogram. About the earth, and uniquely for its benefit, sun, moon and stars paraded. Above was a deity one or multiple. Below were places of vivid discomfort. To the latter, or to the former, the soul of man proceeded. There were no other resorts. Creation had its limits. Poets younger yet more gray have presented a different conception. In the glare of a million million of suns they have sent the earth spinning like a midge. Beyond the uttermost horizon they have strewn other systems, other worlds; beyond the latter, more. Wherever imagination in its weariness would set a limit, there is space begun. There too is energy. Throughout the stretch of universes the same force pulsates that is recognizable here. A deduction is obvious. Throughout infinity are sentient beings, perhaps our brothers, perhaps ourselves. The obvious, very frequently, is misleading. But the dream of precipitation into that wonderful tornado of worlds has the merit of more colourful idealism than that which was formerly displayed. Taken but as an hypothesis, it holds suggestions ampler than any other conveys. It intimates that just as the butterfly rises from the chrysalis, so does the spiritual rise from the flesh. It indicates that just as the sun cannot set, so is it impossible for death to be. There are topics about which words hover like enchanted bees. Death is one of them. Mediævally it was represented by a skeleton to which prose had given a rictus, poetry a scythe, and philosophy wings. From its eyries it swooped spectral and sinister. Previously it was more gracious. In Greece it resembled Eros. Among its attributes was beauty. It did not alarm. It beckoned and consoled. The child of Night, the brother of Sleep, it was less funereal than narcotic. The theory of it generally was beneficent. But not enduring. In the change of things death lost its charm. It became a sexless nightmare-frame of bones topped by a grinning skull. That perhaps was excessive. In epicurean Rome it was a marionette that invited you to wreathe yourself with roses before they could fade. In the Muslim East it was represented by Azrael, who was an angel. In Vedic India it was represented by Yama, who was a god. But mediævally in Europe the skeleton was preferred. Since then it has changed again. It is no longer a spectral vampire. It has acquired the serenity of a natural law. Regarding the operation of that law there are perhaps but three valid conjectures. Rome entertained all of them. There, there was a tomb on which was written _Umbra_. Before it was another on which was engraved _Nihil_. Between the two was a portal behind which the _Nec plus ultra_ stood revealed. The portal, fashioned by the philosophy of ages, still is open, wider than before, on vaster horizons and unsuspected skies. Through it one may see the explication of things; the reason why men are not born equal, why some are rich and some are poor, why some are weak and some are strong, why some are wise and many are not. One may see there too the reason of joys and sorrows, the cause of tears and smiles. One may see also how the soul changes its raiment and how it happens to have a raiment to change. One may see all these things, and others besides, in the revelation that this life, being the refuse of many deaths, has acquired merits and demerits in accordance with which are present punishments and rewards. In proportion as these are utilized or disregarded, so perhaps is retrogression induced or progress achieved. But not in Hades or yet in Elysium. These were the inventions of man for his brother. So also was the very neighbourly heaven which the early Church devised. But because that has gone from the sidereal chart, it does not follow that there is no such place. Because there is nothing alarming under the earth, it does not follow that hell has ceased to be. On the contrary. Both are constant, though it be but in the heart. In the light of reincarnation it is probable that neither can occur there without anterior cause. But probably too it is the preponderance of either that creates the mystery of life, as it may also foreshadow the portent of death. Death, it may be, is not merely a law but a place, perhaps a garage which the traveller reaches on a demolished motor, but whence none can proceed until all old scores are paid. Pending payment, there, perhaps the soul must wait. But the bill of its past acquitted, it may be that then it shall be free to pursue on trillions of spheres the diversified course of endless life--free to pass from world to world, from beatitude to bliss, from transformation to transfiguration, from the transitory to the eternal; weaving, meanwhile, a garland of migrations that stretch from sky to sky, marrying its memoirs with those of the universe, and, finally, from some ultimate zenith, reviewing, as it casts them aside, the masks of concluded incarnations. The prospect, overwhelming in beauty, is really divine. The divine is always utopian. But there is the supreme Alhambra of dream. It exceeds any other, however excessive another may be. It is the _Nec plus ultra_. Into it all may wander and never weary of the wonders that are there. It may be unrealizable, but for that very reason it must be also ideal. FINIS HISTORIÆ DEORUM 
1397	----	THE RUINS, OR, MEDITATION ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF EMPIRES: AND THE LAW OF NATURE, by C. F. VOLNEY, COMTE ET PAIR DE FRANCE. COMMANDEUR DE LA LEGION D'HONNEUR, MEMBRE DE L'ACADEMIE FRANCAISE, ET DE PLUSIEURS AUTRES SOCIETES SAVANTES. DEPUTY TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF 1789, AND AUTHOR OF "TRAVELS IN EGYPT AND SYRIA," "NEW RESEARCHES ON ANCIENT HISTORY," ETC. TO WHICH IS ADDED VOLNEY'S ANSWER TO DR. PRIESTLY, A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE BY COUNT DARU, AND THE ZODIACAL SIGNS AND CONSTELLATIONS BY THE EDITOR. I will cherish in remembrance the love of man, I will employ myself on the means of effecting good for him, and build my own happiness on the promotion of his.--Volney. NEW YORK, TWENTIETH CENTURY PUB. CO., 4 WARREN ST. 1890. PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. Having recently purchased a set of stereotyped plates of Volney's Ruins, with a view of reprinting the same, I found, on examination, that they were considerably worn by the many editions that had been printed from them and that they greatly needed both repairs and corrections. A careful estimate showed that the amount necessary for this purpose would go far towards reproducing this standard work in modern type and in an improved form. After due reflection this course was at length decided upon, and all the more readily, as by discarding the old plates and resetting the entire work, the publisher was enabled to greatly enhance its value, by inserting the translator's preface as it appeared in the original edition, and also to restore many notes and other valuable material which had been carelessly omitted in the American reprint. An example of an important omission of this kind may be found on the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth pages of this volume, which may be appropriately referred to, in this connection. It is there stated, in describing the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia, and the ruins of Thebes, her opulent metropolis, that "There a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men, now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe." A voluminous note, in which standard authorities are cited, seems to prove that this statement is substantially correct, and that we are in reality indebted to the ancient Ethiopians, to the fervid imagination of the persecuted and despised negro, for the various religious systems now so highly revered by the different branches of both the Semitic and Aryan races. This fact, which is so frequently referred to in Mr. Volney's writings, may perhaps solve the question as to the origin of all religions, and may even suggest a solution to the secret so long concealed beneath the flat nose, thick lips, and negro features of the Egyptian Sphinx. It may also confirm the statement of Dioderus, that "the Ethiopians conceive themselves as the inventors of divine worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and of every other religious practice." That an imaginative and superstitious race of black men should have invented and founded, in the dim obscurity of past ages, a system of religious belief that still enthralls the minds and clouds the intellects of the leading representatives of modern theology,--that still clings to the thoughts, and tinges with its potential influence the literature and faith of the civilized and cultured nations of Europe and America, is indeed a strange illustration of the mad caprice of destiny, of the insignificant and apparently trivial causes that oft produce the most grave and momentous results. The translation here given closely follows that published in Paris by Levrault, Quai Malaquais, in 1802, which was under the direction and careful supervision of the talented author; and whatever notes Count Volney then thought necessary to insert in his work, are here carefully reproduced without abridgment or modification. The portrait, maps and illustrations are from a French edition of Volney's complete works, published by Bossange Freres at No. 12 Rue de Seine, Paris, in 1821,--one year after the death of Mr. Volney. It is a presentation copy "on the part of Madame, the Countess de Volney, and of the nephew of the author," and it may therefore be taken for granted that Mr. Volney's portrait, as here given, is correct, and was satisfactory to his family. An explanation of the figures and diagrams shown on the map of the Astrological Heaven of the Ancients has been added in the appendix by the publisher. PETER ECKLER. New York, January 3, 1890. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE OF THE ENGLISH EDITION PUBLISHED IN PARIS. To offer the public a new translation of Volney's Ruins may require some apology in the view of those who are acquainted with the work only in the English version which already exists, and which has had a general circulation. But those who are conversant with the book in the author's own language, and have taken pains to compare it with that version, must have been struck with the errors with which the English performance abounds. They must have regretted the loss of many original beauties, some of which go far in composing the essential merits of the work. The energy and dignity of the author's manner, the unaffected elevation of his style, the conciseness, perspicuity and simplicity of his diction, are everywhere suited to his subject, which is solemn, novel, luminous, affecting,--a subject perhaps the most universally interesting to the human race that has ever been presented to their contemplation. It takes the most liberal and comprehensive view of the social state of man, develops the sources of his errors in the most perspicuous and convincing manner, overturns his prejudices with the greatest delicacy and moderation, sets the wrongs he has suffered, and the rights he ought to cherish, in the clearest point of view, and lays before him the true foundation of morals--his only means of happiness. As the work has already become a classical one, even in English, and as it must become and continue to be so regarded in all languages in which it shall be faithfully rendered, we wish it to suffer as little as possible from a change of country;--that as much of the spirit of the original be transfused and preserved as is consistent with the nature of translation. How far we have succeeded in performing this service for the English reader we must not pretend to determine. We believe, however, that we have made an improved translation, and this without claiming any particular merit on our part, since we have had advantages which our predecessor had not. We have been aided by his labors; and, what is of still more importance, our work has been done under the inspection of the author, whose critical knowledge of both languages has given us a great facility in avoiding such errors as might arise from hurry or mistake. Paris, November 1, 1802. PREFACE OF THE LONDON EDITION.* * Published by T. Allman, 42 Holborn Hill, London, 1851. The plan of this publication was formed nearly ten years ago; and allusions to it may be seen in the preface to Travels in Syria and Egypt, as well as at the end of that work, (published in 1787). The performance was in some forwardness when the events of 1788 in France interrupted it. Persuaded that a development of the theory of political truth could not sufficiently acquit a citizen of his debt to society, the author wished to add practice; and that particularly at a time when a single arm was of consequence in the defence of the general cause. The same desire of public benefit which induced him to suspend his work, has since engaged him to resume it, and though it may not possess the same merit as if it had appeared under the circumstances that gave rise to it, yet he imagines that at a time when new passions are bursting forth,--passions that must communicate their activity to the religious opinions of men,--it is of importance to disseminate such moral truths as are calculated to operate as a curb and restraint. It is with this view he has endeavored to give to these truths, hitherto treated as abstract, a form likely to gain them a reception. It was found impossible not to shock the violent prejudices of some readers; but the work, so far from being the fruit of a disorderly and perturbed spirit, has been dictated by a sincere love of order and humanity. After reading this performance it will be asked, how it was possible in 1784 to have had an idea of what did not take place till the year 1790? The solution is simple. In the original plan the legislator was a fictitious and hypothetical being: in the present, the author has substituted an existing legislator; and the reality has only made the subject additionally interesting. PREFACE OF THE AMERICAN EDITION.* * The copy from which this preface is reprinted was published in Boston by Charles Gaylord, in 1833. It was given to the writer, when a mere lad, by a lady--almost a stranger--who was traveling through the little hamlet on the banks of the Hudson where he then resided. This lady assured me that the book was of great value, containing noble and sublime truths; and the only condition she attached to the gift was, that I should read it carefully and endeavor to understand its meaning. This I willingly promised and faithfully performed; and all who have "climbed the heights," and escaped from the thraldom of superstitious faith, will concede the inestimable value of such a gift-- rich with the peace and consolation that the truth imparts. --Pub. If books were to be judged of by their volume, the following would have but little value; if appraised by their contents, it will perhaps be reckoned among the most instructive. In general, nothing is more important than a good elementary book; but, also, nothing is more difficult to compose and even to read: and why? Because, as every thing in it should be analysis and definition, all should be expressed with truth and precision. If truth and precision are wanting, the object has not been attained; if they exist, its very force renders it abstract. The first of these defects has been hitherto evident in all books of morality. We find in them only a chaos of incoherent maxims, precepts without causes, and actions without a motive. The pedants of the human race have treated it like a little child: they have prescribed to it good behavior by frightening it with spirits and hobgoblins. Now that the growth of the human race is rapid, it is time to speak reason to it; it is time to prove to men that the springs of their improvement are to be found in their very organization, in the interest of their passions, and in all that composes their existence. It is time to demonstrate that morality is a physical and geometrical science, subject to the rules and calculations of the other mathematical sciences: and such is the advantage of the system expounded in this book, that the basis of morality being laid in it on the very nature of things, it is both constant and immutable; whereas, in all other theological systems, morality being built upon arbritary opinions, not demonstrable and often absurd, it changes, decays, expires with them, and leaves men in an absolute depravation. It is true that because our system is founded on facts and not on reveries, it will with much greater difficulty be extended and adopted: but it will derive strength from this very struggle, and sooner or later the eternal religion of Nature must overturn the transient religions of the human mind. This book was published for the first time in 1793, under the title of The French Citizen's Catechism. It was at first intended for a national work, but as it may be equally well entitled the Catechism of men of sense and honor, it is to be hoped that it will become a book common to all Europe. It is possible that its brevity may prevent it from attaining the object of a popular classical work, but the author will be satisfied if he has at least the merit of pointing out the way to make a better. ADVERTISEMENT OF THE AMERICAN EDITION. VOLNEY'S RUINS; OR MEDITATION ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF EMPIRES. The superior merits of this work are too well known to require commendation; but as it is not generally known that there are in circulation three English translations of it, varying materially in regard to faithfulness and elegance of diction, the publisher of the present edition inserts the following extracts for the information of purchasers and readers: PARIS TRANSLATION, First published in this Country by Dixon and Sickels. INVOCATION. Hail, solitary ruins! holy sepulchres, and silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments--sublime contemplations. What useful lessons! what affecting and profound reflections you suggest to him who knows how to consult you. When the whole earth, in chains and silence, bowed the neck before its tyrants, you had already proclaimed the truths which they abhor, and confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave, had announced to man the sacred dogma of Equality! Within your pale, in solitary adoration of Liberty, I saw her Genius arise from the mansions of the dead; not such as she is painted by the impassioned multitude, armed with fire and sword, but under the august aspect of justice, poising in her hand the sacred balance, wherein are weighed the actions of men at the gates of eternity. O Tombs! what virtues are yours! you appal the tyrant's heart, and poison with secret alarm his impious joys; he flies, with coward step, your incorruptible aspect, and erects afar his throne of insolence. LONDON TRANSLATION. INVOCATION. Solitary ruins, sacred tombs, ye mouldering and silent walls, all hail! To you I address my invocation. While the vulgar shrink from your aspect with secret terror, my heart finds in the contemplation a thousand delicious sentiments, a thousand admirable recollections. Pregnant, I may truly call you, with useful lessons, with pathetic and irresistible advice to the man who knows how to consult you. A while ago the whole world bowed the neck in silence before the tyrants that oppressed it; and yet in that hopeless moment you already proclaimed the truths that tyrants hold in abhorrence: mixing the dust of the proudest kings with that of the meanest slaves, you called upon us to contemplate this example of Equality. From your caverns, whither the musing and anxious love of Liberty led me, I saw escape its venerable shade, and with unexpected felicity, direct its flight and marshal my steps the way to renovated France. Tombs! what virtues and potency do you exhibit! Tyrants tremble at your aspect--you poison with secret alarm their impious pleasures--they turn from you with impatience, and, coward like, endeavor to forget you amid the sumptuousness of their palaces. PHILADELPHIA TRANSLATION. INVOCATION. Hail, ye solitary ruins, ye sacred tombs, and silent walls! 'Tis your auspicious aid that I invoke; 'tis to you my soul, wrapt in meditation, pours forth its prayers! What though the profane and vulgar mind shrinks with dismay from your august and awe-inspiring aspect; to me you unfold the sublimest charms of contemplation and sentiment, and offer to my senses the luxury of a thousand delicious and enchanting thoughts! How sumptuous the feast to a being that has a taste to relish, and an understanding to consult you! What rich and noble admonitions; what exquisite and pathetic lessons do you read to a heart that is susceptible of exalted feelings! When oppressed humanity bent in timid silence throughout the globe beneath the galling yoke of slavery, it was you that proclaimed aloud the birthright of those truths which tyrants tremble at while they detect, and which, by sinking the loftiest head of the proudest potentate, with all his boasted pageantry, to the level of mortality with his meanest slave, confirmed and ratified by your unerring testimony the sacred and immortal doctrine of Equality. Musing within the precincts of your inviting scenes of philosophic solitude, whither the insatiate love of true-born Liberty had led me, I beheld her Genius ascending, not in the spurious character and habit of a blood-thirsty Fury, armed with daggers and instruments of murder, and followed by a frantic and intoxicated multitude, but under the placid and chaste aspect of Justice, holding with a pure and unsullied hand the sacred scales in which the actions of mortals are weighed on the brink of eternity. The first translation was made and published in London soon after the appearance of the work in French, and, by a late edition, is still adopted without alteration. Mr. Volney, when in this country in 1797, expressed his disapprobation of this translation, alleging that the translator must have been overawed by the government or clergy from rendering his ideas faithfully; and, accordingly, an English gentleman, then in Philadelphia, volunteered to correct this edition. But by his endeavors to give the true and full meaning of the author with great precision, he has so overloaded his composition with an exuberance of words, as in a great measure to dissipate the simple elegance and sublimity of the original. Mr. Volney, when he became better acquainted with the English language, perceived this defect; and with the aid of our countryman, Joel Barlow, made and published in Paris a new, correct, and elegant translation, of which the present edition is a faithful and correct copy. CONTENTS Publisher's Preface Translator's Preface Preface of London Edition Preface of the American Edition Advertisement of the American Edition The Life of Volney A List of Volney's Works Invocation Chap. I. The Journey II. The Reverie III. The Apparition IV. The Exposition V. Condition of Man in the Universe VI. The Primitive State of Man VII. Principles of Society VIII. Sources of the Evils of Societies IX. Origin of Governments and Laws X. General Causes of the Prosperity of Ancient States XI. General Causes of the Revolutions and Ruin of Ancient States XII. Lessons of Times Past repeated on the Present XIII. Will the Human Race Improve XIV. The Great Obstacle to Improvement XV. The New Age XVI. A Free and Legislative People XVII. Universal Basis of all Right and all Law XVIII. Consternation and Conspiracy of Tyrants XIX. General Assembly of the Nations XX. The Search of Truth XXI. Problem of Religious Contradictions XXII. Origin and Filiation of Religious Ideas I. Origin of the Idea of God: Worship of the Elements and of the Physical Powers of Nature II. Second System. Worship of the Stars, or Sabeism III. Third System. Worship of Symbols, or Idolatry IV. Fourth System. Worship of two Principles, or Dualism V. Moral and Mystical Worship, or System of a Future State VI. Sixth System. The Animated World, or Worship of the Universe under diverse Emblems VII. Seventh System. Worship of the Soul of the World, that is to say, the Element of Fire, Vital Principle of the Universe VIII. Eighth System. The World Machine: Worship of the Demi- Ourgos, or Grand Artificer IX. Religion of Moses, or Worship of the Soul of the World (You-piter) X. Religion of Zoroaster XI. Budsoism, or Religion of the Samaneans XII. Brahmism, or Indian System XIII. Christianity, or the Allegorical Worship of the Sun under the cabalistic names of Chrish-en or Christ and Yesus or Jesus XXIII. All Religions have the same Object XXIV. Solution of the Problem of Contradictions THE LAW OF NATURE. Chap. I. Of the Law of Nature II. Characters of the Law of Nature III. Principles of the Law of Nature relating to Man IV. Basis of Morality: of Good, of Evil, of Sin, of Crime, of Vice, and of Virtue V. Of Individual Virtues VI. On Temperance VII. On Continence VIII. On Courage and Activity IX. On Cleanliness X. On Domestic Virtues XI. The Social Virtues; Justice XII. Development of the Social Virtues Volney's Answer to Dr. Priestly. Appendix: The Zodiacal Signs and Constellations LIFE OF VOLNEY. By Count Daru. Constantine Francis Chassebeuf De Volney was born in 1757 at Craon, in that intermediate condition of life, which is of all the happiest, since it is deprived only of fortune's too dangerous favors, and can aspire to the social and intellectual advantages reserved for a laudable ambition. From his earliest youth, he devoted himself to the search after truth, without being disheartened by the serious studies which alone can initiate us into her secrets. After having become acquainted with the ancient languages, the natural sciences and history, and being admitted into the society of the most eminent literary characters, he submitted, at the age of twenty, to an illustrious academy, the solution of one of the most difficult problems that the history of antiquity has left open for discussion. This attempt received no encouragement from the learned men who were appointed his judges; and the author's only appeal from their sentence was to his courage and his efforts. Soon after, a small inheritance having fallen to his lot, the difficulty was how to spend it (these are his own words.) He resolved to employ it in acquiring, by a long voyage, a new fund of information, and determined to visit Egypt and Syria. But these countries could not be explored to advantage without a knowledge of the language. Our young traveller was not to be discouraged by this difficulty. Instead of learning Arabic in Europe, he withdrew to a convent of Copts, until he had made himself master of an idiom that is spoken by so many nations of the East. This resolution showed one of those undaunted spirits that remain unshaken amid the trials of life. Although, like other travellers, he might have amused us with an account of his hardships and the perils surmounted by his courage, he overcame the temptation of interrupting his narrative by personal adventures. He disdained the beaten track. He does not tell us the road he took, the accidents he met with, or the impressions he received. He carefully avoids appearing upon the stage; he is an inhabitant of the country, who has long and well observed it, and who describes its physical, political, and moral state. The allusion would be entire if an old Arab could be supposed to possess all the erudition, all the European philosophy, which are found united and in their maturity in a traveller of twenty-five. But though a master in all those artifices by which a narration is rendered interesting, the young man is not to be discerned in the pomp of labored descriptions. Although possessed of a lively and brilliant imagination, he is never found unwarily explaining by conjectural systems the physical or moral phenomena he describes. In his observations he unites prudence with science. With these two guides he judges with circumspection, and sometimes confesses himself unable to account for the effects he has made known to us. Thus his account has all the qualities that persuade--accuracy and candor. And when, ten years later, a vast military enterprise transported forty thousand travellers to the classic ground, which he had trod unattended, unarmed and unprotected, they all recognized a sure guide and an enlightened observer in the writer who had, as it seemed, only preceded them to remove or point out a part of the difficulties of the way. The unanimous testimony of all parties proved the accuracy of his account and the justness of his observations; and his Travels in Egypt and Syria were, by universal suffrage, recommended to the gratitude and the confidence of the public. Before the work had undergone this trial it had obtained in the learned world such a rapid and general success, that it found its way into Russia. The empress, then (in 1787) upon the throne, sent the author a medal, which he received with respect, as a mark of esteem for his talents, and with gratitude, as a proof of the approbation given to his principles. But when the empress declared against France, Volney sent back the honorable present, saying: "If I obtained it from her esteem, I can only preserve her esteem by returning it." The revolution of 1789, which had drawn upon France the menaces of Catharine, had opened to Volney a political career. As deputy in the assembly of the states-general, the first words he uttered there were in favor of the publicity of their deliberations. He also supported the organization of the national guards, and that of the communes and departments. At the period when the question of the sale of the domain lands was agitated (in 1790), he published an essay in which he lays down the following principles: "The force of a State is in proportion to its population; population is in proportion to plenty; plenty is in proportion to tillage; and tillage, to personal and immediate interest, that is to the spirit of property. Whence it follows, that the nearer the cultivator approaches the passive condition of a mercenary, the less industry and activity are to be expected from him; and, on the other hand, the nearer he is to the condition of a free and entire proprietor, the more extension he gives to his own forces, to the produce of his lands, and the general prosperity of the State." The author draws this conclusion, that a State is so much the more powerful as it includes a greater number of proprietors,--that is, a greater division of property. Conducted into Corsica by that spirit of observation which belongs only to men whose information is varied and extensive, he perceived at the first glance all that could be done for the improvement of agriculture in that country: but he knew that, for a people firmly attached to ancient customs, there can exist no other demonstration or means of persuasion than example. He purchased a considerable estate, and made experiments on those kinds of tillage that he hoped to naturalize in that climate. The sugar-cane, cotton, indigo and coffee soon demonstrated the success of his efforts. This success drew upon him the notice of the government. He was appointed director of agriculture and commerce in that island, where, through ignorance, all new methods are introduced with such difficulty. It is impossible to calculate all the good that might have resulted from this peaceable magistracy; and we know that neither instruction, zeal, nor a persevering courage was wanting to him who had undertaken it. Of this he had given convincing proofs. It was in obedience to another sentiment, no less respectable, that he voluntarily interrupted the course of his labors. When his fellow citizens of Angers appointed him their deputy in the constituent assembly, he resigned the employment he held under government, upon the principle that no man can represent the nation and be dependent for a salary upon those by whom it is administered. Through respect for the independence of his legislative functions, he had ceased to occupy the place he possessed in Corsica before his election, but he had not ceased to be a benefactor of that country. He returned thither after the session of the constituent assembly. Invited into that island by the principal inhabitants, who were anxious to put into practice his lessons, he spent there a part of the years 1792 and 1793. On his return he published a work entitled: An Account of the Present State of Corsica. This was an act of courage; for it was not a physical description, but a political review of the condition of a population divided into several factions and distracted by violent animosities. Volney unreservedly revealed the abuses, solicited the interest of France in favor of the Corsicans, without flattering them, and boldly denounced their defects and vices; so that the philosopher obtained the only recompense he could expect from his sincerity--he was accused by the Corsicans of heresy. To prove that he had not merited this reproach, he published soon after a short treatise entitled: The Law of Nature, or Physical Principles of Morality. He was soon exposed to a much more dangerous charge, and this, it must be confessed, he did merit. This philosopher, this worthy citizen, who in our first National assembly had seconded with his wishes and his talents the establishment of an order of things which he considered favorable to the happiness of his country, was accused of not being sincerely attached to that liberty for which he had contended; that is to say, of being averse to anarchy. An imprisonment of ten months, which only ended after the 9th of Thermidor, was a new trial reserved for his courage. The moment at which he recovered his liberty, was when the horror inspired by criminal excesses had recalled men to those noble sentiments which fortunately are one of the first necessaries of civilized life. They sought for consolations in study and literature after so many misfortunes, and organized a plan of public instruction. It was in the first place necessary to insure the aptitude of those to whom education should be confided; but as the systems were various, the best methods and a unity of doctrine were to be determined. It was not enough to interrogate the masters, they were to be formed, new ones were to be created, and for that purpose a school was opened in 1794, wherein the celebrity of the professors promised new instruction even to the best informed. This was not, as was objected, beginning the edifice at the roof, but creating architects, who were to superintend all the arts requisite for constructing the building. The more difficult their functions were, the greater care was to be taken in the choice of the professors; but France, though then accused of being plunged in barbarism, possessed men of transcendent talents, already enjoying the esteem of all Europe, and we may be bold to say, that by their labors, our literary glory had likewise extended its conquests. Their names were proclaimed by the public voice, and Volney's was associated with those of the men most illustrious in science and in literature.* * Lagrange, Laplace, Berthollet, Garat, Bernardin de Saint- Pierre, Daubenton, Hauy, Volney, Sicard, Monge, Thouin, La Harpe, Buache Mentelle. This institution, however, did not answer the expectations that had been formed of it, because the two thousand students that assembled from all parts of France were not equally prepared to receive these transcendent lessons, and because it had not been sufficiently ascertained how far the theory of education should be kept distinct from education itself. Volney's Lectures on History, which were attended by an immense concourse of auditors, became one of his chief claims to literary glory. When forced to interrupt them, by the suppression of the Normal school, he might have reasonably expected to enjoy in his retirement that consideration which his recent functions had added to his name. But, disgusted with the scenes he had witnessed in his native land, he felt that passion revive within him which, in his youth, had led him to visit Africa and Asia. America, civilized within a century, and free only within a few years, fixed his attention. There every thing was new,--the inhabitants, the constitution, the earth itself. These were objects worthy of his observation. When embarking for this voyage, however, he felt emotions very different from those which formerly accompanied him into Turkey. Then in the prime of life, he joyfully bid adieu to a land where peace and plenty reigned, to travel amongst barbarians; now, mature in years, but dismayed at the spectacle and experience of injustice and persecution, it was with diffidence, as we learn from himself, that he went to implore from a free people an asylum for a sincere friend of that liberty that had been so profaned. Our traveller had gone to seek for repose beyond the seas. He there found himself exposed to aggression from a celebrated philosopher, Dr. Priestley. Although the subject of this discussion was confined to the investigation of some speculative opinions, published by the French writer in his work entitled The Ruins, the naturalist in this attack employed a degree of violence which added nothing to the force of his arguments, and an acrimony of expression not to be expected from a philosopher. M. Volney, though accused of Hottentotism and ignorance, preserved in his defence, all the advantages that the scurrility of his adversary gave over him. He replied in English, and Priestley's countrymen could only recognize the Frenchman in the refinement and politeness of his answer. Whilst M. Volney was travelling in America, there had been formed in France a literary body which, under the name of Institute, had attained in a very few years a distinguished rank amongst the learned societies of Europe. The name of the illustrious traveller was inscribed in it at its formation, and he acquired new rights to the academical honors conferred on him during his absence, by the publication of his observations On the Climate and Soil of the United States. These rights were further augmented by the historical and physiological labors of the Academician. An examination and justification of The Chronology of Herodotus, with numerous and profound researches on The History of the most Ancient Nations, occupied for a long time him who had observed their monuments and traces in the countries they inhabited. The trial he had made of the utility of the Oriental languages inspired him with an ardent desire to propagate the knowledge of them; and to be propagated, he felt how necessary it was to render it less difficult. In this view he conceived the project of applying to the study of the idioms of Asia, a part of the grammatical notions we possess concerning the languages of Europe. It only appertains to those conversant with their relations of dissimilitude or conformity to appreciate the possibility of realizing this system. The author has, however, already received the most flattering encouragement and the most unequivocal appreciation, by the inscription of his name amongst the members of the learned and illustrious society founded by English commerce in the Indian peninsula. M. Volney developed his system in three works,* which prove that this idea of uniting nations separated by immense distances and such various idioms, had never ceased to occupy him for twenty-five years. Lest those essays, of the utility of which he was persuaded, should be interrupted by his death, with the clay-cold hand that corrected his last work, he drew up a will which institutes a premium for the prosecution of his labors. Thus he prolonged, beyond the term of a life entirely devoted to letters, the glorious services he had rendered to them. * On the Simplification of Oriental Languages, 1795. The European Alphabet Applied to the Languages of Asia, 1819. Hebrew Simplified, 1820. This is not the place, nor does it belong to me to appreciate the merit of the writings which render Volney's name illustrious. His name had been inscribed in the list of the Senate, and afterwards of the House of Peers. The philosopher who had travelled in the four quarters of the world, and observed their social state, had other titles to his admission into this body, than his literary glory. His public life, his conduct in the constituent assembly, his independent principles, the nobleness of his sentiments, the wisdom and fixity of his opinions, had gained him the esteem of those who can be depended upon, and with whom it is so agreeable to discuss political interests. Although no man had a better right to have an opinion, no one was more tolerant for the opinions of others. In State assemblies as well as in Academical meetings, the man whose counsels were so wise, voted according to his conscience, which nothing could bias; but the philosopher forgot his superiority to hear, to oppose with moderation, and sometimes to doubt. The extent and variety of his information, the force of his reason, the austerity of his manners, and the noble simplicity of his character, had procured him illustrious friends in both hemispheres; and now that this erudition is extinct in the tomb,* we may be allowed at least to predict that he was one of the very few whose memory shall never die. * He died in Paris on the 20th of April, 1820. A list of the Works Published by Count Volney. TRAVELS IN EGYPT AND SYRIA during the years 1783, 1784, and 1785: 2 vols. 8vo.--1787. CHRONOLOGY OF THE TWELVE CENTURIES that preceded the entrance of Xerxes into Greece. CONSIDERATIONS ON THE TURKISH WAR, in 1788. THE RUINS, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires--1791. ACCOUNT OF THE PRESENT STATE OF CORSICA--1793. THE LAW OF NATURE, or Physical Principles of Morality--1793. ON THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ORIENTAL LANGUAGES--1795. A LETTER TO DR. PRIESTLEY--1797. LECTURES ON HISTORY, delivered at the Normal School in the year 3--1800. ON THE CLIMATE AND SOIL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, to which is added an account of Florida, of the French colony of Scioto, of some Canadian Colonies, and of the Savages--1803. REPORT MADE TO THE CELTIC ACADEMY ON THE RUSSIAN WORK OF PROFESSOR PALLAS, entitled "A Comparative Vocabulary of all the Languages in the World." THE CHRONOLOGY OF HERODOTUS conformable with his Text--1808 and 1809. NEW RESEARCHES ON ANCIENT HISTORY, 3 vols. 8vo.--1814 THE EUROPEAN ALPHABET Applied to the Languages of Asia--1819. A HISTORY OF SAMUEL--1819. HEBREW SIMPLIFIED--1820. INVOCATION. Hail solitary ruins, holy sepulchres and silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments--sublime contemplations. What useful lessons, what affecting and profound reflections you suggest to him who knows how to consult you! When the whole earth, in chains and silence bowed the neck before its tyrants, you had already proclaimed the truths which they abhor; and confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave, had announced to man the sacred dogma of Equality. Within your pale, in solitary adoration of Liberty, I saw her Genius arise from the mansions of the dead; not such as she is painted by the impassioned multitude, armed with fire and sword, but under the august aspect of Justice, poising in her hand the sacred balance wherein are weighed the actions of men at the gates of eternity! O Tombs! what virtues are yours! You appal the tyrant's heart, and poison with secret alarm his impious joys. He flies, with coward step, your incorruptible aspect, and erects afar his throne of insolence.* You punish the powerful oppressor; you wrest from avarice and extortion their ill-gotten gold, and you avenge the feeble whom they have despoiled; you compensate the miseries of the poor by the anxieties of the rich; you console the wretched, by opening to him a last asylum from distress; and you give to the soul that just equipoise of strength and sensibility which constitutes wisdom--the true science of life. Aware that all must return to you, the wise man loadeth not himself with the burdens of grandeur and of useless wealth: he restrains his desires within the limits of justice; yet, knowing that he must run his destined course of life, he fills with employment all its hours, and enjoys the comforts that fortune has allotted him. You thus impose on the impetuous sallies of cupidity a salutary rein! you calm the feverish ardor of enjoyments which disturb the senses; you free the soul from the fatiguing conflict of the passions; elevate it above the paltry interests which torment the crowd; and surveying, from your commanding position, the expanse of ages and nations, the mind is only accessible to the great affections--to the solid ideas of virtue and of glory. * The cathedral of St. Denis is the tomb of the kings of France; and it was because the towers of that edifice are seen from the Castle of St. Germain, that Louis XIV. quitted that admirable residence, and established a new one in the savage forests of Versailles. (This note, like many others, has been omitted from the American editions. It seems pertinent to the subject, and is explanatory of the text.--Pub.) Ah! when the dream of life is over, what will then avail all its agitations, if not one trace of utility remains behind? O Ruins! to your school I will return! I will seek again the calm of your solitudes; and there, far from the afflicting spectacle of the passions, I will cherish in remembrance the love of man, I will employ myself on the means of effecting good for him, and build my own happiness on the promotion of his. THE RUINS OF EMPIRES. CHAPTER I. THE JOURNEY. In the eleventh year of the reign of Abd-ul-Hamid, son of Ahmid, emperor of the Turks; when the Nogais-Tartars were driven from the Crimea, and a Mussulman prince of the blood of Gengis-Kahn became the vassal and guard of a Christian woman and queen,* I was travelling in the Ottoman dominions, and through those provinces which were anciently the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria. * In the eleventh year of Abd-ul-Hamid, that is 1784 of the Christian era, and 1198 of the Hegira. The emigration of the Tartars took place in March, immediately on the manifesto of the empress, declaring the Crimea to be incorporated with Russia. The Mussulman prince of the blood of Gengis-khan was Chahin-Guerai. Gengis-Khan was borne and served by the kings whom he conquered: Chahin, on the contrary, after selling his country for a pension of eighty thousand roubles, accepted the commission of captain of guards to Catherine II. He afterwards returned home, and according to custom was strangled by the Turks. My whole attention bent on whatever concerns the happiness of man in a social state, I visited cities, and studied the manners of their inhabitants; entered palaces, and observed the conduct of those who govern; wandered over fields, and examined the condition of those who cultivated them: and nowhere perceiving aught but robbery and devastation, tyranny and wretchedness, my heart was oppressed with sorrow and indignation. I saw daily on my road fields abandoned, villages deserted, and cities in ruin. Often I met with ancient monuments, wrecks of temples, palaces and fortresses, columns, aqueducts and tombs. This spectacle led me to meditate on times past, and filled my mind with contemplations the most serious and profound. Arrived at the city of Hems, on the border of the Orontes, and being in the neighborhood of Palmyra of the desert, I resolved to visit its celebrated ruins. After three days journeying through arid deserts, having traversed the Valley of Caves and Sepulchres, on issuing into the plain, I was suddenly struck with a scene of the most stupendous ruins--a countless multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. Among them were magnificent edifices, some entire, others in ruins; the earth every where strewed with fragments of cornices, capitals, shafts, entablatures, pilasters, all of white marble, and of the most exquisite workmanship. After a walk of three-quarters of an hour along these ruins, I entered the enclosure of a vast edifice, formerly a temple dedicated to the Sun; and accepting the hospitality of some poor Arabian peasants, who had built their hovels on the area of the temple, I determined to devote some days to contemplate at leisure the beauty of these stupendous ruins. Daily I visited the monuments which covered the plain; and one evening, absorbed in reflection, I had advanced to the Valley of Sepulchres. I ascended the heights which surround it from whence the eye commands the whole group of ruins and the immensity of the desert. The sun had sunk below the horizon: a red border of light still marked his track behind the distant mountains of Syria; the full-orbed moon was rising in the east, on a blue ground, over the plains of the Euphrates; the sky was clear, the air calm and serene; the dying lamp of day still softened the horrors of approaching darkness; the refreshing night breezes attempered the sultry emanations from the heated earth; the herdsmen had given their camels to repose, the eye perceived no motion on the dusky and uniform plain; profound silence rested on the desert; the howlings only of the jackal,* and the solemn notes of the bird of night, were heard at distant intervals. Darkness now increased, and through the dusk could only be discerned the pale phantasms of columns and walls. The solitude of the place, the tranquillity of the hour, the majesty of the scene, impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city deserted, the memory of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my mind to high contemplations. I sat on the shaft of a column, my elbow reposing on my knee, and head reclining on my hand, my eyes fixed, sometimes on the desert, sometimes on the ruins, and fell into a profound reverie. * An animal resembling a dog and a fox. It preys on other small animals, and upon the bodies of the dead on the field of battle. It is the Canis aureus of Linnaeus. CHAPTER II. THE REVERIE. Here, said I, once flourished an opulent city; here was the seat of a powerful empire. Yes! these places now so wild and desolate, were once animated by a living multitude; a busy crowd thronged in these streets, now so solitary. Within these walls, where now reigns the silence of death, the noise of the arts, and the shouts of joy and festivity incessantly resounded; these piles of marble were regular palaces; these fallen columns adorned the majesty of temples; these ruined galleries surrounded public places. Here assembled a numerous people for the sacred duties of their religion, and the anxious cares of their subsistence; here industry, parent of enjoyments, collected the riches of all climes, and the purple of Tyre was exchanged for the precious thread of Serica;* the soft tissues of Cassimere for the sumptuous tapestry of Lydia; the amber of the Baltic for the pearls and perfumes of Arabia; the gold of Ophir for the tin of Thule. * The precious thread of Serica.--That is, the silk originally derived from the mountainous country where the great wall terminates, and which appears to have been the cradle of the Chinese empire. The tissues of Cassimere.-- The shawls which Ezekiel seems to have described under the appellation of Choud-choud. The gold of Ophir.--This country, which was one of the twelve Arab cantons, and which has so much and so unsuccessfully been sought for by the antiquarians, has left, however, some trace of itself in Ofor, in the province of Oman, upon the Persian Gulf, neighboring on one side to the Sabeans, who are celebrated by Strabo for their abundance of gold, and on the other to Aula or Hevila, where the pearl fishery was carried on. See the 27th chapter of Ezekiel, which gives a very curious and extensive picture of the commerce of Asia at that period. And now behold what remains of this powerful city: a miserable skeleton! What of its vast domination: a doubtful and obscure remembrance! To the noisy concourse which thronged under these porticoes, succeeds the solitude of death. The silence of the grave is substituted for the busy hum of public places; the affluence of a commercial city is changed into wretched poverty; the palaces of kings have become a den of wild beasts; flocks repose in the area of temples, and savage reptiles inhabit the sanctuary of the gods. Ah! how has so much glory been eclipsed? how have so many labors been annihilated? Do thus perish then the works of men--thus vanish empires and nations? And the history of former times revived in my mind; I remembered those ancient ages when many illustrious nations inhabited these countries; I figured to myself the Assyrian on the banks of the Tygris, the Chaldean on the banks of the Euphrates, the Persian reigning from the Indus to the Mediterranean. I enumerated the kingdoms of Damascus and Idumea, of Jerusalem and Samaria, the warlike states of the Philistines, and the commercial republics of Phoenicia. This Syria, said I, now so depopulated, then contained a hundred flourishing cities, and abounded with towns, villages, and hamlets.* In all parts were seen cultivated fields, frequented roads, and crowded habitations. Ah! whither have flown those ages of life and abundance?--whither vanished those brilliant creations of human industry? Where are those ramparts of Nineveh, those walls of Babylon, those palaces of Persepolis, those temples of Balbec and of Jerusalem? Where are those fleets of Tyre, those dock-yards of Arad, those work-shops of Sidon, and that multitude of sailors, of pilots, of merchants, and of soldiers? Where those husbandmen, harvests, flocks, and all the creation of living beings in which the face of the earth rejoiced? Alas! I have passed over this desolate land! I have visited the palaces, once the scene of so much splendor, and I beheld nothing but solitude and desolation. I sought the ancient inhabitants and their works, and found nothing but a trace, like the foot-prints of a traveller over the sand. The temples are fallen, the palaces overthrown, the ports filled up, the cities destroyed; and the earth, stripped of inhabitants, has become a place of sepulchres. Great God! whence proceed such fatal revolutions? What causes have so changed the fortunes of these countries? Wherefore are so many cities destroyed? Why has not this ancient population been reproduced and perpetuated? * According to Josephus and Strabo, there were in Syria twelve millions of souls, and the traces that remain of culture and habitation confirm the calculation. Thus absorbed in meditation, a crowd of new reflections continually poured in upon my mind. Every thing, continued I, bewilders my judgment, and fills my heart with trouble and uncertainty. When these countries enjoyed what constitutes the glory and happiness of man, they were inhabited by infidel nations: It was the Phoenician, offering human sacrifices to Moloch, who gathered into his stores the riches of all climates; it was the Chaldean, prostrate before his serpent-god,* who subjugated opulent cities, laid waste the palaces of kings, and despoiled the temples of the gods; it was the Persian, worshipper of fire, who received the tribute of a hundred nations; they were the inhabitants of this very city, adorers of the sun and stars, who erected so many monuments of prosperity and luxury. Numerous herds, fertile fields, abundant harvests--whatsoever should be the reward of piety--was in the hands of these idolaters. And now, when a people of saints and believers occupy these fields, all is become sterility and solitude. The earth, under these holy hands, produces only thorns and briers. Man soweth in anguish, and reapeth tears and cares. War, famine, pestilence, assail him by turns. And yet, are not these the children of the prophets? The Mussulman, Christian, Jew, are they not the elect children of God, loaded with favors and miracles? Why, then, do these privileged races no longer enjoy the same advantages? Why are these fields, sanctified by the blood of martyrs, deprived of their ancient fertility? Why have those blessings been banished hence, and transferred for so many ages to other nations and different climes? * The dragon Bell. At these words, revolving in my mind the vicissitudes which have transmitted the sceptre of the world to people so different in religion and manners from those in ancient Asia to the most recent of Europe, this name of a natal land revived in me the sentiment of my country; and turning my eyes towards France, I began to reflect on the situation in which I had left her.* * In the year 1782, at the close of the American war. I recalled her fields so richly cultivated, her roads so admirably constructed, her cities inhabited by a countless people, her fleets spread over every sea, her ports filled with the produce of both the Indies: and then comparing the activity of her commerce, the extent of her navigation, the magnificence of her buildings, the arts and industry of her inhabitants, with what Egypt and Syria had once possessed, I was gratified to find in modern Europe the departed splendor of Asia; but the charm of my reverie was soon dissolved by a last term of comparison. Reflecting that such had once been the activity of the places I was then contemplating, who knows, said I, but such may one day be the abandonment of our countries? Who knows if on the banks of the Seine, the Thames, the Zuyder-Zee, where now, in the tumult of so many enjoyments, the heart and the eye suffice not for the multitude of sensations,--who knows if some traveller, like myself, shall not one day sit on their silent ruins, and weep in solitude over the ashes of their inhabitants, and the memory of their former greatness. At these words, my eyes filled with tears: and covering my head with the fold of my mantle, I sank into gloomy meditations on all human affairs. Ah! hapless man, said I in my grief, a blind fatality sports with thy destiny!* A fatal necessity rules with the hand of chance the lot of mortals! But no: it is the justice of heaven fulfilling its decrees!--a God of mystery exercising his incomprehensible judgments! Doubtless he has pronounced a secret anathema against this land: blasting with maledictions the present, for the sins of past generations. Oh! who shall dare to fathom the depths of the Omnipotent? * Fatality is the universal and rooted prejudice of the East. "It was written," is there the answer to every thing. Hence result an unconcern and apathy, the most powerful impediments to instruction and civilization. And sunk in profound melancholy, I remained motionless. CHAPTER III. THE APPARITION. While thus absorbed, a sound struck my ear, like the agitation of a flowing robe, or that of slow footsteps on dry and rustling grass. Startled, I opened my mantle, and looking about with fear and trembling, suddenly, on my left, by the glimmering light of the moon, through the columns and ruins of a neighboring temple, I thought I saw an apparition, pale, clothed in large and flowing robes, such as spectres are painted rising from their tombs. I shuddered: and while agitated and hesitating whether to fly or to advance toward the object, a distinct voice, in solemn tones, pronounced these words: How long will man importune heaven with unjust complaint? How long, with vain clamors, will he accuse Fate as the author of his calamities? Will he forever shut his eyes to the light, and his heart to the admonitions of truth and reason? The light of truth meets him everywhere; yet he sees it not! The voice of reason strikes his ear; and he hears it not! Unjust man! if for a moment thou canst suspend the delusion which fascinates thy senses, if thy heart can comprehend the language of reason, interrogate these ruins! Read the lessons which they present to thee! And you, evidences of twenty centuries, holy temples! venerable tombs! walls once so glorious, appear in the cause of nature herself! Approach the tribunal of sound reason, and bear testimony against unjust accusations! Come and confound the declamations of a false wisdom or hypocritical piety, and avenge the heavens and the earth of man who calumniates them both! What is that blind fatality, which without order and without law, sports with the destiny of mortals? What is that unjust necessity, which confounds the effect of actions, whether of wisdom or of folly? In what consist the anathemas of heaven over this land? Where is that divine malediction which perpetuates the abandonment of these fields? Say, monuments of past ages! have the heavens changed their laws and the earth its motion? Are the fires of the sun extinct in the regions of space? Do the seas no longer emit their vapors? Are the rains and the dews suspended in the air? Do the mountains withhold their springs? Are the streams dried up? And do the plants no longer bear fruit and seed? Answer, generation of falsehood and iniquity, hath God deranged the primitive and settled order of things which he himself assigned to nature? Hath heaven denied to earth, and earth to its inhabitants, the blessings they formerly dispensed? If nothing hath changed in the creation, if the same means now exist which before existed, why then are not the present what former generations were? Ah! it is falsely that you accuse fate and heaven! it is unjustly that you accuse God as the cause of your evils! Say, perverse and hypocritical race! if these places are desolate, if these powerful cities are reduced to solitude, is it God who has caused their ruin? Is it his hand which has overthrown these walls, destroyed these temples, mutilated these columns, or is it the hand of man? Is it the arm of God which has carried the sword into your cities, and fire into your fields, which has slaughtered the people, burned the harvests, rooted up trees, and ravaged the pastures, or is it the hand of man? And when, after the destruction of crops, famine has ensued, is it the vengeance of God which has produced it, or the mad fury of mortals? When, sinking under famine, the people have fed on impure aliments, if pestilence ensues, is it the wrath of God which sends it, or the folly of man? When war, famine and pestilence, have swept away the inhabitants, if the earth remains a desert, is it God who has depopulated it? Is it his rapacity which robs the husbandman, ravages the fruitful fields, and wastes the earth, or is it the rapacity of those who govern? Is it his pride which excites murderous wars, or the pride of kings and their ministers? Is it the venality of his decisions which overthrows the fortunes of families, or the corruption of the organs of the law? Are they his passions which, under a thousand forms, torment individuals and nations, or are they the passions of man? And if, in the anguish of their miseries, they see not the remedies, is it the ignorance of God which is to blame, or their ignorance? Cease then, mortals, to accuse the decrees of Fate, or the judgments of the Divinity! If God is good, will he be the author of your misery? If he is just, will he be the accomplice of your crimes? No, the caprice of which man complains is not the caprice of fate; the darkness that misleads his reason is not the darkness of God; the source of his calamities is not in the distant heavens, it is beside him on the earth; it is not concealed in the bosom of the divinity; it dwells within himself, he bears it in his own heart. Thou murmurest and sayest: What! have an infidel people then enjoyed the blessings of heaven and earth? Are the holy people of God less fortunate than the races of impiety? Deluded man! where then is the contradiction which offends thee? Where is the inconsistency which thou imputest to the justice of heaven? Take into thine own hands the balance of rewards and punishments, of causes and effects. Say: when these infidels observed the laws of the heavens and the earth, when they regulated well-planned labors by the order of the seasons and the course of the stars, should the Almighty have disturbed the equilibrium of the universe to defeat their prudence? When their hands cultivated these fields with toil and care, should he have diverted the course of the rains, suspended the refreshing dews, and planted crops of thorns? When, to render these arid fields productive, their industry constructed aqueducts, dug canals, and led the distant waters across the desert, should he have dried up their sources in the mountains? Should he have blasted the harvests which art had nourished, wasted the plains which peace had peopled, overthrown cities which labor had created, or disturbed the order established by the wisdom of man? And what is that infidelity which founded empires by its prudence, defended them by its valor, and strengthened them by its justice--which built powerful cities, formed capacious ports, drained pestilential marshes, covered the ocean with ships, the earth with inhabitants; and, like the creative spirit, spread life and motion throughout the world? If such be infidelity, what then is the true faith? Doth sanctity consist in destruction? The God who peoples the air with birds, the earth with animals, the waters with fishes--the God who animates all nature--is he then a God of ruins and tombs? Demands he devastation for homage, and conflagration for sacrifice? Requires he groans for hymns, murderers for votaries, a ravaged and desolate earth for his temple? Behold then, holy and believing people, what are your works! behold the fruits of your piety! You have massacred the people, burned their cities, destroyed cultivation, reduced the earth to a solitude; and you ask the reward of your works! Miracles then must be performed! The people whom you extirpated must be recalled to life, the walls rebuilt which you have overthrown, the harvests reproduced which you have destroyed, the waters regathered which you have dispersed; the laws, in fine, of heaven and earth reversed; those laws, established by God himself, in demonstration of his magnificence and wisdom; those eternal laws, anterior to all codes, to all the prophets those immutable laws, which neither the passions nor the ignorance of man can pervert. But that passion which mistaketh, that ignorance which observeth neither causes nor effects, hath said in its folly: "All things flow from chance; a blind fatality poureth out good and evil upon the earth; success is not to the prudent, nor felicity to the wise;" or, assuming the language of hypocrisy, she hath said, "all things are from God; he taketh pleasure in deceiving wisdom and confounding reason." And Ignorance, applauding herself in her malice, hath said, "thus will I place myself on a par with that science which confounds me--thus will I excel that prudence which fatigues and torments me." And Avarice hath added: "I will oppress the weak, and devour the fruits of his labors; and I will say, it is fate which hath so ordained." But I! I swear by the laws of heaven and earth, and by the law which is written in the heart of man, that the hypocrite shall be deceived in his cunning--the oppressor in his rapacity! The sun shall change his course, before folly shall prevail over wisdom and knowledge, or ignorance surpass prudence, in the noble and sublime art of procuring to man his true enjoyments, and of building his happiness on an enduring foundation. CHAPTER IV. THE EXPOSITION Thus spoke the Phantom. Confused with this discourse, and my heart agitated with different reflections, I remained long in silence. At length, taking courage, I thus addressed him: Oh, Genius of tombs and ruins! Thy presence, thy severity, hath disordered my senses; but the justice of thy discourse restoreth confidence to my soul. Pardon my ignorance. Alas, if man is blind, shall his misfortune be also his crime? I may have mistaken the voice of reason; but never, knowingly, have I rejected its authority. Ah! if thou readest my heart, thou knowest with what enthusiasm it seeketh truth. Is it not in its pursuit that thou seest me in this sequestered spot? Alas! I have wandered over the earth, I have visited cities and countries; and seeing everywhere misery and desolation, a sense of the evils which afflict my fellow men hath deeply oppressed my soul. I have said, with a sigh: is man then born but for sorrow and anguish? And I have meditated upon human misery that I might discover a remedy. I have said, I will separate myself from the corruption of society; I will retire far from palaces where the mind is depraved by satiety and from the hovel where it is debased by misery. I will go into the desert and dwell among ruins; I will interrogate ancient monuments on the wisdom of past ages; I will invoke from the bosom of the tombs the spirit which once in Asia gave splendor to states, and glory to nations; I will ask of the ashes of legislators, by what secret causes do empires rise and fall; from what sources spring the Prosperity and misfortunes of nations, on what principles can the Peace of Society, and the happiness of man be established? I ceased, and with submissive look awaited the answer of the Genius. Peace and happiness, said he, attend those who practice justice! Since thy heart, O mortal, with sincerity seeketh truth; since thine eyes can still recognize her through the mist of prejudice, thy prayer shall not be in vain. I will unfold to thy view that truth thou invokest; I will teach thy reason that knowledge thou seekest; I will reveal to thee the science of ages and the wisdom of the tombs. Then approaching and laying his hand on my head, he said: Rise, mortal, and extricate thy senses from the dust in which thou movest. Suddenly a celestial flame seemed to dissolve the bands which held us to the earth; and, like a light vapor, borne on the wings of the Genius, I felt myself wafted to the regions above. Thence, from the aerial heights, looking down upon the earth, I perceived a scene altogether new. Under my feet, floating in the void, a globe like that of the moon, but smaller and less luminous, presented to me one of its phases; and that phase* had the aspect of a disk varigated with large spots, some white and nebulous, others brown, green or gray, and while I strained my sight to distinguish what they were, the Genius exclaimed: * See Plate representing half the terrestrial globe, opposite page 10. Disciple of Truth, knowest thou that object? O Genius, answered I, if I did not see the moon in another quarter of the heavens, I should have supposed that to be her globe. It has the appearance of that planet seen through the telescope during the obscuration of an eclipse. These varigated spots might be mistaken for seas and continents. They are seas and continents, said he, and those of the very hemisphere which you inhabit. What! said I, is that the earth--the habitation of man? Yes, replied he, that brown space which occupies irregularly a great portion of the disk, and envelops it almost on every side, is what you call the great ocean, which advancing from the south pole towards the equator, forms first the great gulf of India and Africa, then extends eastward across the Malay islands to the confines of Tartary, while towards the west it encircles the continents of Africa and of Europe, even to the north of Asia. That square peninsula under our feet is the arid country of the Arabs; the great continent on its left, almost as naked in its interior, with a little verdure only towards its borders, is the parched soil inhabited by black-men.* To the north, beyond a long, narrow and irregular sea,** are the countries of Europe, rich in meadows and cultivated fields. On its right, from the Caspian Sea, extend the snowy and naked plains of Tartary. Returning in this direction that white space is the vast and barren desert of Cobi, which separates China from the rest of the world. You see that empire in the furrowed plain which obliquely rounds itself off from our sight. On yonder coasts, those ragged tongues of land and scattered points are the peninsulas and islands of the Malays, the wretched possessors of the spices and perfumes. That triangle which advances so far into the sea, is the too famous peninsula of India.*** You see the winding course of the Ganges, the rough mountains of Thibet, the lovely valley of Cachemere, the briny deserts of Persia, the banks of the Euphrates and Tygris, the deep bed of the Jordan and the canals of the solitary Nile. * Africa. ** The Mediterranean. *** Of what real good has been the commerce of India to the mass of the people? On the contrary, how great the evil occasioned by the superstition of this country having been added the general superstition! O Genius, said I, interrupting him, the sight of a mortal reaches not to objects at such a distance. He touched my eyes, and immediately they became piercing as those of an eagle; nevertheless the rivers still appeared like waving lines, the mountains winding furrows, and the cities little compartments like the squares of a chess-board. And the Genius proceeded to enumerate and point out the objects to me: Those piles of ruins, said he, which you see in that narrow valley watered by the Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia.* Behold the wrecks of her metropolis, of Thebes with her hundred palaces,** the parent of cities, and monument of the caprice of destiny. There a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe. Lower down, those dusky points are the pyramids whose masses have astonished you. Beyond that, the coast, hemmed in between the sea and a narrow ridge of mountains, was the habitation of the Phoenicians. These were the famous cities of Tyre, of Sidon, of Ascalon, of Gaza, and of Berytus. That thread of water with no outlet, is the river Jordan; and those naked rocks were once the theatre of events that have resounded throughout the world. Behold that desert of Horeb, and that Mount Sinai; where, by means beyond vulgar reach, a genius, profound and bold, established institutions which have weighed on the whole human race. On that dry shore which borders it, you perceive no longer any trace of splendor; yet there was an emporium of riches. There were those famous Ports of Idumea, whence the fleets of Phoenicia and Judea, coasting the Arabian peninsula, went into the Persian gulf, to seek there the pearls of Hevila, the gold of Saba and of Ophir. Yes, there on that coast of Oman and of Barhain was the seat of that commerce of luxuries, which, by its movements and revolutions, fixed the destinies of ancient nations.*** Thither came the spices and precious stones of Ceylon, the shawls of Cassimere, the diamonds of Golconda, the amber of Maldivia, the musk of Thibet, the aloes of Cochin, the apes and peacocks of the continent of India, the incense of Hadramaut, the myrrh, the silver, the gold dust and ivory of Africa; thence passing, sometimes by the Red Sea on the vessels of Egypt and Syria, these luxuries nourished successively the wealth of Thebes, of Sidon, of Memphis and of Jerusalem; sometimes, ascending the Tygris and Euphrates, they awakened the activity of the Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans, and Persians; and that wealth, according to the use or abuse of it, raised or reversed by turns their domination. Hence sprung the magnificence of Persepolis, whose columns you still perceive; of Ecbatana, whose sevenfold wall is destroyed; of Babylon,**** now leveled with the earth; of Nineveh, of which scarce the name remains; of Thapsacus, of Anatho, of Gerra, and of desolated Palmyra. O names for ever glorious! fields of renown! countries of never-dying memory! what sublime lessons doth your aspect offer! what profound truths are written on the surface of your soil! remembrances of times past, return into my mind! places, witnesses of the life of man in so many different ages, retrace for me the revolutions of his fortune! say, what were their springs and secret causes! say, from what sources he derived success and disgrace! unveil to himself the causes of his evils! correct him by the spectacle of his errors! teach him the wisdom which belongeth to him, and let the experience of past ages become a means of instruction, and a germ of happiness to present and future generations. * In the new Encyclopedia 3rd vol. Antiquities is published a memoir, respecting the chronology of the twelve ages anterior to the passing of Xerxes into Greece, in which I conceive myself to have proved that upper Egypt formerly composed a distinct kingdom known to the Hebrews by the name of Kous and to which the appellation of Ethiopia was specially given. This kingdom preserved its independence to the time of Psammeticus; at which period, being united to the Lower Egypt, it lost its name of Ethiopia, which thenceforth was bestowed upon the nations of Nubia and upon the different tribes of blacks, including Thebes, their metropolis. ** The idea of a city with a hundred gates, in the common acceptation of the word, is so absurd, that I am astonished the equivoque has not before been felt. It has ever been the custom of the East to call palaces and houses of the great by the name of gates, because the principal luxury of these buildings consists in the singular gate leading from the street into the court, at the farthest extremity of which the palace is situated. It is under the vestibule of this gate that conversation is held with passengers, and a sort of audience and hospitality given. All this was doubtless known to Homer; but poets make no commentaries, and readers love the marvellous. This city of Thebes, now Lougsor, reduced to the condition of a miserable village, has left astonishing monuments of its magnificence. Particulars of this may be seen in the plates of Norden, in Pocock, and in the recent travels of Bruce. These monuments give credibility to all that Homer has related of its splendor, and lead us to infer its political power and external commerce. Its geographical position was favorable to this twofold object. For, on one side, the valley of the Nile, singularly fertile, must have early occasioned a numerous population; and, on the other, the Red Sea, giving communication with Arabia and India, and the Nile with Abyssinia and the Mediterranean, Thebes was thus naturally allied to the richest countries on the globe; an alliance that procured it an activity so much the greater, as Lower Egypt, at first a swamp, was nearly, if not totally, uninhabited. But when at length this country had been drained by the canals and dikes which Sesostris constructed, population was introduced there, and wars arose which proved fatal to the power of Thebes. Commerce then took another route, and descended to the point of the Red Sea, to the canals of Sesostris (see Strabo), and wealth and activity were transferred to Memphis. This is manifestly what Diodorus means when he tells us (lib. i. sect. 2), that as soon as Memphis was established and made a wholesome and delicious abode, kings abandoned Thebes to fix themselves there. Thus Thebes continued to decline, and Memphis to flourish, till the time of Alexander, who, building Alexandria on the border of the sea, caused Memphis to fall in its turn; so that prosperity and power seem to have descended historically step by step along the Nile; whence it results, both physically and historically, that the existence of Thebes was prior to that of the other cities. The testimony of writers is very positive in this respect. "The Thebans," says Diodorus, "consider themselves as the most ancient people of the earth, and assert, that with them originated philosophy and the science of the stars. Their situation, it is true, is infinitely favorable to astronomical observation, and they have a more accurate division of time into mouths and years than other nations" etc. What Diodorus says of the Thebans, every author, and himself elsewhere, repeat of the Ethiopians, which tends more firmly to establish the identity of this place of which I have spoken. "The Ethiopians conceive themselves," says he, lib. iii., "to be of greater antiquity than any other nation: and it is probable that, born under the sun's path, its warmth may have ripened them earlier than other men. They suppose themselves also to be the inventors of divine worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and every other religious practice. They affirm that the Egyptians are one of their colonies, and that the Delta, which was formerly sea, became land by the conglomeration of the earth of the higher country which was washed down by the Nile. They have, like the Egyptians, two species of letters, hieroglyphics, and the alphabet; but among the Egyptians the first was known only to the priests, and by them transmitted from father to son, whereas both species were common among the Ethiopians." "The Ethiopians," says Lucian, page 985, "were the first who invented the science of the stars, and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, to the Egyptians." It would be easy to multiply citations upon this subject; from all which it follows, that we have the strongest reasons to believe that the country neighboring to the tropic was the cradle of the sciences, and of consequence that the first learned nation was a nation of Blacks; for it is incontrovertible, that, by the term Ethiopians, the ancients meant to represent a people of black complexion, thick lips, and woolly hair. I am therefore inclined to believe, that the inhabitants of Lower Egypt were originally a foreign colony imported from Syria and Arabia, a medley of different tribes of savages, originally shepherds and fishermen, who, by degrees formed themselves into a nation, and who, by nature and descent, were enemies of the Thebans, by whom they were no doubt despised and treated as barbarians. I have suggested the same ideas in my Travels into Syria, founded upon the black complexion of the Sphinx. I have since ascertained that the antique images of Thebias have the same characteristic; and Mr. Bruce has offered a multitude of analogous facts; but this traveller, of whom I heard some mention at Cairo, has so interwoven these facts with certain systematic opinions, that we should have recourse to his narratives with caution. It is singular that Africa, situated so near us, should be the least known country on the earth. The English are at this moment making explorations, the success of which ought to excite our emulation. *** Ailah (Eloth), and Atsiom-Gaber (Hesien-Geber.) The name of the first of these towns still subsists in its ruins, at the point of the gulf of the Red Sea, and in the route which the pilgrims take to Mecca. Hesion has at present no trace, any more than Quolzoum and Faran: it was, however, the harbor for the fleets of Solomon. The vessels of this prince conducted by the Tyrians, sailed along the coast of Arabia to Ophir, in the Persian Gulf, thus opening a communication with the merchants of India and Ceylon. That this navigation was entirely of Tyrian invention, appears both from the pilots and shipbuilders employed by the Jews, and the names that were given to the trading islands, viz. Tyrus and Aradus, now Barhain. The voyage was performed in two different modes, either in canoes of osier and rushes, covered on the outside with skins done over with pitch: (these vessels were unable to quit the Red Sea, or so much as to leave the shore.) The second mode of carrying on the trade was by means of vessels with decks of the size of our river boats, which were able to pass the strait and to weather the dangers of time ocean; but for this purpose it was necessary to bring the wood from Mount Libanus and Cilicia, where it is very fine and in great abundance. This wood was first conveyed in floats from Tarsus to Phoenicia, for which reason the vessels were called ships of Tarsus; from whence it has been ridiculously inferred, that they went round the promontory of Africa as far as Tortosa in Spain. From Phoenicia it was transported on the backs of camels to the Red Sea, which practice still continues, because the shores of this sea are absolutely unprovided with wood even for fuel. These vessels spent a complete year in their voyage, that is, sailed one year, sojourned another, and did not return till the third. This tediousness was owing first to their cruising from port to port, as they do at present; secondly, to their being detained by the Monsoon currents; and thirdly, because, according to the calculations of Pliny and Strabo, it was the ordinary practice among the ancients to spend three years in a voyage of twelve hundred leagues. Such a commerce must have been very expensive, particularly as they were obliged to carry with them their provisions, and even fresh water. For this reason Solomon made himself master of Palmyra, which was at that time inhabited, and was already the magazine and high road of merchants by the way of the Euphrates. This conquest brought Solomon much nearer to the country of gold and pearls. This alternative of a route either by the Red Sea or by the river Euphrates was to the ancients, what in later times has been the alternative in a voyage to the Indies, either by crossing the isthmus of Suez or doubling the cape of Good Hope. It appears that till the time of Moses, this trade was carried on across the desert of Syria and Thebais; that afterwards it fell into the hands of the Phoenicians, who fixed its site upon the Red Sea; and that it was mutual jealousy that induced the kings of Nineveh and Babylon to undertake the destruction of Tyre and Jerusalem. I insist the more upon these facts, because I have never seen any thing reasonable upon the subject. **** It appears that Babylon occupied on the eastern banks of the Euphrates a space of ground six leagues in length. Throughout this space bricks are found by means of which daily additions are made to the town of Helle. Upon many of these are characters written with a nail similar to those of Persepolis. I am indebted for these facts to M. de Beauchamp, grand vicar of Babylon, a traveller equally distinguished for his knowledge of astronomy and for his veracity. CHAPTER V. CONDITION OF MAN IN THE UNIVERSE. The Genius, after some moments of silence, resumed in these words: I have told thee already, O friend of truth! that man vainly ascribes his misfortunes to obscure and imaginary agents; in vain he seeks as the source of his evils mysterious and remote causes. In the general order of the universe his condition is, doubtless, subject to inconveniences, and his existence governed by superior powers; but those powers are neither the decrees of a blind fatality, nor the caprices of whimsical and fantastic beings. Like the world of which he forms a part, man is governed by natural laws, regular in their course, uniform in their effects, immutable in their essence; and those laws,--the common source of good and evil,--are not written among the distant stars, nor hidden in codes of mystery; inherent in the nature of terrestrial beings, interwoven with their existence, at all times and in all places, they are present to man; they act upon his senses, they warn his understanding, and give to every action its reward or punishment. Let man then know these laws! let him comprehend the nature of the elements which surround him, and also his own nature, and he will know the regulators of his destiny; he will know the causes of his evils and the remedies he should apply. When the hidden power which animates the universe, formed the globe which man inhabits, he implanted in the beings composing it, essential properties which became the law of their individual motion, the bond of their reciprocal relations, the cause of the harmony of the whole; he thereby established a regular order of causes and effects, of principles and consequences, which, under an appearance of chance, governs the universe, and maintains the equilibrium of the world. Thus, he gave to fire, motion and activity; to air, elasticity; weight and density to matter; he made air lighter than water, metal heavier than earth, wood less cohesive than steel; he decreed flame to ascend, stones to fall, plants to vegetate; to man, who was to be exposed to the action of so many different beings, and still to preserve his frail life, he gave the faculty of sensation. By this faculty all action hurtful to his existence gives him a feeling of pain and evil, and all which is salutary, of pleasure and happiness. By these sensations, man, sometimes averted from that which wounds his senses, sometimes allured towards that which soothes them, has been obliged to cherish and preserve his own life; thus, self-love, the desire of happiness, aversion to pain, become the essential and primary laws imposed on man by nature herself--the laws which the directing power, whatever it be, has established for his government--and which laws, like those of motion in the physical world, are the simple and fruitful principle of whatever happens in the moral world. Such, then, is the condition of man: on one side, exposed to the action of the elements which surround him, he is subject to many inevitable evils; and if, in this decree, nature has been severe, on the other hand, just and even indulgent she has not only tempered the evils with equivalent good, she has also enabled him to increase the good and alleviate the evil. She seems to say: "Feeble work of my hands, I owe thee nothing, and I give thee life; the world wherein I placed thee was not made for thee, yet I give thee the use of it; thou wilt find in it a mixture of good and evil; it is for thee to distinguish them; for thee to guide thy footsteps in a path containing thorns as well as roses. Be the arbiter of thine own fate; I put thy destiny into thine own hands!" Yes, man is made the architect of his own destiny; he, himself, hath been the cause of the successes or reverses of his own fortune; and if, on a review of all the pains with which he has tormented his own life, he finds reason to weep over his own weakness or imprudence yet, considering the beginnings from which he sat out, and the height attained, he has, perhaps, still reason to presume on his strength, and to pride himself on his genius. CHAPTER VI. THE PRIMITIVE STATE OF MAN. Formed naked in body and in mind, man at first found himself thrown, as it were by chance, on a rough and savage land: an orphan, abandoned by the unknown power which had produced him, he saw not by his side beings descended from heaven to warn him of those wants which arise only from his senses, nor to instruct him in those duties which spring only from his wants. Like to other animals, without experience of the past, without foresight of the future, he wandered in the bosom of the forest, guided only and governed by the affections of his nature. By the pain of hunger, he was led to seek food and provide for his subsistence; by the inclemency of the air, he was urged to cover his body, and he made him clothes; by the attraction of a powerful pleasure, he approached a being like himself, and he perpetuated his kind. Thus the impressions which he received from every object, awakening his faculties, developed by degrees his understanding, and began to instruct his profound ignorance: his wants excited industry, dangers formed his courage; he learned to distinguish useful from noxious plants, to combat the elements, to seize his prey, to defend his life; and thus he alleviated its miseries. Thus self-love, aversion to pain, the desire of happiness, were the simple and powerful excitements which drew man from the savage and barbarous condition in which nature had placed him. And now, when his life is replete with enjoyments, when he may count each day by the comforts it brings, he may applaud himself and say: "It is I who have produced the comforts which surround me; it is I who am the author of my own happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild wood, a dreary desert." Yes, creative man, receive my homage! Thou hast measured the span of the heavens, calculated the volume of the stars, arrested the lightning in its clouds, subdued seas and storms, subjected all the elements. Ah! how are so many sublime energies allied to so many errors? CHAPTER VII. PRINCIPLES OF SOCIETY. Wandering in the woods and on the banks of rivers in pursuit of game and fish, the first men, beset with dangers, assailed by enemies, tormented by hunger, by reptiles, by ravenous beasts, felt their own individual weakness; and, urged by a common need of safety, and a reciprocal sentiment of like evils, they united their resources and their strength; and when one incurred a danger, many aided and succored him; when one wanted subsistence, another shared his food with him. Thus men associated to secure their existence, to augment their powers, to protect their enjoyments; and self-love thus became the principle of society. Instructed afterwards by the experience of various and repeated accidents, by the fatigues of a wandering life, by the distress of frequent scarcity, men reasoned with themselves and said: "Why consume our days in seeking scattered fruits from a parsimonious soil? why exhaust ourselves in pursuing prey which eludes us in the woods or waters? why not collect under our hands the animals that nourish us? why not apply our cares in multiplying and preserving them? We will feed on their increase, be clothed in their skins, and live exempt from the fatigues of the day and solicitude for the morrow." And men, aiding one another, seized the nimble goat, the timid sheep; they tamed the patient camel, the fierce bull, the impetuous horse; and, applauding their own industry, they sat down in the joy of their souls, and began to taste repose and comfort: and self-love, the principle of all reasoning, became the incitement to every art, and every enjoyment. When, therefore, men could pass long days in leisure, and in communication of their thoughts, they began to contemplate the earth, the heavens, and their own existence as objects of curiosity and reflection; they remarked the course of the seasons, the action of the elements, the properties of fruits and plants; and applied their thoughts to the multiplication of their enjoyments. And in some countries, having observed that certain seeds contained a wholesome nourishment in a small volume, convenient for transportation and preservation, they imitated the process of nature; they confided to the earth rice, barley, and corn, which multiplied to the full measure of their hope; and having found the means of obtaining within a small compass and without removal, plentiful subsistence and durable stores, they established themselves in fixed habitations; they built houses, villages, and towns; formed societies and nations; and self-love produced all the developments of genius and of power. Thus by the aid of his own faculties, man has raised himself to the astonishing height of his present fortune. Too happy if, observing scrupulously the law of his being, he had faithfully fulfilled its only and true object! But, by a fatal imprudence, sometimes mistaking, sometimes transgressing its limits, he has launched forth into a labyrinth of errors and misfortunes; and self-love, sometimes unruly, sometimes blind, became a principle fruitful in calamities. CHAPTER VIII. SOURCES OF THE EVILS OF SOCIETY. In truth, scarcely were the faculties of men developed, when, inveigled by objects which gratify the senses, they gave themselves up to unbridled desires. The sweet sensations which nature had attached to their real wants, to endear to them their existence, no longer satisfied them. Not content with the abundance offered by the earth or produced by industry, they wished to accumulate enjoyments and coveted those possessed by their fellow men. The strong man rose up against the feeble, to take from him the fruit of his labor; the feeble invoked another feeble one to repel the violence. Two strong ones then said: "Why fatigue ourselves to produce enjoyments which we may find in the hands of the weak? Let us join and despoil them; they shall labor for us, and we will enjoy without labor." And the strong associating for oppression and the weak for resistance, men mutually afflicted each other; and a general and fatal discord spread over the earth, in which the passions, assuming a thousand new forms, have generated a continued chain of misfortunes. Thus the same self-love which, moderate and prudent, was a principle of happiness and perfection, becoming blind and disordered, was transformed into a corrupting poison; and cupidity, offspring and companion of ignorance, became the cause of all the evils that have desolated the earth. Yes, ignorance and cupidity! these are the twin sources of all the torments of man! Biased by these into false ideas of happiness, he has mistaken or broken the laws of nature in his own relation with external objects; and injuring his own existence, has violated individual morality; shutting through these his heart to compassion, and his mind to justice, he has injured and afflicted his equal, and violated social morality. From ignorance and cupidity, man has armed against man, family against family, tribe against tribe; and the earth is become a theatre of blood, of discord, and of rapine. By ignorance and cupidity, a secret war, fermenting in the bosom of every state, has separated citizen from citizen; and the same society has divided itself into oppressors and oppressed, into masters and slaves; by these, the heads of a nation, sometimes insolent and audacious, have forged its chains within its own bowels; and mercenary avarice has founded political despotism. Sometimes, hypocritical and cunning, they have called from heaven a lying power, and a sacrilegious yoke; and credulous cupidity has founded religious despotism. By these have been perverted the ideas of good and evil, just and unjust, vice and virtue; and nations have wandered in a labyrinth of errors and calamities. The cupidity of man and his ignorance,--these are the evil genii which have wasted the earth! These are the decrees of fate which have overthrown empires! These are the celestial anathemas which have smitten these walls once so glorious, and converted the splendor of a populous city into a solitude of mourning and of ruins! But as in the bosom of man have sprung all the evils which have afflicted his life, there he also is to seek and to find their remedies. CHAPTER IX. ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT AND LAWS. In fact, it soon happened that men, fatigued with the evils they reciprocally inflicted, began to sigh for peace; and reflecting on their misfortunes and the causes of them, they said: "We are mutually injuring each other by our passions; and, aiming to grasp every thing, we hold nothing. What one seizes to-day, another takes to-morrow, and our cupidity reacts upon ourselves. Let us establish judges, who shall arbitrate our rights, and settle our differences! When the strong shall rise against the weak, the judge shall restrain him, and dispose of our force to suppress violence; and the life and property of each shall be under the guarantee and protection of all; and all shall enjoy the good things of nature." Conventions were thus formed in society, sometimes express, sometimes tacit, which became the rule for the action of individuals, the measure of their rights, the law of their reciprocal relations; and persons were appointed to superintend their observance, to whom the people confided the balance to weigh rights, and the sword to punish transgressions. Thus was established among individuals a happy equilibrium of force and action, which constituted the common security. The name of equity and of justice was recognized and revered over the earth; every one, assured of enjoying in peace, the fruits of his toil, pursued with energy the objects of his attention; and industry, excited and maintained by the reality or the hope of enjoyment, developed, all the riches of art and of nature. The fields were covered with harvests, the valleys with flocks, the hills with fruits, the sea with vessels, and man became happy and powerful on the earth. Thus did his own wisdom repair the disorder which his imprudence had occasioned; and that wisdom was only the effect of his own organization. He respected the enjoyments of others in order to secure his own; and cupidity found its corrective in the enlightened love of self. Thus the love of self, the moving principle of every individual, becomes the necessary foundation of every association; and on the observance of that law of our nature has depended the fate of nations. Have the factitious and conventional laws tended to that object and accomplished that aim? Every one, urged by a powerful instinct, has displayed all the faculties of his being; and the sum of individual felicities has constituted the general felicity. Have these laws, on the contrary, restrained the effort of man toward his own happiness? His heart, deprived of its exciting principle, has languished in inactivity, and from the oppression of individuals has resulted the weakness of the state. As self-love, impetuous and improvident, is ever urging man against his equal, and consequently tends to dissolve society, the art of legislation and the merit of administrators consists in attempering the conflict of individual cupidities, in maintaining an equilibrium of powers, and securing to every one his happiness, in order that, in the shock of society against society, all the members may have a common interest in the preservation and defence of the public welfare. The internal splendor and prosperity of empires then, have had for their efficient cause the equity of their laws and government; and their respective external powers have been in proportion to the number of persons interested, and their degree of interest in the public welfare. On the other hand, the multiplication of men, by complicating their relations, having rendered the precise limitation of their rights difficult, the perpetual play of the passions having produced incidents not foreseen--their conventions having been vicious, inadequate, or nugatory--in fine, the authors of the laws having sometimes mistaken, sometimes disguised their objects; and their ministers, instead of restraining the cupidity of others, having given themselves up to their own; all these causes have introduced disorder and trouble into societies; and the viciousness of laws and the injustice of governments, flowing from cupidity and ignorance, have become the causes of the misfortunes of nations, and the subversion of states. CHAPTER X. GENERAL CAUSES OF THE PROSPERITY OF ANCIENT STATES. Such, O man who seekest wisdom, such have been the causes of revolution in the ancient states of which thou contemplatest the ruins! To whatever spot I direct my view, to whatever period my thoughts recur, the same principles of growth or destruction, of rise or fall, present themselves to my mind. Wherever a people is powerful, or an empire prosperous, there the conventional laws are conformable with the laws of nature--the government there procures for its citizens a free use of their faculties, equal security for their persons and property. If, on the contrary, an empire goes to ruin, or dissolves, it is because its laws have been vicious, or imperfect, or trodden under foot by a corrupt government. If the laws and government, at first wise and just, become afterwards depraved, it is because the alternation of good and evil is inherent to the heart of man, to a change in his propensities, to his progress in knowledge, to a combination of circumstances and events; as is proved by the history of the species. In the infancy of nations, when men yet lived in the forest, subject to the same wants, endowed with the same faculties, all were nearly equal in strength; and that equality was a circumstance highly advantageous in the composition of society: as every individual, thus feeling himself sufficiently independent of every other, no one was the slave, none thought of being the master of another. Man, then a novice, knew neither servitude nor tyranny; furnished with resources sufficient for his existence, he thought not of borrowing from others; owning nothing, requiring nothing, he judged the rights of others by his own, and formed ideas of justice sufficiently exact. Ignorant, moreover, in the art of enjoyments, unable to produce more than his necessaries, possessing nothing superfluous, cupidity remained dormant; or if excited, man, attacked in his real wants, resisted it with energy, and the foresight of such resistance ensured a happy balance. Thus original equality, in default of compact, maintained freedom of person, security of property, good manners, and order. Every one labored by himself and for himself; and the mind of man, being occupied, wandered not to culpable desires. He had few enjoyments, but his wants were satisfied; and as indulgent nature had made them less than his resources, the labor of his hands soon produced abundance--abundance, population; the arts unfolded, culture extended, and the earth, covered with numerous inhabitants, was divided into different dominions. The relations of man becoming complicated, the internal order of societies became more difficult to maintain. Time and industry having generated riches, cupidity became more active; and because equality, practicable among individuals, could not subsist among families, the natural equilibrium was broken; it became necessary to supply it by a factitious equilibrium; to set up chiefs, to establish laws; and in the primitive inexperience, it necessarily happened that these laws, occasioned by cupidity, assumed its character. But different circumstances concurred to correct the disorder, and oblige governments to be just. States, in fact, being weak at first, and having foreign enemies to fear, the chiefs found it their interest not to oppress their subjects; for, by lessening the confidence of the citizens in their government, they would diminish their means of resistance--they would facilitate foreign invasion, and by exercising arbitrary power, have endangered their very existence. In the interior, the firmness of the people repelled tyranny; men had contracted too long habits of independence; they had too few wants, and too much consciousness of their own strength. States being of a moderate size, it was difficult to divide their citizens so as to make use of some for the oppression of others. Their communications were too easy, their interest too clear and simple: besides, every one being a proprietor and cultivator, no one needed to sell himself, and the despot could find no mercenaries. If, then, dissensions arose, they were between family and family, faction and faction, and they interested a great number. The troubles, indeed, were warmer; but fears from abroad pacified discord at home. If the oppression of a party prevailed, the earth being still unoccupied, and man, still in a state of simplicity, finding every where the same advantages, the oppressed party emigrated, and carried elsewhere their independence. The ancient states then enjoyed within themselves numerous means of prosperity and power. Every one finding his own well-being in the constitution of his country, took a lively interest in its preservation. If a stranger attacked it, having to defend his own field, his own house, he carried into combat all the passions of a personal quarrel; and, devoted to his own interests, he was devoted to his country. As every action useful to the public attracted its esteem and gratitude, every one became eager to be useful; and self-love multiplied talents and civic virtues. Every citizen contributing equally by his talents and person, armies and funds were inexhaustible, and nations displayed formidable masses of power. The earth being free, and its possession secure and easy, every one was a proprietor; and the division of property preserved morals, and rendered luxury impossible. Every one cultivating for himself, culture was more active, produce more abundant; and individual riches became public wealth. The abundance of produce rendering subsistence easy, population was rapid and numerous, and states attained quickly the term of their plenitude. Productions increasing beyond consumption, the necessity of commerce arose; and exchanges took place between people and people; which augmented their activity and reciprocal advantages. In fine, certain countries, at certain times, uniting the advantages of good government with a position on the route of the most active circulation, they became emporiums of flourishing commerce and seats of powerful domination. And on the shores of the Nile and Mediterranean, of the Tygris and Euphrates, the accumulated riches of India and of Europe raised in successive splendor a hundred different cities. The people, growing rich, applied their superfluity to works of common and public use; and this was in every state, the epoch of those works whose grandeur astonishes the mind; of those wells of Tyre, of those dykes of the Euphrates, of those subterranean conduits of Media,* of those fortresses of the desert, of those aqueducts of Palmyra, of those temples, of those porticoes. And such labors might be immense, without oppressing the nations; because they were the effect of an equal and common contribution of the force of individuals animated and free. * See respecting these monuments my Travels into Syria, vol. ii. p. 214. From the town or village of Samouat the course of the Euphrates is accompanied with a double bank, which descends as far as its junction with the Tygris, and from thence to the sea, being a length of about a hundred leagues, French measure. The height of these artificial banks is not uniform, but increases as you advance from the sea; it may be estimated at from twelve to fifteen feet. But for them, the inundation of the river would bury the country around, which is flat, to an extent of twenty or twenty-five leagues and even notwithstanding these banks, there has been in modern times an overflow, which has covered the whole triangle formed by the junction of this river to the Tygris, being a space of country of one hundred and thirty square leagues. By the stagnation of these waters an epidemical disease of the most fatal nature was occasioned. It follows from hence, 1. That all the flat country bordering upon these rivers, was originally a marsh; 2. That this marsh could not have been inhabited previously to the construction of the banks in question; 3. That these banks could not have been the work but of a population prior as to date; and the elevation of Babylon, therefore, must have been posterior to that of Nineveh, as I think I have chronologically demonstrated in the memoir above cited. See Encyclopedia, vol. xiii, of Antiquities. The modern Aderbidjan, which was a part of Medea, the mountains of Koulderstan, and those of Diarbekr, abound with subterranean canals, by means of which the ancient inhabitants conveyed water to their parched soil in order to fertilize it. It was regarded as a meritorious act and a religious duty prescribed by Zoroaster, who, instead of preaching celibacy, mortifications, and other pretended virtues of the monkish sort, repeats continually in the passages that are preserved respecting him in the Sad-der and the Zend-avesta: "That the action most pleasing to God is to plough and cultivate the earth, to water it with running streams, to multiply vegetation and living beings, to have numerous flocks, young and fruitful virgins, a multitude of children," etc., etc. Among the aqueducts of Palmyra it appears certain, that, besides those which conducted water from the neighboring hills, there was one which brought it even from the mountains of Syria. It is to be traced a long way into the Desert where it escapes our search by going under ground. Thus ancient states prospered, because their social institutions conformed to the true laws of nature; and because men, enjoying liberty and security for their persons and their property, might display all the extent of their faculties,--all the energies of their self-love. CHAPTER XI. GENERAL CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTIONS AND RUIN OF ANCIENT STATES. Cupidity had nevertheless excited among men a constant and universal conflict, which incessantly prompting individuals and societies to reciprocal invasions, occasioned successive revolutions, and returning agitations. And first, in the savage and barbarous state of the first men, this audacious and fierce cupidity produced rapine, violence, and murder, and retarded for a long time the progress of civilization. When afterwards societies began to be formed, the effect of bad habits, communicated to laws and governments, corrupted their institutions and objects, and established arbitrary and factitious rights, which depraved the ideas of justice, and the morality of the people. Thus one man being stronger than another, their inequality--an accident of nature--was taken for her law;* and the strong being able to take the life of the weak, and yet sparing him, arrogated over his person an abusive right of property; and the slavery of individuals prepared the way for the slavery of nations. *Almost all the ancient philosophers and politicians have laid it down as a principle that men are born unequal, that nature his created some to be free, and others to be slaves. Expressions of this kind are to be found in Aristotle, and even in Plato, called the divine, doubtless in the same sense as the mythological reveries which he promulgated. With all the people of antiquity, the Gauls, the Romans, the Athenians, the right of the strongest was the right of nations; and from the same principle are derived all the political disorders and public national crimes that at present exist. Because the head of a family could be absolute in his house, he made his own affections and desires the rule of his conduct; he gave or resumed his goods without equality, without justice; and paternal despotism laid the foundation of despotism in government.* * Upon this single expression it would be easy to write a long and important chapter. We might prove in it, beyond contradiction, that all the abuses of national governments, have sprung from those of domestic government, from that government called patriarchal, which superficial minds have extolled without having analyzed it. Numberless facts demonstrate, that with every infant people, in every savage and barbarous state, the father, the chief of the family, is a despot, and a cruel and insolent despot. The wife is his slave, the children his servants. This king sleeps or smokes his pipe, while his wife and daughters perform all the drudgery of the house, and even that of tillage and cultivation, as far as occupations of this nature are practised in such societies; and no sooner have the boys acquired strength then they are allowed to beat the females and make them serve and wait upon them as they do upon their fathers. Similar to this is the state of our own uncivilized peasants. In proportion as civilization spreads, the manners become milder, and the condition of the women improves, till, by a contrary excess, they arrive at dominion, and then a nation becomes effeminate and corrupt. It is remarkable that parental authority is great in proportion as the government is despotic. China, India, and Turkey are striking examples of this. One would suppose that tyrants gave themselves accomplices and interested subaltern despots to maintain their authority. In opposition to this the Romans will be cited, but it remains to be proved that the Romans were men truly free and their quick passage from their republican despotism to their abject servility under the emperors, gives room at least for considerable doubt as to that freedom. In societies formed on such foundations, when time and labor had developed riches, cupidity restrained by the laws, became more artful, but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations. Sometimes, opposing itself to all social compact, or breaking that which already existed, it committed the inhabitants of a country to the tumultuous shock of all their discords; and states thus dissolved, and reduced to the condition of anarchy, were tormented by the passions of all their members. Sometimes a nation, jealous of its liberty, having appointed agents to administer its government, these agents appropriated the powers of which they had only the guardianship: they employed the public treasures in corrupting elections, gaining partisans, in dividing the people among themselves. By these means, from being temporary they became perpetual; from elective, hereditary; and the state, agitated by the intrigues of the ambitious, by largesses from the rich and factious, by the venality of the poor and idle, by the influence of orators, by the boldness of the wicked, and the weakness of the virtuous, was convulsed with all the inconveniences of democracy. The chiefs of some countries, equal in strength and mutually fearing each other, formed impious pacts, nefarious associations; and, apportioning among themselves all power, rank, and honor, unjustly arrogated privileges and immunities; erected themselves into separate orders and distinct classes; reduced the people to their control; and, under the name of aristocracy, the state was tormented by the passions of the wealthy and the great. Sacred impostors, in other countries, tending by other means to the same object, abused the credulity of the ignorant. In the gloom of their temples, behind the curtain of the altar, they made their gods act and speak; gave forth oracles, worked miracles, ordered sacrifices, levied offerings, prescribed endowments; and, under the names of theocracy and of religion, the state became tormented by the passions of the priests. Sometimes a nation, weary of its dissensions or of its tyrants, to lessen the sources of evil, submitted to a single master; but if it limited his powers, his sole aim was to enlarge them; if it left them indefinite, he abused the trust confided to him; and, under the name of monarchy, the state was tormented by the passions of kings and princes. Then the factions, availing themselves of the general discontent, flattered the people with the hope of a better master; dealt out gifts and promises, deposed the despot to take his place; and their contests for the succession, or its partition, tormented the state with the disorders and devastations of civil war. In fine, among these rivals, one more adroit, or more fortunate, gained the ascendency, and concentrated all power within himself. By a strange phenomenon, a single individual mastered millions of his equals, against their will and without their consent; and the art of tyranny sprung also from cupidity. In fact, observing the spirit of egotism which incessantly divides mankind, the ambitious man fomented it with dexterity, flattered the vanity of one, excited the jealousy of another, favored the avarice of this, inflamed the resentment of that, and irritated the passions of all; then, placing in opposition their interests and prejudices, he sowed divisions and hatreds, promised to the poor the spoils of the rich, to the rich the subjection of the poor; threatened one man by another, this class by that; and insulating all by distrust, created his strength out of their weakness, and imposed the yoke of opinion, which they mutually riveted on each other. With the army he levied contributions, and with contributions he disposed of the army: dealing out wealth and office on these principles, he enchained a whole people in indissoluble bonds, and they languished under the slow consumption of despotism. Thus the same principle, varying its action under every possible form, was forever attenuating the consistence of states, and an eternal circle of vicissitudes flowed from an eternal circle of passions. And this spirit of egotism and usurpation produced two effects equally operative and fatal: the one a division and subdivision of societies into their smallest fractions, inducing a debility which facilitated their dissolution; the other, a preserving tendency to concentrate power in a single hand,* which, engulfing successively societies and states, was fatal to their peace and social existence. * It is remarkable that this has in all instances been the constant progress of societies; beginning with a state of anarchy or democracy, that is, with a great division of power they have passed to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to monarchy. Does it not hence follow that those who constitute states under the democratic form, destine them to undergo all the intervening troubles between that and monarchy; but it should at the same time be proved that social experience is already exhausted for the human race, and that this spontaneous movement is not solely the effect of ignorance. Thus, as in a state, a party absorbed the nation, a family the party, and an individual the family; so a movement of absorption took place between state and state, and exhibited on a larger scale in the political order, all the particular evils of the civil order. Thus a state having subdued a state, held it in subjection in the form of a province; and two provinces being joined together formed a kingdom; two kingdoms being united by conquest, gave birth to empires of gigantic size; and in this conglomeration, the internal strength of states, instead of increasing, diminished; and the condition of the people, instead of ameliorating, became daily more abject and wretched, for causes derived from the nature of things. Because, in proportion as states increased in extent, their administration becoming more difficult and complicated, greater energies of power were necessary to move such masses; and there was no longer any proportion between the duties of sovereigns and their ability to perform their duties: Because despots, feeling their weakness, feared whatever might develop the strength of nations, and studied only how to enfeeble them: Because nations, divided by the prejudices of ignorance and hatred, seconded the wickedness of their governments; and availing themselves reciprocally of subordinate agents, aggravated their mutual slavery: Because, the balance between states being destroyed, the strong more easily oppressed the weak. Finally, because in proportion as states were concentrated, the people, despoiled of their laws, of their usages, and of the government of their choice, lost that spirit of personal identification with their government, which had caused their energy. And despots, considering empires as their private domains and the people as their property, gave themselves up to depredations, and to all the licentiousness of the most arbitrary authority. And all the strength and wealth of nations were diverted to private expense and personal caprice; and kings, fatigued with gratification, abandoned themselves to all the extravagancies of factitious and depraved taste.* They must have gardens mounted on arcades, rivers raised over mountains, fertile fields converted into haunts for wild beasts; lakes scooped in dry lands, rocks erected in lakes, palaces built of marble and porphyry, furniture of gold and diamonds. Under the cloak of religion, their pride founded temples, endowed indolent priests, built, for vain skeletons, extravagant tombs, mausoleums and pyramids;** millions of hands were employed in sterile labors; and the luxury of princes, imitated by their parasites, and transmitted from grade to grade to the lowest ranks, became a general source of corruption and impoverishment. * It is equally worthy of remark, that the conduct and manners of princes and kings of every country and every age, are found to be precisely the same at similar periods, whether of the formation or dissolution of empires. History every where presents the same pictures of luxury and folly; of parks, gardens, lakes, rocks, palaces, furniture, excess of the table, wine, women, concluding with brutality. The absurd rock in the garden of Versailles has alone cost three millions. I have sometimes calculated what might have been done with the expense of the three pyramids of Gizah, and I have found that it would easily have constructed from the Red Sea to Alexandria, a canal one hundred and fifty feet wide and thirty deep, completely covered in with cut stones and a parapet, together with a fortified and commercial town, consisting of four hundred houses, furnished with cisterns. What a difference in point of utility between such a canal and these pyramids! ** The learned Dupuis could not be persuaded that the pyramids were tombs; but besides the positive testimony of historians, read what Diodorus says of the religious and superstitious importance every Egyptian attached to building his dwelling eternal, b. 1. During twenty years, says Herodotus, a hundred thousand men labored every day to build the pyramid of the Egyptian Cheops. Supposing only three hundred days a year, on account of the sabbath, there will be 30 millions of days' work in a year, and 600 millions in twenty years; at 15 sous a day, this makes 450 millions of francs lost, without any further benefit. With this sum, if the king had shut the isthmus of Suez by a strong wall, like that of China, the destinies of Egypt might have been entirely changed. Foreign invasions would have been prevented, and the Arabs of the desert would neither have conquered nor harassed that country. Sterile labors! how many millions lost in putting one stone upon another, under the forms of temples and churches! Alchymists convert stones into gold; but architects change gold into stone. Woe to the kings (as well as subjects) who trust their purse to these two classes of empirics! And in the insatiable thirst of enjoyment, the ordinary revenues no longer sufficing, they were augmented; the cultivator, seeing his labors increase without compensation, lost all courage; the merchant, despoiled, was disgusted with industry; the multitude, condemned to perpetual poverty, restrained their labor to simple necessaries; and all productive industry vanished. The surcharge of taxes rendering lands a burdensome possession, the poor proprietor abandoned his field, or sold it to the powerful; and fortune became concentrated in a few hands. All the laws and institutions favoring this accumulation, the nation became divided into a group of wealthy drones, and a multitude of mercenary poor; the people were degraded with indigence, the great with satiety, and the number of those interested in the preservation of the state decreasing, its strength and existence became proportionally precarious. On the other hand, emulation finding no object, science no encouragement, the mind sunk into profound ignorance. The administration being secret and mysterious, there existed no means of reform or amelioration. The chiefs governing by force or fraud, the people viewed them as a faction of public enemies; and all harmony ceased between the governors and governed. And these vices having enervated the states of the wealthy part of Asia, the vagrant and indigent people of the adjacent deserts and mountains coveted the enjoyments of the fertile plains; and, urged by a cupidity common to all, attacked the polished empires, and overturned the thrones of their despots. These revolutions were rapid and easy; because the policy of tyrants had enfeebled the subjects, razed the fortresses, destroyed the warriors; and because the oppressed subjects remained without personal interest, and the mercenary soldiers without courage. And hordes of barbarians having reduced entire nations to slavery, the empires, formed of conquerors and conquered, united in their bosom two classes essentially opposite and hostile. All the principles of society were dissolved: there was no longer any common interest, no longer any public spirit; and there arose a distinction of casts and races, which reduced to a regular system the maintenance of disorder; and he who was born of this or that blood, was born a slave or a tyrant--property or proprietor. The oppressors being less numerous than the oppressed it was necessary to perfect the science of oppression, in order to support this false equilibrium. The art of governing became the art of subjecting the many to the few. To enforce an obedience so contrary to instinct, the severest punishments were established, and the cruelty of the laws rendered manners atrocious. The distinction of persons establishing in the state two codes, two orders of criminal justice, two sets of laws, the people, placed between the propensities of the heart and the oath uttered from the mouth, had two consciences in contradiction with each other; and the ideas of justice and injustice had no longer any foundation in the understanding. Under such a system, the people fell into dejection and despair; and the accidents of nature were added to the other evils which assailed them. Prostrated by so many calamities, they attributed their causes to superior and hidden powers; and, because they had tyrants on earth, they fancied others in heaven; and superstition aggravated the misfortunes of nations. Fatal doctrines and gloomy and misanthropic systems of religion arose, which painted their gods, like their despots, wicked and envious. To appease them, man offered up the sacrifice of all his enjoyments. He environed himself in privations, and reversed the order of nature. Conceiving his pleasures to be crimes, his sufferings expiations, he endeavored to love pain, and to abjure the love of self. He persecuted his senses, hated his life; and a self-denying and anti-social morality plunged nations into the apathy of death. But provident nature having endowed the heart of man with hope inexhaustible, when his desires of happiness were baffled on this earth, he pursued it into another world. By a sweet illusion he created for himself another country--an asylum where, far from tyrants, he should recover the rights of nature, and thence resulted new disorders. Smitten with an imaginary world, man despised that of nature. For chimerical hopes, he neglected realities. His life began to appear a troublesome journey--a painful dream; his body a prison, the obstacle to his felicity; and the earth, a place of exile and of pilgrimage, not worthy of culture. Then a holy indolence spread over the political world; the fields were deserted, empires depopulated, monuments neglected and deserts multiplied; ignorance, superstition and fanaticism, combining their operations, overwhelmed the earth with devastation and ruin. Thus agitated by their own passions, men, whether collectively or individually taken, always greedy and improvident, passing from slavery to tyranny, from pride to baseness, from presumption to despondency, have made themselves the perpetual instruments of their own misfortunes. These, then, are the principles, simple and natural, which regulated the destiny of ancient states. By this regular and connected series of causes and effects, they rose or fell, in proportion as the physical laws of the human heart were respected or violated; and in the course of their successive changes, a hundred different nations, a hundred different empires, by turns humbled, elevated, conquered, overthrown, have repeated for the earth their instructive lessons. Yet these lessons were lost for the generations which have followed! The disorders in times past have reappeared in the present age! The chiefs of the nations have continued to walk in the paths of falsehood and tyranny!--the people to wander in the darkness of superstition and ignorance! Since then, continued the Genius, with renewed energy, since the experience of past ages is lost for the living--since the errors of progenitors have not instructed their descendants, the ancient examples are about to reappear; the earth will see renewed the tremendous scenes it has forgotten. New revolutions will agitate nations and empires; powerful thrones will again be overturned, and terrible catastrophes will again teach mankind that the laws of nature and the precepts of wisdom and truth cannot be infringed with impunity. CHAPTER XII. LESSONS OF TIMES PAST REPEATED ON THE PRESENT. Thus spoke the Genius. Struck with the justice and coherence of his discourse, assailed with a crowd of ideas, repugnant to my habits yet convincing to my reason, I remained absorbed in profound silence. At length, while with serious and pensive mien, I kept my eyes fixed on Asia, suddenly in the north, on the shores of the Black sea, and in the fields of the Crimea, clouds of smoke and flame attracted my attention. They appeared to rise at the same time from all parts of the peninsula; and passing by the isthmus into the continent, they ran, as if driven by a westerly wind, along the oozy lake of Azof, and disappeared in the grassy plains of Couban; and following more attentively the course of these clouds, I observed that they were preceded or followed by swarms of moving creatures, which, like ants or grasshoppers disturbed by the foot of a passenger, agitated themselves with vivacity. Sometimes these swarms appeared to advance and rush against each other; and numbers, after the concussion, remained motionless. While disquieted at this spectacle, I strained my sight to distinguish the objects. Do you see, said the Genius, those flames which spread over the earth, and do you comprehend their causes and effects? Oh! Genius, I answered, I see those columns of flame and smoke, and something like insects, accompanying them; but, when I can scarcely discern the great masses of cities and monuments, how should I discover, such little creatures? I can just perceive that these insects mimic battle, for they advance, retreat, attack and pursue. It is no mimicry, said the Genius, these are real battles. And what, said I, are those mad animalculae, which destroy each other? Beings of a day! will they not perish soon enough? Then the Genius, touching my sight and hearing, again directed my eyes towards the same object. Look, said he, and listen! Ah! wretches, cried I, oppressed with grief, these columns of flame! these insects! oh! Genius, they are men. These are the ravages of war! These torrents of flame rise from towns and villages! I see the squadrons who kindle them, and who, sword in hand overrun the country: they drive before them crowds of old men, women, and children, fugitive and desolate: I perceive other horsemen, who with shouldered lances, accompany and guide them. I even recognize them to be Tartars by their led horses,* their kalpacks, and tufts of hair: and, doubtless, they who pursue, in triangular hats and green uniforms, are Muscovites. Ah! I now comprehend, a war is kindled between the empire of the Czars and that of the Sultans. * A Tartar horseman has always two horses, of which he leads one in hand. The Kalpeck is a bonnet made of the skin of a sheep or other animal. The part of the head covered by this bonnet is shaved, with the exception of a tuft, about the size of a crown piece, and which is suffered to grow to the length of seven or eight inches, precisely where our priests place their tonsure. It is by this tuft of hair, worn by the majority of Mussulmen, that the angel of the tomb is to take the elect and carry them into paradise. Not yet, replied the Genius; this is only a preliminary. These Tartars have been, and might still he troublesome neighbors. The Muscovites are driving them off, finding their country would be a convenient extension of their own limits; and as a prelude to another revolution, the throne of the Guerais is destroyed. And in fact, I saw the Russian standards floating over the Crimea: and soon after their flag waving on the Euxine. Meanwhile, at the cry of the flying Tartars, the Mussulman empire was in commotion. They are driving off our brethren, cried the children of Mahomet: the people of the prophet are outraged! infidels occupy a consecrated land and profane the temples of Islamism.* Let us arm; let us rush to combat, to avenge the glory of God and our own cause. * It is not in the power of the Sultan to cede to a foreign power a province inhabited by true believers. The people, instigated by the lawyers, would not fail to revolt. This is one reason which has led those who know the Turks, to regard as chimerical the ceding of Candia, Cyprus, and Egypt, projected by certain European potentates. And a general movement of war took place in both empires. In every part armed men assembled. Provisions, stores, and all the murderous apparatus of battle were displayed. The temples of both nations, besieged by an immense multitude, presented a spectacle which fixed all my attention. On one side, the Mussulmen gathered before their mosques, washed their hands and feet, pared their nails, and combed their beards; then spreading carpets upon the ground, and turning towards the south, with their arms sometimes crossed and sometimes extended, they made genuflexions and prostrations, and recollecting the disasters of the late war, they exclaimed: God of mercy and clemency! hast thou then abandoned thy faithful people? Thou who hast promised to thy Prophet dominion over nations, and stamped his religion by so many triumphs, dost thou deliver thy true believers to the swords of infidels? And the Imans and the Santons said to the people: It is in chastisement of your sins. You eat pork; you drink wine; you touch unclean things. God hath punished you. Do penance therefore; purify; repeat the profession of faith;* fast from the rising to the setting sun; give the tenth of your goods to the mosques; go to Mecca; and God will render you victorious. * There is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet. And the people, recovering courage, uttered loud cries: There is but one God, said they transported with fury, and Mahomet is his prophet! Accursed be he who believeth not! God of goodness, grant us to exterminate these Christians; it is for thy glory we fight, and our death is a martyrdom for thy name. And then, offering victims, they prepared for battle. On the other side, the Russians, kneeling, said: We render thanks to God, and celebrate his power. He hath strengthened our arm to humble his enemies. Hear our prayers, thou God of mercy! To please thee, we will pass three days without eating either meat or eggs. Grant us to extirpate these impious Mahometans, and to overturn their empire. To thee we will consecrate the tenth of our spoil; to thee we will raise new temples. And the priests filled the churches with clouds of smoke, and said to the people: We pray for you, God accepteth our incense, and blesseth your arms. Continue to fast and to fight; confess to us your secret sins; give your wealth to the church; we will absolve you from your crimes, and you shall die in a state of grace. And they sprinkled water upon the people, dealt out to them, as amulets and charms, small relics of the dead, and the people breathed war and combat. Struck with this contrast of the same passions, and grieving for their fatal consequences, I was considering the difficulty with which the common judge could yield to prayers so contradictory; when the Genius, glowing with anger, spoke with vehemence: What accents of madness strike my ear? What blind and perverse delirium disorders the spirits of the nations? Sacrilegious prayers rise not from the earth! and you, oh Heavens, reject their homicidal vows and impious thanksgivings! Deluded mortals! is it thus you revere the Divinity? Say then; how should he, whom you style your common father, receive the homage of his children murdering one another? Ye victors! with what eye should he view your hands reeking in the blood he hath created? And, what do you expect, oh vanquished, from useless groans? Hath God the heart of a mortal, with passions ever changing? Is he, like you, agitated with vengeance or compassion, with wrath or repentance? What base conception of the most sublime of beings! According to them, it would seem, that God whimsical and capricious, is angered or appeased as a man: that he loves and hates alternately; that he punishes or favors; that, weak or wicked, he broods over his hatred; that, contradictory or perfidious, he lays snares to entrap; that he punishes the evils he permits; that he foresees but hinders not crimes; that, like a corrupt judge, he is bribed by offerings; like an ignorant despot, he makes laws and revokes them; that, like a savage tyrant, he grants or resumes favors without reason, and can only be appeased by servility. Ah! now I know the lying spirit of man! Contemplating the picture which he hath drawn of the Divinity: No, said I, it is not God who hath made man after the image of God; but man hath made God after the image of man; he hath given him his own mind, clothed him with his own propensities; ascribed to him his own judgments. And when in this medley he finds the contradiction of his own principles, with hypocritical humility, he imputes weakness to his reason, and names the absurdities of his own mind the mysteries of God. He hath said, God is immutable, yet he offers prayers to change him; he hath pronounced him incomprehensible, yet he interprets him without ceasing. Imposters have arisen on the earth who have called themselves the confidants of God; and, erecting themselves into teachers of the people, have opened the ways of falsehood and iniquity; they have ascribed merit to practices indifferent or ridiculous; they have supposed a virtue, in certain postures, in pronouncing certain words, articulating certain names; they have transformed into a crime the eating of certain meats, the drinking of certain liquors, on one day rather than another. The Jew would rather die than labor on the sabbath; the Persian would endure suffocation, before he would blow the fire with his breath; the Indian places supreme perfection in besmearing himself with cow-dung, and pronouncing mysteriously the word Aum;* the Mussulman believes he has expiated everything in washing his head and arms; and disputes, sword in hand, whether the ablution should commence at the elbow, or finger ends;** the Christian would think himself damned, if he ate flesh instead of milk or butter. Oh sublime doctrines! Doctrines truly from heaven! Oh perfect morals, and worthy of martyrdom or the apostolate! I will cross the seas to teach these admirable laws to the savage people--to distant nations; I will say unto them: * This word is, in the religion of the Hindoos, a sacred emblem of the Divinity. It is only to be pronounced in secret, without being heard by any one. It is formed of three letters, of which the first, a, signifies the principal of all, the creator, Brama; the second, u, the conservator, Vichenou; and the last, m, the destroyer, who puts an end to all, Chiven. It is pronounced like the monosyllable om, and expresses the unity of those three Gods. The idea is precisely that of the Alpha and Omega mentioned in the New Testament. ** This is one of the grand points of schism between the partisans of Omar and those of Ali. Suppose two Mahometans to meet on a journey, and to accost each other with brotherly affection: the hour of prayer arrives; one begins his ablution at his fingers, the other at the elbow, and instantly they are mortal enemies. O sublime importance of religious opinions! O profound philosophy of the authors of them! Children of nature, how long will you walk in the paths of ignorance? how long will you mistake the true principles of morality and religion? Come and learn its lessons from nations truly pious and learned, in civilized countries. They will inform you how, to gratify God, you must in certain months of the year, languish the whole day with hunger and thirst; how you may shed your neighbor's blood, and purify yourself from it by professions of faith and methodical ablutions; how you may steal his property and be absolved on sharing it with certain persons, who devote themselves to its consumption. Sovereign and invisible power of the universe! mysterious mover of nature! universal soul of beings! thou who art unknown, yet revered by mortals under so many names! being incomprehensible and infinite! God, who in the immensity of the heavens directest the movement of worlds, and peoplest the abyss of space with millions of suns! say what do these human insects, which my sight no longer discerns on the earth, appear in thy eyes? To thee, who art guiding stars in their orbits, what are those wormlings writhing themselves in the dust? Of what import to thy immensity, their distinctions of parties and sects? And of what concern the subtleties with which their folly torments itself? And you, credulous men, show me the effect of your practices! In so many centuries, during which you have been following or altering them, what changes have your prescriptions wrought in the laws of nature? Is the sun brighter? Is the course of the seasons varied? Is the earth more fruitful, or its inhabitants more happy? If God be good, can your penances please him? If infinite, can your homage add to his glory? If his decrees have been formed on foresight of every circumstance, can your prayers change them? Answer, O inconsistent mortals! Ye conquerors of the earth, who pretend you serve God! doth he need your aid? If he wishes to punish, hath he not earthquakes, volcanoes, and thunder? And cannot a merciful God correct without extermination? Ye Mussulmans, if God chastiseth you for violating the five precepts, how hath he raised up the Franks who ridicule them? If he governeth the earth by the Koran, by what did he govern it before the days of the prophet, when it was covered with so many nations who drank wine, ate pork, and went not to Mecca, whom he nevertheless permitted to raise powerful empires? How did he judge the Sabeans of Nineveh and of Babylon; the Persian, worshipper of fire; the Greek and Roman idolators; the ancient kingdoms of the Nile; and your own ancestors, the Arabians and Tartars? How doth he yet judge so many nations who deny, or know not your worship--the numerous castes of Indians, the vast empire of the Chinese, the sable race of Africa, the islanders of the ocean, the tribes of America? Presumptuous and ignorant men, who arrogate the earth to yourselves! if God were to gather all the generations past and present, what would be, in their ocean, the sects calling themselves universal, of Christians and Mussulmans? What would be the judgments of his equal and common justice over the real universality of mankind? Therein it is that your knowledge loseth itself in incoherent systems; it is there that truth shines with evidence; and there are manifested the powerful and simple laws of nature and reason--laws of a common and general mover--of a God impartial and just, who sheds rain on a country without asking who is its prophet; who causeth his sun to shine alike on all the races of men, on the white as on the black, on the Jew, on the Mussulman, the Christian, and the Idolater; who reareth the harvest wherever cultivated with diligence; who multiplieth every nation where industry and order prevaileth; who prospereth every empire where justice is practised, where the powerful are restrained, and the poor protected by the laws; where the weak live in safety, and all enjoy the rights given by nature and a compact formed in justice. These are the principles by which people are judged! this the true religion which regulates the destiny of empires, and which, O Ottomans, hath governed yours! Interrogate your ancestors, ask of them by what means they rose to greatness; when few, poor and idolaters, they came from the deserts of Tartary and encamped in these fertile countries; ask if it was by Islamism, till then unknown to them, that they conquered the Greeks and the Arabs, or was it by their courage, their prudence, moderation, spirit of union--the true powers of the social state? Then the Sultan himself dispensed justice, and maintained discipline. The prevaricating judge, the extortionate governor, were punished, and the multitude lived at ease. The cultivator was protected from the rapine of the janissary, and the fields prospered; the highways were safe, and commerce caused abundance. You were a band of plunderers, but just among yourselves. You subdued nations, but did not oppress them. Harassed by their own princes, they preferred being your tributaries. What matters it, said the Christian, whether my ruler breaks or adores images, if he renders justice to me? God will judge his doctrines in the heavens above. You were sober and hardy; your enemies timid and enervated; you were expert in battle, your enemies unskillful; your leaders were experienced, your soldiers warlike and disciplined. Booty excited ardor, bravery was rewarded, cowardice and insubordination punished, and all the springs of the human heart were in action. Thus you vanquished a hundred nations, and of a mass of conquered kingdoms compounded an immense empire. But other customs have succeeded; and in the reverses attending them, the laws of nature have still exerted their force. After devouring your enemies, your cupidity, still insatiable, has reacted on itself, and, concentrated in your own bowels, has consumed you. Having become rich, you have quarrelled for partition and enjoyment, and disorder hath arisen in every class of society. The Sultan, intoxicated with grandeur, has mistaken the object of his functions; and all the vices of arbitrary power have been developed. Meeting no obstacle to his appetites, he has become a depraved being; weak and arrogant, he has kept the people at a distance; and their voice has no longer instructed and guided him. Ignorant, yet flattered, neglecting all instruction, all study, he has fallen into imbecility; unfit for business, he has thrown its burdens on hirelings, and they have deceived him. To satisfy their own passions, they have stimulated and nourished his; they have multiplied his wants, and his enormous luxury has consumed everything. The frugal table, plain clothing, simple dwelling of his ancestors no longer sufficed. To supply his pomp, earth and sea have been exhausted. The rarest furs have been brought from the poles; the most costly tissues from the equator. He has devoured at a meal the tribute of a city, and in a day that of a province. He has surrounded himself with an army of women, eunuchs, and satellites. They have instilled into him that the virtue of kings is to be liberal, and the munificence and treasures of the people have been delivered into the hands of flatterers. In imitation of their master, his servants must also have splendid houses, the most exquisite furniture; carpets embroidered at great cost, vases of gold and silver for the lowest uses, and all the riches of the empire have been swallowed up in the Serai. To supply this inordinate luxury, the slaves and women have sold their influence, and venality has introduced a general depravation. The favor of the sovereign has been sold to his vizier, and the vizier has sold the empire. The law has been sold to the cadi, and the cadi has made sale of justice. The altar has been sold to the priest, and the priest has sold the kingdom of heaven. And gold obtaining everything, they have sacrificed everything to obtain gold. For gold, friend has betrayed friend, the child his parent, the servant his master, the wife her honor, the merchant his conscience; and good faith, morals, concord, and strength were banished from the state. The pacha, who had purchased the government of his province, farmed it out to others, who exercised every extortion. He sold in turn the collection of the taxes, the command of the troops, the administration of the villages; and as every employ has been transient, rapine, spread from rank to rank, has been greedy and implacable. The revenue officer has fleeced the merchant, and commerce was annihilated; the aga has plundered the husbandman, and culture has degenerated. The laborer, deprived of his stock, has been unable to sow; the tax was augmented, and he could not pay it; the bastinado has been threatened, and he has borrowed. Money, from want of security, being locked up from circulation, interest was therefore enormous, and the usury of the rich has aggravated the misery of the laborer. When excessive droughts and accidents of seasons have blasted the harvest, the government has admitted no delay, no indulgence for the tax; and distress bearing hard on the village, a part of its inhabitants have taken refuge in the cities; and their burdens falling on those who remained, has completed their ruin, and depopulated the country. If driven to extremity by tyranny and outrage, the villages have revolted, the pacha rejoices. He wages war on them, assails their homes, pillages their property, carries off their stock; and when the fields have become a desert, he exclaims: "What care I? I leave these fields to-morrow." The earth wanting laborers, the rain of heaven and overflowing of torrents have stagnated in marshes; and their putrid exhalations in a warm climate, have caused epidemics, plagues, and maladies of all sorts, whence have flowed additional suffering, penury, and ruin. Oh! who can enumerate all the calamities of tyrannical government? Sometimes the pachas declare war against each other, and for their personal quarrels the provinces of the same state are laid waste. Sometimes, fearing their masters, they attempt independence, and draw on their subjects the chastisement of their revolt. Sometimes dreading their subjects, they invite and subsidize strangers, and to insure their fidelity set no bounds to their depredations. Here they persecute the rich and despoil them under false pretences; there they suborn false witnesses, and impose penalties for suppositious offences; everywhere they excite the hatred of parties, encourage informations to obtain amercements, extort property, seize persons; and when their short-sighted avarice has accumulated into one mass all the riches of a country, the government, by an execrable perfidy, under pretence of avenging its oppressed people, takes to itself all their spoils, as if they were the culprits, and uselessly sheds the blood of its agents for a crime of which it is the accomplice. Oh wretches, monarchs or ministers, who sport with the lives and fortunes of the people! Is it you who gave breath to man, that you dare take it from him? Do you give growth to the plants of the earth, that you may waste them? Do you toil to furrow the field? Do you endure the ardor of the sun, and the torment of thirst, to reap the harvest or thrash the grain? Do you, like the shepherd, watch through the dews of the night? Do you traverse deserts, like the merchant? Ah! on beholding the pride and cruelty of the powerful, I have been transported with indignation, and have said in my wrath, will there never then arise on the earth men who will avenge the people and punish tyrants? A handful of brigands devour the multitude, and the multitude submits to be devoured! Oh! degenerate people! Know you not your rights? All authority is from you, all power is yours. Unlawfully do kings command you on the authority of God and of their lance--Soldiers be still; if God supports the Sultan he needs not your aid; if his sword suffices, he needs not yours; let us see what he can do alone. The soldiers grounded their arms; and behold these masters of the world, feeble as the meanest of their subjects! People! know that those who govern are your chiefs, not your masters; your agents, not your owners; that they have no authority over you, but by you, and for you; that your wealth is yours and they accountable for it; that, kings or subjects, God has made all men equal, and no mortal has the right to oppress his fellow-creatures. But this nation and its chiefs have mistaken these holy truths. They must abide then the consequences of their blindness. The decree is past; the day approaches when this colossus of power shall be crushed and crumbled under its own mass. Yes, I swear it, by the ruins of so many empires destroyed. The empire of the Crescent shall follow the fate of the despotism it has copied. A nation of strangers shall drive the Sultan from his metropolis. The throne of Orkhan shall be overturned. The last shoot of his trunk shall be broken off; and the horde of Oguzians,* deprived of their chief, shall disperse like that of the Nagois. In this dissolution, the people of the empire, loosened from the yoke which united them, shall resume their ancient distinctions, and a general anarchy shall follow, as happened in the empire of the Sophis;** until there shall arise among the Arabians, Armenians, or Greeks, legislators who may compose new states. * Before the Turks took the name of their chief, Othman I., they bore that of Oguzians; and it was under this appellation that they were driven out of Tartary by Gengis, and came from the borders of Giboun to settle themselves in Anatolia. ** In Persia, after the death of Thamas-Koulikan, each province had its chief, and for forty years these chiefs were in a constant state of war. In this view the Turks do not say without reason: "Ten years of a tyrant are less destructive than a single night of anarchy." Oh! if there were on earth men profound and bold! what elements for grandeur and glory! But the hour of destiny has already come; the cry of war strikes my ear; and the catastrophe begins. In vain the Sultan leads forth his armies; his ignorant warriors are beaten and dispersed. In vain he calls his subjects; their hearts are ice. Is it not written? say they, what matters who is our master? We cannot lose by the change. In vain the true believers invoke heaven and the prophet. The prophet is dead; and heaven without pity answers: Cease to invoke me. You have caused your own misfortunes; cure them yourselves. Nature has established laws; your part is to obey them. Observe, reason, and profit by experience. It is the folly of man which ruins him; let his wisdom save him. The people are ignorant; let them gain instruction. Their chiefs are wicked; let them correct and amend; for such is Nature's decree. Since the evils of society spring from cupidity and ignorance, men will never cease to be persecuted, till they become enlightened and wise; till they practise justice, founded on a knowledge of their relations and of the laws of their organization.* * A singular moral phenomenon made its appearance in Europe in the year 1788. A great nation, jealous of its liberty, contracted a fondness for a nation the enemy of liberty; a nation friendly to the arts, for a nation that detests them; a mild and tolerant nation, for a persecuting and fanatic one; a social and gay nation, for a nation whose characteristics are gloom and misanthropy; in a word, the French were smitten with a passion for the Turks: they were desirous of engaging in a war for them, and that at a time when revolution in their own country was just at its commencement. A man, who perceived the true nature of the situation, wrote a book to dissuade them from the war: it was immediately pretended that he was paid by the government, which in reality wished the war, and which was upon the point of shutting him up in a state prison. Another man wrote to recommend the war: he was applauded, and his word taken for the science, the politeness, and importance of the Turks. It is true that he believed in his own thesis, for he has found among them people who cast a nativity, and alchymists who ruined his fortune; as he found Martinists at Paris, who enabled him to sup with Sesostris, and Magnetizers who concluded with destroying his existence. Notwithstanding this, the Turks were beaten by the Russians, and the man who then predicted the fall of their empire, persists in the prediction. The result of this fall will be a complete change of the political system, as far as it relates to the coast of the Mediterranean. If, however, the French become important in proportion as they become free, and if they make use of the advantage they will obtain, their progress may easily prove of the most honorable sort; inasmuch as, by the wise decrees of fate, the true interest of mankind evermore accords with their true morality. CHAPTER XIII. WILL THE HUMAN RACE IMPROVE? At these words, oppressed with the painful sentiment with which their severity overwhelmed me: Woe to the nations! cried I, melting in tears; woe to myself! Ah! now it is that I despair of the happiness of man! Since his miseries proceed from his heart; since the remedy is in his own power, woe for ever to his existence! Who, indeed will ever be able to restrain the lust of wealth in the strong and powerful? Who can enlighten the ignorance of the weak? Who can teach the multitude to know their rights, and force their chiefs to perform their duties? Thus the race of man is always doomed to suffer! Thus the individual will not cease to oppress the individual, a nation to attack a nation; and days of prosperity, of glory, for these regions, shall never return. Alas! conquerors will come; they will drive out the oppressors, and fix themselves in their place; but, inheriting their power, they will inherit their rapacity; and the earth will have changed tyrants, without changing the tyranny. Then, turning to the Genius, I exclaimed: O Genius, despair hath settled on my soul. Knowing the nature of man, the perversity of those who govern, and the debasement of the governed--this knowledge hath disgusted me with life; and since there is no choice but to be the accomplice or the victim of oppression, what remains to the man of virtue but to mingle his ashes with those of the tomb? The Genius then gave me a look of severity, mingled with compassion; and after a few moments of silence, he replied: Virtue, then, consists in dying! The wicked man is indefatigable in consummating his crime, and the just is discouraged from doing good at the first obstacle he encounters! But such is the human heart. A little success intoxicates man with confidence; a reverse overturns and confounds him. Always given up to the sensation of the moment, he seldom judges things from their nature, but from the impulse of his passion. Mortal, who despairest of the human race, on what profound combination of facts hast thou established thy conclusion? Hast thou scrutinized the organization of sentient beings, to determine with precision whether the instinctive force which moves them on to happiness is essentially weaker than that which repels them from it? or, embracing in one glance the history of the species, and judging the future by the past, hast thou shown that all improvement is impossible? Say! hath human society, since its origin, made no progress toward knowledge and a better state? Are men still in their forests, destitute of everything, ignorant, stupid and ferocious? Are all the nations still in that age when nothing was seen upon the globe but brutal robbers and brutal slaves? If at any time, in any place, individuals have ameliorated, why shall not the whole mass ameliorate? If partial societies have made improvements, what shall hinder the improvement of society in general? And if the first obstacles are overcome, why should the others be insurmountable? Art thou disposed to think that the human race degenerates? Guard against the illusion and paradoxes of the misanthrope. Man, discontented with the present, imagines for the past a perfection which never existed, and which only serves to cover his chagrin. He praises the dead out of hatred to the living, and beats the children with the bones of their ancestors. To prove this pretended retrograde progress from perfection we must contradict the testimony of reason and of fact; and if the facts of history are in any measure uncertain, we must contradict the living fact of the organization of man; we must prove that he is born with the enlightened use of his senses; that, without experience, he can distinguish aliment from poison; that the child is wiser than the old man; that the blind walks with more safety than the clear-sighted; that the civilized man is more miserable than the savage; and, indeed, that there is no ascending scale in experience and instruction. Believe, young man, the testimony of monuments, and the voice of the tombs. Some countries have doubtless fallen from what they were at certain epochs; but if we weigh the wisdom and happiness of their inhabitants, even in those times, we shall find more of splendor than of reality in their glory; we shall find, in the most celebrated of ancient states, enormous vices and cruel abuses, the true causes of their decay; we shall find in general that the principles of government were atrocious; that insolent robberies, barbarous wars and implacable hatreds were raging from nation to nation;* that natural right was unknown; that morality was perverted by senseless fanaticism and deplorable superstition; that a dream, a vision, an oracle, were constantly the causes of vast commotions. Perhaps the nations are not yet entirely cured of all these evils; but their intensity at least is diminished, and the experience of the past has not been wholly lost. For the last three centuries, especially, knowledge has increased and been extended; civilization, favored by happy circumstances, has made a sensible progress; inconveniences and abuses have even turned to its advantage; for if states have been too much extended by conquest, the people, by uniting under the same yoke, have lost the spirit of estrangement and division which made them all enemies one to the other. If the powers of government have been more concentrated, there has been more system and harmony in their exercise. If wars have become more extensive in the mass, they are less bloody in detail. If men have gone to battle with less personality, less energy, their struggles have been less sanguinary and less ferocious; they have been less free, but less turbulent; more effeminate, but more pacific. Despotism itself has rendered them some service; for if governments have been more absolute, they have been more quiet and less tempestuous. If thrones have become a property and hereditary, they have excited less dissensions, and the people have suffered fewer convulsions; finally, if the despots, jealous and mysterious, have interdicted all knowledge of their administration, all concurrence in the management of public affairs, the passions of men, drawn aside from politics, have fixed upon the arts, and the sciences of nature; and the sphere of ideas in every direction has been enlarged; man, devoted to abstract studies, has better understood his place in the system of nature, and his relations in society; principles have been better discussed, final causes better explained, knowledge more extended, individuals better instructed, manners more social, and life more happy. The species at large, especially in certain countries, has gained considerably; and this amelioration cannot but increase in future, because its two principal obstacles, those even which, till then, had rendered it slow and sometimes retrograde,--the difficulty of transmitting ideas and of communicating them rapidly,--have been at last removed. * Read the history of the wars of Rome and Carthage, of Sparta and Messina, of Athens and Syracuse, of the Hebrews and the Phoenicians: yet these are the nations of which antiquity boasts as being most polished! Indeed, among the ancients, each canton, each city, being isolated from all others by the difference of its language, the consequence was favorable to ignorance and anarchy. There was no communication of ideas, no participation of discoveries, no harmony of interests or of wills, no unity of action or design; besides, the only means of transmitting and of propagating ideas being that of speech, fugitive and limited, and that of writing, tedious of execution, expensive and scarce, the consequence was a hindrance of present instruction, loss of experience from one generation to another, instability, retrogression of knowledge, and a perpetuity of confusion and childhood. But in the modern world, especially in Europe, great nations having allied themselves in language, and established vast communities of opinions, the minds of men are assimilated, and their affections extended; there is a sympathy of opinion and a unity of action; then that gift of heavenly Genius, the holy art of printing, having furnished the means of communicating in an instant the same idea to millions of men, and of fixing it in a durable manner, beyond the power of tyrants to arrest or annihilate, there arose a mass of progressive instruction, an expanding atmosphere of science, which assures to future ages a solid amelioration. This amelioration is a necessary effect of the laws of nature; for, by the law of sensibility, man as invincibly tends to render himself happy as the flame to mount, the stone to descend, or the water to find its level. His obstacle is his ignorance, which misleads him in the means, and deceives him in causes and effects. He will enlighten himself by experience; he will become right by dint of errors; he will grow wise and good because it is his interest so to be. Ideas being communicated through the nation, whole classes will gain instruction; science will become a vulgar possession, and all men will know what are the principles of individual happiness and of public prosperity. They will know the relations they bear to society, their duties and their rights; they will learn to guard against the illusions of the lust of gain; they will perceive that the science of morals is a physical science, composed, indeed, of elements complicated in their operation, but simple and invariable in their nature, since they are only the elements of the organization of man. They will see the propriety of being moderate and just, because in that is found the advantage and security of each; they will perceive that the wish to enjoy at the expense of another is a false calculation of ignorance, because it gives rise to reprisal, hatred, and vengeance, and that dishonesty is the never-failing offspring of folly. Individuals will feel that private happiness is allied to public good: The weak, that instead of dividing their interests, they ought to unite them, because equality constitutes their force: The rich, that the measure of enjoyment is bounded by the constitution of the organs, and that lassitude follows satiety: The poor, that the employment of time, and the peace of the heart, compose the highest happiness of man. And public opinion, reaching kings on their thrones, will force them to confine themselves to the limits of regular authority. Even chance itself, serving the cause of nations, will sometimes give them feeble chiefs, who, through weakness, will suffer them to become free; and sometimes enlightened chiefs, who, from a principle of virtue, will free them. And when nations, free and enlightened, shall become like great individuals, the whole species will have the same facilities as particular portions now have; the communication of knowledge will extend from one to another, and thus reach the whole. By the law of imitation, the example of one people will be followed by others, who will adopt its spirit and its laws. Even despots, perceiving that they can no longer maintain their authority without justice and beneficence, will soften their sway from necessity, from rivalship; and civilization will become universal. There will be established among the several nations an equilibrium of force, which, restraining them all within the bounds of the respect due to their reciprocal rights, shall put an end to the barbarous practice of war, and submit their disputes to civil arbitration.* The human race will become one great society, one individual family, governed by the same spirit, by common laws, and enjoying all the happiness of which their nature is susceptible. * What is a people? An individual of the society at large. What a war? A duel between two individual people. In what manner ought a society to act when two of its members fight? Interfere and reconcile, or repress them. In the days of the Abbe de Saint Pierre this was treated as a dream, but happily for the human race it begins to be realized. Doubtless this great work will be long accomplishing; because the same movement must be given to an immense body; the same leaven must assimilate an enormous mass of heterogeneous parts. But this movement shall be effected; its presages are already to be seen. Already the great society, assuming in its course the same characters as partial societies have done, is evidently tending to a like result. At first disconnected in all its parts, it saw its members for a long time without cohesion; and this general solitude of nations formed its first age of anarchy and childhood; divided afterwards by chance into irregular sections, called states and kingdoms, it has experienced the fatal effects of an extreme inequality of wealth and rank; and the aristocracy of great empires has formed its second age; then, these lordly states disputing for preeminence, have exhibited the period of the shock of factions. At present the contending parties, wearied with discord, feel the want of laws, and sigh for the age of order and of peace. Let but a virtuous chief arise! a just, a powerful people appear! and the earth will raise them to supreme power. The world is waiting for a legislative people; it wishes and demands it; and my heart attends the cry. Then turning towards the west: Yes, continued he, a hollow sound already strikes my ear; a cry of liberty, proceeding from far distant shores, resounds on the ancient continent. At this cry, a secret murmur against oppression is raised in a powerful nation; a salutary inquietude alarms her respecting her situation; she enquires what she is, and what she ought to be; while, surprised at her own weakness, she interrogates her rights, her resources, and what has been the conduct of her chiefs. Yet another day--a little more reflection--and an immense agitation will begin; a new-born age will open! an age of astonishment to vulgar minds, of terror to tyrants, of freedom to a great nation, and of hope to the human race! CHAPTER XIV. THE GREAT OBSTACLE TO IMPROVEMENT. The Genius ceased. But preoccupied with melancholy thoughts, my mind resisted persuasion; fearing, however, to shock him by my resistance, I remained silent. After a while, turning to me with a look which pierced my soul, he said: Thou art silent, and thy heart is agitated with thoughts which it dares not utter. At last, troubled and terrified, I replied: O Genius, pardon my weakness. Doubtless thy mouth can utter nothing but truth; but thy celestial intelligence can seize its rays, where my gross faculties can discern nothing but clouds. I confess it; conviction has not penetrated my soul, and I feared that my doubts might offend thee. And what is doubt, replied he, that it should be a crime? Can man feel otherwise than as he is affected? If a truth be palpable, and of importance in practice, let us pity him that misconceives it. His punishment will arise from his blindness. If it be uncertain or equivocal, how is he to find in it what it has not? To believe without evidence or proof, is an act of ignorance and folly. The credulous man loses himself in a labyrinth of contradictions; the man of sense examines and discusses, that he may be consistent in his opinions. The honest man will bear contradiction; because it gives rise to evidence. Violence is the argument of falsehood; and to impose a creed by authority is the act and indication of a tyrant. O Genius, said I, encouraged by these words, since my reason is free, I strive in vain to entertain the flattering hope with which you endeavor to console me. The sensible and virtuous soul is easily caught with dreams of happiness; but a cruel reality constantly awakens it to suffering and wretchedness. The more I meditate on the nature of man, the more I examine the present state of societies, the less possible it appears to realize a world of wisdom and felicity. I cast my eye over the whole of our hemisphere; I perceive in no place the germ, nor do I foresee the instinctive energy of a happy revolution. All Asia lies buried in profound darkness. The Chinese, governed by an insolent despotism,* by strokes of the bamboo and the cast of lots, restrained by an immutable code of gestures, and by the radical vices of an ill-constructed language,** appear to be in their abortive civilization nothing but a race of automatons. The Indian, borne down by prejudices, and enchained in the sacred fetters of his castes, vegetates in an incurable apathy. The Tartar, wandering or fixed, always ignorant and ferocious, lives in the savageness of his ancestors. The Arab, endowed with a happy genius, loses its force and the fruits of his virtue in the anarchy of his tribes and the jealousy of his families. The African, degraded from the rank of man, seems irrevocably doomed to servitude. In the North I see nothing but vilified serfs, herds of men with which landlords stock their estates. Ignorance, tyranny, and wretchedness have everywhere stupified the nations; and vicious habits, depraving the natural senses, have destroyed the very instinct of happiness and of truth. * The emperor of China calls himself the son of heaven; that is, of God: for in the opinion of the Chinese, the material of heaven, the arbiter of fatality, is the Deity himself. "The emperor only shows himself once in ten months, lest the people, accustomed to see him, might lose their respect; for he holds it as a maxim that power can only be supported by force, that the people have no idea of justice, and are not to be governed but by coercion." Narrative of two Mahometan travellers in 851 and 877, translated by the Abbe Renaudot in 1718. Notwithstanding what is asserted by the missionaries, this situation has undergone no change. The bamboo still reigns in China, and the son of heaven bastinades, for the most trivial fault, the Mandarin, who in his turn bastinades the people. The Jesuits may tell us that this is the best governed country in the world, and its inhabitants the happiest of men: but a single letter from Amyot has convinced me that China is a truly Turkish government, and the account of Sonnerat confirms it. See Vol. II. of Voyage aux Indes, in 4to. ** As long as the Chinese shall in writing make use of their present characters, they can be expected to make no progress in civilization. The necessary introductory step must be the giving them an alphabet like our own, or of substituting in the room of their language that of the Tartars. The improvement made in the latter by M. de Lengles, is calculated to introduce this change. See the Mantchou alphabet, the production of a mind truly learned in the formation of language. In some parts of Europe, indeed, reason has begun to dawn, but even there, do nations partake of the knowledge of individuals? Are the talents and genius of governors turned to the benefit of the people? And those nations which call themselves polished, are they not the same that for the last three centuries have filled the earth with their injustice? Are they not those who, under the pretext of commerce, have desolated India, depopulated a new continent, and, at present, subject Africa to the most barbarous slavery? Can liberty be born from the bosom of despots? and shall justice be rendered by the hands of piracy and avarice? O Genius, I have seen the civilized countries; and the mockery of their wisdom has vanished before my sight. I saw wealth accumulated in the hands of a few, and the multitude poor and destitute. I have seen all rights, all powers concentered in certain classes, and the mass of the people passive and dependent. I have seen families of princes, but no families of the nation. I have seen government interests, but no public interests or spirit. I have seen that all the science of government was to oppress prudently; and the refined servitude of polished nations appeared to me only the more irremediable. One obstacle above all has profoundly struck my mind. On looking over the world, I have seen it divided into twenty different systems of religion. Every nation has received, or formed, opposite opinions; and every one ascribing to itself the exclusive possession of the truth, must believe the other to be wrong. Now if, as must be the fact in this discordance of opinion, the greater part are in error, and are honest in it, then it follows that our mind embraces falsehood as it does truth; and if so, how is it to be enlightened? When prejudice has once seized the mind, how is it to be dissipated? How shall we remove the bandage from our eyes, when the first article in every creed, the first dogma in all religion, is the absolute proscription of doubt, the interdiction of examination, and the rejection of our own judgment? How is truth to make herself known?--If she resorts to arguments and proofs, the timid man stifles the voice of his own conscience; if she invokes the authority of celestial powers, he opposes it with another authority of the same origin, with which he is preoccupied; and he treats all innovation as blasphemy. Thus man in his blindness, has riveted his own chains, and surrendered himself forever, without defence, to the sport of his ignorance and his passions. To dissolve such fatal chains, a miraculous concurrence of happy events would be necessary. A whole nation, cured of the delirium of superstition, must be inaccessible to the impulse of fanaticism. Freed from the yoke of false doctrine, a whole people must impose upon itself that of true morality and reason. This people should be courageous and prudent, wise and docile. Each individual, knowing his rights, should not transgress them. The poor should know how to resist seduction, and the rich the allurements of avarice. There should be found leaders disinterested and just, and their tyrants should be seized with a spirit of madness and folly. This people, recovering its rights, should feel its inability to exercise them in person, and should name its representatives. Creator of its magistrates, it should know at once to respect them and to judge them. In the sudden reform of a whole nation, accustomed to live by abuses, each individual displaced should bear with patience his privations, and submit to a change of habits. This nation should have the courage to conquer its liberty; the power to defend it, the wisdom to establish it, and the generosity to extend it to others. And can we ever expect the union of so many circumstances? But suppose that chance in its infinite combinations should produce them, shall I see those fortunate days. Will not my ashes long ere then be mouldering in the tomb? Here, sunk in sorrow, my oppressed heart no longer found utterance. The Genius answered not, but I heard him whisper to himself: Let us revive the hope of this man; for if he who loves his fellow creatures be suffered to despair, what will become of nations? The past is perhaps too discouraging; I must anticipate futurity, and disclose to the eye of virtue the astonishing age that is ready to begin; that, on viewing the object she desires, she may be animated with new ardor, and redouble her efforts to attain it. CHAPTER XV. THE NEW AGE. Scarcely had he finished these words, when a great tumult arose in the west; and turning to that quarter, I perceived, at the extremity of the Mediterranean, in one of the nations of Europe, a prodigious movement--such as when a violent sedition arises in a vast city--a numberless people, rushing in all directions, pour through the streets and fluctuate like waves in the public places. My ear, struck with the cries which resounded to the heavens, distinguished these words: What is this new prodigy? What cruel and mysterious scourge is this? We are a numerous people and we want hands! We have an excellent soil, and we are in want of subsistence? We are active and laborious, and we live in indigence! We pay enormous tributes, and we are told they are not sufficient! We are at peace without, and our persons and property are not safe within. Who, then, is the secret enemy that devours us? Some voices from the midst of the multitude replied: Raise a discriminating standard; and let all those who maintain and nourish mankind by useful labors gather round it; and you will discover the enemy that preys upon you. The standard being raised, this nation divided itself at once into two bodies of unequal magnitude and contrasted appearance. The one, innumerable, and almost total, exhibited in the poverty of its clothing, in its emaciated appearance and sun-burnt faces, the marks of misery and labor; the other, a little group, an insignificant faction, presented in its rich attire embroidered with gold and silver, and in its sleek and ruddy faces, the signs of leisure and abundance. Considering these men more attentively, I found that the great body was composed of farmers, artificers, merchants, all professions useful to society; and that the little group was made up of priests of every order, of financiers, of nobles, of men in livery, of commanders of armies; in a word, of the civil, military, and religious agents of government. These two bodies being assembled face to face, and regarding each other with astonishment, I saw indignation and rage arising in one side, and a sort of panic in the other. And the large body said to the little one: Why are you separated from us? Are you not of our number? No, replied the group; you are the people; we are a privileged class, who have our laws, customs, and rights, peculiar to ourselves. PEOPLE.--And what labor do you perform in our society? PRIVILEGED CLASS.--None; we are not made to work. PEOPLE.--How, then, have you acquired these riches? PRIVILEGED CLASS.--By taking the pains to govern you. PEOPLE.--What! is this what you call governing? We toil and you enjoy! we produce and you dissipate! Wealth proceeds from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men! class who are not the people; form a nation apart, and govern yourselves.* * This dialogue between the people and the indolent classes, is applicable to every society; it contains the seeds of all the political vices and disorders that prevail, and which may thus be defined: Men who do nothing, and who devour the substance of others; and men who arrogate to themselves particular rights and exclusive privileges of wealth and indolence. Compare the Mamlouks of Egypt, the nobility of Europe, the Nairs of India, the Emirs of Arabia, the patricians of Rome, the Christian clergy, the Imans, the Bramins, the Bonzes, the Lamas, etc., etc., and you will find in all the same characteristic feature:--Men living in idleness at the expense of those who labor. Then the little group, deliberating on this new state of things, some of the most honorable among them said: We must join the people and partake of their labors and burdens, for they are men like us, and our riches come from them; but others arrogantly exclaimed: It would be a shame, an infamy, for us to mingle with the crowd; they are born to serve us. Are we not men of another race--the noble and pure descendants of the conquerors of this empire? This multitude must be reminded of our rights and its own origin. THE NOBLES.--People! know you not that our ancestors conquered this land, and that your race was spared only on condition of serving us? This is our social compact! this the government constituted by custom and prescribed by time. PEOPLE.--O conquerors, pure of blood! show us your genealogies! we shall then see if what in an individual is robbery and plunder, can be virtuous in a nation. And forthwith, voices were heard in every quarter calling out the nobles by their names; and relating their origin and parentage, they told how the grandfather, great-grandfather, or even father, born traders and mechanics, after acquiring wealth in every way, had purchased their nobility for money: so that but very few families were really of the original stock. See, said these voices, see these purse-proud commoners who deny their parents! see these plebian recruits who look upon themselves as illustrious veterans! and peals of laughter were heard. And the civil governors said: these people are mild, and naturally servile; speak to them of the king and of the law, and they will return to their duty. People! the king wills, the sovereign ordains! PEOPLE.--The king can will nothing but the good of the people; the sovereign can only ordain according to law. CIVIL GOVERNORS.--The law commands you to be submissive. PEOPLE.--The law is the general will; and we will a new order of things. CIVIL GOVERNORS.--You are then a rebel people. PEOPLE.--A nation cannot revolt; tyrants only are rebels. CIVIL GOVERNORS.--The king is on our side; he commands you to submit. PEOPLE.--Kings are inseparable from their nations. Our king cannot be with you; you possess only his phantom. And the military governors came forward. The people are timorous, said they; we must threaten them; they will submit only to force. Soldiers, chastise this insolent multitude. PEOPLE.--Soldiers, you are of our blood! Will you strike your brothers, your relatives? If the people perish who will nourish the army? And the soldiers, grounding their arms, said to the chiefs: We are likewise the people; show us the enemy! Then the ecclesiastical governors said: There is but one resource left. The people are superstitious; we must frighten them with the names of God and religion. Our dear brethren! our children! God has ordained us to govern you. PEOPLE.--Show us your credentials from God! PRIESTS.--You must have faith; reason leads astray. PEOPLE.--Do you govern without reason? PRIESTS.--God commands peace! Religion prescribes obedience. PEOPLE.--Peace supposes justice. Obedience implies conviction of a duty. PRIESTS.--Suffering is the business of this world. PEOPLE.--Show us the example. PRIESTS.--Would you live without gods or kings? PEOPLE.--We would live without oppressors. PRIESTS.--You must have mediators, intercessors. PEOPLE.--Mediators with God and with the king! courtiers and priests, your services are too expensive: we will henceforth manage our own affairs. And the little group said: We are lost! the multitude are enlightened. And the people answered: You are safe; since we are enlightened we will commit no violence; we only claim our rights. We feel resentments, but we will forget them. We were slaves, we might command; but we only wish to be free, and liberty is but justice. CHAPTER XVI. A FREE AND LEGISLATIVE PEOPLE. Considering that all public power was now suspended, and that the habitual restraint of the people had suddenly ceased, I shuddered with the apprehension that they would fall into the dissolution of anarchy. But, taking their affairs into immediate deliberation, they said: It is not enough that we have freed ourselves from tyrants and parasites; we must prevent their return. We are men, and experience has abundantly taught us that every man is fond of power, and wishes to enjoy it at the expense of others. It is necessary, then, to guard against a propensity which is the source of discord; we must establish certain rules of duty and of right. But the knowledge of our rights, and the estimation of our duties, are so abstract and difficult as to require all the time and all the faculties of a man. Occupied in our own affairs, we have not leisure for these studies; nor can we exercise these functions in our own persons. Let us choose, then, among ourselves, such persons as are capable of this employment. To them we will delegate our powers to institute our government and laws. They shall be the representatives of our wills and of our interests. And in order to attain the fairest representation possible of our wills and our interests, let it be numerous, and composed of men resembling ourselves. Having made the election of a numerous body of delegates, the people thus addressed them: We have hitherto lived in a society formed by chance, without fixed agreements, without free conventions, without a stipulation of rights, without reciprocal engagements,--and a multitude of disorders and evils have arisen from this precarious state. We are now determined on forming a regular compact; and we have chosen you to adjust the articles. Examine, then, with care what ought to be its basis and its conditions; consider what is the end and the principles of every association; recognize the rights which every member brings, the powers which he delegates, and those which he reserves to himself. Point out to us the rules of conduct--the basis of just and equitable laws. Prepare for us a new system of government; for we realize that the one which has hitherto guided us is corrupt. Our fathers have wandered in the paths of ignorance, and habit has taught us to follow in their footsteps. Everything has been done by fraud, violence, and delusion; and the true laws of morality and reason are still obscure. Clear up, then, their chaos; trace out their connection; publish their code, and we will adopt it. And the people raised a large throne, in the form of a pyramid, and seating on it the men they had chosen, said to them: We raise you to-day above us, that you may better discover the whole of our relations, and be above the reach of our passions. But remember that you are our fellow-citizens; that the power we confer on you is our own; that we deposit it with you, but not as a property or a heritage; that you must be the first to obey the laws you make; that to-morrow you redescend among us, and that you will have acquired no other right but that of our esteem and gratitude. And consider what a tribute of glory the world, which reveres so many apostles of error, will bestow on the first assembly of rational men, who shall have declared the unchangeable principles of justice, and consecrated, in the face of tyrants, the rights of nations. CHAPTER XVII. UNIVERSAL BASIS OF ALL RIGHT AND ALL LAW. The men chosen by the people to investigate the true principles of morals and of reason then proceeded in the sacred object of their mission; and, after a long examination, having discovered a fundamental and universal principle, a legislator arose and said to the people: Here is the primordial basis, the physical origin of all justice and of all right. Whatever be the active power, the moving cause, that governs the universe, since it has given to all men the same organs, the same sensations, and the same wants, it has thereby declared that it has given to all the same right to the use of its treasures, and that all men are equal in the order of nature. And, since this power has given to each man the necessary means of preserving his own existence, it is evident that it has constituted them all independent one of another; that it has created them free; that no one is subject to another; that each one is absolute proprietor of his own person. Equality and liberty are, therefore, two essential attributes of man, two laws of the Divinity, constitutional and unchangeable, like the physical properties of matter. Now, every individual being absolute master of his own person, it follows that a full and free consent is a condition indispensable to all contracts and all engagements. Again, since each individual is equal to another, it follows that the balance of what is received and of what is given, should be strictly in equilibrium; so that the idea of justice, of equity, necessarily imports that of equality.* * The etymology of the words themselves trace out to us this connection: equilibrium, equalitas, equitas, are all of one family, and the physical idea of equality, in the scales of a balance, is the source and type of all the rest. Equality and liberty are therefore the physical and unalterable basis of every union of men in society, and of course the necessary and generating principle of every law and of every system of regular government.* * In the Declaration of Rights, there is an inversion of ideas in the first article, liberty being placed before equality, from which it in reality springs. This defect is not to be wondered at; the science of the rights of man is a new science: it was invented yesterday by the Americans, to-day the French are perfecting it, but there yet remains a great deal to be done. In the ideas that constitute it there is a genealogical order which, from us basis, physical equality, to the minutest and most remote branches of government, ought to proceed in an uninterrupted series of inferences. A disregard of this basis has introduced in your nation, and in every other, those disorders which have finally roused you. It is by returning to this rule that you may reform them, and reorganize a happy order of society. But observe, this reorganization will occasion a violent shock in your habits, your fortunes, and your prejudices. Vicious contracts and abusive claims must be dissolved, unjust distinctions and ill founded property renounced; you must indeed recur for a moment to a state of nature. Consider whether you can consent to so many sacrifices. Then, reflecting on the cupidity inherent in the heart of man, I thought that this people would renounce all ideas of amelioration. But, in a moment, a great number of men, advancing toward the pyramid, made a solemn abjuration of all their distinctions and all their riches. Establish for us, said they, the laws of equality and liberty; we will possess nothing in future but on the title of justice. Equality, liberty, justice,--these shall be our code, and shall be written on our standards. And the people immediately raised a great standard, inscribed with these three words, in three different colors. They displayed it over the pyramid of the legislators, and for the first time the flag of universal justice floated on the face of the earth. And the people raised before the pyramid a new altar, on which they placed a golden balance, a sword, and a book with this inscription: TO EQUAL LAW, WHICH JUDGES AND PROTECTS. And having surrounded the pyramid and the altar with a vast amphitheatre, all the people took their seats to hear the publication of the law. And millions of men, raising at once their hands to heaven, took the solemn oath to live equal, free, and just; to respect their reciprocal properties and rights; to obey the law and its regularly chosen representatives. A spectacle so impressive and sublime, so replete with generous emotions, moved me to tears; and addressing myself to the Genius, I exclaimed: Let me now live, for in future I have everything to hope. CHAPTER XVIII. CONSTERNATION AND CONSPIRACY OF TYRANTS. But scarcely had the solemn voice of liberty and equality resounded through the earth, when a movement of confusion, of astonishment, arose in different nations. On the one hand, the people, warmed with desire, but wavering between hope and fear, between the sentiment of right and the habit of obedience, began to be in motion. The kings, on the other hand, suddenly awakened from the sleep of indolence and despotism, were alarmed for the safety of their thrones; while, on all sides, those clans of civil and religious tyrants, who deceive kings and oppress the people, were seized with rage and consternation; and, concerting their perfidious plans, they said: Woe to us, if this fatal cry of liberty comes to the ears of the multitude! Woe to us, if this pernicious spirit of justice be propagated! And, pointing to the floating banner, they continued: Consider what a swarm of evils are included in these three words! If all men are equal, where is our exclusive right to honors and to power? If all men are to be free, what becomes of our slaves, our vassals, our property? If all are equal in the civil state, where is our prerogative of birth, of inheritance? and what becomes of nobility? If they are all equal in the sight of God, what need of mediators?--where is the priesthood? Let us hasten, then, to destroy a germ so prolific, and so contagious. We must employ all our cunning against this innovation. We must frighten the kings, that they may join us in the cause. We must divide the people by national jealousies, and occupy them with commotions, wars, and conquests. They must be alarmed at the power of this free nation. Let us form a league against the common enemy, demolish that sacrilegious standard, overturn that throne of rebellion, and stifle in its birth the flame of revolution. And, indeed, the civil and religious tyrants of nations formed a general combination; and, multiplying their followers by force and seduction, they marched in hostile array against the free nation; and, surrounding the altar and the pyramid of natural law, they demanded with loud cries: What is this new and heretical doctrine? what this impious altar, this sacrilegious worship? True believers and loyal subjects! can you suppose that truth has been first discovered to-day, and that hitherto you have been walking in error? that those men, more fortunate than you, have the sole privilege of wisdom? And you, rebel and misguided nation, perceive you not that your new leaders are misleading you? that they destroy the principles of your faith, and overturn the religion of your ancestors? Ah, tremble! lest the wrath of heaven should kindle against you; and hasten by speedy repentance to retrieve your error. But, inaccessible to seduction as well as to fear, the free nation kept silence, and rising universally in arms, assumed an imposing attitude. And the legislator said to the chiefs of nations: If while we walked with a bandage on our eyes the light guided our steps, why, since we are no longer blindfold, should it fly from our search? If guides, who teach mankind to see for themselves, mislead and deceive them, what can be expected from those who profess to keep them in darkness? But hark, ye leaders of nations! If you possess the truth, show it to us, and we will receive it with gratitude, for we seek it with ardor, and have a great interest in finding it. We are men, and liable to be deceived; but you are also men, and equally fallible. Aid us then in this labyrinth, where the human race has wandered for so many ages; help us to dissipate the illusion of so many prejudices and vicious habits. Amid the shock of so many opinions which dispute for our acceptance, assist us in discovering the proper and distinctive character of truth. Let us this day terminate the long combat with error. Let us establish between it and truth a solemn contest, to which we will invite the opinions of men of all nations. Let us convoke a general assembly of the nations. Let them be judges in their own cause; and in the debate of all systems, let no champion, no argument, be wanting, either on the side of prejudice or of reason; and let the sentiment of a general and common mass of evidence give birth to a universal concord of opinions and of hearts. CHAPTER XIX. GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE NATIONS. Thus spoke the legislator; and the multitude, seized with those emotions which a reasonable proposition always inspires, expressed its applause; while the tyrants, left without support, were overwhelmed with confusion. A scene of a new and astonishing nature then opened to my view. All that the earth contains of people and of nations; men of every race and of every region, converging from their various climates, seemed to assemble in one allotted place; where, forming an immense congress, distinguished in groups by the vast variety of their dresses, features, and complexion, the numberless multitude presented a most unusual and affecting sight. On one side I saw the European, with his short close coat, pointed triangular hat, smooth chin, and powdered hair; on the other side the Asiatic, with a flowing robe, long beard, shaved head, and round turban. Here stood the nations of Africa, with their ebony skins, their woolly hair, their body girt with white and blue tissues of bark, adorned with bracelets and necklaces of coral, shells, and glass; there the tribes of the north, enveloped in their leathern bags; the Laplander, with his pointed bonnet and his snow-shoes; the Samoyede, with his feverish body and strong odor; the Tongouse, with his horned cap, and carrying his idols pendant from his neck; the Yakoute, with his freckled face; the Kalmuc, with his flat nose and little retorted eyes. Farther distant were the Chinese, attired in silk, with their hair hanging in tresses; the Japanese, of mingled race; the Malays, with wide-spreading ears, rings in their noses, and palm-leaf hats of vast circumference;* and the tattooed races of the isles of the southern ocean and of the continent of the antipodes.** The view of so many varieties of the same species, of so many extravagant inventions of the same understanding, and of so many modifications of the same organization, affected me with a thousand feelings and a thousand thoughts.*** I contemplated with astonishment this gradation of color, which, passing from a bright carnation to a light brown, a deeper brown, dusky, bronze, olive, leaden, copper, ends in the black of ebony and of jet. And finding the Cassimerian, with his rosy cheek, next to the sun-burnt Hindoo, and the Georgian by the side of the Tartar, I reflected on the effects of climate hot or cold, of soil high or low, marshy or dry, open or shaded. I compared the dwarf of the pole with the giant of the temperate zones, the slender body of the Arab with the ample chest of the Hollander; the squat figure of the Samoyede with the elegant form of the Greek and the Sclavonian; the greasy black wool of the Negro with the bright silken locks of the Dane; the broad face of the Kalmuc, his little angular eyes and flattened nose, with the oval prominent visage, large blue eyes, and aquiline nose of the Circassian and Abazan. I contrasted the brilliant calicoes of the Indian, the well-wrought stuffs of the European, the rich furs of the Siberian, with the tissues of bark, of osiers, leaves and feathers of savage nations; and the blue figures of serpents, flowers, and stars, with which they painted their bodies. Sometimes the variegated appearance of this multitude reminded me of the enamelled meadows of the Nile and the Euphrates, when, after rains or inundations, millions of flowers are rising on every side. Sometimes their murmurs and their motions called to mind the numberless swarms of locusts which, issuing from the desert, cover in the spring the plains of Hauran. * This species of the palm-tree is called Latanier. Its leaf, similar to a fan-mount, grows upon a stalk issuing directly from the earth. A specimen may be seen in the botanic garden. ** The country of the Papons of New Guinea. *** A hall of costumes in one of the galleries of the Louvre would, in every point of view, be an interesting establishment. It would furnish an admirable treat to the curiosity of a great number of persons, excellent models to the artist, and useful subjects of meditation to the physician, the philosopher and the legislator. Picture to yourself a collection of the various faces and figures of every country and nation, exhibiting accurately, color, features and form; what a field for investigation and enquiry as to the influence of climate, customs, food, etc. It might truly be called the science of man! Buffon has attempted a chapter of this nature, but it only serves to exhibit more strikingly our actual ignorance. Such a collection is said to have been begun at St. Petersburg, but it is also said at the same time to be as imperfect as the vocabulary of the three hundred languages. The enterprise would be worthy of the French nation. At the sight of so many rational beings, considering on the one hand the immensity of thoughts and sensations assembled in this place, and on the other hand, reflecting on the opposition of so many opinions, and the shock of so many passions of men so capricious, I struggled between astonishment, admiration, and secret dread--when the legislator commanded silence, and attracted all my attention. Inhabitants of earth! a free and powerful nation addresses you with words of justice and peace, and she offers you the sure pledges of her intentions in her own conviction and experience. Long afflicted with the same evils as yourselves, we sought for their source, and found them all derived from violence and injustice, erected into law by the inexperience of past ages, and maintained by the prejudices of the present. Then abolishing our artificial and arbitrary institutions, and recurring to the origin of all right and reason, we have found that there existed in the very order of nature and in the physical constitution of man, eternal and immutable laws, which only waited his observance to render him happy. O men! cast your eyes on the heavens that give you light, and on the earth that gives you bread! Since they offer the same bounties to you all--since from the power that gives them motion you have all received the same life, the same organs, have you not likewise all received the same right to enjoy its benefits? Has it not hereby declared you all equal and free? What mortal shall dare refuse to his fellow that which nature gives him? O nations! let us banish all tyranny and all discord; let us form but one society, one great family; and, since human nature has but one constitution, let there exist in future but one law, that of nature--but one code, that of reason--but one throne, that of justice--but one altar, that of union. He ceased; and an immense acclamation resounded to the skies. Ten thousand benedictions announced the transports of the multitude; and they made the earth re-echo JUSTICE, EQUALITY and UNION. But different emotions soon succeeded; soon the doctors and the chiefs of nations exciting a spirit of dispute, there was heard a sullen murmur, which growing louder, and spreading from group to group, became a vast disorder; and each nation setting up exclusive pretensions, claimed a preference for its own code and opinion. You are in error, said the parties, pointing one to the other. We alone are in possession of reason and truth. We alone have the true law, the real rule of right and justice, the only means of happiness and perfection. All other men are either blind or rebellious. And great agitation prevailed. Then the legislator, after enforcing silence, loudly exclaimed: What, O people! is this passionate emotion? Whither will this quarrel conduct you? What can you expect from this dissension? The earth has been for ages a field of disputation, and you have shed torrents of blood in your controversies. What have you gained by so many battles and tears? When the strong has subjected the weak to his opinion, has he thereby aided the cause of truth? O nations! take counsel of your own wisdom. When among yourselves disputes arise between families and individuals, how do you reconcile them? Do you not give them arbitrators? Yes, cried the whole multitude. Do so then to the authors of your present dissensions. Order those who call themselves your instructors, and who force their creeds upon you, to discuss before you their reasons. Since they appeal to your interests, inform yourselves how they support them. And you, chiefs and governors of the people! before dragging the masses into the quarrels resulting from your diverse opinions, let the reasons for and against your views be given. Let us establish one solemn controversy, one public scrutiny of truth--not before the tribunal of a corruptible individual, or of a prejudiced party, but in the grand forum of mankind--guarded by all their information and all their interests. Let the natural sense of the whole human race be our arbiter and judge. CHAPTER XX. THE SEARCH OF TRUTH. The people expressed their applause, and the legislator continued: To proceed with order, and avoid all confusion, let a spacious semicircle be left vacant in front of the altar of peace and union; let each system of religion, and each particular sect, erect its proper distinctive standard on the line of this semicircle; let its chiefs and doctors place themselves around the standard, and their followers form a column behind them. The semicircle being traced, and the order published, there instantly rose an innumerable multitude of standards, of all colors and of every form, like what we see in a great commercial port, when, on a day of rejoicing, a thousand different flags and streamers are floating from a forest of masts. At the sight of this prodigious diversity, I turned towards the Genius and said: I thought that the earth was divided only into eight or ten systems of faith, and I then despaired of a reconciliation; I now behold thousands of different sects, and how can I hope for concord? But these, replied the Genius, are not all; and yet they will be intolerant! Then, as the groups advanced to take their stations, he pointed out to me their distinctive marks, and thus began to explain their characters: That first group, said he, with a green banner bearing a crescent, a bandage, and a sabre, are the followers of the Arabian prophet. To say there is a God, without knowing what he is; to believe the words of a man, without understanding his language; to go into the desert to pray to God, who is everywhere; to wash the hands with water, and not abstain from blood; to fast all day, and eat all night; to give alms of their own goods, and to plunder those of others; such are the means of perfection instituted by Mahomet--such are the symbols of his followers; and whoever does not bear them is a reprobate, stricken with anathema, and devoted to the sword. A God of clemency, the author of life, has instituted these laws of oppression and murder: he made them for all the world, but has revealed them only to one man; he established them from all eternity, though he made them known but yesterday. These laws are abundantly sufficient for all purposes, and yet a volume is added to them. This volume was to diffuse light, to exhibit evidence, to lead men to perfection and happiness; and yet every page was so full of obscurities, ambiguities, and contradictions, that commentaries and explanations became necessary, even in the life-time of its apostle. Its interpreters, differing in opinion, divided into opposite and hostile sects. One maintains that Ali is the true successor; the other contends for Omar and Aboubekre. This denies the eternity of the Koran; that the necessity of ablutions and prayers. The Carmite forbids pilgrimages, and allows the use of wine; the Hakemite preaches the transmigration of souls. Thus they make up the number of seventy-two sects, whose banners are before you.* In this contestation, every one attributing the evidence of truth exclusively to himself, and taxing all others with heresy and rebellion, turns against them its sanguinary zeal. And their religion, which celebrates a mild and merciful God, the common father of all men,--changed to a torch of discord, a signal for war and murder, has not ceased for twelve hundred years to deluge the earth in blood, and to ravage and desolate the ancient hemisphere from centre to circumference.** * The Mussulmen enumerate in common seventy-two sects, but I read, while I resided among them, a work which gave an account of more than eighty,--all equally wise and important. ** Read the history of Islamism by its own writers, and you will be convinced that one of the principal causes of the wars which have desolated Asia and Africa, since the days of Mahomet, has been the apostolical fanaticism of its doctrine. Caesar has been supposed to have destroyed three millions of men: it would be interesting to make a similar calculation respecting every founder of a religious system. Those men, distinguished by their enormous white turbans, their broad sleeves, and their long rosaries, are the Imans, the Mollas, and the Muftis; and near them are the Dervishes with pointed bonnets, and the Santons with dishevelled hair. Behold with what vehemence they recite their professions of faith! They are now beginning a dispute about the greater and lesser impurities--about the matter and the manner of ablutions,--about the attributes of God and his perfections--about the Chaitan, and the good and wicked angels,--about death, the resurrection, the interrogatory in the tomb, the judgment, the passage of the narrow bridge not broader than a hair, the balance of works, the pains of hell, and the joys of paradise. Next to these, that second more numerous group, with white banners intersected with crosses, are the followers of Jesus. Acknowledging the same God with the Mussulmans, founding their belief on the same books, admitting, like them, a first man who lost the human race by eating an apple, they hold them, however, in a holy abhorrence; and, out of pure piety, they call each other impious blasphemers. The great point of their dissension consists in this, that after admitting a God one and indivisible the Christian divides him into three persons, each of which he believes to be a complete and entire God, without ceasing to constitute an identical whole, by the indivisibility of the three. And he adds, that this being, who fills the universe, has reduced himself to the body of a man; and has assumed material, perishable, and limited organs, without ceasing to be immaterial, infinite, and eternal. The Mussulman who does not comprehend these mysteries, rejects them as follies, and the visions of a distempered brain; though he conceives perfectly well the eternity of the Koran, and the mission of the prophet: hence their implacable hatreds. Again, the Christians, divided among themselves on many points, have formed parties not less violent than the Mussulmans; and their quarrels are so much the more obstinate, as the objects of them are inaccessible to the senses and incapable of demonstration: their opinions, therefore, have no other basis but the will and caprice of the parties. Thus, while they agree that God is a being incomprehensible and unknown, they dispute, nevertheless, about his essence, his mode of acting, and his attributes. While they agree that his pretended transformation into man is an enigma above the human understanding, they dispute on the junction or distinction of his two wills and his two natures, on his change of substance, on the real or fictitious presence, on the mode of incarnation, etc. Hence those innumerable sects, of which two or three hundred have already perished, and three or four hundred others, which still subsist, display those numberless banners which here distract your sight. The first in order, surrounded by a group in varied and fantastic dress, that confused mixture of violet, red, white, black and speckled garments--with heads shaved, or with tonsures, or with short hair--with red hats, square bonnets, pointed mitres, or long beards, is the standard of the Roman pontiff, who, uniting the civil government to the priesthood, has erected the supremacy of his city into a point of religion, and made of his pride an article of faith. On his right you see the Greek pontiff, who, proud of the rivalship of his metropolis, sets up equal pretensions, and supports them against the Western church by the priority of that of the East. On the left are the standards of two recent chiefs,* who, shaking off a yoke that had become tyrannical, have raised altar against altar in their reform, and wrested half of Europe from the pope. Behind these are the subaltern sects, subdivided from the principal divisions, the Nestorians, the Eutycheans, the Jacobites, the Iconoclasts, the Anabaptists, the Presbyterians, the Wicliffites, the Osiandrians, the Manicheans, the Pietists, the Adamites, the Contemplatives, the Quakers, the Weepers, and a hundred others,** all of distinct parties, persecuting when strong, tolerant when weak, hating each other in the name of a God of peace, forming each an exclusive heaven in a religion of universal charity, dooming each other to pains without end in a future state, and realizing in this world the imaginary hell of the other. * Luther and Calvin. ** Consult upon this subject Dictionnaire des Herseies par l'Abbe Pluquet, in two volumes 8vo.: a work admirably calculated to inspire the mind with philosophy, in the sense that the Lacedemonians taught the children temperance by showing to them the drunken Helots. After this group, observing a lonely standard of the color of hyacinth, round which were assembled men clad in all the different dresses of Europe and Asia: At least, said I, to the Genius, we shall find unanimity here. Yes, said he, at first sight and by a momentary accident. Dost thou not know that system of worship? Then, perceiving in Hebrew letters the monogram of the name of God, and the palms which the Rabbins held in their hands: True, said I, these are the children of Moses, dispersed even to this day, abhorring every nation, and abhorred and persecuted by all. Yes, he replied, and for this reason, that, having neither the time nor liberty to dispute, they have the appearance of unanimity. But no sooner will they come together, compare their principles, and reason on their opinions, than they will separate as formerly, at least into two principal sects;* one of which, taking advantage of the silence of their legislator, and adhering to the literal sense of his books, will deny everything that is not clearly expressed therein; and on this principle will reject as profane inventions, the immortality of the soul, its transmigration to places of pain or pleasure, its resurrection, the final judgment, the good and bad angels, the revolt of the evil Genius, and all the poetical belief of a world to come. And this highly-favored people, whose perfection consists in a slight mutilation of their persons,--this atom of a people, which forms but a small wave in the ocean of mankind, and which insists that God has made nothing but for them, will by its schism reduce to one-half, its present trifling weight in the scale of the universe. * The Sadducees and Pharisees. He then showed me a neighboring group, composed of men dressed in white robes, wearing a veil over their mouths, and ranged around a banner of the color of the morning sky, on which was painted a globe cleft in two hemispheres, black and white: The same thing will happen, said he, to these children of Zoroaster,* the obscure remnant of a people once so powerful. At present, persecuted like the Jews, and dispersed among all nations, they receive without discussion the precepts of the representative of their prophet. But as soon as the Mobed and the Destours** shall assemble, they will renew the controversy about the good and the bad principle; on the combats of Ormuzd, God of light, and Ahrimanes, God of darkness; on the direct and allegorical sense; on the good and evil Genii; on the worship of fire and the elements; on impurities and ablutions; on the resurrection of the soul and body, or only of the soul;*** on the renovation of the present world, and on that which is to take its place. And the Parses will divide into sects, so much the more numerous, as their families will have contracted, during their dispersion, the manners and opinions of different nations. * They are the Parses, better known by the opprobrious name of Gaures or Guebres, another word for infidels. They are in Asia what the Jews are in Europe. The name of their pope or high priest is Mobed. ** That is to say, their priests. See, respecting the rites of this religion, Henry Lord Hyde, and the Zendavesta. Their costume is a robe with a belt of four knots, and a veil over their mouth for fear of polluting the fire with their breath. *** The Zoroastrians are divided between two opinions; one party believing that both soul and body will rise, the other that it will be the soul only. The Christians and Mahometans have embraced the most solid of the two. Next to these, remark those banners of an azure ground, painted with monstrous figures of human bodies, double, triple, and quadruple, with heads of lions, boars, and elephants, and tails of fishes and tortoises; these are the ensigns of the sects of India, who find their gods in various animals, and the souls of their fathers in reptiles and insects. These men support hospitals for hawks, serpents, and rats, and they abhor their fellow creatures! They purify themselves with the dung and urine of cows, and think themselves defiled by the touch of a man! They wear a net over the mouth, lest, in a fly, they should swallow a soul in a state of penance,* and they can see a Pariah** perish with hunger! They acknowledge the same gods, but they separate into hostile bands. * According to the system of the Metempsychosis, a soul, to undergo purification, passes into the body of some insect or animal. It is of importance not to disturb this penance, as the work must in that case begin afresh. ** This is the name of a cast or tribe reputed unclean, because they eat of what has enjoyed life. The first standard, retired from the rest, bearing a figure with four heads, is that of Brama, who, though the creator of the universe, is without temples or followers; but, reduced to serve as a pedestal to the Lingam,* he contents himself with a little water which the Bramin throws every morning on his shoulder, reciting meanwhile an idle canticle in his praise. * See Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes, vol. 1. The second, bearing a kite with a scarlet body and a white head, is that of Vichenou, who, though preserver of the world, has passed part of his life in wicked actions. You sometimes see him under the hideous form of a boar or a lion, tearing human entrails, or under that of a horse,* shortly to come armed with a sword to destroy the human race, blot out the stars, annihilate the planets, shake the earth, and force the great serpent to vomit a fire which shall consume the spheres. * These are the incarnations of Vichenou, or metamorphoses of the sun. He is to come at the end of the world, that is, at the expiration of the great period, in the form of a horse, like the four horses of the Apocalypse. The third is that of Chiven, God of destruction and desolation, who has, however, for his emblem the symbol of generation. He is the most wicked of the three, and he has the most followers. These men, proud of his character, express in their devotions to him their contempt for the other gods,* his equals and brothers; and, in imitation of his inconsistencies, while they profess great modesty and chastity, they publicly crown with flowers, and sprinkle with milk and honey, the obscene image of the Lingam. * When a sectary of Chiven hears the name of Vichenou pronounced, he stops his ears, runs, and purifies himself. In the rear of these, approach the smaller standards of a multitude of gods--male, female, and hermaphrodite. These are friends and relations of the principal gods, who have passed their lives in wars among themselves, and their followers imitate them. These gods have need of nothing, and they are constantly receiving presents; they are omnipotent and omnipresent, and a priest, by muttering a few words, shuts them up in an idol or a pitcher, to sell their favors for his own benefit. Beyond these, that cloud of standards, which, on a yellow ground, common to them all, bear various emblems, are those of the same god, who reins under different names in the nations of the East. The Chinese adores him in Fot,* the Japanese in Budso, the Ceylonese in Bedhou, the people of Laos in Chekia, of Pegu in Phta, of Siam in Sommona-Kodom, of Thibet in Budd and in La. Agreeing in some points of his history, they all celebrate his life of penitence, his mortifications, his fastings, his functions of mediator and expiator, the enmity between him and another god, his adversary, their battles, and his ascendency. But as they disagree on the means of pleasing him, they dispute about rites and ceremonies, and about the dogmas of interior doctrine and of public doctrine. That Japanese Bonze, with a yellow robe and naked head, preaches the eternity of souls, and their successive transmigrations into various bodies; near him, the Sintoist denies that souls can exist separate from the senses,** and maintains that they are only the effect of the organs to which they belong, and with which they must perish, as the sound of the flute perishes with the flute. Near him, the Siamese, with his eyebrows shaved, and a talipat screen*** in his hand, recommends alms, offerings, and expiations, at the same time that he preaches blind necessity and inexorable fate. The Chinese vo-chung sacrifices to the souls of his ancestors; and next him, the follower of Confucius interrogates his destiny in the cast of dice and the movement of the stars.**** That child, surrounded by a swarm of priests in yellow robes and hats, is the Grand Lama, in whom the god of Thibet has just become incarnate.*5 But a rival has arisen who partakes this benefit with him; and the Kalmouc on the banks of the Baikal, has a God similar to the inhabitant of Lasa. And they agree, also, in one important point--that god can inhabit only a human body. They both laugh at the stupidity of the Indian who pays homage to cow-dung, though they themselves consecrate the excrements of their high-priest.*6 * The original name of this god is Baits, which in Hebrew signifies an egg. The Arabs pronounce it Baidh, giving to the dh an emphatic sound which makes it approach to dz. Kempfer, an acurate traveler, writes it Budso, which must be pronounced Boudso, whence is derived the name of Budsoist and of Bonze, applied to the priests. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata, writes it Bedou, as it is pronounced also by the Chingulais; and Saint Jerome, Boudda and Boutta. At Thibet they call it Budd; and hence the name of the country called Boud-tan and Ti-budd: it was in this province that this system of religion was first inculcated in Upper Asia; La is a corruption of Allah, the name of God in the Syriac language, from which many of the eastern dialects appear to be derived. The Chinese having neither b nor d, have supplied their place by f and t, and have therefore said Fout. ** See in Kempfer the doctrine of the Sintoists, which is a mixture of that of Epicurus and of the Stoics. *** It is a leaf of the Latanier species of the palm-tree. Hence the bonzes of Siam take the appellation of Talapoin. The use of this screen is an exclusive privilege. **** The sectaries of Confucius are no less addicted to astrology than the bonzes. It is indeed the malady of every eastern nation. *5 The Delai-La-Ma, or immense high priest of La, is the same person whom we find mentioned in our old books of travels, by the name of Prester John, from a corruption of the Persian word Djehan, which signifies the world, to which has been prefixed the French word prestre or pretre, priest. Thus the priest world, and the god world are in the Persian idiom the same. *6 In a recent expedition the English have found certain idols of the Lamas filled in the inside with sacred pastils from the close stool of the high priest. Mr. Hastings, and Colonel Pollier, who is now at Lausanne, are living witnesses of this fact, and undoubtedly worthy of credit. It will be very extraordinary to observe, that this disgusting ceremony is connected with a profound philosophical system, to wit, that of the metempsychosis, admitted by the Lamas. When the Tartars swallow, the sacred relics, which they are accustomed to do, they imitate the laws of the universe, the parts of which are incessantly absorbed and pass into the substance of each other. It is upon the model of the serpent who devours his tail, and this serpent is Budd and the world. After these, a crowd of other banners, which no man could number, came forward into sight; and the genius exclaimed: I should never finish the detail of all the systems of faith which divide these nations. Here the hordes of Tartars adore, in the forms of beasts, birds, and insects, the good and evil Genii; who, under a principal, but indolent god, govern the universe. In their idolatry they call to mind the ancient paganism of the West. You observe the fantastical dress of the Chamans; who, under a robe of leather, hung round with bells and rattles, idols of iron, claws of birds, skins of snakes and heads of owls, invoke, with frantic cries and factitious convulsions, the dead to deceive the living. There, the black tribes of Africa exhibit the same opinions in the worship of their fetiches. See the inhabitant of Juida worship god in a great snake, which, unluckily, the swine delight to eat.* The Teleutean attires his god in a coat of several colors, like a Russian soldier.** The Kamchadale, observing that everything goes wrong in his frozen country, considers god as an old ill-natured man, smoking his pipe and hunting foxes and martins in his sledge.*** * It frequently happens that the swine devour the very species of serpents the negroes adore, which is a source of great desolation in the country. President de Brosses has given us, in his History of the Fetiche, a curious collection of absurdities of this nature. ** The Teleuteans, a Tartar nation, paint God as wearing a vesture of all colors, particularly red and green; and as these constitute the uniform of the Russian dragoons, they compare him to this description of soldiers. The Egyptians also dress the God World in a garment of every color. Eusebius Proep. Evang. p 115. The Teleuteans call God Bou, which is only an alteration of Boudd, the God Egg and World. *** Consult upon this subject a work entitled, Description des Peuples, soumis a la Russie, and it will be found that the picture is not overcharged. But you may still behold a hundred savage nations who have none of the ideas of civilized people respecting God, the soul, another world, and a future life; who have formed no system of worship; and who nevertheless enjoy the rich gifts of nature in the irreligion in which she has created them. CHAPTER XXI. PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS CONTRADICTIONS. The various groups having taken their places, an unbounded silence succeeded to the murmurs of the multitude; and the legislator said: Chiefs and doctors of mankind! You remark how the nations, living apart, have hitherto followed different paths, each believing its own to be that of truth. If, however, truth is one, and opinions are various, it is evident that some are in error. If, then, such vast numbers of us are in the wrong, who shall dare to say, "I am in the right?" Begin, therefore, by being indulgent in your dissensions. Let us all seek truth as if no one possessed it. The opinions which to this day have governed the world, originating from chance, propagated in obscurity, admitted without discussion, accredited by a love of novelty and imitation, have usurped their empire in a clandestine manner. It is time, if they are well founded, to give a solemn stamp to their certainty, and legitimize their existence. Let us summon them this day to a general scrutiny, let each propound his creed, let the whole assembly be the judge, and let that alone be acknowledged as true which is so for the whole human race. Then, by order of position, the representative of the first standard on the left was allowed to speak: "You are not permitted to doubt," said their chief, "that our doctrine is the only true and infallible one. FIRST, it is revealed by God himself--" "So is ours," cried all the other standards, "and you are not permitted to doubt it." "But at least," said the legislator, "you must prove it, for we cannot believe what we do not know." "Our doctrine is proved," replied the first standard, "by numerous facts, by a multitude of miracles, by resurrections of the dead, by rivers dried up, by mountains removed--" "And we also have numberless miracles," cried all the others, and each began to recount the most incredible things. "THEIR miracles," said the first standard, "are imaginary, or the fictions of the evil spirit, who has deluded them." "They are yours," said the others, "that are imaginary;" and each group, speaking of itself, cried out: "None but ours are true, all the others are false." The legislator then asked: "Have you living witnesses of the facts?" "No," replied they all; "the facts are ancient, the witnesses are dead, but their writings remain." "Be it so," replied the legislator; "but if they contradict each other, who shall reconcile them?" "Just judge!" cried one of the standards, "the proof that our witnesses have seen the truth is, that they died to confirm it; and our faith is sealed by the blood of martyrs." "And ours too," said the other standards; "we have thousands of martyrs who have died in the most excruciating torments, without ever denying the truth." Then the Christians of every sect, the Mussulmans, the Indians, the Japanese, recited endless legends of confessors, martyrs, penitents, etc. And one of these parties, having denied the martyrology of the others: "Well," said they, "we will then die ourselves to prove the truth of our belief." And instantly a crowd of men, of every religion and of every sect, presented themselves to suffer the torments of death. Many even began to tear their arms, and to beat their heads and breasts, without discovering any symptom of pain. But the legislator, preventing them--"O men!" said he, "hear my words with patience. If you die to prove that two and two make four, will your death add any thing to this truth?" "No!" answered all. "And if you die to prove that they make five, will that make them five?" Again they all answered, "No." "What, then, is your persuasion to prove, if it changes not the existence of things? Truth is one--your persuasions are various; many of you, therefore, are in error. Now, if man, as is evident, can persuade himself of error, what is the persuasion of man to prove? "If error has its martyrs, what is the sure criterion of truth? "If the evil spirit works miracles, what is the distinctive character of God? "Besides, why resort forever to incomplete and insufficient miracles? Instead of changing the course of nature, why not rather change opinions? Why murder and terrify men, instead of instructing and correcting them? "O credulous, but opinionated mortals! none of us know what was done yesterday, what is doing to-day even under our eyes; and we swear to what was done two thousand years ago! "Oh, the weakness and yet the pride of men! The laws of nature are unchangeable and profound--our minds are full of illusion and frivolity--and yet we would comprehend every thing--determine every thing! Forgetting that it is easier for the whole human race to be in error, than to change the nature of the smallest atom." "Well, then," said one of the doctors, "let us lay aside the evidence of fact, since it is uncertain; let us come to argument--to the proofs inherent in the doctrine." Then came forward, with a look of confidence, an Iman of the law of Mahomet; and, having advanced into the circle, turned towards Mecca, and recited with great fervor his confession of faith. "Praise be to God," said he, with a solemn and imposing voice, "the light shines with full evidence, and the truth has no need of examination." Then, showing the Koran, he exclaimed: "Here is the light of truth in its proper essence. There is no doubt in this book. It conducts with safety him who walks in darkness, and who receives without discussion the divine word which descended on the prophet, to save the simple and confound the wise. God has established Mahomet his minister on earth; he has given him the world, that he may subdue with the sword whoever shall refuse to receive his law. Infidels dispute, and will not believe; their obduracy comes from God, who has hardened their hearts to deliver them to dreadful punishments."* * This passage contains the sense and nearly the very words of the first chapter of the Koran; and the reader will observe in general, that, in the pictures that follow, the writer has endeavored to give as accurately as possible the letter and spirit of the opinions of each party. At these words a violent murmur arose on all sides, and silenced the speaker. "Who is this man," cried all the groups, "who thus insults us without a cause? What right has he to impose his creed on us as conqueror and tyrant? Has not God endowed us, as well as him, with eyes, understanding, and reason? And have we not an equal right to use them, in choosing what to believe and what to reject? If he attacks us, shall we not defend ourselves? If he likes to believe without examination, must we therefore not examine before we believe? "And what is this luminous doctrine that fears the light? What is this apostle of a God of clemency, who preaches nothing but murder and carnage? What is this God of justice, who punishes blindness which he himself has made? If violence and persecution are the arguments of truth, are gentleness and charity the signs of falsehood?" A man then advancing from a neighboring group, said to the Iman: "Admitting that Mahomet is the apostle of the best doctrine,--the prophet of the true religion,--have the goodness at least to tell us whether, in the practice of his doctrine, we are to follow his son-in-law Ali, or his vicars Omar and Aboubekre?"* * These are the two grand parties into which the Mussulmans are divided. The Turks have embraced the second, the Persians the first. At the sound of these names a terrible schism arose among the Mussulmans themselves. The partisans of Ali and those of Omar, calling out heretics and blasphemers, loaded each other with execrations. The quarrel became so violent that neighboring groups were obliged to interfere, to prevent their coming to blows. At length, tranquillity being somewhat restored, the legislator said to the Imans: "See the consequences of your principles! If you yourselves were to carry them into practice, you would destroy each other to the last man. Is it not the first law of God that man should live?" Then, addressing himself to the other groups, he continued: "Doubtless this intolerant and exclusive spirit shocks every idea of justice, and overturns the whole foundation of morals and society; but before we totally reject this code of doctrine, is it not proper to hear some of its dogmas? Let us not pronounce on the forms, without having some knowledge of the substance." The groups having consented, the Iman began to expound how God, having sent to the nations lost in idolatry twenty-four thousand prophets, had finally sent the last, the seal and perfection of all, Mahomet; on whom be the salvation of peace: how, to prevent the divine word from being any longer perverted by infidels, the supreme goodness had itself written the pages of the Koran. Then, explaining the particular dogmas of Islamism, the Iman unfolded how the Koran, partaking of the divine nature, was uncreated and eternal, like its author: how it had been sent leaf by leaf, in twenty-four thousand nocturnal apparitions of the angel Gabriel: how the angel announced himself by a gentle knocking, which threw the prophet into a cold sweat: how in the vision of one night he had travelled over ninety heavens, riding on the beast Borack, half horse and half woman: how, endowed with the gift of miracles, he walked in the sunshine without a shadow, turned dry trees to green, filled wells and cisterns with water, and split in two the body of the moon: how, by divine command, Mahomet had propagated, sword in hand, the religion the most worthy of God by its sublimity, and the most proper for men by the simplicity of its practice; since it consisted in only eight or ten points:--To profess the unity of God; to acknowledge Mahomet as his only prophet; to pray five times a day; to fast one month in the year; to go to Mecca once in our life; to pay the tenth of all we possess; to drink no wine; to eat no pork; and to make war upon the infidels.* He taught that by these means every Mussulman becoming himself an apostle and martyr, should enjoy in this world many blessings; and at his death, his soul, weighed in the balance of works, and absolved by the two black angels, should pass the infernal pit on the bridge as narrow as a hair and as sharp as the edge of a sword, and should finally be received to a region of delight, which is watered with rivers of milk and honey, and embalmed in all the perfumes of India and Arabia; and where the celestial Houris--virgins always chaste--are eternally crowning with repeated favors the elect of God, who preserve an eternal youth. * Whatever the advocates for the philosophy and civilization of the Turks may assert, to make war upon infidels is considered by them as an obligatory precept and an act of religion. See Reland de Relig. Mahom. At these words an involuntary smile was seen on all their lips; and the various groups, reasoning on these articles of faith, exclaimed with one voice: "Is it possible that reasonable beings can admit such reveries? Would you not think it a chapter from The Thousand and One Nights?" A Samoyede advanced into the circle: "The paradise of Mahomet," said he, "appears to me very good; but one of the means of gaining it is embarrassing: for if we must neither eat nor drink between the rising and setting sun, as he has ordered, how are we to practise that fast in my country, where the sun continues above the horizon six months without setting?" "That is impossible," cried all the Mussulman doctors, to support the teaching of the prophet; but a hundred nations having attested the fact, the infallibility of Mahomet could not but receive a severe shock. "It is singular," said an European, "that God should be constantly revealing what takes place in heaven, without ever instructing us what is doing on the earth." "For my part," said an American, "I find a great difficulty in the pilgrimage. For suppose twenty-five years to a generation, and only a hundred millions of males on the globe,--each being obliged to go to Mecca once in his life,--there must be four millions a year on the journey; and as it would be impracticable for them to return the same year, the numbers would be doubled--that is, eight millions: where would you find provisions, lodgings, water, vessels, for this universal procession? Here must be miracles indeed!" "The proof," said a catholic doctor, "that the religion of Mahomet is not revealed, is that the greater part of the ideas which serve for its basis existed a long time before, and that it is only a confused mixture of truths disfigured and taken from our holy religion and from that of the Jews; which an ambitious man has made to serve his projects of domination, and his worldly views. Look through his book; you will see nothing there but the histories of the Bible and the Gospel travestied into absurd fables--into a tissue of vague and contradictory declamations, and ridiculous or dangerous precepts. "Analyze the spirit of these precepts, and the conduct of their apostle; you will find there an artful and audacious character, which, to obtain its end, works ably it is true, on the passions of the people it had to govern. It is speaking to simple men, and it entertains them with miracles; they are ignorant and jealous, and it flatters their vanity by despising science; they are poor and rapacious, and it excites their cupidity by the hope of pillage; having nothing at first to give them on earth, it tells them of treasures in heaven; it teaches them to desire death as a supreme good; it threatens cowards with hell; it rewards the brave with paradise; it sustains the weak with the opinion of fatality; in short, it produces the attachment it wants by all the allurements of sense, and all the power of the passions. "How different is the character of our religion! and how completely does its empire, founded on the counteraction of the natural temper, and the mortification of all our passions, prove its divine origin! How forcibly does its mild and compassionate morality, its affections altogether spiritual, attest its emanation from God! Many of its doctrines, it is true, soar above the reach of the understanding, and impose on reason a respectful silence; but this more fully demonstrates its revelation, since the human mind could never have imagined such mysteries." Then, holding the Bible in one hand and the four Gospels in the other, the doctor began to relate that, in the beginning, God, after passing an eternity in idleness, took the resolution, without any known cause, of making the world out of nothing; that having created the whole universe in six days, he found himself fatigued on the seventh; that having placed the first human pair in a garden of delights, to make them completely happy, he forbade their tasting a particular fruit which he placed within their reach; that these first parents, having yielded to the temptation, all their race (which were not yet born) had been condemned to bear the penalty of a fault which they had not committed; that, after having left the human race to damn themselves for four or five thousand years, this God of mercy ordered a well beloved son, whom he had engendered without a mother, and who was as old as himself, to go and be put to death on the earth; and this for the salvation of mankind; of whom much the greater portion, nevertheless, have ever since continued in the way of perdition; that to remedy this new difficulty, this same God, born of a virgin, having died and risen from the dead, assumes a new existence every day, and in the form of a piece of bread, multiplies himself by millions at the voice of one of the basest of men. Then, passing on to the doctrine of the sacraments, he was going to treat at large on the power of absolution and reprobation, of the means of purging all sins by a little water and a few words, when, uttering the words indulgence, power of the pope, sufficient grace, and efficacious grace, he was interrupted by a thousand cries. "It is a horrible abuse," cried the Lutherans, "to pretend to remit sins for money." "The notion of the real presence," cried the Calvinists, "is contrary to the text of the Gospel." "The pope has no right to decide anything of himself," cried the Jansenists; and thirty other sects rising up, and accusing each other of heresies and errors, it was no longer possible to hear anything distinctly. Silence being at last restored, the Mussulmans observed to the legislator: "Since you have rejected our doctrine as containing things incredible, can you admit that of the Christians? Is not theirs still more contrary to common sense and justice? A God, immaterial and infinite, to become a man! to have a son as old as himself! This god-man to become bread, to be eaten and digested! Have we any thing equal to that? Have the Christians an exclusive right of setting up a blind faith? And will you grant them privileges of belief to our detriment?" Some savage tribes then advanced: "What!" said they, "because a man and woman ate an apple six thousand years ago, all the human race are damned? And you call God just? What tyrant ever rendered children responsible for the faults of their fathers? What man can answer for the actions of another? Does not this overturn every idea of justice and of reason?" Others exclaimed: "Where are the proofs, the witnesses of these pretended facts? Can we receive them without examining the evidence? The least action in a court of justice requires two witnesses; and we are ordered to believe all this on mere tradition and hearsay!" A Jewish Rabbin then addressing the assembly, said: "As to the fundamental facts, we are sureties; but with regard to their form and their application, the case is different, and the Christians are here condemned by their own arguments. For they cannot deny that we are the original source from which they are derived--the primitive stock on which they are grafted; and hence the reasoning is very short: Either our law is from God, and then theirs is a heresy, since it differs from ours, or our law is not from God, and then theirs falls at the same time." "But you must make this distinction," replied the Christian: "Your law is from God as typical and preparative, but not as final and absolute: you are the image of which we are the substance." "We know," replied the Rabbin, "that such are your pretensions; but they are absolutely gratuitous and false. Your system turns altogether on mystical meanings, visionary and allegorical interpretations.* With violent distortions on the letter of our books, you substitute the most chimerical ideas for the true ones, and find in them whatever pleases you; as a roving imagination will find figures in the clouds. Thus you have made a spiritual Messiah of that which, in the spirit of our prophets, is only a temporal king. You have made a redemption of the human race out of the simple re-establishment of our nation. Your conception of the Virgin is founded on a single phrase, of which you have changed the meaning. Thus you make from our Scriptures whatever your fancy dictates; you even find there your trinity; though there is not a word that has the most distant allusion to such a thing; and it is an invention of profane writers, admitted into your system with a host of other opinions, of every religion and of every sect, during the anarchy of the first three centuries of your era." * When we read the Fathers of the church, and see upon what arguments they have built the edifice of religion, we are inexpressibly astonished with their credulity or their knavery: but allegory was the rage of that period; the Pagans employed it to explain the actions of their gods, and the Christians acted in the same spirit when they employed it after their fashion. At these words, the Christian doctors, crying sacrilege and blasphemy, sprang forward in a transport of fury to fall upon the Jew; and a troop of monks, in motley dresses of black and white, advanced with a standard on which were painted pincers, gridirons, lighted fagots, and the words Justice, Charity, Mercy.* "It is necessary," said they, "to make an example of these impious wretches, and burn them for the glory of God." They began even to prepare the pile, when a Mussulman answered in a strain of irony: "This, then, is that religion of peace, that meek and beneficent system which you so much extol! This is that evangelical charity which combats infidelity with persuasive mildness, and repays injuries with patience! Ye hypocrites! It is thus that you deceive mankind--thus that you propagate your accursed errors! When you were weak, you preached liberty, toleration, peace; when you are strong, you practise persecution and violence--" * This description answers exactly to the banner of the Inquisition of Spanish Jacobins. And he was going to begin the history of the wars and slaughters of Christianity, when the legislator, demanding silence, suspended this scene of discord. The monks, affecting a tone of meekness and humility, exclaimed: "It is not ourselves that we would avenge; it is the cause of God; it is the glory of God that we defend." "And what right have you, more than we," said the Imans, "to constitute yourselves the representatives of God? Have you privileges that we have not? Are you not men like us?" "To defend God," said another group, "to pretend to avenge him, is to insult his wisdom and his power. Does he not know, better than men, what befits his dignity?" "Yes," replied the monks, "but his ways are secret." "And it remains for you to prove," said the Rabbins, "that you have the exclusive privilege of understanding them." Then, proud of finding supporters to their cause, the Jews thought that the books of Moses were going to be triumphant, when the Mobed (high priest) of the Parses obtained leave to speak. "We have heard," said he, "the account of the Jews and Christians of the origin of the world; and, though greatly mutilated, we find in it some facts which we admit. But we deny that they are to be attributed to the legislator of the Hebrews. It was not he who made known to men these sublime truths, these celestial events. It was not to him that God revealed them, but to our holy prophet Zoroaster: and the proof of this is in the very books that they refer to. Examine with attention the laws, the ceremonies, the precepts established by Moses in those books; you will not find the slightest indication, either expressed or understood, of what constitutes the basis of the Jewish and Christian theology. You nowhere find the least trace of the immortality of the soul, or of a future life, or of heaven, or of hell, or of the revolt of the principal angel, author of the evils of the human race. These ideas were not known to Moses, and the reason is very obvious: it was not till four centuries afterwards that Zoroaster first evangelized them in Asia.* * See the Chronology of the Twelve Ages, in which I conceive myself to have clearly proved that Moses lived about 1,400 years before Jesus Christ, and Zoroaster about a thousand. "Thus," continued the Mobed, turning to the Rabbins, "it was not till after that epoch, that is to say, in the time of your first kings, that these ideas began to appear in your writers; and then their appearance was obscure and gradual, according to the progress of the political relations between your ancestors and ours. It was especially when, having been conquered by the kings of Nineveh and Babylon and transported to the banks of the Tygris and the Euphrates, where they resided for three successive generations, that they imbibed manners and opinions which had been rejected as contrary to their law. When our king Cyrus had delivered them from slavery, their heart was won to us by gratitude; they became our disciples and imitators; and they admitted our dogmas in the revision of their books;* for your Genesis, in particular, was never the work of Moses, but a compilation drawn up after the return from the Babylonian captivity, in which are inserted the Chaldean opinions of the origin of the world. * In the first periods of the Christian church, not only the most learned of those who have since been denominated heretics, but many of the orthodox conceived Moses to have written neither the law nor the Pentateuch, but that the work was a compilation made by the elders of the people and the Seventy, who, after the death of Moses, collected his scattered ordinances, and mixed with them things that were extraneous; similar to what happened as to the Koran of Mahomet. See Les Clementines, Homel. 2. sect. 51. and Homel. 3. sect. 42. Modern critics, more enlightened or more attentive than the ancients, have found in Genesis in particular, marks of its having been composed on the return from the captivity; but the principal proofs have escaped them. These I mean to exhibit in an analysis of the book of Genesis, in which I shall demonstrate that the tenth chapter, among others, which treats of the pretended generations of the man called Noah, is a real geographical picture of the world, as it was known to the Hebrews at the epoch of the captivity, which was bounded by Greece or Hellas at the West, mount Caucasus at the North, Persia at the East, and Arabia and Upper Egypt at the South. All the pretended personages from Adam to Abraham, or his father Terah, are mythological beings, stars, constellations, countries. Adam is Bootes: Noah is Osiris: Xisuthrus Janus, Saturn; that is to say Capricorn, or the celestial Genius that opened the year. The Alexandrian Chronicle says expressly, page 85, that Nimrod was supposed by the Persians to be their first king, as having invented the art of hunting, and that he was translated into heaven, where he appears under the name of Orion. "At first the pure followers of the law, opposing to the emigrants the letter of the text and the absolute silence of the prophet, endeavored to repel these innovations; but they ultimately prevailed, and our doctrine, modified by your ideas, gave rise to a new sect. "You expected a king to restore your political independence; we announced a God to regenerate and save mankind. From this combination of ideas, your Essenians laid the foundation of Christianity: and whatever your pretensions may be, Jews, Christians, Mussulmans, you are, in your system of spiritual beings, only the blundering followers of Zoroaster." The Mobed, then passing on to the details of his religion, quoting from the Zadder and the Zendavesta, recounted, in the same order as they are found in the book of Genesis, the creation of the world in six gahans,* the formation of a first man and a first woman, in a divine place, under the reign of perfect good; the introduction of evil into the world by the great snake, emblem of Ahrimanes; the revolt and battles of the Genius of evil and darkness against Ormuzd, God of good and of light; the division of the angels into white and black, or good and bad; their hierarchal orders, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, etc.; the end of the world at the close of six thousand years; the coming of the lamb, the regenerator of nature; the new world; the future life, and the regions of happiness and misery; the passage of souls over the bridge of the bottomless pit; the celebration of the mysteries of Mithras; the unleavened bread which the initiated eat; the baptism of new-born children; the unction of the dead; the confession of sins; and, in a word, he recited so many things analagous to those of the three preceding religions, that his discourse seemed like a commentary or a continuation of the Koran or the Apocalypse.** * Or periods, or in six gahan-bars, that is six periods of time. These periods are what Zoroaster calls the thousands of God or of light, meaning the six summer months. In the first, say the Persians, God created (arranged in order) the heavens; in the second the waters; in the third the earth; in the fourth trees; in the fifth animals; and in the sixth man; corresponding with the account in Genesis. For particulars see Hyde, ch. 9, and Henry Lord, ch. 2, on the religion of the ancient Persians. It is remarkable that the same tradition is found in the sacred books of the Etrurians, which relate that the fabricator of all things had comprised the duration of his work in a period of twelve thousand years, which period was distributed to the twelve houses of the sun. In the first thousand, God made heaven and earth; in the second the firmament; in the third the sea and the waters; in the fourth the sun, moon and stars; in the fifth the souls of animals, birds, and reptiles; in the sixth man. See Suidas, at the word Tyrrhena; which shows first the identity of their theological and astrological opinions; and, secondly, the identity, or rather confusion of ideas, between absolute and systematical creation; that is, the periods assigned for renewing the face of nature, which were at first the period of the year, and afterwards periods of 60, of 600, of 25,000, of 36,000 and of 432,000 years. ** The modern Parses and the ancient Mithriacs, who are the same sect, observe all the Christian sacraments, even the laying on of hands in confirmation. The priest of Mithra, says Tertullian, (de Proescriptione, ch. 40) promises absolution from sin on confession and baptism; and, if I rightly remember, Mithra marks his soldiers in the forehead, with the chrism called in the Egyptian Kouphi; he celebrates the sacrifice of bread, which is the resurrection, and presents the crown to his followers, menacing them at the same time with the sword, etc. In these mysteries they tried the courage of the initiated with a thousand terrors, presenting fire to his face, a sword to his breast, etc.; they also offered him a crown, which he refused, saying, God is my crown: and this crown is to be seen in the celestial sphere by the side of Bootes. The personages in these mysteries were distinguished by the names of the animal constellations. The ceremony of mass is nothing more than an imitation of these mysteries and those of Eleusis. The benediction, the Lord be with you, is a literal translation of the formula of admission chou-k, am, p-ka. See Beausob. Hist. Du Manicheisme, vol. ii. But the Jewish, Christian, and Mahometan doctors, crying out against this recital, and treating the Parses as idolaters and worshippers of fire, charged them with falsehood, interpolations, falsification of facts; and there arose a violent dispute as to the dates of the events, their order and succession, the origin of the doctrines, their transmission from nation to nation, the authenticity of the books on which they are founded, the epoch of their composition, the character of their compilers, and the validity of their testimony. And the various parties, pointing out reciprocally to each other, the contradictions, improbabilities, and forgeries, accused one another of having established their belief on popular rumors, vague traditions, and absurd fables, invented without discernment, and admitted without examination by unknown, partial, or ignorant writers, at uncertain or unknown epochs. A great murmur now arose from under the standards of the various Indian sects; and the Bramins, protesting against the pretensions of the Jews and the Parses, said: "What are these new and almost unheard of nations, who arrogantly set themselves up as the sources of the human race, and the depositaries of its archives? To hear their calculations of five or six thousand years, it would seem that the world was of yesterday; whereas our monuments prove a duration of many thousands of centuries. And for what reason are their books to be preferred to ours? Are then the Vedes, the Chastres, and the Pourans inferior to the Bibles, the Zendavestas, and the Zadders?* And is not the testimony of our fathers and our gods as valid as that of the fathers and the gods of the West? Ah! if it were permitted to reveal our mysteries to profane men! if a sacred veil did not justly conceal them from every eye!" These are the sacred volumes of the Hindoos; they are sometimes written Vedams, Pouranams, Chastrans, because the Hindoos, like the Persians, are accustomed to give a nasal sound to the terminations of their words, which we represent by the affixes on and an, and the Portuguese by the affixes om and am. Many of these books have been translated, thanks to the liberal spirit of Mr. Hastings, who has founded at Calcutta a literary society, and a printing press. At the same time, however, that we express our gratitude to this society, we must be permitted to complain of its exclusive spirit; the number of copies printed of each book being such as it is impossible to purchase them even in England; they are wholly in the hands of the East India proprietors. Scarcely even is the Asiatic Miscellany known in Europe; and a man must be very learned in oriental antiquity before he so much as hears of the Jones's, the Wilkins's, and the Halhed's, etc. As to the sacred books of the Hindoos, all that are yet in our hands are the Bhagvat Geeta, the Ezour-Vedam, the Bagavadam, and certain fragments of the Chastres printed at the end of the Bhagvat Geeta. These books are in Indostan what the Old and New Testament are in Christendom, the Koran in Turkey, the Zadder and the Zendavesta among the Parses, etc. When I have taken an extensive survey of their contents, I have sometimes asked myself, what would be the loss to the human race if a new Omar condemned them to the flames; and, unable to discover any mischief that would ensue, I call the imaginary chest that contains them, the box of Pandora. The Bramins stopping short at these words: "How can we admit your doctrine," said the legislator, "if you will not make it known? And how did its first authors propagate it, when, being alone possessed of it, their own people were to them profane? Did heaven reveal it to be kept a secret?"* * The Vedas or Vedams are the sacred volumes of the Hindoos, as the Bibles with us. They are three in number; the Rick Veda, the Yadjour Veda, and the Sama Veda; they are so scarce in India, that the English could with great difficulty find an original one, of which a copy is deposited in the British Museum; they who reckon four Vedas, include among them the Attar Veda, concerning ceremonies, but which is lost. There are besides commentaries named Upanishada, one of which was published by Anquetil du Peron, and entitled Oupnekhat, a curious work. The date of these books is more than twenty-five centuries prior to our era; their contents prove that all the reveries of the Greek metaphysicians come from India and Egypt. Since the year 1788, the learned men of England are working in India a mine of literature totally unknown in Europe, and which proves that the civilization of India ascends to a very remote antiquity. After the Vedas come the Chastras amounting to six. They treat of theology and the Sciences. Afterwards eighteen Pouranas, treating of Mythology and History. See the Bahgouet-guita, the Baga Vadam, and the Ezour-Vedam, etc. But the Bramins persisting in their silence: "Let them have the honor of the secret," said a European: "Their doctrine is now divulged; we have their books, and I can give you the substance of them." Then beginning with an abstract of the four Vedes, the eighteen Pourans, and the five or six Chastres, he recounted how a being, infinite, eternal, immaterial and round, after having passed an eternity in self-contemplation, and determining at last to manifest himself, separated the male and female faculties which were in him, and performed an act of generation, of which the Lingam remains an emblem; how that first act gave birth to three divine powers, Brama, Bichen or Vichenou, and Chib or Chiven;* whose functions were--the first to create, the second to preserve, and the third to destroy, or change the form of the universe. Then, detailing the history of their operations and adventures, he explained how Brama, proud of having created the world and the eight bobouns, or spheres of probation, thought himself superior to Chib, his equal; how his pride brought on a battle between them, in which these celestial globes were crushed like a basket of eggs; how Brama, vanquished in this conflict, was reduced to serve as a pedestal to Chib, metamorphosed into a Lingam; how Vichenou, the god mediator, has taken at different times to preserve the world, nine mortal forms of animals; how first, in shape of a fish, he saved from the universal deluge a family who repeopled the earth; how afterwards, in the form of a tortoise,** he drew from the sea of milk the mountain Mandreguiri (the pole); then, becoming a boar, he tore the belly of the giant Ereuniachessen, who was drowning the earth in the abyss of Djole, from whence he drew it out with his tusks; how, becoming incarnate in a black shepherd, and under the name of Christ-en, he delivered the world of the enormous serpent Calengem, and then crushed his head, after having been wounded by him in the heel. * These names are differently pronounced according to the different dialects; thus they say Birmah, Bremma, Brouma. Bichen has been turned into Vichen by the easy exchange of a B for a V, and into Vichenou by means of a grammatical affix. In the same manner Chib, which is synonymous with Satan, and signifies adversary, is frequently written Chiba and Chiv-en; he is called also Rouder and Routr-en, that is, the destroyer. ** This is the constellation testudo, or the lyre, which was at first a tortoise, on account of its slow motion round the Pole; then a lyre, because it is the shell of this reptile on which the strings of the lyre are mounted. See an excellent memoir of M. Dupuis sur l'Origine des Constellations. Then, passing on to the history of the secondary Genii, he related how the Eternal, to display his own glory, created various orders of angels, whose business it was to sing his praises and to direct the universe; how a part of these angels revolted under the guidance of an ambitious chief, who strove to usurp the power of God, and to govern all; how God plunged them into a world of darkness, there to undergo the punishment for their crimes; how at last, touched with compassion, he consented to release them, to receive them into favor, after they should undergo a long series of probations; how, after creating for this purpose fifteen orbits or regions of planets, and peopling them with bodies, he ordered these rebel angels to undergo in them eighty-seven transmigrations; he then explained how souls, thus purified, returned to the first source, to the ocean of life and animation from which they had proceeded; and since all living creatures contain portions of this universal soul, he taught how criminal it was to deprive them of it. He was finally proceeding to explain the rites and ceremonies, when, speaking of offerings and libations of milk and butter made to gods of copper and wood, and then of purifications by the dung and urine of cows, there arose a universal murmur, mixed with peals of laughter, which interrupted the orator. Each of the different groups began to reason on that religion: "They are idolators," said the Mussulmans; "and should be exterminated." "They are deranged in their intellect," said the followers of Confucius; "we must try to cure them." "What ridiculous gods," said others, "are these puppets, besmeared with grease and smoke! Are gods to be washed like dirty children, from whom you must brush away the flies, which, attracted by honey, are fouling them with their excrements!" But a Bramin exclaimed with indignation: "These are profound mysteries,--emblems of truth, which you are not worthy to hear." "And in what respect are you more worthy than we?" exclaimed a Lama of Tibet. "Is it because you pretend to have issued from the head of Brama, and the rest of the human race from the less noble parts of his body? But to support the pride of your distinctions of origin and castes, prove to us in the first place that you are different from other men; establish, in the next place, as historical facts, the allegories which you relate; show us, indeed, that you are the authors of all this doctrine; for we will demonstrate, if necessary, that you have only stolen and disfigured it; that you are only the imitators of the ancient paganism of the West; to which, by an ill assorted mixture, you have allied the pure and spiritual doctrine of our gods--a doctrine totally detached from the senses, and entirely unknown on earth till Beddou taught it to the nations."* * All the ancient opinions of the Egyptian and Grecian theologians are to be found in India, and they appear to have been introduced, by means of the commerce of Arabia and the vicinity of Persia, time immemorial. A number of groups having asked what was this doctrine, and who was this god, of whom the greater part had never heard the name, the Lama resumed and said: "In the beginning, a sole-existent and self-existent God, having passed an eternity in the contemplation of his own being, resolved to manifest his perfections out of himself, and created the matter of the world. The four elements being produced, but still in a state of confusion, he breathed on the face of the waters, which swelled like an immense bubble in form of an egg, which unfolding, became the vault or orb of heaven, enclosing the world.* Having made the earth, and the bodies of animals, this God, essence of motion, imparted to them a part of his own being to animate them; for this reason, the soul of everything that breathes being a portion of the universal soul, no one of them can perish; they only change their form and mould in passing successively into different bodies. Of all these forms, the one most pleasing to God is that of man, as most resembling his own perfections. When a man, by an absolute disengagement from his senses, is wholly absorbed in self-contemplation, he then discovers the divinity, and becomes himself God. Of all the incarnations of this kind that God has hitherto taken, the greatest and most solemn was that in which he appeared thirty centuries ago in Kachemire, under the name of Fot or Beddou, to preach the doctrines of self-denial and self-annihilation." * This cosmogony of the Lamas, the Bonzes, and even the Bramins, as Henry Lord asserts, is literally that of the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians, says Porphyry, call Kneph, intelligence, or efficient cause of the universe. They relate that this God vomited an egg, from which was produced another God named Phtha or Vulcan, (igneous principle or the sun) and they add, that this egg is the world. Euseb. Proep. Evang. p. 115. They represent, says the same author in another place, the God Kneph, or efficient cause, under the form of a man in deep blue (the color of the sky) having in his hand a sceptre, a belt round his body, and a small bonnet royal of light feathers on his head, to denote how very subtile and fugacious the idea of that being is. Upon which I shall observe that Kneph in Hebrew signifies a wing, a feather, and that this color of sky-blue is to be found in the majority of the Indian Gods, and is, under the name of Narayan, one of their most distinguishing epithets. Then, pursuing the history of Fot, the Lama continued: "He was born from the right flank of a virgin of royal blood, who did not cease to be a virgin for having become a mother; that the king of the country, uneasy at his birth, wished to destroy him, and for this purpose ordered a massacre of all the males born at that period, that being saved by shepherds, Beddou lived in the desert till the age of thirty years, at which time he began his mission to enlighten men and cast out devils; that he performed a multitude of the most astonishing miracles; that he spent his life in fasting and severe penitence, and at his death, bequeathed to his disciples a book containing his doctrines." And the Lama began to read: "He that leaveth his father and mother to follow me," says Fot, "becomes a perfect Samanean (a heavenly man). "He that practices my precepts to the fourth degree of perfection, acquires the faculty of flying in the air, of moving heaven and earth, of prolonging or shortening his life (rising from the dead). "The Samanean despises riches, and uses only what is strictly necessary; he mortifies his body, silences his passions, desires nothing, forms no attachments, meditates my doctrines without ceasing, endures injuries with patience, and bears no malice to his neighbor. "Heaven and earth shall perish," says Fot: "despise therefore your bodies, which are composed of the four perishable elements, and think only of your immortal soul. "Listen not to the flesh: fear and sorrow spring from the passions: stifle the passions and you destroy fear and sorrow. "Whoever dies without having embraced my religion," says Fot, "returns among men, until he embraces it." The Lama was going on with his reading, when the Christians interrupted him, crying out that this was their own religion adulterated--that Fot was no other than Jesus himself disfigured, and that the Lamas were the Nestorians and the Manicheans disguised and bastardized.* * This is asserted by our missionaries, and among others by Georgi in his unfinished work of the Thibetan alphabet: but if it can be proved that the Manicheans were but plagiarists, and the ignorant echo of a doctrine that existed fifteen hundred years before them, what becomes of the declarations of Georgi? See upon this subject, Beausob. Hist. du Manicheisme. But the Lama, supported by the Chamans, Bonzes, Gonnis, Talapoins of Siam, of Ceylon, of Japan, and of China, proved to the Christians, even from their own authors, that the doctrine of the Samaneans was known through the East more than a thousand years before the Christian era; that their name was cited before the time of Alexander, and that Boutta, or Beddou, was known before Jesus.* * The eastern writers in general agree in placing the birth of Beddou 1027 years before Jesus Christ, which makes him the contemporary of Zoroaster, with whom, in my opinion, they confound him. It is certain that his doctrine notoriously existed at that epoch; it is found entire in that of Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the Indian gymnosophists. But the gymnosophists are cited at the time of Alexander as an ancient sect already divided into Brachmans and Samaneans. See Bardesanes en Saint Jerome, Epitre a Jovien. Pythagoras lived in the ninth century before Jesus Christ; See chronology of the twelve ages; and Orpheus is of still greater antiquity. If, as is the case, the doctrine of Pythagoras and that of Orpheus are of Egyptian origin, that of Beddou goes back to the common source; and in reality the Egyptian priests recite, that Hermes as he was dying said: "I have hitherto lived an exile from my country, to which I now return. Weep not for me, I ascend to the celestial abode where each of you will follow in his turn: there God is: this life is only death."--Chalcidius in Thinaeum. Such was the profession of faith of the Samaneans, the sectaries of Orpheus, and the Pythagoreans. Farther, Hermes is no other than Beddou himself; for among the Indians, Chinese, Lamas, etc., the planet Mercury and the corresponding day of the week (Wednesday) bear the name of Beddou, and this accounts for his being placed in the rank of mythological beings, and discovers the illusion of his pretended existence as a man; since it is evident that Mercury was not a human being, but the Genius or Decan, who, placed at the summer solstice, opened the Egyptian year; hence his attributes taken from the constellation Syrius, and his name of Anubis, as well as that of Esculapius, having the figure of a man and the head of a dog: hence his serpent, which is the Hydra, emblem of the Nile (Hydor, humidity); and from this serpent he seems to have derived his name of Hermes, as Remes (with a schin) in the oriental languages, signifies serpent. Now Beddou and Hermes being the same names, it is manifest of what antiquity is the system ascribed to the former. As to the name of Samanean, it is precisely that of Chaman, still preserved in Tartary, China, and India. The interpretation given to it is, man of the woods, a hermit mortifying the flesh, such being the characteristic of this sect; but its literal meaning is, celestial (Samaoui) and explains the system of those who are called by it.--The system is the same as that of the sectaries of Orpheus, of the Essenians, of the ancient Anchorets of Persia, and the whole eastern country. See Porphyry, de Abstin. Animal. These celestial and penitent men carried in India their insanity to such an extreme as to wish not to touch the earth, and they accordingly lived in cages suspended from the trees, where the people, whose admiration was not less absurd, brought them provisions. During the night there were frequent robberies, rapes and murders, and it was at length discovered that they were committed by those men, who, descending from their cages, thus indemnified themselves for their restraint during the day. The Bramins, their rivals, embraced the opportunity of exterminating them; and from that time their name in India has been synonymous with hypocrite. See Hist. de la Chine, in 5 vols. quarto, at the note page 30; Hist. de Huns, 2 vols. and preface to the Ezour-Vedam. Then, retorting the pretensions of the Christians against themselves: "Prove to us," said the Lama, "that you are not Samaneans degenerated, and that the man you make the author of your sect is not Fot himself disguised. Prove to us by historical facts that he even existed at the epoch you pretend; for, it being destitute of authentic testimony,* we absolutely deny it; and we maintain that your very gospels are only the books of some Mithriacs of Persia, and the Essenians of Syria, who were a branch of reformed Samaneans."** * There are absolutely no other monuments of the existence of Jesus Christ as a human being, than a passage in Josephus (Antiq. Jud. lib. 18, c.3,) a single phrase in Tacitus (Annal. lib. 15, c. 44), and the Gospels. But the passage in Josephus is unanimously acknowledged to be apocryphal, and to have been interpolated towards the close of the third century, (See Trad. de joseph, par M. Gillet); and that of Tacitus in so vague and so evidently taken from the deposition of the Christians before the tribunals, that it may be ranked in the class of evangelical records. It remains to enquire of what authority are these records. "All the world knows," says Faustus, who, though a Manichean, was one of the most learned men of the third century, "All the world knows that the gospels were neither written by Jesus Christ, nor his apostles, but by certain unknown persons, who rightly judging that they should not obtain belief respecting things which they had not seen, placed at the head of their recitals the names of contemporary apostles." See Beausob. vol. i. and Hist. des Apologistes de la Relig. Chret. par Burigni, a sagacious writer, who has demonstrated the absolute uncertainty of those foundations of the Christian religion; so that the existence of Jesus is no better proved than that of Osiris and Hercules, or that of Fot or Beddou, with whom, says M. de Guignes, the Chinese continually confound him, for they never call Jesus by any other name than Fot. Hist. de Huns. ** That is to say, from the pious romances formed out of the sacred legends of the mysteries of Mithra, Ceres, Isis, etc., from whence are equally derived the books of the Hindoos and the Bonzes. Our missionaries have long remarked a striking resemblance between those books and the gospels. M. Wilkins expressly mentions it in a note in the Bhagvat Geeta. All agree that Krisna, Fot, and Jesus have the same characteristic features: but religious prejudice has stood in the way of drawing from this circumstance the proper and natural inference. To time and reason must it be left to display the truth. At these words, the Christians set up a general cry, and a new dispute was about to begin; when a number of Chinese Chamans, and Talapoins of Siam, came forward and said that they would settle the whole controversy. And one of them speaking for the whole exclaimed: "It is time to put an end to these frivolous contests by drawing aside the veil from the interior doctrine that Fot himself revealed to his disciples on his death bed.* * The Budsoists have two doctrines, the one public and ostensible, the other interior and secret, precisely like the Egyptian priests. It may be asked, why this distinction? It is, that as the public doctrine recommends offerings, expiations, endowments, etc., the priests find their profit in preaching it to the people; whereas the other, teaching the vanity of worldly things, and attended with no lucre, it is thought proper to make it known only to adepts. Can the teachers and followers of this religion be better classed than under the heads of knavery and credulity? "All these theological opinions," continued he, "are but chimeras. All the stories of the nature of the gods, of their actions and their lives, are but allegories and mythological emblems, under which are enveloped ingenious ideas of morals, and the knowledge of the operations of nature in the action of the elements and the movement of the planets. "The truth is, that all is reduced to nothing--that all is illusion, appearance, dream; that the moral metempsychosis is only the figurative sense of the physical metempsychosis, or the successive movement of the elements of bodies which perish not, but which, having composed one body, pass when that is dissolved, into other mediums and form other combinations. The soul is but the vital principle which results from the properties of matter, and from the action of the elements in those bodies where they create a spontaneous movement. To suppose that this product of the play of the organs, born with them, matured with them, and which sleeps with them, can subsist when they cease, is the romance of a wandering imagination, perhaps agreeable enough, but really chimerical. "God itself is nothing more than the moving principle, the occult force inherent in all beings--the sum of their laws and properties--the animating principle; in a word, the soul of the universe; which on account of the infinite variety of its connections and its operations, sometimes simple, sometimes multiple, sometimes active, sometimes passive, has always presented to the human mind an unsolvable enigma. All that man can comprehend with certainty is, that matter does not perish; that it possesses essentially those properties by which the world is held together like a living and organized being; that the knowledge of these laws with respect to man is what constitutes wisdom; that virtue and merit consist in their observance; and evil, sin, and vice, in the ignorance and violation of them; that happiness and misery result from these by the same necessity which makes heavy bodies descend and light ones rise, and by a fatality of causes and effects, whose chain extends from the smallest atom to the greatest of the heavenly bodies."* * These are the very expressions of La Loubre, in his description of the kingdom of Siam and the theology of the Bronzes. Their dogmas, compared with those of the ancient philosophers of Greece and Italy, give a complete representation of the whole system of the Stoics and Epicureans, mixed with astrological superstitious, and some traits of Pythagorism. At these words, a crowd of theologians of every sect cried out that this doctrine was materialism, and that those who profess it were impious atheists, enemies to God and man, who must be exterminated. "Very well," replied the Chamans, "suppose we are in error, which is not impossible, since the first attribute of the human mind is to be subject to illusion; but what right have you to take away from men like yourselves, the life which Heaven has given them? If Heaven holds us guilty and in abhorrence, why does it impart to us the same blessings as to you? And if it treats us with forbearance, what authority have you to be less indulgent? Pious men! who speak of God with so much certainty and confidence, be so good as to tell us what it is; give us to comprehend what those abstract and metaphysical beings are, which you call God and soul, substance without matter, existence without body, life without organs or sensation. If you know those beings by your senses or their reflections, render them in like manner perceptible to us; or if you speak of them on testimony and tradition, show us a uniform account, and give a determinate basis to our creed." There now arose among the theologians a great controversy respecting God and his nature, his manner of acting, and of manifesting himself; on the nature of the soul and its union with the body; whether it exists before the organs, or only after they are formed; on the future life, and the other world. And every sect, every school, every individual, differing on all these points, and each assigning plausible reasons, and respectable though opposite authorities for his opinion, they fell into an inextricable labyrinth of contradictions. Then the legislator, having commanded silence and recalled the dispute to its true object, said: "Chiefs and instructors of nations; you came together in search of truth. At first, every one of you, thinking he possessed it, demanded of the others an implicit faith; but perceiving the contrariety of your opinions, you found it necessary to submit them to a common rule of evidence, and to bring them to one general term of comparison; and you agreed that each should exhibit the proofs of his doctrine. You began by alleging facts; but each religion and every sect, being equally furnished with miracles and martyrs, each producing an equal number of witnesses, and offering to support them by a voluntary death, the balance on this first point, by right of parity, remained equal. "You then passed to the trial of reasoning; but the same arguments applying equally to contrary positions--the same assertions, equally gratuitous, being advanced and repelled with equal force, and all having an equal right to refuse his assent, nothing was demonstrated. What is more, the confrontation of your systems has brought up more and extraordinary difficulties; for amid the apparent or adventitious diversities, you have discovered a fundamental resemblance, a common groundwork; and each of you pretending to be the inventor, and first depositary, have taxed each other with adulterations and plagiarisms; and thence arises a difficult question concerning the transmission of religious ideas from people to people. "Finally, to complete your embarrassment: when you endeavored to explain your doctrines to each other, they appeared confused and foreign, even to their adherents; they were founded on ideas inaccessible to your senses; you consequently had no means of judging of them, and you confessed yourselves in this respect to be only the echoes of your fathers. Hence follows this other question: how came they to the knowledge of your fathers, who themselves had no other means than you to conceive them? So that, on the one hand, the succession of these ideas being unknown, and on the other, their origin and existence being a mystery, all the edifice of your religious opinions becomes a complicated problem of metaphysics and history. "Since, however, these opinions, extraordinary as they may be, must have had some origin; since even the most abstract and fantastical ideas have some physical model, it may be useful to recur to this origin, and discover this model--in a word, to find out from what source the human understanding has drawn these ideas, at present so obscure, of God, of the soul, of all immaterial beings, which make the basis of so many systems; to unfold the filiation which they have followed, and the alterations which they have undergone in their transmissions and ramifications. If, then, there are any persons present who have made a study of these objects, let them come forward, and endeavor, in the face of nations, to dissipate the obscurity in which their opinions have so long remained." CHAPTER XXII. ORIGIN AND FILIATION OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. At these words, a new group, formed in an instant by men from various standards, but not distinguished by any, came forward into the circle; and one of them spoke in the name of the whole: "Delegates, friends of evidence and virtue! It is not surprising that the subject in question should be enveloped in so many clouds, since, besides its inherent difficulties, thought itself has always been encumbered with superadded obstacles peculiar to this study, where all free enquiry and discussion have been interdicted by the intolerance of every system. But now that our views are permitted to expand, we will expose to open day, and submit to the judgment of nations, that which unprejudiced minds, after long researches, have found to be the most reasonable; and we do this, not with the pretension of imposing a new creed, but with the hope of provoking new lights, and obtaining better information. "Doctors and instructors of nations! You know what thick darkness covers the nature, the origin, the history of the dogmas which you teach. Imposed by authority, inculcated by education, and maintained by example, they pass from age to age, and strengthen their empire from habit and inattention. But if man, enlightened by reflection and experience, brings to mature examination the prejudices of his childhood, he soon discovers a multitude of incongruities and contradictions which awaken his sagacity and excite his reasoning powers. "At first, remarking the diversity and opposition of the creeds which divide the nations, he takes courage to question the infallibility which each of them claims, and arming himself with their reciprocal pretensions, he conceives that his senses and his reason, derived immediately from God, are a law not less holy, a guide not less sure, than the mediate and contradictory codes of the prophets. "If he then examines the texture of these codes themselves, he observes that their laws, pretended to be divine, that is, immutable and eternal, have arisen from circumstances of times, places, and persons; that they have issued one from the other, in a kind of genealogical order, borrowing from each other reciprocally a common and similar fund of ideas, which every lawgiver modifies according to his fancy. "If he ascends to the source of these ideas, he finds it involved in the night of time, in the infancy of nations, even to the origin of the world, to which they claim alliance; and there, placed in the darkness of chaos, in the empire of fables and traditions, they present themselves, accompanied with a state of things so full of prodigies, that it seems to forbid all access to the judgment: but this state itself excites a first effort of reason, which resolves the difficulty; for if the prodigies, found in the theological systems, have really existed--if, for instance, the metamorphoses, the apparitions, the conversations with one or many gods, recorded in the books of the Indians, the Hebrews, the Parses, are historical events, he must agree that nature in those times was totally different from what it is at present; that the present race of men are quite another species from those who then existed; and, therefore, he ought not to trouble his head about them. "If, on the contrary, these miraculous events have really not existed in the physical order of things, then he readily conceives that they are creatures of the human intellect; and this faculty being still capable of the most fantastical combinations, explains at once the phenomenon of these monsters in history. It only remains, then, to find how and wherefore they have been formed in the imagination. Now, if we examine with care the subjects of these intellectual creations, analyze the ideas which they combine and associate, and carefully weigh all the circumstances which they allege, we shall find that this first obscure and incredible state of things is explained by the laws of nature. We find that these stories of a fabulous kind have a figurative sense different from the apparent one; that these events, pretended to be marvellous, are simple and physical facts, which, being misconceived or misrepresented, have been disfigured by accidental causes dependent on the human mind, by the confusion of signs employed to represent the ideas, the want of precision in words, permanence in language, and perfection in writing; we find that these gods, for instance, who display such singular characters in every system, are only the physical agents of nature, the elements, the winds, the stars, and the meteors, which have been personified by the necessary mechanism of language and of the human understanding; that their lives, their manners, their actions, are only their mechanical operations and connections; and that all their pretended history is only the description of these phenomena, formed by the first naturalists who observed them, and misconceived by the vulgar who did not understand them, or by succeeding generations who forgot them. In a word, all the theological dogmas on the origin of the world, the nature of God, the revelation of his laws, the manifestation of his person, are known to be only the recital of astronomical facts, only figurative and emblematical accounts of the motion of the heavenly bodies. We are convinced that the very idea of a God, that idea at present so obscure, is, in its first origin, nothing but that of the physical powers of the universe, considered sometimes as a plurality by reason of their agencies and phenomena, sometimes as one simple and only being by reason of the universality of the machine and the connection of its parts; so that the being called God has been sometimes the wind, the fire, the water, all the elements; sometimes the sun, the stars, the planets, and their influence; sometimes the matter of the visible world, the totality of the universe; sometimes abstract and metaphysical qualities, such as space, duration, motion, intelligence; and we everywhere see this conclusion, that the idea of God has not been a miraculous revelation of invisible beings, but a natural offspring of the human intellect--an operation of the mind, whose progress it has followed and whose revolutions it has undergone, in all the progress that has been made in the knowledge of the physical world and its agents. "It is then in vain that nations attribute their religion to heavenly inspirations; it is in vain that their dogmas pretend to a primeval state of supernatural events: the original barbarity of the human race, attested by their own monuments,* belies these assertions at once. But there is one constant and indubitable fact which refutes beyond contradiction all these doubtful accounts of past ages. From this position, that man acquires and receives no ideas but through the medium of his senses,** it follows with certainty that every notion which claims to itself any other origin than that of sensation and experience, is the erroneous supposition of a posterior reasoning: now, it is sufficient to cast an eye upon the sacred systems of the origin of the world, and of the actions of the gods, to discover in every idea, in every word, the anticipation of an order of things which could not exist till a long time after. Reason, strengthened by these contradictions, rejecting everything that is not in the order of nature, and admitting no historical facts but those founded on probabilities, lays open its own system, and pronounces itself with assurance. * It is the unanimous testimony of history, and even of legends, that the first human beings were every where savages, and that it was to civilize them, and teach them to make bread, that the Gods manifested themselves. ** The rock on which all the ancients have split, and which has occasioned all their errors, has been their supposing the idea of God to be innate and co-eternal with the soul; and hence all the reveries developed in Plato and Jamblicus. See the Timoeus, the Phedon, and De Mysteriis Egyptiorum, sect. I, c. 3. "Before one nation had received from another nation dogmas already invented; before one generation had inherited ideas acquired by a preceding generation, none of these complicated systems could have existed in the world. The first men, being children of nature, anterior to all events, ignorant of all science, were born without any idea of the dogmas arising from scholastic disputes; of rites founded on the practice of arts not then known; of precepts framed after the development of passions; or of laws which suppose a language, a state of society not then in being; or of God, whose attributes all refer to physical objects, and his actions to a despotic state of government; or of the soul, or of any of those metaphysical beings, which we are told are not the objects of sense, and for which, however, there can be no other means of access to the understanding. To arrive at so many results, the necessary circle of preceding facts must have been observed; slow experience and repeated trials must have taught the rude man the use of his organs; the accumulated knowledge of successive generations must have invented and improved the means of living; and the mind, freed from the cares of the first wants of nature, must have raised itself to the complicated art of comparing ideas, of digesting arguments, and seizing abstract similitudes." I. Origin of the idea of God: Worship of the elements and of the physical powers of nature. "It was not till after having overcome these obstacles, and gone through a long career in the night of history, that man, reflecting on his condition, began to perceive that he was subjected to forces superior to his own, and independent of his will. The sun enlightened and warmed him, the fire burned him, the thunder terrified him, the wind beat upon him, the water overwhelmed him. All beings acted upon him powerfully and irresistibly. He sustained this action for a long time, like a machine, without enquiring the cause; but the moment he began his enquiries, he fell into astonishment; and, passing from the surprise of his first reflections to the reverie of curiosity, he began a chain of reasoning. "First, considering the action of the elements on him, he conceived an idea of weakness and subjection on his part, and of power and domination on theirs; and this idea of power was the primitive and fundamental type of every idea of God. "Secondly, the action of these natural existences excited in him sensations of pleasure or pain, of good or evil; and by a natural effect of his organization, he conceived for them love or aversion; he desired or dreaded their presence; and fear or hope gave rise to the first idea of religion. "Then, judging everything by comparison, and remarking in these beings a spontaneous movement like his own, he supposed this movement directed by a will,--an intelligence of the nature of his own; and hence, by induction, he formed a new reasoning. Having experienced that certain practices towards his fellow creatures had the effect to modify their affections and direct their conduct to his advantage, he resorted to the same practices towards these powerful beings of the universe. He reasoned thus with himself: When my fellow creature, stronger than I, is disposed to do me injury, I abase myself before him, and my prayer has the art to calm him. I will pray to these powerful beings who strike me. I will supplicate the intelligences of the winds, of the stars, of the waters, and they will hear me. I will conjure them to avert the evil and give me the good that is at their disposal; I will move them by my tears, I will soften them by offerings, and I shall be happy. "Thus simple man, in the infancy of his reason, spoke to the sun and to the moon; he animated with his own understanding and passions the great agents of nature; he thought by vain sounds, and vain actions, to change their inflexible laws. Fatal error! He prayed the stone to ascend, the water to mount above its level, the mountains to remove, and substituting a fantastical world for the real one, he peopled it with imaginary beings, to the terror of his mind and the torment of his race. "In this manner the ideas of God and religion have sprung, like all others, from physical objects; they were produced in the mind of man from his sensations, from his wants, from the circumstances of his life, and the progressive state of his knowledge. "Now, as the ideas of God had their first models in physical agents, it followed that God was at first varied and manifold, like the form under which he appeared to act. Every being was a Power, a Genius; and the first men conceived the universe filled with innumerable gods. "Again the ideas of God have been created by the affections of the human heart; they became necessarily divided into two classes, according to the sensations of pleasure or pain, love or hatred, which they inspired. "The forces of nature, the gods and genii, were divided into beneficent and malignant, good and evil powers; and hence the universality of these two characters in all the systems of religion. "These ideas, analogous to the condition of their inventors, were for a long time confused and ill-digested. Savage men, wandering in the woods, beset with wants and destitute of resources, had not the leisure to combine principles and draw conclusions; affected with more evils than they found pleasures, their most habitual sentiment was that of fear, their theology terror; their worship was confined to a few salutations and offerings to beings whom they conceived as greedy and ferocious as themselves. In their state of equality and independence, no man offered himself as mediator between men and gods as insubordinate and poor as himself. No one having superfluities to give, there existed no parasite by the name of priest, no tribute by the name of victim, no empire by the name of altar. Their dogmas and their morals were the same thing, it was only self-preservation; and religion, that arbitrary idea, without influence on the mutual relations of men, was a vain homage rendered to the visible powers of nature. "Such was the necessary and original idea of God." And the orator, addressing himself to the savage nations, continued: "We appeal to you, men who have received no foreign and factitious ideas; tell us, have you ever gone beyond what I have described? And you, learned doctors, we call you to witness; is not this the unanimous testimony of all ancient monuments?* * It clearly results, says Plutarch, from the verses of Orpheus and the sacred books of the Egyptians and Phrygians, that the ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but of all nations, was nothing more than a system of physics, a picture of the operations of nature, wrapped up in mysterious allegories and enigmatical symbols, in a manner that the ignorant multitude attended rather to their apparent than to their hidden meaning, and even in what they understood of the latter, supposed there to be something more deep than what they perceived. Fragment of a work of Plutarch now lost, quoted by Eusebius, Proepar. Evang. lib. 3, ch. 1, p. 83. The majority of philosophers, says Porphyry, and among others Haeremon (who lived in Egypt in the first age of Christianity), imagine there never to have been any other world than the one we see, and acknowledged no other Gods of all those recognized by the Egyptians, than such as are commonly called planets, signs of the Zodiac, and constellations; whose aspects, that is, rising and setting, are supposed to influence the fortunes of men; to which they add their divisions of the signs into decans and dispensers of time, whom they style lords of the ascendant, whose names, virtues in relieving distempers, rising, setting, and presages of future events, are the subjects of almanacs (for be it observed, that the Egyptian priests had almanacs the exact counterpart of Matthew Lansberg's); for when the priests affirmed that the sun was the architect of the universe, Chaeremon presently concludes that all their narratives respecting Isis and Osiris, together with their other sacred fables, referred in part to the planets, the phases of the moon, and the revolution of the sun, and in part to the stars of the daily and nightly hemispheres and the river Nile; in a word, in all cases to physical and natural existences and never to such as might be immaterial and incorporeal. . . . All these philosophers believe that the acts of our will and the motion of our bodies depend on those of the stars to which they are subjected, and they refer every thing to the laws of physical necessity, which they call destiny or Fatum, supposing a chain of causes and effects which binds, by I know not what connection, all beings together, from the meanest atom to the supremest power and primary influence of the Gods; so that, whether in their temples or in their idols, the only subject of worship is the power of destiny. Porphyr. Epist. ad Janebonem. II. Second system: Worship of the Stars, or Sabeism. "But those same monuments present us likewise a system more methodical and more complicated--that of the worship of all the stars; adored sometimes in their proper forms, sometimes under figurative emblems and symbols; and this worship was the effect of the knowledge men had acquired in physics, and was derived immediately from the first causes of the social state; that is, from the necessities and arts of the first degree, which are among the elements of society. "Indeed, as soon as men began to unite in society, it became necessary for them to multiply the means of subsistence, and consequently to attend to agriculture: agriculture, to be carried on with success, requires the observation and knowledge of the heavens. It was necessary to know the periodical return of the same operations of nature, and the same phenomena in the skies; indeed to go so far as to ascertain the duration and succession of the seasons and the months of the year. It was indispensable to know, in the first place, the course of the sun, who, in his zodiacal revolution, shows himself the supreme agent of the whole creation; then, of the moon, who, by her phases and periods, regulates and distributes time; then, of the stars, and even of the planets, which by their appearance and disappearance on the horizon and nocturnal hemisphere, marked the minutest divisions. Finally, it was necessary to form a whole system of astronomy,* or a calendar; and from these works there naturally followed a new manner of considering these predominant and governing powers. Having observed that the productions of the earth had a regular and constant relation with the heavenly bodies; that the rise, growth, and decline of each plant kept pace with the appearance, elevation, and declination of the same star or the same group of stars; in short, that the languor or activity of vegetation seemed to depend on celestial influences, men drew from thence an idea of action, of power, in those beings, superior to earthly bodies; and the stars, dispensing plenty or scarcity, became powers, genii,** gods, authors of good and evil. * It continues to be repeated every day, on the indirect authority of the book of Genesis, that astronomy was the invention of the children of Noah. It has been gravely said, that while wandering shepherds in the plains of Shinar, they employed their leisure in composing a planetary system: as if shepherds had occasion to know more than the polar star; and if necessity was not the sole motive of every invention! If the ancient shepherds were so studious and sagacious, how does it happen that the modern ones are so stupid, ignorant, and inattentive? And it is a fact that the Arabs of the desert know not so many as six constellations, and understand not a word of astronomy. ** It appears that by the word genius, the ancients denoted a quality, a generative power; for the following words, which are all of one family, convey this meaning: generare, genos, genesis, genus, gens. "As the state of society had already introduced a regular hierarchy of ranks, employments and conditions, men, continuing to reason by comparison, carried their new notions into their theology, and formed a complicated system of divinities by gradation of rank, in which the sun, as first god,* was a military chief or a political king: the moon was his wife and queen; the planets were servants, bearers of commands, messengers; and the multitude of stars were a nation, an army of heroes, genii, whose office was to govern the world under the orders of their chiefs. All the individuals had names, functions, attributes, drawn from their relations and influences; and even sexes, from the gender of their appellations.** * The Sabeans, ancient and modern, says Maimonides, acknowledge a principal God, the maker and inhabitant of heaven; but on account of his great distance they conceive him to be inaccessible; and in imitation of the conduct of people towards their kings, they employ as mediators with him, the planets and their angels, whom they call princes and potentates, and whom they suppose to reside in those luminous bodies as in palaces or tabernacles, etc. More- Nebuchim. ** According as the gender of the object was in the language of the nation masculine or feminine, the Divinity who bore its name was male or female. Thus the Cappadocians called the moon God, and the sun Goddess: a circumstance which gives to the same beings a perpetual variety in ancient mythology. "And as the social state had introduced certain usages and ceremonies, religion, keeping pace with the social state, adopted similar ones; these ceremonies, at first simple and private, became public and solemn; the offerings became rich and more numerous, and the rites more methodical; they assigned certain places for the assemblies, and began to have chapels and temples; they instituted officers to administer them, and these became priests and pontiffs: they established liturgies, and sanctified certain days, and religion became a civil act, a political tie. "But in this arrangement, religion did not change its first principles; the idea of God was always that of physical beings, operating good or evil, that is, impressing sensations of pleasure or pain: the dogma was the knowledge of their laws, or their manner of acting; virtue and sin, the observance or infraction of these laws; and morality, in its native simplicity, was the judicious practice of whatever contributes to the preservation of existence, the well-being of one's self and his fellow creatures.* * We may add, says Plutarch, that these Egyptian priests always regarded the preservation of health as a point of the first importance, and as indispensably necessary to the practice of piety and the service of the gods. See his account of Isis and Osiris, towards the end. "Should it be asked at what epoch this system took its birth, we shall answer on the testimony of the monuments of astronomy itself; that its principles appear with certainty to have been established about seventeen thousand years ago,* and if it be asked to what people it is to be attributed, we shall answer that the same monuments, supported by unanimous traditions, attribute it to the first tribes of Egypt; and when reason finds in that country all the circumstances which could lead to such a system; when it finds there a zone of sky, bordering on the tropic, equally free from the rains of the equator and the fogs of the North;** when it finds there a central point of the sphere of the ancients, a salubrious climate, a great, but manageable river, a soil fertile without art or labor, inundated without morbid exhalations, and placed between two seas which communicate with the richest countries, it conceives that the inhabitant of the Nile, addicted to agriculture from the nature of his soil, to geometry from the annual necessity of measuring his lands, to commerce from the facility of communications, to astronomy from the state of his sky, always open to observation, must have been the first to pass from the savage to the social state; and consequently to attain the physical and moral sciences necessary to civilized life. * The historical orator follows here the opinion of M. Dupuis, who, in his learned memoirs concerning the Origin of the Constellations and Origin of all Worship, has assigned many plausible reasons to prove that Libra was formerly the sign of the vernal, and Aries of the autumnal equinox; that is, that since the origin of the actual astronomical system, the precession of the equinoxes has carried forward by seven signs the primitive order of the zodiac. Now estimating the precession at about seventy years and a half to a degree, that is, 2,115 years to each sign; and observing that Aries was in its fifteenth degree, 1,447 years before Christ, it follows that the first degree of Libra could not have coincided with the vernal equinox more lately than 15,194 years before Christ; now, if you add 1790 years since Christ, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since the origin of the Zodiac. The vernal equinox coincided with the first degree of Aries, 2,504 years before Christ, and with the first degree of Taurus 4,619 years before Christ. Now it is to be observed, that the worship of the Bull is the principal article in the theological creed of the Egyptians, Persians, Japanese, etc.; from whence it clearly follows, that some general revolution took place among these nations at that time. The chronology of five or six thousand years in Genesis is little agreeable to this hypothesis; but as the book of Genesis cannot claim to be considered as a history farther back than Abraham, we are at liberty to make what arrangements we please in the eternity that preceded. See on this subject the analysis of Genesis, in the first volume of New Researches on Ancient History; see also Origin of Constellatians, by Dupuis, 1781; the Origin of Worship, in 3 vols. 1794, and the Chronological Zodiac, 1806. ** M. Balli, in placing the first astronomers at Selingenakoy, near the Bailkal paid no attention to this twofold circumstance: it equally argues against their being placed at Axoum on account of the rains, and the Zimb fly of which Mr. Bruce speaks. "It was, then, on the borders of the upper Nile, among a black race of men, that was organized the complicated system of the worship of the stars, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture; and this first worship, characterized by their adoration under their own forms and natural attributes, was a simple proceeding of the human mind. But in a short time, the multiplicity of the objects of their relations, and their reciprocal influence, having complicated the ideas, and the signs that represented them, there followed a confusion as singular in its cause as pernicious in its effects." III. Third system. Worship of Symbols, or Idolatry. "As soon as this agricultural people began to observe the stars with attention, they found it necessary to individualize or group them; and to assign to each a proper name, in order to understand each other in their designation. A great difficulty must have presented itself in this business: First, the heavenly bodies, similar in form, offered no distinguishing characteristics by which to denominate them; and, secondly, the language in its infancy and poverty, had no expressions for so many new and metaphysical ideas. Necessity, the usual stimulus of genius, surmounted everything. Having remarked that in the annual revolution, the renewal and periodical appearance of terrestrial productions were constantly associated with the rising and setting of certain stars, and to their position as relative to the sun, the fundamental term of all comparison, the mind by a natural operation connected in thought these terrestrial and celestial objects, which were connected in fact; and applying to them a common sign, it gave to the stars, and their groups, the names of the terrestrial objects to which they answered.* * "The ancients," says Maimonides, "directing all their attention to agriculture, gave names to the stars derived from their occupation during the year." More Neb. pars 3. "Thus the Ethopian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow;* stars of the ox or the bull, those under which they began to plow; stars of the lion, those under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin, those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids, those under which these precious animals were brought forth: and thus was resolved the first part of the difficulty. * This must have been June. "Moreover, man having remarked in the beings which surrounded him certain qualities distinctive and proper to each species, and having thence derived a name by which to designate them, he found in the same source an ingenious mode of generalizing his ideas; and transferring the name already invented to every thing which bore any resemblance or analogy, he enriched his language with a perpetual round of metaphors. "Thus the same Ethiopian having observed that the return of the inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star which appeared towards the source of the Nile, and seemed to warn the husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the stars of the crab, those where the sun, having arrived at the tropic, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab or cancer. He named stars of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those where the sun, having reached the highest point in his annuary tract, rests at the summit of the horary gnomon, and imitates the goat, who delights to climb the summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, or libra, those where the days and nights, being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion. In the same manner he called by the name of rings and serpents the figured traces of the orbits of the stars and the planets, and such was the general mode of naming all the stars and even the planets, taken by groups or as individuals, according to their relations with husbandry and terrestrial objects, and according to the analogies which each nation found between them and the objects of its particular soil and climate.* * The ancients had verbs from the substantives crab, goat, tortoise, as the French have at present the verbs serpenter, coquetter. The history of all languages is nearly the same. "From this it appeared that abject and terrestrial beings became associated with the superior and powerful inhabitants of heaven; and this association became stronger every day by the mechanism of language and the constitution of the human mind. Men would say by a natural metaphor: The bull spreads over the earth the germs of fecundity (in spring) he restores vegetation and plenty: the lamb (or ram) delivers the skies from the maleficent powers of winter; he saves the world from the serpent (emblem of the humid season) and restores the empire of goodness (summer, joyful season): the scorpion pours out his poison on the earth, and scatters diseases and death. The same of all similar effects. "This language, understood by every one, was attended at first with no inconvenience; but in the course of time, when the calendar had been regulated, the people, who had no longer any need of observing the heavens, lost sight of the original meaning of these expressions; and the allegories remaining in common use became a fatal stumbling block to the understanding and to reason. Habituated to associate to the symbols the ideas of their archetypes, the mind at last confounded them: then the same animals, whom fancy had transported to the skies, returned again to the earth; but being thus returned, clothed in the livery of the stars, they claimed the stellary attributes, and imposed on their own authors. Then it was that the people, believing that they saw their gods among them, could pray to them with more convenience: they demanded from the ram of their flock the influences which might be expected from the heavenly ram; they prayed the scorpion not to pour out his venom upon nature; they revered the crab of the sea, the scarabeus of the mud, the fish of the river; and by a series of corrupt but inseparable analogies, they lost themselves in a labyrinth of well connected absurdities. "Such was the origin of that ancient whimsical worship of the animals; such is the train of ideas by which the character of the divinity became common to the vilest of brutes, and by which was formed that theological system, extremely comprehensive, complicated, and learned, which, rising on the borders of the Nile, propagated from country to country by commerce, war, and conquest, overspread the whole of the ancient world; and which, modified by time, circumstances and prejudices, is still seen entire among a hundred nations, and remains as the essential and secret basis of the theology of those even who despise and reject it." Some murmurs at these words being heard from various groups: "Yes!" continued the orator, "hence arose, for instance, among you, nations of Africa, the adoration of your fetiches, plants, animals, pebbles, pieces of wood, before which your ancestors would not have had the folly to bow, if they had not seen in them talismans endowed with the virtue of the stars.* * The ancient astrologers, says the most learned of the Jews (Maimonides), having sacredly assigned to each planet a color, an animal, a tree, a metal, a fruit, a plant, formed from them all a figure or representation of the star, taking care to select for the purpose a proper moment, a fortunate day, such as the conjunction of the star, or some other favorable aspect. They conceived that by their magic ceremonies they could introduce into those figures or idols the influences of the superior beings after which they were modeled. These were the idols that the Chaldean-Sabeans adored; and in the performance of their worship they were obliged to be dressed in the proper color. The astrologers, by their practices, thus introduced idolatry, desirous of being regarded as the dispensers of the favors of heaven; and as agriculture was the sole employment of the ancients, they succeeded in persuading them that the rain and other blessings of the seasons were at their disposal. Thus the whole art of agriculture was exercised by rules of astrology, and the priests made talismans or charms which were to drive away locusts, flies, etc. See Maimonides, More Nebuchim, pars 3, c. 29. The priests of Egypt, Persia, India, etc., pretended to bind the Gods to their idols, and to make them come from heaven at their pleasure. They threatened the sun and moon, if they were disobedient, to reveal the secret mysteries, to shake the skies, etc., etc. Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 198, and Jamblicus de Mysteriis Aegypt. "Here, ye nations of Tartary, is the origin of your marmosets, and of all that train of animals with which your chamans ornament their magical robes. This is the origin of those figures of birds and of snakes which savage nations imprint upon their skins with sacred and mysterious ceremonies. "Ye inhabitants of India! in vain you cover yourselves with the veil of mystery: the hawk of your god Vichenou is but one of the thousand emblems of the sun in Egypt; and your incarnations of a god in the fish, the boar, the lion, the tortoise, and all his monstrous adventures, are only the metamorphoses of the sun, who, passing through the signs of the twelve animals (or the zodiac), was supposed to assume their figures, and perform their astronomical functions.* * These are the very words of Jamblicus de Symbolis Aegyptiorum, c. 2, sect. 7. The sun was the grand Proteus, the universal metamorphist. "People of Japan, your bull, which breaks the mundane egg, is only the bull of the zodiac, which in former times opened the seasons, the age of creation, the vernal equinox. It is the same bull Apis which Egypt adored, and which your ancestors, Jewish Rabbins, worshipped in the golden calf. This is still your bull, followers of Zoroaster, which, sacrificed in the symbolic mysteries of Mithra, poured out his blood which fertilized the earth. And ye Christians, your bull of the Apocalypse, with his wings, symbol of the air, has no other origin; and your lamb of God, sacrificed, like the bull of Mithra, for the salvation of the world, is only the same sun, in the sign of the celestial ram, which, in a later age, opening the equinox in his turn, was supposed to deliver the world from evil, that is to say, from the constellation of the serpent, from that great snake, the parent of winter, the emblem of the Ahrimanes, or Satan of the Persians, your school masters. Yes, in vain does your imprudent zeal consign idolaters to the torments of the Tartarus which they invented; the whole basis of your system is only the worship of the sun, with whose attributes you have decorated your principal personage. It is the sun which, under the name of Horus, was born, like your God, at the winter solstice, in the arms of the celestial virgin, and who passed a childhood of obscurity, indigence, and want, answering to the season of cold and frost. It is he that, under the name of Osiris, persecuted by Typhon and by the tyrants of the air, was put to death, shut up in a dark tomb, emblem of the hemisphere of winter, and afterwards, ascending from the inferior zone towards the zenith of heaven, arose again from the dead triumphant over the giants and the angels of destruction. "Ye priests! who murmur at this relation, you wear his emblems all over your bodies; your tonsure is the disk of the sun; your stole is his zodiac;* your rosaries are symbols of the stars and planets. Ye pontiffs and prelates! your mitre, your crozier, your mantle are those of Osiris; and that cross whose mystery you extol without comprehending it, is the cross of Serapis, traced by the hands of Egyptian priests on the plan of the figurative world; which, passing through the equinoxes and the tropics, became the emblem of the future life and of the resurrection, because it touched the gates of ivory and of horn, through which the soul passed to heaven." * "The Arabs," says Herodotus, "shave their heads in a circle and about the temples, in imitation of Bacchus (that is the sun), who shaves himself is this manner." Jeremiah speaks also of this custom. The tuft of hair which the Mahometans preserve, is taken also from the sun, who was painted by the Egyptians at the winter solstice, as having but a single hair upon his head. . . . The robes of the goddess of Syria and of Diana of Ephesus, from whence are borrowed the dress of the priests; have the twelve animals of the zodiac painted on them. . . . Rosaries are found upon all the Indian idols, constructed more than four thousand years ago, and their use in the East has been universal from time immemorial. . . . The crozier is precisely the staff of Bootes or Osiris. (See plate.) All the Lamas wear the mitre or cap in the shape of a cone, which was an emblem of the sun. At these words, the doctors of all the groups began to look at each other with astonishment; but no one breaking silence, the orator proceeded: "Three principal causes concur to produce this confusion of ideas: First, the figurative expressions under which an infant language was obliged to describe the relations of objects; expressions which, passing afterwards from a limited to a general sense, and from a physical to a moral one, caused, by their ambiguities and synonymes, a great number of mistakes. "Thus, it being first said that the sun had surmounted, or finished, twelve animals, it was thought afterwards that he had killed them, fought them, conquered them; and of this was composed the historical life of Hercules.* * See the memoir of Dupuis on the Origin of the Constellations, before cited. "It being said that he regulated the periods of rural labor, the seed time and the harvest, that he distributed the seasons and occupations, ran through the climates and ruled the earth, etc., he was taken for a legislative king, a conquering warrior; and they framed from this the history of Osiris, of Bacchus, and others of that description. "Having said that a planet entered into a sign, they made of this conjunction a marriage, an adultery, an incest.* Having said that the planet was hid or buried, when it came back to light, and ascended to its exaltation, they said that it had died, risen again, was carried into heaven, etc. * These are the very words of Plutarch in his account of Isis and Osiris. The Hebrews say, in speaking of the generations of the Patriarchs, et ingressus est in eam. From this continual equivoke of ancient language, proceeds every mistake. "A second cause of confusion was the material figures themselves, by which men first painted thoughts; and which, under the name of hieroglyphics, or sacred characters, were the first invention of the mind. Thus, to give warning of the inundation, and of the necessity of guarding against it, they painted a boat, the ship Argo; to express the wind, they painted the wing of a bird; to designate the season, or the month, they painted the bird of passage, the insect, or the animal which made its appearance at that period; to describe the winter, they painted a hog or a serpent, which delight in humid places, and the combination of these figures carried the known sense of words and phrases.* But as this sense could not be fixed with precision, as the number of these figures and their combinations became excessive, and overburdened the memory, the immediate consequence was confusion and false interpretations. Genius afterwards having invented the more simple art of applying signs to sounds, of which the number is limited, and painting words, instead of thoughts, alphabetical writing thus threw into disuetude hieroglyphical painting; and its signification, falling daily into oblivion, gave rise to a multitude of illusions, ambiguities, and errors. * The reader will doubtless see with pleasure some examples of ancient hieroglyphics. "The Egyptians (says Hor-appolo) represent eternity by the figures of the sun and moon. They designate the world by the blue serpent with yellow scales (stars, it is the Chinese Dragon). If they were desirous of expressing the year, they drew a picture of Isis, who is also in their language called Sothis, or dog-star, one of the first constellations, by the rising of which the year commences; its inscription at Sais was, It is I that rise in the constellation of the Dog. "They also represent the year by a palm tree, and the month by one of its branches, because it is the nature of this tree to produce a branch every month. They farther represent it by the fourth part of an acre of land." The whole acre divided into four denotes the bissextile period of four years. The abbreviation of this figure of a field in four divisions, is manifestly the letter ha or het, the seventh in the Samaritan alphabet; and in general all the letters of the alphabet are merely astronomical hieroglyphics; and it is for this reason that the mode of writing is from right to left, like the march of the stars. --"They denote a prophet by the image of a dog, because the dog star (Anoubis) by its rising gives notice of the inundation. Noubi, in Hebrew signifies prophet--They represent inundation by a lion, because it takes place under that sign: and hence, says Plutarch, the custom of placing at the gates of temples figures of lions with water issuing from their mouths.--They express the idea of God and destiny by a star. They also represent God, says Porphyry, by a black stone, because his nature is dark and obscure. All white things express the celestial and luminous Gods: all circular ones the world, the moon, the sun, the orbits; all semicircular ones, as bows and crescents are descriptive of the moon. Fire and the Gods of Olympus they represent by pyramids and obelisks (the name of the sun, Baal, is found in this latter word): the sun by a cone (the mitre of Osiris): the earth, by a cylinder (which revolves): the generative power of the air by the phalus, and that of the earth by a triangle, emblem of the female organ. Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 98. "Clay, says Jamblicus de Symbolis, sect. 7, c. 2. denotes matter, the generative and nutrimental power, every thing which receives the warmth and fermentation of life." "A man sitting upon the Lotos or Nenuphar, represents the moving spirit (the sun) which, in like manner as that plant lives in the water without any communication with clay, exists equally distinct from matter, swimming in empty space, resting on itself: it is round also in all its parts, like the leaves, the flowers, and the fruit of the Lotos. (Brama has the eyes of the Lotos, says Chasler Nesdirsen, to denote his intelligence: his eye swims over every thing, like the flower of the Lotos on the waters.) A man at the helm of a ship, adds Jamblicus, is descriptive of the sun which governs all. And Porphyry tells us that the sun is also represented by a man in a ship resting upon an amphibious crocodile (emblem of air and water). "At Elephantine they worshipped the figure of a man in a sitting posture, painted blue, having the head of a ram, and the horns of a goat which encompassed a disk; all which represented the sun and moon's conjunction at the sign of the ram; the blue color denoting the power of the moon, at the period of junction, to raise water into the clouds. Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 116. "The hawk is an emblem of the sun and of light, on account of his rapid flight and his soaring into the highest regions of the air where light abounds. A fish is the emblem of aversion, and the Hippopotamus of violence, because it is said to kill its father and to ravish its mother. Hence, says Plutarch, the emblematical inscription of the temple of Sais, where we see painted on the vestibule, 1. A child, 2. An old man, 3. A hawk, 4. A fish, 5. A hippopotamus: which signify, 1. Entrance, into life, 2. Departure, 3. God, 4. Hates, 5. Injustice. See Isis and Osiris. "The Egyptians, adds he, represent the world by a Scarabeus, because this insect pushes, in a direction contrary to that in which it proceeds, a ball containing its eggs, just as the heaven of the fixed stars causes the revolution of the sun, (the yolk of an egg) in an opposite direction to its own. "They represent the world also by the number five, being that of the elements, which, says Diodorus, are earth, water, air, fire, and ether, or spiritus. The Indians have the same number of elements, and according to Macrobius's mystics, they are the supreme God, or primum mobile, the intelligence, or mens, born of him, the soul of the world which proceeds from him, the celestial spheres, and all things terrestrial. Hence, adds Plutarch, the analogy between the Greek pente, five, and pan all. "The ass," says he again, "is the emblem of Typhon, because like that animal he is of a reddish color. Now Typhon signifies whatever is of a mirey or clayey nature; (and in Hebrew I find the three words clay, red, and ass to be formed from the same root hamr). Jamblicus has farther told us that clay was the emblem of matter and he elsewhere adds, that all evil and corruption proceeded from matter; which compared with the phrase of Macrobius, all is perishable, liable to change in the celestial sphere, gives us the theory, first physical, then moral, of the system of good and evil of the ancients." "Finally, a third cause of confusion was the civil organization of ancient states. When the people began to apply themselves to agriculture, the formation of a rural calendar, requiring a continued series of astronomical observations, it became necessary to appoint certain individuals charged with the functions of watching the appearance and disappearance of certain stars, to foretell the return of the inundation, of certain winds, of the rainy season, the proper time to sow every kind of grain. These men, on account of their service, were exempt from common labor, and the society provided for their maintenance. With this provision, and wholly employed in their observations, they soon became acquainted with the great phenomena of nature, and even learned to penetrate the secret of many of her operations. They discovered the movement of the stars and planets, the coincidence of their phases and returns with the productions of the earth and the action of vegetation; the medicinal and nutritive properties of plants and fruits; the action of the elements, and their reciprocal affinities. Now, as there was no other method of communicating the knowledge of these discoveries but the laborious one of oral instruction, they transmitted it only to their relations and friends, it followed therefore that all science and instruction were confined to a few families, who, arrogating it to themselves as an exclusive privilege, assumed a professional distinction, a corporation spirit, fatal to the public welfare. This continued succession of the same researches and the same labors, hastened, it is true, the progress of knowledge; but by the mystery which accompanied it, the people were daily plunged in deeper shades, and became more superstitious and more enslaved. Seeing their fellow mortals produce certain phenomena, announce, as at pleasure, eclipses and comets, heal diseases, and handle venomous serpents, they thought them in alliance with celestial powers; and, to obtain the blessings and avert the evils which they expected from above, they took them for mediators and interpreters; and thus became established in the bosom of every state sacrilegious corporations of hypocritical and deceitful men, who centered all powers in themselves; and the priests, being at once astronomers, theologians, naturalists, physicians, magicians, interpreters of the gods, oracles of men, and rivals of kings, or their accomplices, established, under the name of religion, an empire of mystery and a monopoly of instruction, which to this day have ruined every nation. . . ." Here the priests of all the groups interrupted the orator, and with loud cries accused him of impiety, irreligion, blasphemy; and endeavored to cut short his discourse; but the legislator observing that this was only an exposition of historical facts, which, if false or forged, would be easily refuted; that hitherto the declaration of every opinion had been free, and without this it would be impossible to discover the truth, the orator proceeded: "Now, from all these causes, and from the continual associations of ill-assorted ideas, arose a mass of disorders in theology, in morals, and in traditions; first, because the animals represented the stars, the characters of the animals, their appetites, their sympathies, their aversions, passed over to the gods, and were supposed to be their actions; thus, the god Ichneumon made war against the god Crocodile; the god Wolf liked to eat the god Sheep; the god Ibis devoured the god Serpent; and the deity became a strange, capricious, and ferocious being, whose idea deranged the judgment of man, and corrupted his morals and his reason. "Again, because in the spirit of their worship every family, every nation, took for its special patron a star or a constellation, the affections or antipathies of the symbolic animal were transferred to its sectaries; and the partisans of the god Dog were enemies to those of the god Wolf;* those who adored the god Ox had an abhorrence to those who ate him; and religion became the source of hatred and hostility,--the senseless cause of frenzy and superstition. * These are properly the words of Plutarch, who relates that those various worships were given by a king of Egypt to the different towns to disunite and enslave them, and these kings had been taken from the cast of priests. See Isis and Osiris. "Besides, the names of those animal-stars having, for this same reason of patronage, been conferred on countries, nations, mountains, and rivers, these objects were taken for gods, and hence followed a mixture of geographical, historical, and mythological beings, which confounded all traditions. "Finally, by the analogy of actions which were ascribed to them, the god-stars, having been taken for men, for heroes, for kings, kings and heroes took in their turn the actions of gods for models, and by imitation became warriors, conquerors, proud, lascivious, indolent, sanguinary; and religion consecrated the crimes of despots, and perverted the principles of government." IV. Fourth system. Worship of two Principles, or Dualism. "In the mean time, the astronomical priests, enjoying peace and abundance in their temples, made every day new progress in the sciences, and the system of the world unfolding gradually to their view, they raised successively various hypotheses as to its agents and effects, which became so many theological systems. "The voyages of the maritime nations and the caravans of the nomads of Asia and Africa, having given them a knowledge of the earth from the Fortunate Islands to Serica, and from the Baltic to the sources of the Nile, the comparison of the phenomena of the various zones taught them the rotundity of the earth, and gave birth to a new theory. Having remarked that all the operations of nature during the annual period were reducible to two principal ones, that of producing and that of destroying; that on the greater part of the globe these two operations were performed in the intervals of the two equinoxes; that is to say, during the six months of summer every thing was procreating and multiplying, and that during winter everything languished and almost died; they supposed in Nature two contrary powers, which were in a continual state of contention and exertion; and considering the celestial sphere in this view, they divided the images which they figured upon it into two halves or hemispheres; so that the constellations which were on the summer heaven formed a direct and superior empire; and those which were on the winter heaven composed an antipode and inferior empire. Therefore, as the constellations of summer accompanied the season of long, warm, and unclouded days, and that of fruits and harvests, they were considered as the powers of light, fecundity, and creation; and, by a transition from a physical to a moral sense, they became genii, angels of science, of beneficence, of purity and virtue. And as the constellations of winter were connected with long nights and polar fogs, they were the genii of darkness, of destruction, of death; and by transition, angels of ignorance, of wickedness, of sin and vice. By this arrangement the heaven was divided into two domains, two factions; and the analogy of human ideas already opened a vast field to the errors of imagination; but the mistake and the illusion were determined, if not occasioned by a particular circumstance. (Observe plate Astrological Heaven of the Ancients.) "In the projection of the celestial sphere, as traced by the astronomical priests,* the zodiac and the constellations, disposed in circular order, presented their halves in diametrical opposition; the hemisphere of winter, antipode of that of summer, was adverse, contrary, opposed to it. By a continual metaphor, these words acquired a moral sense; and the adverse genii, or angels, became revolted enemies.** From that moment all the astronomical history of the constellations was changed into a political history; the heavens became a human state, where things happened as on the earth. Now, as the earthly states, the greater part despotic, had already their monarchs, and as the sun was apparently the monarch of the skies, the summer hemisphere (empire of light) and its constellations (a nation of white angels) had for king an enlightened God, a creator intelligent and good. And as every rebel faction must have its chief, the heaven of winter, the subterranean empire of darkness and woe, and its stars, a nation of black angels, giants and demons, had for their chief a malignant genius, whose character was applied by different people to the constellation which to them was the most remarkable. In Egypt it was at first the Scorpion, first zodiacal sign after Libra, and for a long time chief of the winter signs ; then it was the Bear, or the polar Ass, called Typhon, that is to say, deluge,** on account of the rains which deluge the earth during the dominion of that star. At a later period,*** in Persia,**** it was the Serpent, who, under the name of Abrimanes, formed the basis of the system of Zoroaster; and it is the same, O Christians and Jews! that has become your serpent of Eve (the celestial virgin,) and that of the cross; in both cases it is the emblem of Satan, the enemy and great adversary of the Ancient of Days, sung by Daniel. * The ancient priests had three kinds of spheres, which it may be useful to make known to the reader. "We read in Eusebius," says Porphyry, "that Zoroaster was the first who, having fixed upon a cavern pleasantly situated in the mountains adjacent to Persia, formed the idea of consecrating it to Mithra (the sun) creator and father of all things: that is to say, having made in this cavern several geometrical divisions, representing the seasons and the elements, he imitated on a small scale the order and disposition of the universe by Mithra. After Zoroaster, it became a custom to consecrate caverns for the celebration of mysteries: so that in like manner as temples were dedicated to the Gods, rural altars to heroes and terrestrial deities, etc., subterranean abodes to infernal deities, so caverns and grottoes were consecrated to the world, to the universe, and to the nymphs: and from hence Pythagoras and Plato borrowed the idea of calling the earth a cavern, a cave, de Antro Nympharum. Such was the first projection of the sphere in relief; though the Persians give the honor of the invention to Zoroaster, it is doubtless due to the Egyptians; for we may suppose from this projection being the most simple that it was the most ancient; the caverns of Thebes, full of similar pictures, tend to strengthen this opinion. The following was the second projection: "The prophets or hierophants," says Bishop Synnesius, "who had been initiated in the mysteries, do not permit the common workmen to form idols or images of the Gods; but they descend themselves into the sacred caves, where they have concealed coffers containing certain spheres upon which they construct those images secretly and without the knowledge of the people, who despise simple and natural things and wish for prodigies and fables." (Syn. in Calvit.) That is, the ancient priests had armillary spheres like ours; and this passage, which so well agrees with that of Chaeremon, gives us the key to all their theological astrology. Lastly, they had flat models of the nature of Plate V. with the difference that they were of a very complicated nature, having every fictitious division of decan and subdecan, with the hieroglyphic signs of their influence. Kircher has given us a copy of one of them in his Egyptian Oedipus, and Gybelin a figured fragment in his book of the calendar (under the name of the Egyptian Zodiac). The ancient Egyptians, says the astrologer Julius Firmicus, (Astron. lib. ii. and lib. iv., c. 16), divide each sign of the Zodiac into three sections; and each section was under the direction of an imaginary being whom they called decan or chief of ten; so that there were three decans a month, and thirty-six a year. Now these decans, who were also called Gods (Theoi), regulated the destinies of mankind--and they were placed particularly in certain stars. They afterwards imagined in every ten three other Gods, whom they called arbiters; so that there were nine for every month, and these were farther divided into an infinite number of powers. The Persians and Indians made their spheres on similar plans; and if a picture thereof were to be drawn from the description given by Scaliger at the end of Manilius, we should find in it a complete explanation of their hieroglyphics, for every article forms one. ** If it was for this reason the Persians always wrote the name of Ahrimanes inverted thus: ['Ahrimanes' upside down and backwards]. *** Typhon, pronounced Touphon by the Greeks, is precisely the touphan of the Arabs, which signifies deluge; and these deluges in mythology are nothing more than winter and the rains, or the overflowing of the Nile: as their pretended fires which are to destroy the world, are simply the summer season. And it is for this reason that Aristotle (De Meteor, lib. I. c. xiv), says, that the winter of the great cyclic year is a deluge; and its summer a conflagration. "The Egyptians," says Porphyry, "employ every year a talisman in remembrance of the world: at the summer solstice they mark their houses, flocks and trees with red, supposing that on that day the whole world had been set on fire. It was also at the same period that they celebrated the pyrric or fire dance." And this illustrates the origin of purification by fire and by water; for having denominated the tropic of Cancer the gate of heaven, and the genial heat of celestial fire, and that of Capricorn the gate of deluge or of water, it was imagined that the spirit or souls who passed through these gates in their way to and from heaven, were roasted or bathed: hence the baptism of Mithra; and the passage through flames, observed throughout the East long before Moses. **** That is when the ram became the equinoctial sign, or rather when the alteration of the skies showed that it was no longer the bull. "In Syria, it was the hog or wild boar, enemy of Adonis; because in that country the functions of the Northern Bear were performed by the animal whose inclination for mire and dirt was emblematic of winter. And this is the reason, followers of Moses and Mahomet! that you hold him in horror, in imitation of the priests of Memphis and Balbec, who detested him as the murderer of their God, the sun. This likewise, O Indians! is the type of your Chib-en; and it has been likewise the Pluto of your brethren, the Romans and Greeks; in like manner, your Brama, God the creator, is only the Persian Ormuzd, and the Egyptian Osiris, whose very name expresses creative power, producer of forms. And these gods received a worship analogous to their attributes, real or imaginary; which worship was divided into two branches, according to their characters. The good god receives a worship of love and joy, from which are derived all religious acts of gaiety, such as festivals, dances, banquets, offerings of flowers, milk, honey, perfumes; in a word, everything grateful to the senses and to the soul.* The evil god, on the contrary, received a worship of fear and pain; whence originated all religious acts of the gloomy sort,** tears, desolations, mournings, self-denials, bloody offerings, and cruel sacrifices. * All the ancient festivals respecting the return and exaltation of the sun were of this description: hence the hilaria of the Roman calendar at the period of the passage, Pascha, of the vernal equinox. The dances were imitations of the march of the planets. Those of the Dervises still represent it to this day. ** "Sacrifices of blood," says Porphyry, "were only offered to Demons and evil Genii to avert their wrath. Demons are fond of blood, humidity, stench." Apud. Euseb. Proep. Ev., p. 173. "The Egyptians," says Plutarch, "only offer bloody victims to Typhon. They sacrifice to him a red ox, and the animal immolated is held in execration and loaded with all the sins of the people." The goat of Moses. See Isis and Osiris. Strabo says, speaking of Moses, and the Jews, "Circumcision and the prohibition of certain kinds of meat sprung from superstition." And I observe, respecting the ceremony of circumcision, that its object was to take from the symbol of Osiris, (Phallus) the pretended obstacle to fecundity: an obstacle which bore the seal of Typhon, "whose nature," says Plutarch, "is made up of all that hinders, opposes, causes obstruction." "Hence arose that distinction of terrestrial beings into pure and impure, sacred and abominable, according as their species were of the number of the constellations of one of these two gods, and made part of his domain; and this produced, on the one hand, the superstitions concerning pollutions and purifications; and, on the other, the pretended efficacious virtues of amulets and talismans. "You conceive now," continued the orator, addressing himself to the Persians, the Indians, the Jews, the Christians, the Mussulmans, "you conceive the origin of those ideas of battles and rebellions, which equally abound in all your mythologies. You see what is meant by white and black angels, your cherubim and seraphim, with heads of eagles, of lions, or of bulls; your deus, devils, demons, with horns of goats and tails of serpents; your thrones and dominions, ranged in seven orders or gradations, like the seven spheres of the planets; all beings acting the same parts, and endowed with the same attributes in your Vedas, Bibles, and Zend-avestas, whether they have for chiefs Ormuzd or Brama, Typhon or Chiven, Michael or Satan;--whether they appear under the form of giants with a hundred arms and feet of serpents, or that of gods metamorphosed into lions, storks, bulls or cats, as they are in the sacred fables of the Greeks and Egyptians. You perceive the successive filiation of these ideas, and how, in proportion to their remoteness from their source, and as the minds of men became refined, their gross forms have been polished, and rendered less disgusting. "But in the same manner as you have seen the system of two opposite principles or gods arise from that of symbols, interwoven into its texture, your attention shall now be called to a new system which has grown out of this, and to which this has served in its turn as the basis and support. V. Moral and Mystical Worship, or System of a Future State. "Indeed, when the vulgar heard speak of a new heaven and another world, they soon gave a body to these fictions; they erected therein a real theatre of action, and their notions of astronomy and geography served to strengthen, if not to originate, this illusion. "On the one hand, the Phoenician navigators who passed the pillars of Hercules, to fetch the tin of Thule and the amber of the Baltic, related that at the extremity of the world, the end of the ocean (the Mediterranean), where the sun sets for the countries of Asia, were the Fortunate Islands, the abode of eternal spring; and beyond were the hyperborean regions, placed under the earth (relatively to the tropics) where reigned an eternal night.* From these stories, misunderstood, and no doubt confusedly related, the imagination of the people composed the Elysian fields,** regions of delight, placed in a world below, having their heaven, their sun, and their stars; and Tartarus, a place of darkness, humidity, mire, and frost. Now, as man, inquisitive of that which he knows not, and desirous of protracting his existence, had already interrogated himself concerning what was to become of him after his death, as he had early reasoned on the principle of life which animates his body, and which leaves it without deforming it, and as he had imagined airy substances, phantoms, and shades, he fondly believed that he should continue, in the subterranean world, that life which it was too painful for him to lose; and these lower regions seemed commodious for the reception of the beloved objects which he could not willingly resign. * Nights of six months duration. ** Aliz, in the Phoenician or Hebrew language signifies dancing and joyous. "On the other hand, the astrological and geological priests told such stories and made such descriptions of their heavens, as accorded perfectly well with these fictions. Having, in their metaphorical language, called the equinoxes and solstices the gates of heaven, the entrance of the seasons, they explained these terrestrial phenomena by saying, that through the gate of horn (first the bull, afterwards the ram) and through the gate of Cancer, descended the vivifying fires which give life to vegetation in the spring, and the aqueous spirits which bring, at the solstice, the inundation of the Nile; that through the gate of ivory (Libra, formerly Sagittarius, or the bowman) and that of Capricorn, or the urn, the emanations or influences of the heavens returned to their source, and reascended to their origin; and the Milky Way, which passed through the gates of the solstices, seemed to be placed there to serve them as a road or vehicle.* Besides, in their atlas, the celestial scene presented a river (the Nile, designated by the windings of the hydra), a boat, (the ship Argo) and the dog Sirius, both relative to this river, whose inundation they foretold. These circumstances, added to the preceding, and still further explaining them, increased their probability, and to arrive at Tartarus or Elysium, souls were obliged to cross the rivers Styx and Acheron in the boat of the ferryman Charon, and to pass through the gates of horn or ivory, guarded by the dog Cerberus. Finally, these inventions were applied to a civil use, and thence received a further consistency. *See Macrob. Som. Scrip. c. 12. "Having remarked that in their burning climate the putrefaction of dead bodies was a cause of pestilential diseases, the Egyptians, in many of their towns, had adopted the practice of burying their dead beyond the limits of the inhabited country, in the desert of the West. To go there, it was necessary to pass the channels of the river, and consequently to be received into a boat, and pay something to the ferryman, without which the body, deprived of sepulture, must have been the prey of wild beasts. This custom suggested to the civil and religious legislators the means of a powerful influence on manners; and, addressing uncultivated and ferocious men with the motives of filial piety and a reverence for the dead, they established, as a necessary condition, their undergoing a previous trial, which should decide whether the deceased merited to be admitted to the rank of the family in the black city. Such an idea accorded too well with all the others, not to be incorporated with them: the people soon adopted it; and hell had its Minos and its Rhadamanthus, with the wand, the bench, the ushers, and the urn, as in the earthly and civil state. It was then that God became a moral and political being, a lawgiver to men, and so much the more to be dreaded, as this supreme legislator, this final judge, was inaccessible and invisible. Then it was that this fabulous and mythological world, composed of such odd materials and disjointed parts, became a place of punishments and of rewards, where divine justice was supposed to correct what was vicious and erroneous in the judgment of men. This spiritual and mystical system acquired the more credit, as it took possession of man by all his natural inclinations. The oppressed found in it the hope of indemnity, and the consolation of future vengeance; the oppressor, expecting by rich offerings to purchase his impunity, formed out of the errors of the vulgar an additional weapon of oppression; the chiefs of nations, the kings and priests, found in this a new instrument of domination by the privilege which they reserved to themselves of distributing the favors and punishments of the great judge, according to the merit or demerit of actions, which they took care to characterize as best suited their system. "This, then, is the manner in which an invisible and imaginary world has been introduced into the real and visible one; this is the origin of those regions of pleasure and pain, of which you Persians have made your regenerated earth, your city of resurrection, placed under the equator, with this singular attribute, that in it the blessed cast no shade.* Of these materials, Jews and Christians, disciples of the Persians, have you formed your New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, your paradise, your heaven, copied in all its parts from the astrological heaven of Hermes: and your hell, ye Mussulmans, your bottomless pit, surmounted by a bridge, your balance for weighing souls and good works, your last judgment by the angels Monkir and Nekir, are likewise modeled from the mysterious ceremonies of the cave of Mithras** and your heaven differs not in the least from that of Osiris, of Ormuzd, and of Brama. * There is on this subject a passage in Plutarch, so interesting and explanatory of the whole of this system, that we shall cite it entire. Having observed that the theory of good and evil had at all times occupied the attention of philosophers and theologians, he adds: "Many suppose there to be two gods of opposite inclinations, one delighting in good, the other in evil; the first of these is called particularly by the name of God, the second by that of Genius or Demon. Zoroaster has denominated them Oromaze and Ahrimanes, and has said that of whatever falls under the cognizance of our senses, light is the best representation of the one, and darkness and ignorance of the other. He adds, that Mithra is an intermediate being, and it is for this reason the Persians call Mithra the mediator or intermediator. Each of these Gods has distinct plants and animals consecrated to him: for example, dogs, birds and hedge-hogs belong to the good Genius, and all aquatic animals to the evil one. "The Persians also say, that Oromaze was born or formed out of the purest light; Ahrimanes, on the contrary, out of the thickest darkness: that Oromaze made six gods as good as himself, and Ahrimanes opposed to them six wicked ones: that Oromaze afterwards multiplied himself threefold (Hermes trismegistus) and removed to a distance as remote from the sun as the sun is remote from the earth that he there formed stars, and, among others, Sirius, which he placed in the heavens as a guard and sentinel. He made also twenty-four other Gods, which he inclosed in an egg; but Ahrimanes created an equal number on his part, who broke the egg, and from that moment good and evil were mixed (in the universe). But Ahrimanes is one day to be conquered, and the earth to be made equal and smooth, that all men may live happy. "Theopompus adds, from the books of the Magi, that one of these Gods reigns in turn every three thousand years during which the other is kept in subjection; that they afterwards contend with equal weapons during a similar portion of time, but that in the end the evil Genius will fall (never to rise again). Then men will become happy, and their bodies cast no shade. The God who mediates all these things reclines at present in repose, waiting till he shall be pleased to execute them." See Isis and Osiris. There is an apparent allegory through the whole of this passage. The egg is the fixed sphere, the world: the six Gods of Oromaze are the six signs of summer, those of Ahrimanes the six signs of winter. The forty-eight other Gods are the forty-eight constellations of the ancient sphere, divided equally between Ahrimanes and Oronmze. The office of Sirius, as guard and sentinel, tells us that the origin of these ideas was Egyptian: finally, the expression that the earth is to become equal and smooth, and that the bodies of happy beings are to cast no shade, proves that the equator was considered as their true paradise. ** In the caves which priests every where constructed, they celebrated mysteries which consisted (says Origen against Celsus) in imitating the motion of the stars, the planets and the heavens. The initiated took the name of constellations, and assumed the figures of animals. One was a lion, another a raven, and a third a ram. Hence the use of masks in the first representation of the drama. See Ant. Devoile, vol. iii., p. 244. "In the mysteries of Ceres the chief in the procession called himself the creator; the bearer of the torch was denominated the sun; the person nearest to the altar, the moon; the herald or deacon, Mercury. In Egypt there was a festival in which the men and women represented the year, the age, the seasons, the different parts of the day, and they walked in precession after Bacchus. Athen. lib. v., ch. 7. In the cave of Mithra was a ladder with seven steps, representing the seven spheres of the planets, by means of which souls ascended and descended. This is precisely the ladder in Jacob's vision, which shows that at that epoch a the whole system was formed. There is in the French king's library a superb volume of pictures of the Indian Gods, in which the ladder is represented with the souls of men mounting it." VI. Sixth System. The Animated World, or Worship of the Universe under diverse Emblems. "While the nations were wandering in the dark labyrinth of mythology and fables, the physical priests, pursuing their studies and enquiries into the order and disposition of the universe, came to new conclusions, and formed new systems concerning powers and first causes. "Long confined to simple appearances, they saw nothing in the movement of the stars but an unknown play of luminous bodies rolling round the earth, which they believed the central point of all the spheres; but as soon as they discovered the rotundity of our planet, the consequences of this first fact led them to new considerations; and from induction to induction they rose to the highest conceptions in astronomy and physics. "Indeed, after having conceived this luminous idea, that the terrestrial globe is a little circle inscribed in the greater circle of the heavens, the theory of concentric circles came naturally into their hypothesis, to determine the unknown circle of the terrestrial globe by certain known portions of the celestial circle; and the measurement of one or more degrees of the meridian gave with precision the whole circumference. Then, taking for a compass the known diameter of the earth, some fortunate genius applied it with a bold hand to the boundless orbits of the heavens; and man, the inhabitant of a grain of sand, embracing the infinite distances of the stars, launches into the immensity of space and the eternity of time: there he is presented with a new order of the universe of which the atom-globe which he inhabited appeared no longer to be the centre; this important post was reserved to the enormous mass of the sun; and that body became the flaming pivot of eight surrounding spheres, whose movements were henceforth subjected to precise calculations. "It was indeed a great effort for the human mind to have undertaken to determine the disposition and order of the great engines of nature; but not content with this first effort, it still endeavored to develop the mechanism, and discover the origin and the instinctive principle. Hence, engaged in the abstract and metaphysical nature of motion and its first cause, of the inherent or incidental properties of matter, its successive forms and its extension, that is to say, of time and space unbounded, the physical theologians lost themselves in a chaos of subtile reasoning and scholastic controversy.* * Consult the Ancient Astronomy of M. Bailly, and you will find our assertions respecting the knowledge of the priests amply proved. "In the first place, the action of the sun on terrestrial bodies, teaching them to regard his substance as a pure and elementary fire, they made it the focus and reservoir of an ocean of igneous and luminous fluid, which, under the name of ether, filled the universe and nourished all beings. Afterwards, having discovered, by a physical and attentive analysis, this same fire, or another perfectly resembling it, in the composition of all bodies, and having perceived it to be the essential agent of that spontaneous movement which is called life in animals and vegetation in plants, they conceived the mechanism and harmony of the universe, as of a homogeneous whole, of one identical body, whose parts, though distant, had nevertheless an intimate relation;* and the world was a living being, animated by the organic circulation of an igneous and even electrical fluid,** which, by a term of comparison borrowed first from men and animals, had the sun for a heart and a focus.*** * These are the very words of Jamblicus. De Myst. Egypt. ** The more I consider what the ancients understood by ether and spirit, and what the Indians call akache, the stronger do I find the analogy between it and the electrial fluid. A luminous fluid, principle of warmth and motion, pervading the universe, forming the matter of the stars, having small round particles, which insinuate themselves into bodies, and fill them by dilating itself, be their extent what it will. What can more strongly resemble electricity? *** Natural philosophers, says Macrobius, call the sun the heart of the world. Som. Scrip. c. 20. The Egyptians, says Plutarch, call the East the face, the North the right side, and the South the left side of the world, because there the heart is placed. They continually compare the universe to a man; and hence the celebrated microcosm of the Alchymists. We observe, by the bye, that the Alchymists, Cabalists, Free-masons, Magnetisers, Martinists, and every other such sort of visionaries, are but the mistaken disciples of this ancient school: we say mistaken, because, in spite of their pretensions, the thread of the occult science is broken. "From this time the physical theologians seem to have divided into several classes; one class, grounding itself on these principles resulting from observation; that nothing can be annihilated in the world; that the elements are indestructible; that they change their combinations but not their nature; that the life and death of beings are but the different modifications of the same atoms; that matter itself possesses properties which give rise to all its modes of existence; that the world is eternal,* or unlimited in space and duration; said that the whole universe was God; and, according to them, God was a being, effect and cause, agent and patient, moving principle and thing moved, having for laws the invariable properties that constitute fatality; and this class conveyed their idea by the emblem of Pan (the great whole); or of Jupiter, with a forehead of stars, body of planets, and feet of animals; or of the Orphic Egg,** whose yolk, suspended in the center of a liquid, surrounded by a vault, represented the globe of the sun, swimming in ether in the midst of the vault of heaven;*** sometimes by a great round serpent, representing the heavens where they placed the moving principle, and for that reason of an azure color, studded with spots of gold, (the stars) devouring his tail--that is, folding and unfolding himself eternally, like the revolutions of the spheres; sometimes by that of a man, having his feet joined together and tied, to signify immutable existence, wrapped in a cloak of all colors, like the face of nature, and bearing on his head a sphere of gold,**** emblem of the sphere of the stars; or by that of another man, sometimes seated on the flower of the lotos borne on the abyss of waters, sometimes lying on a pile of twelve cushions, denoting the twelve celestial signs. And here, Indians, Japanese, Siamese, Tibetans, and Chinese, is the theology, which, founded by the Egyptians and transmitted to you, is preserved in the pictures which you compose of Brama, of Beddou, of Somona-Kodom of Omito. This, ye Jews and Christians, is likewise the opinion of which you have preserved a part in your God moving on the face of the waters, by an allusion to the wind*5 which, at the beginning of the world, that is, the departure of the sun from the sign of Cancer, announced the inundation of the Nile, and seemed to prepare the creation." * See the Pythagorean, Ocellus Lacunus. ** Vide Oedip. Aegypt. Tome II., page 205. *** This comparison of the sun with the yolk of an egg refers: 1. To its round and yellow figure; 2. To its central situation; 3. To the germ or principle of life contained in the yolk. May not the oval form of the egg allude to the elipsis of the orbs? I am inclined to this opinion. The word Orphic offers a farther observation. Macrobius says (Som. Scrip. c. 14. and c. 20), that the sun is the brain of the universe, and that it is from analogy that the skull of a human being is round, like the planet, the seat of intelligence. Now the word Oerph signifies in Hebrew the brain and its seat (cervix): Orpheus, then, is the same as Bedou or Baits; and the Bonzes are those very Orphics which Plutarch represents as quacks, who ate no meat, vended talismans and little stones, and deceived individuals, and even governments themselves. See a learned memoir of Freret sur les Orphiques, Acad. des Inscrp. vol. 25, in quarto. **** See Porphyry in Eusebus. Proep. Evang., lib. 3, p. 115. *5 The Northern or Etesian wind, which commences regularly at the solstice, with the inundation. VII. Seventh System. Worship of the SOUL of the WORLD, that is to say, the Element of Fire, vital Principle of the Universe. "But others, disgusted at the idea of a being at once effect and cause, agent and patient, and uniting contrary natures in the same nature, distinguished the moving principle from the thing moved; and premising that matter in itself was inert they pretended that its properties were communicated to it by a distinct agent, of which itself was only the cover or the case. This agent was called by some the igneous principle, known to be the author of all motion; by others it was supposed to be the fluid called ether, which was thought more active and subtile; and, as in animals the vital and moving principle was called a soul, a spirit, and as they reasoned constantly by comparisons, especially those drawn from human beings, they gave to the moving principle of the universe the name of soul, intelligence, spirit; and God was the vital spirit, which extended through all beings and animated the vast body of the world. And this class conveyed their idea sometimes by Youpiter,* essence of motion and animation, principle of existence, or rather existence itself; sometimes by Vulcan or Phtha, elementary principle of fire; or by the altar of Vesta, placed in the center of her temple like the sun in the heavens; sometimes by Kneph, a human figure, dressed in dark blue, having in one hand a sceptre and a girdle (the zodiac), with a cap of feathers to express the fugacity of thought, and producing from his mouth the great egg. * This is the true pronunciation of the Jupiter of the Latins. . . . Existence itself. This is the signification of the word You. "Now, as a consequence of this system, every being containing in itself a portion of the igneous and etherial fluid, common and universal mover, and this fluid soul of the world being God, it followed that the souls of all beings were portions of God himself partaking of all his attributes, that is, being a substance indivisible, simple, and immortal; and hence the whole system of the immortality of the soul, which at first was eternity.* * In the system of the first spiritualists, the soul was not created with, or at the same time as the body, in order to be inserted in it: its existence was supposed to be anterior and from all eternity. Such, in a few words, is the doctrine of Macrobius on this head. Som. Seip. passim. "There exists a luminous, igneous, subtile fluid, which under the name of ether and spiritus, fills the universe. It is the essential principle and agent of motion and life, it is the Deity. When an earthly body is to be animated, a small round particle of this fluid gravitates through the milky way towards the lunar sphere; where, when it arrives, it unites with a grosser air, and becomes fit to associate with matter: it then enters and entirely fills the body, animates it, suffers, grows, increases, and diminishes with it; lastly, when the body dies, and its gross elements dissolve, this incorruptible particle takes its leave of it, and returns to the grand ocean of ether, if not retained by its union with the lunar air: it is this air or gas, which, retaining the shape of the body, becomes a phantom or ghost, the perfect representation of the deceased. The Greeks called this phantom the image or idol of the soul; the Pythagoreans, its chariot, its frame; and the Rabbinical school, its vessel, or boat. When a man had conducted himself well in this world, his whole soul, that is its chariot and ether, ascended to the moon, where a separation took place: the chariot lived in the lunar Elysium, and the ether returned to the fixed sphere, that is, to God: for the fixed heaven, says Macrobius, was by many called by the name of God (c. 14). If a man had not lived virtuously, the soul remained on earth to undergo purification, and was to wander to and fro, like the ghosts of Homer, to whom this doctrine must have been known, since he wrote after the time of Pherecydes and Pythagoras, who were its promulgators in Greece. Herodotus upon this occasion says, that the whole romance of the soul and its transmigrations was invented by the Egyptians, and propagated in Greece by men, who pretended to be its authors. I know their names, adds he, but shall not mention them (lib. 2). Cicero, however, has positively informed us, that it was Pherecydes, master of Pythagoras. Tuscul. lib. 1, sect. 16. Now admitting that this system was at that period a novelty, it accounts for Solomon's treating it as a fable, who lived 130 years before Pherecydes. 'Who knoweth,' said he, 'the spirit of a man that it goeth upwards? I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity.'" Eccles. c. iii: v. 18. And such had been the opinion of Moses, as a translator of Herodotus (M. Archer of the Academy of Inscriptions) justly observes in note 389 of the second book; where he says also that the immortality of the soul was not introduced among the Hebrews till their intercourse with the Assyrians. In other respects, the whole Pythagorean system, properly analysed, appears to be merely a system of physics badly understood. "Hence, also its transmigrations, known by the name of metempsychosis, that is, the passage of the vital principle from one body to another; an idea which arose from the real transmigration of the material elements. And behold, ye Indians, ye Boudhists, ye Christians, ye Mussulmans! whence are derived all your opinions on the spirituality of the soul; behold what was the source of the dreams of Pythagoras and Plato, your masters, who were themselves but the echoes of another, the last sect of visionary philosophers, which we will proceed to examine. VIII. Eighth system. The WORLD-MACHINE: Worship of the Demi-Ourgos, or Grand Artificer. "Hitherto the theologians, employing themselves in examining the fine and subtile substances of ether or the generating fire, had not, however, ceased to treat of beings palpable and perceptible to the senses; and theology continued to be the theory of physical powers, placed sometimes exclusively in the stars, and sometimes disseminated through the universe; but at this period, certain superficial minds, losing the chain of ideas which had directed them in their profound studies, or ignorant of the facts on which they were founded, distorted all the conclusions that flowed from them by the introduction of a strange and novel chimera. They pretended that this universe, these heavens, these stars, this sun, differed in no respect from an ordinary machine; and applying to this first hypothesis a comparison drawn from the works of art, they raised an edifice of the most whimsical sophisms. A machine, said they, does not make itself; it has had an anterior workman; its very existence proves it. The world is a machine; therefore it had an artificer.* * All the arguments of the spiritualists are founded on this. See Macrobius, at the end of the second book, and Plato, with the comments of Marcilius Ficinus. "Here, then, is the Demi-Ourgos or grand artificer, constituted God autocratical and supreme. In vain the ancient philosophy objected to this by saying that the artificer himself must have had parents and progenitors; and that they only added another step to the ladder by taking eternity from the world, and giving it to its supposed author. The innovators, not content with this first paradox, passed on to a second; and, applying to their artificer the theory of the human understanding, they pretended that the Demi-Ourgos had framed his machine on a plan already existing in his understanding. Now, as their masters, the naturalists, had placed in the regions of the fixed stars the great primum mobile, under the name of intelligence and reason, so their mimics, the spiritualists, seizing this idea, applied it to their Demi-Ourgos, and making it a substance distinct and self-existent, they called it mens or logos (reason or word). And, as they likewise admitted the existence of the soul of the world, or solar principle, they found themselves obliged to compose three grades of divine beings, which were: first, the Demi-Ourgos, or working god; secondly, the logos, word or reason; thirdly, the spirit or soul (of the world).* And here, Christians! is the romance on which you have founded your trinity; here is the system which, born a heretic in the temples of Egypt, transported a pagan into the schools of Greece and Italy, is now found to be good, catholic, and orthodox, by the conversion of its partisans, the disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, to Christianity. * These are the real types of the Christian Trinity. "It is thus that God, after having been, First, The visible and various action of the meteors and the elements; "Secondly, The combined powers of the stars, considered in their relations to terrestrial beings; Thirdly, These terrestrial beings themselves, by confounding the symbols with their archetypes; Fourthly, The double power of nature in its two principal operations of producing and destroying; "Fifthly, The animated world, with distinction of agent and patient, of effect and cause; "Sixthly, The solar principle, or the element of fire considered as the only mover; "Has thus become, finally, in the last resort, a chimerical and abstract being, a scholastic subtilty, of substance without form, a body without a figure, a very delirium of the mind, beyond the power of reason to comprehend. But vainly does it seek in this last transformation to elude the senses; the seal of its origin is imprinted upon it too deep to be effaced; and its attributes, all borrowed from the physical attributes of the universe, such as immensity, eternity, indivisibility, incomprehensibility; or on the moral affections of man, such as goodness, justice, majesty; its names* even, all derived from the physical beings which were its types, and especially from the sun, from the planets, and from the world, constantly bring to mind, in spite of its corrupters, indelible marks of its real nature. * In our last analysis we found all the names of the Deity to be derived from some material object in which it was supposed to reside. We have given a considerable number of instances; let us add one more relative to our word God. This is known to be the Deus of the Latins, and the Theos of the Greeks. Now by the confession of Plato (in Cratylo), of Macrobius (Saturn, lib. 1, c. 24,) and of Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) its root is thein, which signifies to wander, like planein, that is to say, it is synonymous with planets; because, add our authors, both the ancient Greeks and Barbarians particularly worshipped the planets. I know that such enquiries into etymologies have been much decried: but if, as is the case, words are the representative signs of ideas, the genealogy of the one becomes that of the other, and a good etymological dictionary would be the most perfect history of the human understanding. It would only be necessary in this enquiry to observe certain precautions, which have hitherto been neglected, and particularly to make an exact comparison of the value of the letters of the different alphabets. But, to continue our subject, we shall add, that in the Phoenician language, the word thah (with ain) signifies also to wander, and appears to be the derivation of thein. If we suppose Deus to be derived from the Greek Zeus, a proper name of You-piter, having zaw, I live, for its root, its sense will be precisely that of you, and will mean soul of the world, igneous principle. (See note p. 143). Div-us, which only signifies Genius, God of the second order, appears to me to come from the oriental word div substituted for dib, wolf and chacal, one of the emblems of the sun. At Thebes, says Macrobius, the sun was painted under the form of a wolf or chacal, for there are no wolves in Egypt. The reason of this emblem, doubtless, is that the chacal, like the cock announces by its cries the sun's rising; and this reason is confirmed by the analogy of the words lykos, wolf, and lyke, light of the morning, whence comes lux. Dius, which is to be understood also of the sun, must be derived from dih, a hawk. "The Egyptians," says Porphyry (Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 92,) "represent the sun under the emblem of a hawk, because this bird soars to the highest regions of air where light abounds." And in reality we continually see at Cairo large flights of these birds, hovering in the air, from whence they descend not but to stun us with their shrieks, which are like the monosyllable dih: and here, as in the preceding example, we find an analogy between the word dies, day, light, and dius, god, sun. "Such is the chain of ideas which the human mind had already run through at an epoch previous to the records of history; and since their continuity proves that they were the produce of the same series of studies and labors, we have every reason to place their origin in Egypt, the cradle of their first elements. This progress there may have been rapid; because the physical priests had no other food, in the retirement of the temples, but the enigma of the universe, always present to their minds; and because in the political districts into which that country was for a long time divided, every state had its college of priests, who, being by turns auxiliaries or rivals, hastened by their disputes the progress of science and discovery.* * One of the proofs that all these systems were invented in Egypt, is that this is the only country where we see a complete body of doctrine formed from the remotest antiquity. Clemens Alexandrinus has transmitted to us (Stromat. lib. 6,) a curious detail of the forty-two volumes which were borne in the procession of Isis. "The priest," says he, "or chanter, carries one of the symbolic instruments of music, and two of the books of Mercury; one containing hymns of the gods, the other the list of kings. Next to him the horoscope (the regulator of time,) carries a palm and a dial, symbols of astrology; he must know by heart the four books of Mercury which treat of astrology: the first on the order of the planets, the second on the risings of the sun and moon, and the two last on the rising and aspect of the stars. Then comes the sacred author, with feathers on his head (like Kneph) and a book in his hand, together with ink, and a reed to write with, (as is still the practice among the Arabs). He must be versed in hieroglyphics, must understand the description of the universe, the course of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, be acquainted with the division of Egypt into thirty-six nomes, with the course of the Nile, with instruments, measures, sacred ornaments, and sacred places. Next comes the stole bearer, who carries the cubit of justice, or measure of the Nile, and a cup for the libations; he bears also in the procession ten volumes on the subject of sacrifices, hymns, prayers, offerings, ceremonies, festivals. Lastly arrives the prophet, bearing in his bosom a pitcher, so as to be exposed to view; he is followed by persons carrying bread (as at the marriage of Cana.) This prophet, as president of the mysteries, learns ten other sacred volumes, which treat of the laws, the gods, and the discipline of the priests. Now there are in all forty-two volumes, thirty-six of which are studied and got by heart by these personages, and the remaining six are set apart to be consulted by the pastophores; they treat of medicine, the construction of the human body (anatomy), diseases, remedies, instruments, etc., etc." We leave the reader to deduce all the consequences of an Encyclopedia. It is ascribed to Mercury; but Jamblicus tells us that each book, composed by priests, was dedicated to that god, who, on account of his title of genius or decan opening the zodiac, presided over every enterprise. He is the Janus of the Romans, and the Guianesa of the Indians, and it is remarkable that Yanus and Guianes are homonymous. In short it appears that these books are the source of all that has been transmitted to us by the Greeks and Latins in every science, even in alchymy, necromancy, etc. What is most to be regretted in their loss is that part which related to the principles of medicine and diet, in which the Egyptians appear to have made a considerable progress, and to have delivered many useful observations. "There happened early on the borders of the Nile, what has since been repeated in every country; as soon as a new system was formed its novelty excited quarrels and schisms; then, gaining credit by persecution itself, sometimes it effaced antecedent ideas, sometimes it modified and incorporated them; then, by the intervention of political revolutions, the aggregation of states and the mixture of nations confused all opinions; and the filiation of ideas being lost, theology fell into a chaos, and became a mere logogriph of old traditions no longer understood. Religion, having strayed from its object was now nothing more than a political engine to conduct the credulous vulgar; and it was used for this purpose, sometimes by men credulous themselves and dupes of their own visions, and sometimes by bold and energetic spirits in pursuit of great objects of ambition. IX. Religion of Moses, or Worship of the Soul of the World (You-piter). "Such was the legislator of the Hebrews; who, wishing to separate his nation from all others, and to form a distinct and solitary empire, conceived the design of establishing its basis on religious prejudices, and of raising around it a sacred rampart of opinions and of rites. But in vain did he prescribe the worship of the symbols which prevailed in lower Egypt and in Phoenicia;* for his god was nevertheless an Egyptian god, invented by those priests of whom Moses had been the disciple; and Yahouh,** betrayed by its very name, essence (of beings), and by its symbol, the burning bush, is only the soul of the world, the moving principle which the Greeks soon after adopted under the same denomination in their you-piter, regenerating being, and under that of Ei, existence,*** which the Thebans consecrated by the name of Kneph, which Sais worshipped under the emblem of Isis veiled, with this inscription: I am al that has been, all that is, and all that is to come, and no mortal has raised my veil; which Pythagoras honored under the name of Vesta, and which the stoic philosophy defined precisely by calling it the principle of fire. In vain did Moses wish to blot from his religion every thing which had relation to the stars; many traits call them to mind in spite of all he has done. The seven planetary luminaries of the great candlestick; the twelve stones, or signs in the Urim of the high priests; the feast of the two equinoxes, (entrances and gates of the two hemispheres); the ceremony of the lamb, (the celestial ram then in his fifteenth degree); lastly, the name even of Osiris preserved in his song,**** and the ark, or coffer, an imitation of the tomb in which that God was laid, all remain as so many witnesses of the filiation of his ideas, and of their extraction from the common source. * "At a certain period," says Plutarch (de Iside) "all the Egyptians have their animal gods painted. The Thebans are the only people who do not employ painters, because they worship a god whose form comes not under the senses, and cannot be represented." And this is the god whom Moses, educated at Heliopolis, adopted; but the idea was not of his invention. ** Such is the true pronunciation of the Jehovah of the moderns, who violate, in this respect, every rule of criticism; since it is evident that the ancients, particularly the eastern Syrians and Phoenicians, were acquainted neither with the J nor the P which are of Tartar origin. The subsisting usage of the Arabs, which we have re-established here, is confirmed by Diodorus, who calls the god of Moses Iaw, (lib. 1), and Iaw and Yahouh are manifestly the same word: the identity continues in that of You-piter; but in order to render it more complete, we shall demonstrate the signification to be the same. In Hebrew, that is to say, in one of the dialects of the common language of lower Asia, Yahouh is the participle of the verb hih, to exist, to be, and signifies existing: in other words, the principle of life, the mover or even motion (the universal soul of beings). Now what is Jupiter? Let us hear the Greeks and Latins explain their theology. "The Egyptians," says Diodorus, after Manatho, priest of Memphis, "in giving names to the five elements, called spirit, or ether, You-piter, on account of the true meaning of that word: for spirit is the source of life, author of the vital principle in animals; and for this reason they considered him as the father, the generator of beings." For the same reason Homer says, father, and king of men and gods. (Diod. lib. 1, sect 1). "Theologians," says Macrobius, "consider You-piter as the soul of the world." Hence the words of Virgil: " Muses let us begin with You-piter; the world is full of You-piter." (Somn. Scrip., ch. 17). And in the Saturnalia, he says, "Jupiter is the sun himself." It was this also which made Virgil say, "The spirit nourishes the life (of beings), and the soul diffused through the vast members (of the universe), agitates the whole mass, and forms but one immense body." "Ioupiter," says the ancient verses of the Orphic sect, which originated in Egypt; verses collected by Onomacritus in the days of Pisistratus, "Ioupiter, represented with the thunder in his hand, is the beginning, origin, end, and middle of all things: a single and universal power, he governs every thing; heaven, earth, fire, water, the elements, day, and night. These are what constitute his immense body: his eyes are the sun and moon: he is space and eternity: in fine," adds Porphyry. "Jupiter is the world, the universe, that which constitutes the essence and life of all beings. Now," continues the same author, "as philosophers differed in opinion respecting the nature and constituent parts of this god, and as they could invent no figure that should represent all his attributes, they painted him in the form of a man. He is in a sitting posture, in allusion to his immutable essence; the upper part of his body is uncovered, because it is in the upper regions of the universe (the stars) that he most conspicuously displays himself. He is covered from the waist downwards, because respecting terrestrial things he is more secret and concealed. He holds a scepter in his left hand, because on the left side is the heart, and the heart is the seat of the understanding, which, (in human beings) regulates every action." Euseb. Proeper. Evang., p 100. The following passage of the geographer and philosopher, Strabo, removes every doubt as to the identity of the ideas of Moses and those of the heathen theologians. "Moses, who was one of the Egyptian priests, taught his followers that it was an egregious error to represent the Deity under the form of animals, as the Egyptians did, or in the shape of man, as was the practice of the Greeks and Africans. That alone is the Deity, said he, which constitutes heaven, earth, and every living thing; that which we call the world, the sum of all things, nature; and no reasonable person will think of representing such a being by the image of any one of the objects around us. It is for this reason, that, rejecting every species of images or idols, Moses wished the Deity to be worshipped without emblems, and according to his proper nature; and he accordingly ordered a temple worthy of him to be erected, etc. Geograph. lib. 16, p. 1104, edition of 1707. The theology of Moses has, then, differed in no respect from that of his followers, that is to say, from that of the Stoics and Epicureans, who consider the Deity as the soul of the world. This philosophy appears to have taken birth, or to have been disseminated when Abraham came into Egypt (200 years before Moses), since he quitted his system of idols for that of the god Yahouh; so that we may place its promulgation about the seventeenth or eighteenth century before Christ; which corresponds with what we have said before. As to the history of Moses, Diodorus properly represents it when he says, lib. 34 and 40, "That the Jews were driven out of Egypt at a time of dearth, when the country was full of foreigners, and that Moses, a man of extraordinary prudence seized this opportunity of establishing his religion in the mountains of Judea." It will seem paradoxical to assert, that the 600,000 armed men whom he conducted thither ought to be reduced to 6,000; but I can confirm the assertion by so many proofs drawn from the books themselves, that it will be necessary to correct an error which appears to have arisen from the mistake of the transcribers. *** This was the monosyllable written on the gates of the temple of Delphos. Plutarch has made it the subject of a dissertation. **** These are the literal expressions of the book of Deuteronomy, chap. XXXII. "The works of Tsour are perfect." Now Tsour has been translated by the word creator; its proper signification is to give forms, and this is one of the definitions of Osiris in Plutarch. X. Religion of Zoroaster. "Such also was Zoroaster; who, five centuries after Moses, and in the time of David, revived and moralized among the Medes and Bactrians, the whole Egyptian system of Osiris and Typhon, under the names Ormuzd and Ahrimanes; who called the reign of summer, virtue and good; the reign of winter, sin and evil; the renewal of nature in spring, creation of the world; the conjunction of the spheres at secular periods, resurrection; and the Tartarus and Elysium of the astrologers and geographers were named future life, hell and paradise. In a word, he did nothing but consecrate the existing dreams of the mystical system. XI. Budsoism, or Religion of the Samaneans. "Such again are the propagators of the dismal doctrine of the Samaneans; who, on the basis of the Metempsychosis, have erected the misanthropic system of self-denial, and of privations; who, laying it down as a principle that the body is only a prison where the soul lives in an impure confinement, that life is only a dream, an illusion, and the world only a passage to another country, to a life without end, placed virtue and perfection in absolute immobility, in the destruction of all sentiment, in the abnegation of physical organs, in the annihilation of all our being; whence resulted fasts, penances, macerations, solitude, contemplations, and all the practices of the deplorable delirium of the Anchorites. XII. Brahmism, or Indian System. "And such, too, were the founders of the Indian System; who, refining after Zoroaster on the two principles of creation and destruction, introduced an intermediary principle, that of preservation, and on their trinity in unity, of Brama, Chiven, and Vichenou, accumulated the allegories of their ancient traditions, and the alembicated subtilities of their metaphysics. "These are the materials which existed in a scattered state for many centuries in Asia; when a fortuitous concourse of events and circumstances, on the borders of the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, served to form them into new combinations. XIII. Christianity, or the Allegorical Worship of the Sun, under the cabalistical names of Chrish-en, or Christ, and Ye-sus or Jesus. "In constituting a separate nation, Moses strove in vain to defend it against the invasion of foreign ideas. An invisible inclination, founded on the affinity of their origin, had constantly brought back the Hebrews towards the worship of the neighboring nations; and the commercial and political relations which necessarily existed between them, strengthened this propensity from day to day. As long as the constitution of the state remained entire, the coercive force of the government and the laws opposed these innovations, and retarded their progress; nevertheless the high places were full of idols; and the god Sun had his chariot and horses painted in the palaces of the kings, and even in the temples of Yahouh; but when the conquests of the sultans of Nineveh and Babylon had dissolved the bands of civil power, the people, left to themselves and solicited by their conquerors, restrained no longer their inclination for profane opinions, and they were publicly established in Judea. First, the Assyrian colonies, which came and occupied the lands of the tribes, filled the kingdom of Samaria with dogmas of the Magi, which very soon penetrated into the kingdom of Judea. Afterwards, Jerusalem being subjugated, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Arabs, entering this defenceless country, introduced their opinions; and the religion of Moses was doubly mutilated. Besides the priests and great men, being transported to Babylon and educated in the sciences of the Chaldeans, imbibed, during a residence of seventy years, the whole of their theology; and from that moment the dogmas of the hostile Genius (Satan), the archangel Michael,* the ancient of days (Ormuzd), the rebel angels, the battles in heaven, the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection, all unknown to Moses, or rejected by his total silence respecting them, were introduced and naturalized among the Jews. * "The names of the angels and of the months, such as Gabriel, Michael, Yar, Nisan, etc., came from Babylon with the Jews:" says expressly the Talmud of Jerusalem. See Beousob. Hist. du Manich. Vol. II, p. 624, where he proves that the saints of the Almanac are an imitation of the 365 angels of the Persians; and Jamblicus in his Egyptian Mysteries, sect. 2, c. 3, speaks of angels, archangels, seraphims, etc., like a true Christian. "The emigrants returned to their country with these ideas; and their innovation at first excited disputes between their partisans the Pharisees, and their opponents the Saducees, who maintained the ancient national worship; but the former, aided by the propensities of the people and their habits already contracted, and supported by the Persians, their deliverers and masters, gained the ascendant over the latter; and the Sons of Moses consecrated the theology of Zoroaster.* * "The whole philosophy of the gymnosophists," says Diogenes Laertius on the authority of an ancient writer, "is derived from that of the Magi, and many assert that of the Jews to have the same origin." Lib. 1. c. 9. Megasthenes, an historian of repute in the days of Seleucus Nicanor, and who wrote particularly upon India, speaking of the philosophy of the ancients respecting natural things, puts the Brachmans and the Jews precisely on the same footing. "A fortuitous analogy between two leading ideas was highly favorable to this coalition, and became the basis of a last system, not less surprising in the fortune it has had in the world, than in the causes of its formation. "After the Assyrians had destroyed the kingdom of Samaria, some judicious men foresaw the same destiny for Jerusalem, which they did not fail to predict and publish; and their predictions had the particular turn of being terminated by prayers for a re-establishment and regeneration, uttered in the form of prophecies. The Hierophants, in their enthusiasm, had painted a king as a deliverer, who was to re-establish the nation in its ancient glory; the Hebrews were to become once more a powerful, a conquering nation, and Jerusalem the capital of an empire extended over the whole earth. "Events having realized the first part of these predictions, the ruin of Jerusalem, the people adhered to the second with a firmness of belief in proportion to their misfortunes; and the afflicted Jews expected, with the impatience of want and desire, this victorious king and deliverer, who was to come and save the nation of Moses, and restore the empire of David. "On the other hand, the sacred and mythological traditions of preceding times had spread through all Asia a dogma perfectly analogous. The cry there was a great mediator, a final judge, a future saviour, a king, god, conqueror and legislator, who was to restore the golden age upon earth,* to deliver it from the dominion of evil, and restore men to the empire of good, peace, and happiness. The people seized and cherished these ideas with so much the more avidity, as they found in them a consolation under that deplorable state of suffering into which they had been plunged by the devastations of successive conquests, and the barbarous despotism of their governments. This conformity between the oracles of different nations, and those of the prophets, excited the attention of the Jews; and doubtless the prophets had the art to compose their descriptions after the style and genius of the sacred books employed in the Pagan mysteries. There was therefore a general expectation in Judea of a great ambassador, a final Saviour; when a singular circumstance determined the epoch of his coming. * This is the reason of the application of the many Pagan oracles to Jesus, and particularly the fourth eclogue of Virgil, and the Sybilline verses so celebrated among the ancients. "It is found in the sacred books of the Persians and Chaldeans, that the world, composed of a total revolution of twelve thousand, was divided into two partial revolutions; one of which, the age and reign of good, terminated in six thousand; the other, the age and reign of evil, was to terminate in six thousand more. "By these records, the first authors had understood the annual revolution of the great celestial orb called the world, (a revolution composed of twelve months or signs, divided each into a thousand parts), and the two systematic periods, of winter and summer, composed each of six thousand. These expressions, wholly equivocal and badly explained, having received an absolute and moral, instead of a physical and astrological sense, it happened that the annual world was taken for the secular world, the thousand of the zodiacal divisions, for a thousand of years; and supposing, from the state of things, that they lived in the age of evil, they inferred that it would end with the six thousand pretended years.* * We have already seen this tradition current among the Tuscans; it was disseminated through most nations, and shows us what we ought to think of all the pretended creations and terminations of the world, which are merely the beginnings and endings of astronomical periods invented by astrologers. That of the year or solar revolution, being the most simple and perceptible, served as a model to the rest, and its comparison gave rise to the most whimsical ideas. Of this description is the idea of the four ages of the world among the Indians. Originally these four ages were merely the four seasons; and as each season was under the supposed influence of a planet, it bore the name of the metal appropriated to that planet; thus spring was the age of the sun, or of gold; summer the age of the moon, or of silver; autumn the age of Venus, or of brass; and winter the age of Mars, or of iron. Afterwards when astronomers invented the great year of 25 and 36 thousand common years, which had for its object the bringing back all the stars to one point of departure and a general conjunction, the ambiguity of the terms introduced a similar ambiguity of ideas; and the myriads of celestial signs and periods of duration which were thus measured were easily converted into so many revolutions of the sun. Thus the different periods of creation which have been so great a source of difficulty and misapprehension to curious enquirers, were in reality nothing more than hypothetical calculations of astronomical periods. In the same manner the creation of the world has been attributed to different seasons of the year, just as these different seasons have served for the fictitious period of these conjunctions; and of consequence has been adopted by different nations for the commencement of an ordinary year. Among the Egyptians this period fell upon the summer solstice, which was the commencement of their year; and the departure of the spheres, according to their conjectures, fell in like manner upon the period when the sun enters cancer. Among the Persians the year commenced at first in the spring, or when the sun enters Aries; and from thence the first Christians were led to suppose that God created the world in the spring: this opinion is also favored by the book of Genesis; and it is farther remarkable, that the world is not there said to be created by the God of Moses (Yahouh), but by the Elohim or gods in the plural, that is by the angels or genii, for so the word constantly means in the Hebrew books. If we farther observe that the root of the word Elohim signifies strong or powerful, and that the Egyptians called their decans strong and powerful leaders, attributing to them the creation of the world, we shall presently perceive that the book of Genesis affirms neither more nor less than that the world was created by the decans, by those very genii whom, according to Sanchoniathon, Mercury excited against Saturn, and who were called Elohim. It may be farther asked why the plural substantive Elohim is made to agree with the singular verb bara (the Elohim creates). The reason is that after the Babylonish captivity the unity of the Supreme Being was the prevailing opinion of the Jews; it was therefore thought proper to introduce a pious solecism in language, which it is evident had no existence before Moses; thus in the names of the children of Jacob many of them are compounded of a plural verb, to which Elohim is the nominative case understood, as Raouben (Reuben), they have looked upon me, and Samaonni (Simeon), they have granted me my prayer; to wit, the Elohim. The reason of this etymology is to be found in the religious creeds of the wives of Jacob, whose gods were the taraphim of Laban, that is, the angels of the Persians, and Egyptian decans. "Now, according to calculations admitted by the Jews, they began to reckon near six thousand years since the supposed creation of the world.* This coincidence caused a fermentation in the public mind. Nothing was thought of but the approaching end. They consulted the hierophants and the mystical books, which differed as to the term; the great mediator, the final judge, was expected and desired, to put an end to so many calamities. This being was so much spoken of, that some person finally was said to have seen him; and a first rumor of this sort was sufficient to establish a general certainty. Popular report became an established fact: the imaginary being was realized; and all the circumstances of mythological tradition, being assembled around this phantom, produced a regular history, of which it was no longer permitted to doubt. * According to the computation of the Seventy, the period elapsed consisted of about 5,600 years, and this computation was principally followed. It is well known how much, in the first ages of the church, this opinion of the end of the world agitated the minds of men. In the sequel, the general councils encouraged by finding that the general conflagration did not come, pronounced the expectation that prevailed heretical, and its believers were called Millenarians; a circumstance curious enough, since it is evident from the history of the gospels that Jesus Christ was a Millenarian, and of consequence a heretic. "These mythological traditions recounted that, in the beginning, a woman and a man had by their fall introduced sin and misery into the world. (Consult plate of the Astrological Heaven of the Ancients.) "By this was denoted the astronomical fact, that the celestial virgin and the herdsman (Bootes), by setting heliacally at the autumnal equinox, delivered the world to the wintry constellations, and seemed, on falling below the horizon, to introduce into the world the genius of evil, Ahrimanes, represented by the constellation of the Serpent.* * "The Persians," says Chardin, "call the constellation of the serpent Ophiucus, serpent of Eve: and this serpent Ophiucas or Ophioneus plays a similar part in the theology of the Phoenicians," for Pherecydes, their disciple and the master of Pythagoras, said "that Ophioneus Serpentinus had been chief of the rebels against Jupiter." See Mars. Ficin. Apol. Socrat. p. m. 797, col. 2. I shall add that ephah (with ain) signifies in Hebrew, serpent. These traditions related that the woman had decoyed and seduced the man.* * In a physical sense to seduce, seducere, means only to attract, to draw after us. "And in fact, the virgin, setting first, seems to draw the herdsman after her. "That the woman tempted him by offering him fruit fair to the sight and good to eat, which gave the knowledge of good and evil. "And in fact, the Virgin holds in her hand a branch of fruit, which she seems to offer to the Herdsman; and the branch, emblem of autumn, placed in the picture of Mithra* between winter and summer, seems to open the door and give knowledge, the key of good and evil. * See this picture in Hyde, page 111, edition of 1760. That this couple had been driven from the celestial garden, and that a cherub with a flaming sword had been placed at the gate to guard it. "And in fact, when the virgin and the herdsman fall beneath the horizon, Perseus rises on the other side;* and this Genius, with a sword in his hand, seems to drive them from the summer heaven, the garden and dominion of fruits and flowers. * Rather the head of Medusa; that head of a woman once so beautiful, which Perseus cut off and which beholds in his hand, is only that of the virgin, whose head sinks below the horizon at the very moment that Perseus rises; and the serpents which surround it are Orphiucus and the Polar Dragon, who then occupy the zenith. This shows us in what manner the ancients composed all their figures and fables. They took such constellations as they found at the same time on the circle of the horizon, and collecting the different parts, they formed groups which served them as an almanac in hieroglyphic characters. Such is the secret of all their pictures, and the solution of all their mythological monsters. The virgin is also Andromeda, delivered by Perseus from the whale that pursues her (pro-sequitor). That of this virgin should be born, spring up, an offspring, a child, who should bruise the head of the serpent, and deliver the world from sin. "This denotes the son, which, at the moment of the winter solstice, precisely when the Persian Magi drew the horoscope of the new year, was placed on the bosom of the Virgin, rising heliacally in the eastern horizon; on this account he was figured in their astrological pictures under the form of a child suckled by a chaste virgin,* and became afterwards, at the vernal equinox, the ram, or the lamb, triumphant over the constellation of the Serpent, which disappeared from the skies. * Such was the picture of the Persian sphere, cited by Aben Ezra in the Coelam Poeticum of Blaeu, p. 71. "The picture of the first decan of the Virgin," says that writer. "represents a beautiful virgin with flowing hair; sitting in a chair, with two ears of corn in her hand, and suckling an infant, called Jesus by some nations, and Christ in Greek." In the library of the king of France is a manuscript in Arabic, marked 1165, in which is a picture of the twelve signs; and that of the Virgin represents a young woman with an infant by her side: the whole scene indeed of the birth of Jesus is to be found in the adjacent part of the heavens. The stable is the constellation of the charioteer and the goat, formerly Capricorn: a constellation called proesepe Jovis Heniochi, stable of Iou; and the word Iou is found in the name Iou-seph (Joseph). At no great distance is the ass of Typhon (the great she-bear), and the ox or bull, the ancient attendants of the manger. Peter the porter, is Janus with his keys and bald forehead: the twelve apostles are the genii of the twelve months, etc. This Virgin has acted very different parts in the various systems of mythology: she has been the Isis of the Egyptians, who said of her in one of their inscriptions cited by Julian, the fruit I have brought forth is the sun. The majority of traits drawn by Plutarch apply to her, in the same manner as those of Osiris apply to Bootes: also the seven principal stars of the she-bear, called David's chariot, were called the chariot of Osiris (See Kirker); and the crown that is situated behind, formed of ivy, was called Chen-Osiris, the tree of Osiris. The Virgin has likewise been Ceres, whose mysteries were the same with those of Isis and Mithra; she has been the Diana of the Ephesians; the great goddess of Syria, Cybele, drawn by lions; Minerva, the mother of Bacchus; Astraea, a chaste virgin taken up into heaven at the end of a golden age; Themis at whose feet is the balance that was put in her hands; the Sybil of Virgil, who descends into hell, or sinks below the hemisphere with a branch in her hand, etc. That, in his infancy, this restorer of divine and celestial nature would live abased, humble, obscure and indigent. "And this, because the winter sun is abased below the horizon; and that this first period of his four ages or seasons, is a time of obscurity, scarcity, fasting, and want. "That, being put to death by the wicked, he had risen gloriously; that he had reascended from hell to heaven, where he would reign forever "This is a sketch of the life of the sun; who, finishing his career at the winter solstice, when Typhon and the rebel angels gain the dominion, seems to be put to death by them; but who soon after is born again, and rises* into the vault of heaven, where he reigns. * Resurgere, to rise a second time, cannot signify to return to life, but in a metaphorical sense; but we see continually mistakes of this kind result from the ambiguous meaning of the words made use of in ancient tradition. "Finally, these traditions went so far as to mention even his astrological and mythological names, and inform us that he was called sometimes Chris, that is to say, preserver,* and from that, ye Indians, you have made your god Chrish-en or Chrish-na; and, ye Greek and Western Christians, your Chris-tos, son of Mary, is the same; sometimes he is called Yes, by the union of three letters, which by their numerical value form the number 608, one of the solar periods.** And this, Europeans, is the name which, with the Latin termination, is become your Yes-us or Jesus, the ancient and cabalistic name attributed to young Bacchus, the clandestine son (nocturnal) of the Virgin Minerva, who, in the history of his whole life, and even of his death, brings to mind the history of the god of the Christians, that is, of the star of day, of which they are each of them the emblems." * The Greeks used to express by X, or Spanish iota, the aspirated ha of the Orientals, who said haris. In Hebrew heres signifies the sun, but in Arabic the meaning of the radical word is, to guard, to preserve, and of haris, guardian, preserver. It is the proper epithet of Vichenou, which demonstrates at once the identity of the Indian and Christian Trinities, and their common origin. It is manifestly but one system, which divided into two branches, one extending to the east, and the other to the west, assumed two different forms: Its principal trunk is the Pythagorean system of the soul of the world, or Iou-piter. The epithet piter, or father, having been applied to the demi-ourgos of Plato, gave rise to an ambiguity which caused an enquiry to be made respecting the son of this father. In the opinion of the philosophers the son was understanding, Nous and Logos, from which the Latins made their Verbum. And thus we clearly perceive the origin of the eternal father and of the Verbum his son, proceeding from him (Mens Ex Deo nata, says Macrobius): the oenima or spiritus mundi, was the Holy Ghost; and it is for this reason that Manes, Pasilides, Valentinius, and other pretended heretics of the first ages, who traced things to their source, said, that God the Father was the supreme inaccessible light (that of the heaven, the primum mobile, or the aplanes); the Son the secondary light resident in the sun, and the Holy Ghost the atmosphere of the earth (See Beausob. vol. II, p. 586): hence, among the Syrians, the representation of the Holy Ghost by a dove, the bird of Venus Urania, that is of the air. The Syrians (says Nigidius de Germaico) assert that a dove sat for a certain number of days on the egg of a fish, and that from this incubation Venus was born: Sextus Empiricus also observes (Inst. Pyrrh. lib. 3, c. 23) that the Syrians abstain from eating doves; which intimates to us a period commencing in the sign Pisces, in the winter solstice. We may farther observe, that if Chris comes from Harisch by a chin, it will signify artificer, an epithet belonging to the sun. These variations, which must have embarrassed the ancients, prove it to be the real type of Jesus, as had been already remarked in the time of Tertullian. "Many, says this writer, suppose with greater probability that the sun is our God, and they refer us to the religion of the Persians." Apologet. c. 16. ** See a curious ode to the sun, by Martianus Capella, translated by Gebelin. Here a great murmur having arisen among all the Christian groups, the Lamas, the Mussulmans and the Indians called them to order, and the orator went on to finish his discourse: "You know at present," said he, "how the rest of this system was composed in the chaos and anarchy of the three first centuries; what a multitude of singular opinions divided the minds of men, and armed them with an enthusiasm and a reciprocal obstinacy; because, being equally founded on ancient tradition, they were equally sacred. You know how the government, after three centuries, having embraced one of these sects, made it the orthodox, that is to say, the pre-dominant religion, to the exclusion of the rest; which, being less in number, became heretics; you know how and by what means of violence and seduction this religion was propagated, extended, divided, and enfeebled; how, six hundred years after the Christian innovation, another system was formed from it and from that of the Jews; and how Mahomet found the means of composing a political and theological empire at the expense of those of Moses and the vicars of Jesus. "Now, if you take a review of the whole history of the spirit of all religion, you will see that in its origin it has had no other author than the sensations and wants of man; that the idea of God has had no other type and model than those of physical powers, material beings, producing either good or evil, by impressions of pleasure or pain on sensitive beings; that in the formation of all these systems the spirit of religion has always followed the same course, and been uniform in its proceedings; that in all of them the dogma has never failed to represent, under the name of gods, the operations of nature, and passions and prejudices of men; that the moral of them all has had for its object the desire of happiness and the aversion to pain; but that the people, and the greater part of legislators, not knowing the route to be pursued, have formed false, and therefore discordant, ideas of virtue and vice of good and evil, that is to say, of what renders man happy or miserable; that in every instance, the means and the causes of propagating and establishing systems have exhibited the same scenes of passion and the same events; everywhere disputes about words, pretexts for zeal, revolutions and wars excited by the ambition of princes, the knavery of apostles, the credulity of proselytes, the ignorance of the vulgar, the exclusive cupidity and intolerant arrogance of all. Indeed, you will see that the whole history of the spirit of religion is only the history of the errors of the human mind, which, placed in a world that it does not comprehend, endeavors nevertheless to solve the enigma; and which, beholding with astonishment this mysterious and visible prodigy, imagines causes, supposes reasons, builds systems; then, finding one defective, destroys it for another not less so; hates the error that it abandons, misconceives the one that it embraces, rejects the truth that it is seeking, composes chimeras of discordant beings; and thus, while always dreaming of wisdom and happiness, wanders blindly in a labyrinth of illusion and doubt." CHAPTER XXIII. ALL RELIGIONS HAVE THE SAME OBJECT. Thus spoke the orator in the name of those men who had studied the origin and succession of religious ideas. The theologians of various systems, reasoning on this discourse: "It is an impious representation," said some, "whose tendency is nothing less than to overturn all belief, to destroy subordination in the minds of men, and annihilate our ministry and power." "It is a romance," said others, "a tissue of conjectures, composed with art, but without foundation." The moderate and prudent men added: "Supposing all this to be true, why reveal these mysteries? Doubtless our opinions are full of errors; but these errors are a necessary restraint on the multitude. The world has gone thus for two thousand years; why change it now?" A murmur of disapprobation, which never fails to rise at every innovation, now began to increase; when a numerous group of the common classes of people, and of untaught men of all countries and of every nation, without prophets, without doctors, and without doctrine, advancing in the circle, drew the attention of the whole assembly; and one of them, in the name of all, thus addressed the multitude: "Mediators and arbiters of nations! the strange relations which have occupied the present debate were unknown to us until this day. Our understanding, confounded and amazed at so many statements, some of them learned, others absurd and all incomprehensible, remains in uncertainty and doubt. One only reflection has struck us: on reviewing so many prodigious facts, so many contradictory assertions, we ask ourselves: What are all these discussions to us? What need have we of knowing what passed five or six thousand years ago, in countries we never heard of, and among men who will ever be unknown to us? True or false, what interest have we in knowing whether the world has existed six thousand, or twenty-five thousand years? Whether it was made of nothing, or of something; by itself, or by a maker, who in his turn would require another maker? What! we are not sure of what happens near us, and shall we answer for what happens in the sun, in the moon, or in imaginary regions of space? We have forgotten our own infancy, and shall we know the infancy of the world? And who will attest what no one has seen? who will certify what no man comprehends? "Besides, what addition or diminution will it make to our existence, to answer yes or no to all these chimeras? Hitherto neither our fathers nor ourselves have had the least knowledge or notion of them, and we do not perceive that we have had on this account either more or less of the sun, more or less of subsistence, more or less of good or of evil. "If the knowledge of these things is so necessary, why have we lived as well without it as those who have taken so much trouble concerning it? If this knowledge is superfluous, why should we burden ourselves with it to-day?" Then addressing himself to the doctors and theologians: "What!" said he, "is it necessary that we, poor and ignorant men, whose every moment is scarcely sufficient for the cares of life, and the labors of which you take the profit,--is it necessary for us to learn the numberless histories that you have recounted, to read the quantity of books that you have cited, and to study the various languages in which they are composed! A thousand years of life would not suffice--" "It is not necessary," replied the doctors, "that you should acquire all this science; we have it for you--" "But even you," replied the simple men, "with all your science, you are not agreed; of what advantage, then, is your science? Besides, how can you answer for us? If the faith of one man is applicable to many, what need have even you to believe? your fathers may have believed for you; and this would be reasonable, since they have seen for you. "Farther, what is believing, if believing influences no action? And what action is influenced by believing, for instance, that the world is or is not eternal?" "The latter would be offensive to God," said the doctors. "How prove you that?" replied the simple men. "In our books," answered the doctors. "We do not understand them," returned the simple men. "We understand them for you," said the doctors. "That is the difficulty," replied the simple men. "By what right do you constitute yourselves mediators between God and us?" "By his orders," said the doctors. "Where is the proof of these orders?" said the simple men. "In our books," said the doctors. "We understand them not," said the simple men; "and how came this just God to give you this privilege over us? Why did this common father oblige us to believe on a less degree of evidence than you? He has spoken to you; be it so; he is infallible, and deceives you not. But it is you who speak to us! And who shall assure us that you are not in error yourselves, or that you will not lead us into error? And if we should be deceived, how will that just God save us contrary to law, or condemn us on a law which we have not known?" "He has given you the natural law," said the doctors. "And what is the natural law?" replied the simple men. "If that law is sufficient, why has he given any other? If it is not sufficient, why did he make it imperfect?" "His judgments are mysteries," said the doctors, "and his justice is not like that of men." "If his justice," replied the simple men, "is not like ours, by what rule are we to judge of it? And, moreover, why all these laws, and what is the object proposed by them?" "To render you more happy," replied a doctor, "by rendering you better and more virtuous. It is to teach man to enjoy his benefits, and not injure his fellows, that God has manifested himself by so many oracles and prodigies." "In that case," said the simple men, "there is no necessity for so many studies, nor of such a variety of arguments; only tell us which is the religion that best answers the end which they all propose." Immediately, on this, every group, extolling its own morality above that of all others, there arose among the different sects a new and most violent dispute. "It is we," said the Mussulmans, "who possess the most excellent morals, who teach all the virtues useful to men and agreeable to God. We profess justice, disinterestedness, resignation to providence, charity to our brethren, alms-giving, and devotion; we torment not the soul with superstitious fears; we live without alarm, and die without remorse." "How dare you speak of morals," answered the Christian priests, "you, whose chief lived in licentiousness and preached impurity? You, whose first precept is homicide and war? For this we appeal to experience: for these twelve hundred years your fanatical zeal has not ceased to spread commotion and carnage among the nations. If Asia, so flourishing in former times, is now languishing in barbarity and depopulation, it is in your doctrine that we find the cause; in that doctrine, the enemy of all instruction, which sanctifies ignorance, which consecrates the most absolute despotism in the governors, imposes the most blind and passive obedience in the people, that has stupefied the faculties of man, and brutalized the nations. "It is not so with our sublime and celestial morals; it was they which raised the world from its primitive barbarity, from the senseless and cruel superstitions of idolatry, from human sacrifices,* from the shameful orgies of pagan mysteries; they it was that purified manners, proscribed incest and adultery, polished savage nations, banished slavery, and introduced new and unknown virtues, charity for men, their equality in the sight of God, forgiveness and forgetfulness of injuries, the restraint of all the passions, the contempt of worldly greatness, a life completely spiritual and completely holy!" * Read the cold declaration of Eusebius (Proep. Evang. lib. I, p. 11,), who pretends that, since the coming of Christ, there have been neither wars, nor tyrants, nor cannibals, nor sodomites, nor persons committing incest, nor savages destroying their parents, etc. When we read these fathers of the church we are astonished at their insincerity or infatuation. "We admire," said the Mussulmans, "the ease with which you reconcile that evangelical meekness, of which you are so ostentatious, with the injuries and outrages with which you are constantly galling your neighbors. When you criminate so severely the great man whom we revere, we might fairly retort on the conduct of him whom you adore; but we scorn such advantages, and confining ourselves to the real object in question, we maintain that the morals of your gospel have by no means that perfection which you ascribe to them; it is not true that they have introduced into the world new and unknown virtues: for example, the equality of men in the sight of God,--that fraternity and that benevolence which follow from it, were formal doctrines of the sect of the Hermatics or Samaneans,* from whom you descend. As to the forgiveness of injuries, the Pagans themselves had taught it; but in the extent that you give it, far from being a virtue, it becomes an immorality, a vice. Your so much boasted precept of turning one cheek after the other, is not only contrary to every sentiment of man, but is opposed to all ideas of justice. It emboldens the wicked by impunity, debases the virtuous by servility, delivers up the world to despotism and tyranny, and dissolves all society. Such is the true spirit of your doctrines. Your gospels in their precepts and their parables, never represent God but as a despot without any rules of equity; a partial father treating a debauched and prodigal son with more favor than his respectful and virtuous children; a capricious master, who gives the same wages to workmen who had wrought but one hour, as to those who had labored through the whole day; one who prefers the last comers to the first. The moral is everywhere misanthropic and antisocial; it disgusts men with life and with society; and tends only to encourage hermitism and celibacy. * The equality of mankind in a state of nature and in the eyes of God was one of the principal tenets of the Samaneans, and they appear to be the only ancients that entertained this opinion. "As to the manner in which you have practised these morals, we appeal in our turn to the testimony of facts. We ask whether it is this evangelical meekness which has excited your interminable wars between your sects, your atrocious persecutions of pretended heretics, your crusades against Arianism, Manicheism, Protestantism, without speaking of your crusades against us, and of those sacrilegious associations, still subsisting, of men who take an oath to continue them?* We ask you whether it be gospel charity which has made you exterminate whole nations in America, to annihilate the empires of Mexico and Peru; which makes you continue to dispeople Africa and sell its inhabitants like cattle, notwithstanding your abolition of slavery; which makes you ravage India and usurp its dominions; and whether it be the same charity which, for three centuries past, has led you to harrass the habitations of the people of three continents, of whom the most prudent, the Chinese and Japanese, were constrained to drive you off, that they might escape your chains and recover their internal peace?" * The oath taken by the knights of the Order of Malta, is to kill, or make the Mahometans prisoners, for the glory of God. Here the Bramins, the Rabbins, the Bonzes, the Chamans, the Priests of the Molucca islands, and the coasts of Guinea, loading the Christian doctors with reproaches: "Yes!" cried they, "these men are robbers and hypocrites, who preach simplicity, to surprise confidence; humility, to enslave with more ease; poverty, to appropriate all riches to themselves. They promise another world, the better to usurp the present; and while they speak to you of tolerance and charity, they burn, in the name of God, the men who do not worship him in their manner." "Lying priests," retorted the missionaries, "it is you who abuse the credulity of ignorant nations to subjugate them. It is you who have made of your ministry an art of cheating and imposture; you have converted religion into a traffic of cupidity and avarice. You pretend to hold communications with spirits, and they give for oracles nothing but your wills. You feign to read the stars, and destiny decrees only your desires. You cause idols to speak, and the gods are but the instruments of your passions. You have invented sacrifices and libations, to collect for your own profit the milk of flocks, and the flesh and fat of victims; and under the cloak of piety you devour the offerings of the gods, who cannot eat, and the substance of the people who are forced to labor." "And you," replied the Bramins, the Bonzes, the Chamans, "you sell to the credulous living, your vain prayers for the souls of the dead. With your indulgences and your absolutions you have usurped the power of God himself; and making a traffic of his favors and pardons, you have put heaven at auction; and by your system of expiations you have formed a tariff of crimes, which has perverted all consciences."* * As long as it shall be possible to obtain purification from crimes and exemption from punishment by means of money or other frivolous practices; as long as kings and great men shall suppose that building temples or instituting foundations, will absolve them from the guilt of oppression and homicide; as long as individuals shall imagine that they may rob and cheat, provided they observe fast during Lent, go to confession, and receive extreme unction, it is impossible there should exist in society any morality or virtue; and it is from a deep conviction of truth, that a modern philosopher has called the doctrine of expiations la verola des societes. "Add to this," said the Imans, "that these men have invented the most insidious of all systems of wickedness,--the absurd and impious obligation of recounting to them the most intimate secrets of actions and of thoughts (confessions); so their insolent curiosity has carried their inquisition even into the sanctuary of the marriage bed,* and the inviolable recesses of the heart." * Confession is a very ancient invention of the priests, who did not fail to avail themselves of that means of governing. It was practised in the Egyptian, Greek, Phrygian, Persian mysteries, etc. Plutarch has transmitted us the remarkable answer of a Spartan whom a priest wanted to confess. "Is it to you or to God I am to confess?" "To God," answered the priest: "In that case," replied the Spartan, "man, begone!" (Remarkable Savings of the Lacedemonians.) The first Christians confessed their faults publicly, like the Essenians. Afterwards, priests began to be established, with power of absolution from the sin of idolatry. In the time of Theodosius, a woman having publicly confessed an intrigue with a deacon, bishop Necterius, and his successor Chrysostom, granted communion without confession. It was not until the seventh century that the abbots of convents exacted from monks and nuns confession twice a year; and it was at a still later period that bishops of Rome generalized it. The Mussulmen, who suppose women to have no souls, are shocked at the idea of confession; and say; How can an honest man think of listening to the recital of the actions or the secret thoughts of a woman? May we not also ask, on the other hand, how can an honest woman consent to reveal them? Thus by mutual reproaches the doctors of the different sects began to reveal all the crimes of their ministry--all the vices of their craft; and it was found that among all nations the spirit of the priesthood, their system of conduct, their actions their morals, were absolutely the same: That they had everywhere formed secret associations and corporations at enmity with the rest of society:* * That we may understand the general feelings of priests respecting the rest of mankind, whom they always call by the name of the people, let us hear one of the doctors of the church. "The people," says Bishop Synnesius, in Calvit. page 315, "are desirous of being deceived, we cannot act otherwise respecting them. The case was similar with the ancient priests of Egypt, and for this reason they shut themselves up in their temples, and there composed their mysteries, out of the reach of the eye of the people." And forgetting what he has before just said, he adds: "for had the people been in the secret they might have been offended at the deception played upon them. In the mean time how is it possible to conduct one's self otherwise with the people so long as they are people? For my own part, to myself I shall always be a philosopher, but in dealing with the mass of mankind, I shall be a priest." "A little jargon," says Geogory Nazianzen to St. Jerome (Hieron. ad. Nep.) "is all that is necessary to impose on the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire. Our forefathers and doctors of the church have often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances and necessity dictated to them." "We endeavor," says Sanchoniaton, "to excite admiration by means of the marvellous." (Proep. Evang. lib. 3.) Such was the conduct of all the priests of antiquity, and is still that of the Bramins and Lamas who are the exact counterpart of the Egyptian priests. Such was the practice of the Jesuits, who marched with hasty strides in the same career. It is useless to point out the whole depravity of such a doctrine. In general every association which has mystery for its basis, or an oath of secrecy, is a league of robbers against society, a league divided in its very bosom into knaves and dupes, or in other words agents and instruments. It is thus we ought to judge of those modern clubs, which, under the name of Illuminatists, Martinists, Cagliostronists, and Mesmerites, infest Europe. These societies are the follies and deceptions of the ancient Cabalists, Magicians, Orphies, etc., "who," says Plutarch, "led into errors of considerable magnitude, not only individuals, but kings and nations." That they had everywhere attributed to themselves prerogatives and immunities, by means of which they lived exempt from the burdens of other classes: That they everywhere avoided the toils of the laborer, the dangers of the soldier, and the disappointments of the merchant: That they lived everywhere in celibacy, to shun even the cares of a family: That, under the cloak of poverty, they found everywhere the secret of procuring wealth and all sorts of enjoyments: That under the name of mendicity they raised taxes to a greater amount than princes: That in the form of gifts and offerings they had established fixed and certain revenues exempt from charges: That under pretence of retirement and devotion they lived in idleness and licentiousness: That they had made a virtue of alms-giving, to live quietly on the labors of others: That they had invented the ceremonies of worship, as a means of attracting the reverence of the people, while they were playing the parts of gods, of whom they styled themselves the interpreters and mediators, to assume all their powers; that, with this design, they had (according to the degree of ignorance or information of their people) assumed by turns the character of astrologers, drawers of horoscopes, fortune-tellers, magicians,* necromancers, quacks, physicians, courtiers, confessors of princes, always aiming at the great object to govern for their own advantage: * What is a magician, in the sense in which people understand the word? A man who by words and gestures pretends to act on supernatural beings, and compel them to descend at his call and obey his orders. Such was the conduct of the ancient priests, and such is still that of all priests in idolatrous nations; for which reason we have given them the denomination of Magicians. And when a Christian priest pretends to make God descend from heaven, to fix him to a morsel of leaven, and render, by means of this talisman, souls pure and in a state of grace, what is this but a trick of magic? And where is the difference between a Chaman of Tartary who invokes the Genii, or an Indian Bramin, who makes Vichenou descend in a vessel of water to drive away evil spirits? Yes, the identity of the spirit of priests in every age and country is fully established! Every where it is the assumption of an exclusive privilege, the pretended faculty of moving at will the powers of nature; and this assumption is so direct a violation of the right of equality, that whenever the people shall regain their importance, they will forever abolish this sacrilegious kind of nobility, which has been the type and parent stock of the other species of nobility. That sometimes they had exalted the power of kings and consecrated their persons, to monopolize their favors, or participate their sway: That sometimes they had preached up the murder of tyrants (reserving it to themselves to define tyranny), to avenge themselves of their contempt or their disobedience: And that they always stigmatised with impiety whatever crossed their interests; that they hindered all public instruction, to exercise the monopoly of science; that finally, at all times and in all places, they had found the secret of living in peace in the midst of the anarchy they created, in safety under the despotism that they favored, in idleness amidst the industry they preached, and in abundance while surrounded with scarcity; and all this by carrying on the singular trade of selling words and gestures to credulous people, who purchase them as commodities of the greatest value.* * A curious work would be the comparative history of the agnuses of the pope and the pastils of the grand Lama. It would be worth while to extend this idea to religions ceremonies in general, and to confront column by column, the analogous or contrasting points of faith and superstitious practices in all nations. There is one more species of superstition which it would be equally salutary to cure, blind veneration for the great; and for this purpose it would be alone sufficient to write a minute detail of the private life of kings and princes. No work could be so philosophical as this; and accordingly we have seen what a general outcry was excited among kings and the panders of kings, when the Anecdotes of the Court of Berlin first appeared. What would be the alarm were the public put in possession of the sequel of this work? Were the people fairly acquainted with all the absurdities of this species of idol, they would no longer be exposed to covet their specious pleasures of which the plausible and hollow appearance disturbs their peace, and hinders them from enjoying the much more solid happiness of their own condition. Then the different nations, in a transport of fury, were going to tear in pieces the men who had thus abused them; but the legislator, arresting this movement of violence, addressed the chiefs and doctors: "What!" said he, "instructors of nations, is it thus that you have deceived them?" And the terrified priests replied. "O legislator! we are men. The people are so superstitious! they have themselves encouraged these errors."* * Consider in this view the Brabanters. And the kings said: "O legislator! the people are so servile and so ignorant! they prostrated themselves before the yoke, which we scarcely dared to show them."* * The inhabitants of Vienna, for example, who harnessed themselves like cattle and drew the chariot of Leopold. Then the legislator, turning to the people--"People!" said he, "remember what you have just heard; they are two indelible truths. Yes, you yourselves cause the evils of which you complain; yourselves encourage the tyrants, by a base adulation of their power, by an imprudent admiration of their false beneficence, by servility in obedience, by licentiousness in liberty, and by a credulous reception of every imposition. On whom shall you wreak vengeance for the faults committed by your own ignorance and cupidity?" And the people, struck with confusion, remained in mournful silence. CHAPTER XXIV. SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF CONTRADICTIONS. The legislator then resumed his discourse: "O nations!" said he, "we have heard the discussion of your opinions. The different sentiments which divide you have given rise to many reflections, and furnished several questions which we shall propose to you to solve. "First, considering the diversity and opposition of the creeds to which you are attached, we ask on what motives you found your persuasion? Is it from a deliberate choice that you follow the standard of one prophet rather than another? Before adopting this doctrine, rather than that, did you first compare? did you carefully examine them? Or have you received them only from the chance of birth, from the empire of education and habit? Are you not born Christians on the borders of the Tiber, Mussulmans on those of the Euphrates, Idolaters on the Indus, just as you are born fair in cold climates, and sable under the scorching sun of Africa? And if your opinions are the effect of your fortuitous position on the earth, of consanguinity, of imitation, how is it that such a hazard should be a ground of conviction, an argument of truth? "Secondly, when we reflect on the mutual proscriptions and arbitrary intolerance of your pretensions, we are frightened at the consequences that flow from your own principles. Nations! who reciprocally devote each other to the bolts of heavenly wrath, suppose that the universal Being, whom you revere, should this moment descend from heaven on this multitude; and, clothed with all his power, should sit on this throne to judge you; suppose that he should say to you: Mortals! it is your own justice that I am going to exercise upon you. Yes, of all the religious systems that divide you, one alone shall this day be preferred; all the others, all this multitude of standards, of nations, of prophets, shall be condemned to eternal destruction. This is not enough: among the particular sects of the chosen system, one only can be favored; all the others must be condemned: neither is this enough;--from this little remnant of a group I must exclude all those who have not fulfilled the conditions enjoined by its precepts. O men! to what a small number of elect have you limited your race! to what a penury of beneficence do you reduce the immensity of my goodness! to what a solitude of beholders do you condemn my greatness and my glory! "But," said the legislator rising, "no matter you have willed it so. Nations! here is an urn in which all your names are placed: one only is a prize: approach, and draw this tremendous lottery!" And the nations, seized with terror cried: "No, no; we are all brothers, all equal; we cannot condemn each other." "Then," said the legislator, resuming his seat: "O men! who dispute on so many subjects, lend an attentive ear to one problem which you exhibit, and which you ought to decide yourselves." And the people, giving great attention, he lifted an arm towards heaven, and, pointing to the sun, said: "Nations, does that sun, which enlightens you, appear square or triangular?" "No," answered they with one voice, "it is round." Then, taking the golden balance that was on the altar: "This gold," said the legislator, "that you handle every day, is it heavier than the same volume of copper?" "Yes," answered all the people, "gold is heavier than Copper." Then, taking the sword: "Is this iron," said the legislator, "softer than lead?" "No," said the people. "Is sugar sweet, and gall bitter?" "Yes." "Do you love pleasure and hate pain?" "Yes." "Thus, then, you are agreed in these points, and many others of the same nature. "Now, tell us, is there a cavern in the centre of the earth, or inhabitants in the moon?" This question caused a universal murmur. Every one answered differently--some yes, others no; one said it was probable, another said it was an idle and ridiculous question; some, that it was worth knowing. And the discord was universal. After some time the legislator, having obtained silence, said: "Explain to us, O Nations! this problem: we have put to you several questions which you have answered with one voice, without distinction of race or of sect: white men, black men, followers of Mahomet and of Moses, worshippers of Boudha and of Jesus, all have returned the same answer. We then proposed another question, and you have all disagreed! Why this unanimity in one case, and this discordance in the other?" And the group of simple men and savages answered and said: "The reason of this is plain. In the first case we see and feel the objects, and we speak from sensation; in the second, they are beyond the reach of our senses--we speak of them only from conjecture." "You have resolved the problem," said the legislator; "and your own consent has established this first truth: "That whenever objects can be examined and judged of by your senses, you are agreed in opinion; and that you only differ when the objects are absent and beyond your reach. "From this first truth flows another equally clear and worthy of notice. Since you agree on things which you know with certainty, it follows that you disagree only on those which you know not with certainty, and about which you are not sure; that is to say, you dispute, you quarrel, you fight, for that which is uncertain, that of which you doubt. O men! is this wisdom? "Is it not, then, demonstrated that truth is not the object of your contests? that it is not her cause which you defend, but that of your affections, and your prejudices? that it is not the object, as it really is in itself, that you would verify, but the object as you would have it; that is to say, it is not the evidence of the thing that you would enforce, but your own personal opinion, your particular manner of seeing and judging? It is a power that you wish to exercise, an interest that you wish to satisfy, a prerogative that you arrogate to yourself; it is a contest of vanity. Now, as each of you, on comparing himself to every other, finds himself his equal and his fellow, he resists by a feeling of the same right. And your disputes, your combats, your intolerance, are the effect of this right which you deny each other, and of the intimate conviction of your equality. "Now, the only means of establishing harmony is to return to nature, and to take for a guide and regulator the order of things which she has founded; and then your accord will prove this other truth: "That real beings have in themselves an identical, constant and uniform mode of existence; and that there is in your organs a like mode of being affected by them. "But at the same time, by reason of the mobility of these organs as subject to your will, you may conceive different affections, and find yourselves in different relations with the same objects; so that you are to them like a mirror, capable of reflecting them truly as they are, or of distorting and disfiguring them. "Hence it follows, that whenever you perceive objects as they are, you agree among yourselves, and with the objects; and this similitude between your sensations and their manner of existence, is what constitutes their truth with respect to you; and, on the contrary, whenever you differ in opinion, your disagreement is a proof that you do not represent them such as they are,--that you change them. "Hence, also, it follows, that the causes of your disagreement exist not in the objects themselves, but in your minds, in your manner of perceiving or judging. "To establish, therefore, a uniformity of opinion, it is necessary first to establish the certainty, completely verified, that the portraits which the mind forms are perfectly like the originals; that it reflects the objects correctly as they exist. Now, this result cannot be obtained but in those cases where the objects can be brought to the test, and submitted to the examination of the senses. Everything which cannot be brought to this trial is, for that reason alone, impossible to be determined; there exists no rule, no term of comparison, no means of certainty, respecting it. "From this we conclude, that, to live in harmony and peace, we must agree never to decide on such subjects, and to attach to them no importance; in a word, we must trace a line of distinction between those that are capable of verification, and those that are not; and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities; that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions. "This, O ye people of the earth! is the object proposed by a great nation freed from her fetters and her prejudices; this is the work which, under her eye and by her orders, we had undertaken, when your kings and your priests came to interrupt it. O kings and priests! you may suspend, yet for a while, the solemn publication of the laws of nature; but it is no longer in your power to annihilate or to subvert them." A general shout then arose from every part of the assembly; and the nations universally, and with one voice, testified their assent to the proposals of the delegates: "Resume," said they, "your holy and sublime labors, and bring them to perfection. Investigate the laws which nature, for our guidance, has implanted in our breasts, and collect from them an authentic and immutable code; nor let this code be any longer for one family only, but for us all without exception. Be the legislators of the whole human race, as you are the interpreters of nature herself. Show us the line of partition between the world of chimeras and that of realities; and teach us, after so many religions of error and delusion, the religion of evidence and truth!" Then the delegates, having resumed their enquiries into the physical and constituent attributes of man, and examined the motives and affections which govern him in his individual and social state, unfolded in these words the laws on which nature herself has founded his happiness. THE LAW OF NATURE. CHAPTER 1. OF THE LAW OF NATURE. Q. What is the law of nature? A. It is the constant and regular order of events, by which God governs the universe; an order which his wisdom presents to the senses and reason of men, as an equal and common rule for their actions, to guide them, without distinction of country or sect, towards perfection and happiness. Q. Give a clear definition of the word law. A. The word law, taken literary, signifies lecture,* because originally, ordinances and regulations were the lectures, preferably to all others, made to the people, in order that they might observe them, and not incur the penalties attached to their infraction: whence follows the original custom explaining the true idea. The definition of law is, "An order or prohibition to act with the express clause of a penalty attached to the infraction, or of a recompense attached to the observance of that order." * From the Latin word lex, lectio. Alcoran likewise signifies lecture and is only a literal translation of the word law. Q. Do such orders exist in nature? A. Yes. Q. What does the word nature signify? A. The word nature bears three different significations. 1. It signifies the universe, the material world: in this first sense we say the beauties of nature, the riches of nature, that is to say, the objects in the heavens and on the earth exposed to our sight; 2. It signifies the power that animates, that moves the universe, considering it as a distinct being, such as the soul is to the body; in this second sense we say, "The intentions of nature, the incomprehensible secrets of nature." 3. It signifies the partial operations of that power on each being, or on each class of beings; and in this third sense we say, "The nature of man is an enigma; every being acts according to its nature." Wherefore, as the actions of each being, or of each species of beings, are subjected to constant and general rules, which cannot be infringed without interrupting and troubling the general or particular order, those rules of action and of motion are called natural laws, or laws of nature. Q. Give me examples of those laws. A. It is a law of nature, that the sun illuminates successively the surface of the terrestrial globe;--that its presence causes both light and heat;--that heat acting upon water, produces vapors;--that those vapors rising in clouds into the regions of the air, dissolve into rain or snow, and renew incessantly the waters of fountains and rivers. It is a law of nature, that water flows downwards; that it endeavors to find its level; that it is heavier than air; that all bodies tend towards the earth; that flame ascends towards the heavens;--that it disorganizes vegetables and animals; that air is essential to the life of certain animals; that, in certain circumstances, water suffocates and kills them; that certain juices of plants, certain minerals attack their organs, and destroy their life, and so on in a multitude of other instances. Wherefore, as all those and similar facts are immutable, constant, and regular, so many real orders result from them for man to conform himself to, with the express clause of punishment attending the infraction of them, or of welfare attending their observance. So that if man pretends to see clear in darkness, if he goes in contradiction to the course of the seasons, or the action of the elements; if he pretends to remain under water without being drowned, to touch fire without burning himself, to deprive himself of air without being suffocated, to swallow poison without destroying himself, he receives from each of those infractions of the laws of nature a corporeal punishment proportionate to his fault; but if on the contrary, he observes and practises each of those laws according to the regular and exact relations they have to him he preserves his existence, and renders it as happy as it can be: and as the only and common end of all those laws, considered relatively to mankind, is to preserve, and render them happy, it has been agreed upon to reduce the idea to one simple expression, and to call them collectively the law of nature. CHAPTER II. CHARACTERS OF THE LAW OF NATURE. Q. What are the characters of the law of nature? A. There can be assigned ten principal ones. Q. Which is the first? A. To be inherent to the existence of things, and, consequently, primitive and anterior to every other law: so that all those which man has received, are only imitations of it, and their perfection is ascertained by the resemblance they bear to this primordial model. Q. Which is the second? A. To be derived immediately from God, and presented by him to each man, whereas all other laws are presented to us by men, who may be either deceived or deceivers. Q. Which is the third? A. To be common to all times, and to all countries, that is to say, one and universal. Q. Is no other law universal? A. No: for no other is agreeable or applicable to all the people of the earth; they are all local and accidental, originating from circumstances of places and of persons; so that if such a man had not existed, or such an event happened, such a law would never have been enacted. Q. Which is the fourth character? A. To be uniform and invariable. Q. Is no other law uniform and invariable? A. No: for what is good and virtue according to one, is evil and vice according to another; and what one and the same law approves of at one time, it often condemns at another. Q. Which is the fifth character? A. To be evident and palpable, because it consists entirely of facts incessantly present to the senses, and to demonstration. Q. Are not other laws evident? A. No: for they are founded on past and doubtful facts, on equivocal and suspicious testimonies, and on proofs inaccessible to the senses. Q. Which is the sixth character? A. To be reasonable, because its precepts and entire doctrine are conformable to reason, and to the human understanding. Q. Is no other law reasonable? A. No: for all are in contradiction to the reason and the understanding of men, and tyrannically impose on him a blind and impracticable belief. Q. Which is the seventh character? A. To be just, because in that law, the penalties are proportionate to the infractions. Q. Are not other laws just? A. No: for they often exceed bounds, either in rewarding deserts, or in punishing delinquencies, and consider as meritorious or criminal, null or indifferent actions. Q. Which is the eighth character? A. To be pacific and tolerant, because in the law of nature, all men being brothers and equal in rights, it recommends to them only peace and toleration, even for errors. Q. Are not other laws pacific? A. No: for all preach dissension, discord, and war, and divide mankind by exclusive pretensions of truth and domination. Q. Which is the ninth character? A. To be equally beneficent to all men, in teaching them the true means of becoming better and happier. Q. Are not other laws beneficent likewise? A. No: for none of them teach the real means of attaining happiness; all are confined to pernicious or futile practices; and this is evident from facts, since after so many laws, so many religions, so many legislators and prophets, men are still as unhappy and ignorant, as they were six thousand years ago. Q. Which is the last character of the law of nature? A. That it is alone sufficient to render men happier and better, because it comprises all that is good and useful in other laws, either civil or religious, that is to say, it constitutes essentially the moral part of them; so that if other laws were divested of it, they would be reduced to chimerical and imaginary opinions devoid of any practical utility. Q. Recapitulate all those characters. A. We have said that the law of nature is, 1. Primitive; 6. Reasonable; 2. Immediate; 7. Just; 3. Universal; 8. Pacific; 4. Invariable; 9. Beneficent: and 5. Evident; 10. Alone sufficient. And such is the power of all these attributes of perfection and truth, that when in their disputes the theologians can agree upon no article of belief, they recur to the law of nature, the neglect of which, say they, forced God to send from time to time prophets to proclaim new laws; as if God enacted laws for particular circumstances, as men do; especially when the first subsists in such force, that we may assert it to have been at all times and in all countries the rule of conscience for every man of sense or understanding. Q. If, as you say, it emanates immediately from God, does it teach his existence? A. Yes, most positively: for, to any man whatever, who observes with reflection the astonishing spectacle of the universe, the more he meditates on the properties and attributes of each being, on the admirable order and harmony of their motions, the more it is demonstrated that there exists a supreme agent, a universal and identic mover, designated by the appellation of God; and so true it is that the law of nature suffices to elevate him to the knowledge of God, that all which men have pretended to know by supernatural means, has constantly turned out ridiculous and absurd, and that they have ever been obliged to recur to the immutable conceptions of natural reason. Q. Then it is not true that the followers of the law of nature are atheists? A. No; it is not true; on the contrary, they entertain stronger and nobler ideas of the Divinity than most other men; for they do not sully him with the foul ingredients of all the weaknesses and passions entailed on humanity. Q. What worship do they pay to him? A. A worship wholly of action; the practice and observance of all the rules which the supreme wisdom has imposed on the motion of each being; eternal and unalterable rules, by which it maintains the order and harmony of the universe, and which, in their relations to man, constitute the law of nature. Q. Was the law of nature known before this period: A. It has been at all times spoken of: most legislators pretend to adopt it as the basis of their laws; but they only quote some of its precepts, and have only vague ideas of its totality. Q. Why. A. Because, though simple in its basis, it forms in its developements and consequences, a complicated whole which requires an extensive knowledge of facts, joined to all the sagacity of reasoning. Q. Does not instinct alone teach the law of nature? A. No; for by instinct is meant nothing more than that blind sentiment by which we are actuated indiscriminately towards everything that flatters the senses. Q. Why, then, is it said that the law of nature is engraved in the hearts of all men. A. It is said for two reasons: first, because it has been remarked, that there are acts and sentiments common to all men, and this proceeds from their common organization; secondly, because the first philosophers believed that men were born with ideas already formed, which is now demonstrated to be erroneous. Q. Philosophers, then, are fallible? A. Yes, sometimes. Q. Why so? A. First, because they are men; secondly, because the ignorant call all those who reason, right or wrong, philosophers; thirdly, because those who reason on many subjects, and who are the first to reason on them, are liable to be deceived. Q. If the law of nature be not written, must it not become arbitrary and ideal? A. No: because it consists entirely in facts, the demonstration of which can be incessantly renewed to the senses, and constitutes a science as accurate and precise as geometry and mathematics; and it is because the law of nature forms an exact science, that men, born ignorant and living inattentive and heedless, have had hitherto only a superficial knowledge of it. CHAPTER III. PRINCIPLES OF THE LAW OF NATURE RELATING TO MAN. Q. Explain the principles of the law of nature with relation to man. A. They are simple; all of them are comprised in one fundamental and single precept. Q. What is that precept? A. It is self-preservation. Q. Is not happiness also a precept of the law of nature? A. Yes: but as happiness is an accidental state, resulting only from the development of man's faculties and his social system, it is not the immediate and direct object of nature; it is in some measure, a superfluity annexed to the necessary and fundamental object of preservation. Q. How does nature order man to preserve himself? A. By two powerful and involuntary sensations, which it has attached, as two guides, two guardian Geniuses to all his actions: the one a sensation of pain, by which it admonishes him of, and deters him from, everything that tends to destroy him; the other, a sensation of pleasure, by which it attracts and carries him towards everything that tends to his preservation and the development of his existence. Q. Pleasure, then, is not an evil, a sin, as casuists pretend? A. No, only inasmuch as it tends to destroy life and health which, by the avowal of those same casuists, we derive from God himself. Q. Is pleasure the principal object of our existence, as some philosophers have asserted? A. No; not more than pain; pleasure is an incitement to live as pain is a repulsion from death. Q. How do you prove this assertion? A. By two palpable facts: One, that pleasure, when taken immoderately, leads to destruction; for instance, a man who abuses the pleasure of eating or drinking, attacks his health, and injures his life. The other, that pain sometimes leads to self-preservation; for instance, a man who permits a mortified member to be cut off, suffers pain in order not to perish totally. Q. But does not even this prove that our sensations can deceive us respecting the end of our preservation? A. Yes; they can momentarily. Q. How do our sensations deceive us? A. In two ways: by ignorance, and by passion. Q. When do they deceive us by ignorance? A. When we act without knowing the action and effect of objects on our senses: for example, when a man touches nettles without knowing their stinging quality, or when he swallows opium without knowing its soporiferous effects. Q. When do they deceive us by passion? A. When, conscious of the pernicious action of objects, we abandon ourselves, nevertheless, to the impetuosity of our desires and appetites: for example, when a man who knows that wine intoxicates, does nevertheless drink it to excess. Q. What is the result? A. That the ignorance in which we are born, and the unbridled appetites to which we abandon ourselves, are contrary to our preservation; that, therefore, the instruction of our minds and the moderation of our passions are two obligations, two laws, which spring directly from the first law of preservation. Q. But being born ignorant, is not ignorance a law of nature? A. No more than to remain in the naked and feeble state of infancy. Far from being a law of nature, ignorance is an obstacle to the practice of all its laws. It is the real original sin. Q. Why, then, have there been moralists who have looked upon it as a virtue and perfection? A. Because, from a strange or perverted disposition, they confounded the abuse of knowledge with knowledge itself; as if, because men abuse the power of speech, their tongues should be cut out; as if perfection and virtue consisted in the nullity, and not in the proper development of our faculties. Q. Instruction, then, is indispensable to man's existence? A. Yes, so indispensable, that without it he is every instant assailed and wounded by all that surrounds him; for if he does not know the effects of fire, he burns himself; those of water he drowns himself; those of opium, he poisons himself; if, in the savage state, he does not know the wiles of animals, and the art of seizing game, he perishes through hunger; if in the social state, he does not know the course of the seasons, he can neither cultivate the ground, nor procure nourishment; and so on, of all his actions, respecting all his wants. Q. But can man individually acquire this knowledge necessary to his existence, and to the development of his faculties? A. No; not without the assistance of his fellow men, and by living in society. Q. But is not society to man a state against nature? A. No: it is on the contrary a necessity, a law that nature imposed on him by the very act of his organization; for, first, nature has so constituted man, that he cannot see his species of another sex without feeling emotions and an attraction which induce him to live in a family, which is already a state of society; secondly, by endowing him with sensibility, she organized him so that the sensations of others reflect within him, and excite reciprocal sentiments of pleasure and of grief, which are attractions, and indissoluble ties of society; thirdly, and finally, the state of society, founded on the wants of man, is only a further means of fulfilling the law of preservation: and to pretend that this state is out of nature, because it is more perfect, is the same as to say, that a bitter and wild fruit of the forest, is no longer the production of nature, when rendered sweet and delicious by cultivation in our gardens. Q. Why, then, have philosophers called the savage state the state of perfection? A. Because, as I have told you, the vulgar have often given the name of philosophers to whimsical geniuses, who, from moroseness, from wounded vanity, or from a disgust to the vices of society, have conceived chimerical ideas of the savage state, in contradiction with their own system of a perfect man. Q. What is the true meaning of the word philosopher? A. The word philosopher signifies a lover of wisdom; and as wisdom consists in the practice of the laws of nature, the true philosopher is he who knows those laws, and conforms the whole tenor of his conduct to them. Q. What is man in the savage state? A. A brutal, ignorant animal, a wicked and ferocious beast. Q. Is he happy in that state? A. No; for he only feels momentary sensations, which are habitually of violent wants which he cannot satisfy, since he is ignorant by nature, and weak by being isolated from his race. Q. Is he free? A. No; he is the most abject slave that exists; for his life depends on everything that surrounds him: he is not free to eat when hungry, to rest when tired, to warm himself when cold; he is every instant in danger of perishing; wherefore nature offers but fortuitous examples of such beings; and we see that all the efforts of the human species, since its origin, sorely tends to emerge from that violent state by the pressing necessity of self-preservation. Q. But does not this necessity of preservation engender in individuals egotism, that is to say self-love? and is not egotism contrary to the social state? A. No; for if by egotism you mean a propensity to hurt our neighbor, it is no longer self-love, but the hatred of others. Self-love, taken in its true sense, not only is not contrary to society, but is its firmest support, by the necessity we lie under of not injuring others, lest in return they should injure us. Thus mans preservation, and the unfolding of his faculties, directed towards this end, teach the true law of nature in the production of the human being; and it is from this essential principle that are derived, are referred, and in its scale are weighed, all ideas of good and evil, of vice and virtue, of just and unjust, of truth or error, of lawful or forbidden, on which is founded the morality of individual, or of social man. CHAPTER IV. BASIS OF MORALITY; OF GOOD, OF EVIL, OF SIN, OF CRIME, OF VICE AND OF VIRTUE. Q. What is good, according to the law of nature? A. It is everything that tends to preserve and perfect man. Q. What is evil? A. That which tends to man's destruction or deterioration. Q. What is meant by physical good and evil, and by moral good and evil? A. By the word physical is understood, whatever acts immediately on the body. Health is a physical good; and sickness a physical evil. By moral, is meant what acts by consequences more or less remote. Calumny is a moral evil; a fair reputation is a moral good, because both one and the other occasion towards us, on the part of other men, dispositions and habitudes,* which are useful or hurtful to our preservation, and which attack or favor our means of existence. * It is from this word habitudes, (reiterated actions,) in Latin mores, that the word moral, and all its family, are derived. Q. Everything that tends to preserve, or to produce is therefore a good? A. Yes; and it is for that reason that certain legislators have classed among the works agreeable to the divinity, the cultivation of a field and the fecundity of a woman. Q. Whatever tends to cause death is, therefore, an evil? A. Yes; and it is for that reason some legislators have extended the idea of evil and of sin even to the killing of animals. Q. The murdering of a man is, therefore, a crime in the law of nature? A. Yes, and the greatest that can be committed; for every other evil can be repaired, but murder alone is irreparable. Q. What is a sin in the law of nature? A. Whatever tends to disturb the order established by nature for the preservation and perfection of man and of society. Q. Can intention be a merit or a crime? A. No, for it is only an idea void of reality: but it is a commencement of sin and evil, by the impulse it gives to action. Q. What is virtue according to the law of nature? A. It is the practice of actions useful to the individual and to society. Q. What is meant by the word individual? A. It means a man considered separately from every other. Q. What is vice according to the law of nature? A. It is the practice of actions prejudicial to the individual and to society. Q. Have not virtue and vice an object purely spiritual and abstracted from the senses? A. No; it is always to a physical end that they finally relate, and that end is always to destroy or preserve the body. Q. Have vice and virtue degrees of strength and intensity? A. Yes: according to the importance of the faculties, which they attack or which they favor; and according to the number of persons in whom those faculties are favored or injured. Q. Give me some examples? A. The action of saving a man's life is more virtuous than that of saving his property; the action of saving the lives of ten men, than that of saving only the life of one, and an action useful to the whole human race is more virtuous than an action that is only useful to one single nation. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe the practice of good and virtue, and forbid that of evil and vice? A. By the advantages resulting from the practice of good and virtue for the preservation of our body, and by the losses which result to our existence from the practice of evil and vice. Q. Its precepts are then in action? A. Yes: they are action itself, considered in its present effect and in its future consequences. Q. How do you divide the virtues? A. We divide them in three classes, first, individual virtues, as relative to man alone; secondly, domestic virtues, as relative to a family; thirdly, social virtues, as relative to society. CHAPTER V. OF INDIVIDUAL VIRTUES. Q. Which are the individual virtues? A. There are five principal ones, to wit: first, science, which comprises prudence and wisdom; secondly, temperance, comprising sobriety and chastity; thirdly, courage, or strength of body and mind; fourthly, activity, that is to say, love of labor and employment of time; fifthly, and finally, cleanliness, or purity of body, as well in dress as in habitation. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe science? A. Because the man acquainted with the causes and effects of things attends in a careful and sure manner to his preservation, and to the development of his faculties. Science is to him the eye and the light, which enable him to discern clearly and accurately all the objects with which he is conversant, and hence by an enlightened man is meant a learned and well-informed man. With science and instruction a man never wants for resources and means of subsistence; and upon this principle a philosopher, who had been shipwrecked, said to his companions, that were inconsolable for the loss of their wealth: "For my part, I carry all my wealth within me." Q. Which is the vice contrary to science? A. It is ignorance. Q. How does the law of nature forbid ignorance? A. By the grievous detriments resulting from it to our existence; for the ignorant man who knows neither causes nor effects, commits every instant errors most pernicious to himself and to others; he resembles a blind man groping his way at random, and who, at every step, jostles or is jostled by every one he meets. Q. What difference is there between an ignorant and a silly man? A. The same difference as between him who frankly avows his blindness and the blind man who pretends to sight; silliness is the reality of ignorance, to which is superadded the vanity of knowledge. Q. Are ignorance and silliness common? A. Yes, very common; they are the usual and general distempers of mankind: more than three thousand years ago the wisest of men said: "The number of fools is infinite;" and the world has not changed. Q. What is the reason of it? A. Because much labor and time are necessary to acquire instruction, and because men, born ignorant and indolent, find it more convenient to remain blind, and pretend to see clear. Q. What difference is there between a learned and a wise man? A. The learned knows, and the wise man practices. Q. What is prudence? A. It is the anticipated perception, the foresight of the effects and consequences of every action; by means of which foresight, man avoids the dangers which threaten him, while he seizes on and creates opportunities favorable to him: he thereby provides for his present and future safety in a certain and secure manner, whereas the imprudent man, who calculates neither his steps nor his conduct, nor efforts, nor resistance, falls every instant into difficulties and dangers, which sooner or later impair his faculties and destroy his existence. Q. When the Gospel says, "Happy are the poor of spirit," does it mean the ignorant and imprudent? A. No; for, at the same time that it recommends the simplicity of doves, it adds the prudent cunning of serpents. By simplicity of mind is meant uprightness, and the precept of the Gospel is that of nature. CHAPTER VI. ON TEMPERANCE. Q. What is temperance? A. It is a regular use of our faculties, which makes us never exceed in our sensations the end of nature to preserve us; it is the moderation of the passions. Q. Which is the vice contrary to temperance? A. The disorder of the passions, the avidity of all kind of enjoyments, in a word, cupidity. Q. Which are the principal branches of temperance? A. Sobriety, and continence or chastity. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe sobriety? A. By its powerful influence over our health. The sober man digests with comfort; he is not overpowered by the weight of aliments; his ideas are clear and easy; he fulfills all his functions properly; he conducts his business with intelligence; his old age is exempt from infirmity; he does not spend his money in remedies, and he enjoys, in mirth and gladness, the wealth which chance and his own prudence have procured him. Thus, from one virtue alone, generous nature derives innumerable recompenses. Q. How does it prohibit gluttony? A. By the numerous evils that are attached to it. The glutton, oppressed with aliments, digests with anxiety; his head, troubled by the fumes of indigestion, is incapable of conceiving clear and distinct ideas; he abandons himself with violence to the disorderly impulse of lust and anger, which impair his health; his body becomes bloated, heavy, and unfit for labor; he endures painful and expensive distempers; he seldom lives to be old; and his age is replete with infirmities and sorrow. Q. Should abstinence and fasting be considered as virtuous actions? A. Yes, when one has eaten too much; for then abstinence and fasting are simple and efficacious remedies; but when the body is in want of aliment, to refuse it any, and let it suffer from hunger or thirst, is delirium and a real sin against the law of nature. Q. How is drunkenness considered in the law of nature? A. As a most vile and pernicious vice. The drunkard, deprived of the sense and reason given us by God, profanes the donations of the divinity: he debases himself to the condition of brutes; unable even to guide his steps, he staggers and falls as if he were epileptic; he hurts and even risks killing himself; his debility in this state exposes him to the ridicule and contempt of every person that sees him; he makes in his drunkenness, prejudicial and ruinous bargains, and injures his fortune; he makes use of opprobrious language, which creates him enemies and repentance; he fills his house with trouble and sorrow, and ends by a premature death or by a cacochymical old age. Q. Does the law of nature interdict absolutely the use of wine? A. No; it only forbids the abuse; but as the transition from the use to the abuse is easy and prompt among the generality of men, perhaps the legislators, who have proscribed the use of wine, have rendered a service to humanity. Q. Does the law of nature forbid the use of certain kinds of meat, or of certain vegetables, on particular days, during certain seasons? A. No; it absolutely forbids only whatever is injurious to health; its precepts, in this respect, vary according to persons, and even constitute a very delicate and important science for the quality, the quantity, and the combination of aliments have the greatest influence, not only over the momentary affections of the soul, but even over its habitual disposition. A man is not the same when fasting as after a meal, even if he were sober. A glass of spirituous liquor, or a dish of coffee, gives degrees of vivacity, of mobility, of disposition to anger, sadness, or gaiety; such a meat, because it lies heavy on the stomach, engenders moroseness and melancholy; such another, because it facilitates digestion, creates sprightliness, and an inclination to oblige and to love. The use of vegetables, because they have little nourishment, enfeebles the body, and gives a disposition to repose, indolence, and ease; the use of meat, because it is full of nourishment, and of spirituous liquors, because they stimulate the nerves, creates vivacity, uneasiness, and audacity. Now from those habitudes of aliment result habits of constitution and of the organs, which form afterwards different kinds of temperaments, each of which is distinguished by a peculiar characteristic. And it is for this reason that, in hot countries especially, legislators have made laws respecting regimen or food. The ancients were taught by long experience that the dietetic science constituted a considerable part of morality; among the Egyptians, the ancient Persians, and even among the Greeks, at the Areopagus, important affairs were examined fasting; and it has been remarked that, among those people, where public affairs were discussed during the heat of meals, and the fumes of digestion, deliberations were hasty and violent, and the results of them frequently unreasonable, and productive of turbulence and confusion. CHAPTER VII. ON CONTINENCE. Q. Does the law of nature prescribe continence? A. Yes: because a moderate use of the most lively of pleasures is not only useful, but indispensable, to the support of strength and health: and because a simple calculation proves that, for some minutes of privation, you increase the number of your days, both in vigor of body and of mind. Q. How does it forbid libertinism? A. By the numerous evils which result from it to the physical and the moral existence. He who carries it to an excess enervates and pines away; he can no longer attend to study or labor; he contracts idle and expensive habits, which destroy his means of existence, his public consideration, and his credit; his intrigues occasion continual embarrassment, cares, quarrels and lawsuits, without mentioning the grievous deep-rooted distempers, and the loss of his strength by an inward and slow poison; the stupid dullness of his mind, by the exhaustion of the nervous system; and, in fine, a premature and infirm old age. Q. Does the law of nature look on that absolute chastity so recommended in monastical institutions, as a virtue? A. No: for that chastity is of no use either to the society that witnesses, or the individual who practises it; it is even prejudicial to both. First, it injures society by depriving it of population, which is one of its principal sources of wealth and power; and as bachelors confine all their views and affections to the term of their lives, they have in general an egotism unfavorable to the interests of society. In the second place, it injures the individuals who practise it, because it deprives them of a number of affections and relations which are the springs of most domestic and social virtues; and besides, it often happens, from circumstances of age, regimen, or temperament, that absolute continence injures the constitution and causes severe diseases, because it is contrary to the physical laws on which nature has founded the system of the reproduction of beings; and they who recommend so strongly chastity, even supposing them to be sincere, are in contradiction with their own doctrine, which consecrates the law of nature by the well known commandment: increase and multiply. Q. Why is chastity considered a greater virtue in women than in men? A. Because a want of chastity in women is attended with inconveniences much more serious and dangerous for them and for society; for, without taking into account the pains and diseases they have in common with men, they are further exposed to all the disadvantages and perils that precede, attend, and follow child-birth. When pregnant contrary to law, they become an object of public scandal and contempt, and spend the remainder of their lives in bitterness and misery. Moreover, all the expense of maintaining and educating their fatherless children falls on them: which expense impoverishes them, and is every way prejudicial to their physical and moral existence. In this situation, deprived of the freshness and health that constitute their charm, carrying with them an extraneous and expensive burden, they are less prized by men, they find no solid establishment, they fall into poverty, misery, and wretchedness, and thus drag on in sorrow their unhappy existence. Q. Does the law of nature extend so far as the scruples of desires and thoughts. A. Yes; because, in the physical laws of the human body, thoughts and desires inflame the senses, and soon provoke to action: now, by another law of nature in the organization of our body, those actions become mechanical wants which recur at certain periods of days or of weeks, so that, at such a time, the want is renewed of such an action and such a secretion; if this action and this secretion be injurious to health, the habitude of them becomes destructive of life itself. Thus thoughts and desires have a true and natural importance. Q. Should modesty be considered as a virtue? A. Yes; because modesty, inasmuch as it is a shame of certain actions, maintains the soul and body in all those habits useful to good order, and to self-preservation. The modest woman is esteemed, courted, and established, with advantages of fortune which ensure her existence, and render it agreeable to her, while the immodest and prostitute are despised, repulsed, and abandoned to misery and infamy. CHAPTER VIII. ON COURAGE AND ACTIVITY. Q. Are courage and strength of body and mind virtues in the law of nature? A. Yes, and most important virtues; for they are the efficacious and indispensable means of attending to our preservation and welfare. The courageous and strong man repulses oppression, defends his life, his liberty, and his property; by his labor he procures himself an abundant subsistence, which he enjoys in tranquillity and peace of mind. If he falls into misfortunes, from which his prudence could not protect him, he supports them with fortitude and resignation; and it is for this reason that the ancient moralists have reckoned strength and courage among the four principal virtues. Q. Should weakness and cowardice be considered as vices? A. Yes, since it is certain that they produce innumerable calamities. The weak or cowardly man lives in perpetual cares and agonies; he undermines his health by the dread, oftentimes ill founded, of attacks and dangers: and this dread which is an evil, is not a remedy; it renders him, on the contrary, the slave of him who wishes to oppress him; and by the servitude and debasement of all his faculties, it degrades and diminishes his means of existence, so far as the seeing his life depend on the will and caprice of another man. Q. But, after what you have said on the influence of aliments, are not courage and force, as well as many other virtues, in a great measure the effect of our physical constitution and temperament? A. Yes, it is true; and so far, that those qualities are transmitted by generation and blood, with the elements on which they depend: the most reiterated and constant facts prove that in the breed of animals of every kind, we see certain physical and moral qualities, attached to the individuals of those species, increase or decay according to the combinations and mixtures they make with other breeds. Q. But, then, as our will is not sufficient to procure us those qualities, is it a crime to be destitute of them? A. No, it is not a crime, but a misfortune; it is what the ancients call an unlucky fatality; but even then we have it yet in our power to acquire them; for, as soon as we know on what physical elements such or such a quality is founded, we can promote its growth, and hasten its developments, by a skillful management of those elements; and in this consists the science of education, which, according as it is directed, meliorates or degrades individuals, or the whole race, to such a pitch as totally to change their nature and inclinations; for which reason it is of the greatest importance to be acquainted with the laws of nature by which those operations and changes are certainly and necessarily effected. Q. Why do you say that activity is a virtue according to the law of nature? A. Because the man who works and employs his time usefully, derives from it a thousand precious advantages to his existence. If he is born poor, his labor furnishes him with subsistence; and still more so, if he is sober, continent, and prudent, for he soon acquires a competency, and enjoys the sweets of life; his very labor gives him virtues; for, while he occupies his body and mind, he is not affected with unruly desires, time does not lie heavy on him, he contracts mild habits, he augments his strength and health, and attains a peaceful and happy old age. Q. Are idleness and sloth vices in the law of nature? A. Yes, and the most pernicious of all vices, for they lead to all the others. By idleness and sloth man remains ignorant, he forgets even the science he had acquired, and falls into all the misfortunes which accompany ignorance and folly; by idleness and sloth man, devoured with disquietude, in order to dissipate it, abandons himself to all the desires of his senses, which, becoming every day more inordinate, render him intemperate, gluttonous, lascivious, enervated, cowardly, vile, and contemptible. By the certain effect of all those vices, he ruins his fortune, consumes his health, and terminates his life in all the agonies of sickness and of poverty. Q. From what you say, one would think that poverty was a vice? A. No, it is not a vice; but it is still less a virtue, for it is by far more ready to injure than to be useful; it is even commonly the result, or the beginning of vice, for the effect of all individual vices is to lead to indigence, and to the privation of the necessaries of life; and when a man is in want of necessaries, he is tempted to procure them by vicious means, that is to say, by means injurious to society. All the individual virtues tend, on the contrary, to procure to a man an abundant subsistence; and when he has more than he can consume, it is much easier for him to give to others, and to practice the actions useful to society. Q. Do you look upon opulence as a virtue? A. No; but still less as a vice: it is the use alone of wealth that can be called virtuous or vicious, according as it is serviceable or prejudicial to man and to society. Wealth is an instrument, the use and employment alone of which determine its virtue or vice. CHAPTER IX. ON CLEANLINESS. Q. Why is cleanliness included among the virtues? A. Because it is, in reality, one of the most important among them, on account of its powerful influence over the health and preservation of the body. Cleanliness, as well in dress as in residence, obviates the pernicious effects of the humidity, baneful odors, and contagious exhalations, proceeding from all things abandoned to putrefaction. Cleanliness, maintains free transpiration; it renews the air, refreshes the blood, and disposes even the mind to cheerfulness. From this it appears that persons attentive to the cleanliness of their bodies and habitations are, in general, more healthy, and less subject to disease, than those who live in filth and nastiness; and it is further remarked, that cleanliness carries with it, throughout all the branches of domestic administration, habits of order and arrangement, which are the chief means and first elements of happiness. Q. Uncleanliness or filthiness is, then, a real vice? A. Yes, as real a one as drunkenness, or as idleness, from which in a great measure it is derived. Uncleanliness is the second, and often the first, cause of many inconveniences, and even of grievous disorders; it is a fact in medicine, that it brings on the itch, the scurf, tetters, leprosies, as much as the use of tainted or sour aliments; that it favors the contagious influence of the plague and malignant fevers, that it even produces them in hospitals and prisons; that it occasions rheumatisms, by incrusting the skin with dirt, and thereby preventing transpiration; without reckoning the shameful inconvenience of being devoured by vermin--the foul appendage of misery and depravity. Most ancient legislators, therefore, considered cleanliness, which they called purity, as one of the essential dogmas of their religions. It was for this reason that they expelled from society, and even punished corporeally those who were infected with distempers produced by uncleanliness; that they instituted and consecrated ceremonies of ablutions baths, baptisms, and of purifications, even by fire and the aromatic fumes of incense, myrrh, benjamin, etc., so that the entire system of pollutions, all those rites of clean and unclean things, degenerated since into abuses and prejudices, were only founded originally on the judicious observation, which wise and learned men had made, of the extreme influence that cleanliness in dress and abode exercises over the health of the body, and by an immediate consequence over that of the mind and moral faculties. Thus all the individual virtues have for their object, more or less direct, more or less near, the preservation of the man who practises them and by the preservation of each man, they lead to that of families and society, which are composed of the united sum of individuals. CHAPTER X. ON DOMESTIC VIRTUES. Q. What do you mean be domestic virtues? A. I mean the practice of actions useful to a family, supposed to live in the same house.* * Domestic is derived from the Latin word domus, a house. Q. What are those virtues? A. They are economy, paternal love, filial love, conjugal love, fraternal love, and the accomplishment of the duties of master and servant. Q. What is economy? A. It is, according to the most extensive meaning of the word, the proper administration of every thing that concerns the existence of the family or house; and as subsistence holds the first rank, the word economy in confined to the employment of money for the wants of life. Q. Why is economy a virtue? A. Because a man who makes no useless expenses acquires a superabundancy, which is true wealth, and by means of which he procures for himself and his family everything that is really convenient and useful; without mentioning his securing thereby resources against accidental and unforeseen losses, so that he and his family enjoy an agreeable and undisturbed competency, which is the basis of human felicity. Q. Dissipation and prodigality, therefore, are vices? A. Yes, for by them man, in the end, is deprived of the necessaries of life; he falls into poverty and wretchedness; and his very friends, fearing to be obliged to restore to him what he has spent with or for them, avoid him as a debtor does his creditor, and he remains abandoned by the whole world. Q. What is paternal love? A. It is the assiduous care taken by parents to make their children contract the habit of every action useful to themselves and to society. Q. Why is paternal tenderness a virtue in parents? A. Because parents, who rear their children in those habits, procure for themselves, during the course of their lives, enjoyments and helps that give a sensible satisfaction at every instant, and which assure to them, when advanced in years, supports and consolations against the wants and calamities of all kinds with which old age is beset. Q. Is paternal love a common virtue? A. No; notwithstanding the ostentation made of it by parents, it is a rare virtue. They do not love their children, they caress and spoil them. In them they love only the agents of their will, the instruments of their power, the trophies of their vanity, the pastime of their idleness. It is not so much the welfare of their children that they propose to themselves, as their submission and obedience; and if among children so many are seen ungrateful for benefits received, it is because there are among parents as many despotic and ignorant benefactors. Q. Why do you say that conjugal love is a virtue? A. Because the concord and union resulting from the love of the married, establish in the heart of the family a multitude of habits useful to its prosperity and preservation. The united pair are attached to, and seldom quit their home; they superintend each particular direction of it; they attend to the education of their children; they maintain the respect and fidelity of domestics; they prevent all disorder and dissipation; and from the whole of their good conduct, they live in ease and consideration; while married persons who do not love one another, fill their house with quarrels and troubles, create dissension between their children and the servants, leaving both indiscriminately to all kinds of vicious habits; every one in turn spoils, robs, and plunders the house; the revenues are absorbed without profit; debts accumulate; the married pair avoid each other, or contend in lawsuits; and the whole family falls into disorder, ruin, disgrace and want. Q. Is adultery an offence in the law of nature? A. Yes; for it is attended with a number of habits injurious to the married and to their families. The wife or husband, whose affections are estranged, neglect their house, avoid it, and deprive it, as much as they can, of its revenues or income, to expend them with the object of their affections; hence arise quarrels, scandal, lawsuits, the neglect of their children and servants, and at last the plundering and ruin of the whole family; without reckoning that the adulterous woman commits a most grievous theft, in giving to her husband heirs of foreign blood, who deprive his real children of their legitimate portion. Q. What is filial love? A. It is, on the side of children, the practice of those actions useful to themselves and to their parents. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe filial love? A. By three principal motives: 1. By sentiment; for the affectionate care of parents inspires, from the most tender age, mild habits of attachment. 2. By justice; for children owe to their parents a return and indemnity for the cares, and even for the expenses, they have caused them. 3. By personal interest; for, if they use them ill, they give to their own children examples of revolt and ingratitude, which authorize them, at a future day, to behave to themselves in a similar manner. Q. Are we to understand by filial love a passive and blind submission? A. No; but a reasonable submission, founded on the knowledge of the mutual rights and duties of parents and children; rights and duties, without the observance of which their mutual conduct is nothing but disorder. Q. Why is fraternal love a virtue? A. Because the concord and union, which result from the love of brothers, establish the strength, security, and conservation of the family: brothers united defend themselves against all oppression, they aid one another in their wants, they help one another in their misfortunes, and thus secure their common existence; while brothers disunited, abandoned each to his own personal strength, fall into all the inconveniences attendant on an insulated state and individual weakness. This is what a certain Scythian king ingeniously expressed when, on his death-bed, calling his children to him, he ordered them to break a bundle of arrows. The young men, though strong, being unable to effect it, he took them in his turn, and untieing them, broke each of the arrows separately with his fingers. "Behold," said he, "the effects of union; united together, you will be invincible; taken separately, you will be broken like reeds." Q. What are the reciprocal duties of masters and of servants? A. They consist in the practice of the actions which are respectively and justly useful to them; and here begin the relations of society; for the rule and measure of those respective actions is the equilibrium or equality between the service and the recompense, between what the one returns and the other gives; which is the fundamental basis of all society. Thus all the domestic and individual virtues refer, more or less mediately, but always with certitude, to the physical object of the amelioration and preservation of man, and are thereby precepts resulting from the fundamental law of nature in his formation. CHAPTER XI. THE SOCIAL VIRTUES; JUSTICE. Q. What is society? A. It is every reunion of men living together under the clauses of an expressed or tacit contract, which has for its end their common preservation. Q. Are the social virtues numerous? A. Yes; they are in as great number as the kinds of actions useful to society; but all may be reduced to one principle. Q. What is that fundamental principle? A. It is justice, which alone comprises all the virtues of society. Q. Why do you say that justice is the fundamental and almost only virtue of society? A. Because it alone embraces the practice of all the actions useful to it; and because all the other virtues, under the denominations of charity, humanity, probity, love of one's country, sincerity, generosity, simplicity of manners, and modesty, are only varied forms and diversified applications of the axiom, "Do not to another what you do not wish to be done to yourself," which is the definition of justice. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe justice? A. By three physical attributes, inherent in the organization of man. Q. What are those attributes? A. They are equality, liberty, and property. Q. How is equality a physical attribute of man? A. Because all men, having equally eyes, hands, mouths, ears, and the necessity of making use of them, in order to live, have, by this reason alone, an equal right to life, and to the use of the aliments which maintain it; they are all equal before God. Q. Do you suppose that all men hear equally, see equally, feel equally, have equal wants, and equal passions? A. No; for it is evident, and daily demonstrated, that one is short, and another long-sighted; that one eats much, another little; that one has mild, another violent passions; in a word, that one is weak in body and mind, while another is strong in both. Q. They are, therefore, really unequal? A. Yes, in the development of their means, but not in the nature and essence of those means. They are made of the same stuff, but not in the same dimensions; nor are the weight and value equal. Our language possesses no one word capable of expressing the identity of nature, and the diversity of its form and employment. It is a proportional equality; and it is for this reason I have said, equal before God, and in the order of nature. Q. How is liberty a physical attribute of man? A. Because all men having senses sufficient for their preservation--no one wanting the eye of another to see, his ear to hear, his mouth to eat, his feet to walk--they are all, by this very reason, constituted naturally independent and free; no man is necessarily subjected to another, nor has he a right to dominate over him. Q. But if a man is born strong, has he a natural right to master the weak man? A. No; for it is neither a necessity for him, nor a convention between them; it is an abusive extension of his strength; and here an abuse is made of the word right, which in its true meaning implies, justice or reciprocal faculty. Q. How is property a physical attribute of man? A. Inasmuch as all men being constituted equal or similar to one another, and consequently independent and free, each is the absolute master, the full proprietor of his body and of the produce of his labor. Q. How is justice derived from these three attributes? A. In this, that men being equal and free, owing nothing to each other, have no right to require anything from one another only inasmuch as they return an equal value for it; or inasmuch as the balance of what is given is in equilibrium with what is returned: and it is this equality, this equilibrium which is called justice, equity;* that is to say that equality and justice are but one and the same word, the same law of nature, of which the social virtues are only applications and derivatives. * Aequitas, aequilibrium, aequalitas, are all of the same family. CHAPTER XII. DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL VIRTUES. Q. Explain how the social virtues are derived from the law of nature. How is charity or the love of one's neighbor a precept and application of it? A. By reason of equality and reciprocity; for when we injure another, we give him a right to injure us in return; thus, by attacking the existence of our neighbor, we endanger our own, from the effect of reciprocity; on the other hand, by doing good to others, we have room and right to expect an equivalent exchange; and such is the character of all social virtues, that they are useful to the man who practises them, by the right of reciprocity which they give him over those who are benefited by them. Q. Charity is then nothing but justice? A. No: it is only justice; with this slight difference, that strict justice confines itself to saying, "Do not to another the harm you would not wish he should do to you;" and that charity, or the love of one's neighbor, extends so far as to say, "Do to another the good which you would wish to receive from him." Thus when the gospel said, that this precept contained the whole of the law and the prophets, it announced nothing more than the precept of the law of nature. Q. Does it enjoin forgiveness of injuries? A. Yes, when that forgiveness implies self-preservation. Q. Does it prescribe to us, after having received a blow on one cheek, to hold out the other? A. No; for it is, in the first place, contrary to the precept of loving our neighbor as ourselves, since thereby we should love, more than ourselves, him who makes an attack on our preservation. Secondly, such a precept in its literal sense, encourages the wicked to oppression and injustice. The law of nature has been more wise in prescribing a calculated proportion of courage and moderation, which induces us to forget a first or unpremediated injury, but which punishes every act tending to oppression. Q. Does the law of nature prescribe to do good to others beyond the bounds of reason and measure? A. No; for it is a sure way of leading them to ingratitude. Such is the force of sentiment and justice implanted in the heart of man, that he is not even grateful for benefits conferred without discretion. There is only one measure with them, and that is to be just. Q. Is alms-giving a virtuous action? A. Yes, when it is practised according to the rule first mentioned; without which it degenerates into imprudence and vice, inasmuch as it encourages laziness, which is hurtful to the beggar and to society; no one has a right to partake of the property and fruits of another's labor, without rendering an equivalent of his own industry. Q. Does the law of nature consider as virtues faith and hope, which are often joined with charity? A. No; for they are ideas without reality; and if any effects result from them, they turn rather to the profit of those who have not those ideas, than of those who have them; so that faith and hope may be called the virtues of dupes for the benefit of knaves. Q. Does the law of nature prescribe probity? A. Yes, for probity is nothing more than respect for one's own rights in those of another; a respect founded on a prudent and well combined calculation of our interests compared to those of others. Q. But does not this calculation, which embraces the complicated interests and rights of the social state, require an enlightened understanding and knowledge, which make it a difficult science? A. Yes, and a science so much the more delicate as the honest man pronounces in his own cause. Q. Probity, then, shows an extension and justice in the mind? A. Yes, for an honest man almost always neglects a present interest, in order not to destroy a future one; whereas the knave does the contrary, and loses a great future interest for a present smaller one. Q. Improbity, therefore, is a sign of false judgment and a narrow mind? A. Yes, and rogues may be defined ignorant and silly calculators; for they do not understand their true interest, and they pretend to cunning: nevertheless, their cunning only ends in making known what they are--in losing all confidence and esteem, and the good services resulting from them for their physical and social existence. They neither live in peace with others, nor with themselves; and incessantly menaced by their conscience and their enemies, they enjoy no other real happiness but that of not being hanged. Q. Does the law of nature forbid robbery? A. Yes, for the man who robs another gives him a right to rob him; from that moment there is no security in his property, nor in his means of preservation: thus in injuring others, he, by a counterblow, injures himself. Q. Does it interdict even an inclination to rob? A. Yes; for that inclination leads naturally to action, and it is for this reason that envy is considered a sin? Q. How does it forbid murder? A. By the most powerful motives of self-preservation; for, first, the man who attacks exposes himself to the risk of being killed, by the right of defence; secondly, if he kills, he gives to the relations and friends of the deceased, and to society at large, an equal right of killing him; so that his life is no longer in safety. Q. How can we, by the law of nature, repair the evil we have done? A. By rendering a proportionate good to those whom we have injured. Q. Does it allow us to repair it by prayers, vows, offerings to God, fasting and mortifications? A. No: for all those things are foreign to the action we wish to repair: they neither restore the ox to him from whom it has been stolen, honor to him whom we have deprived of it, nor life to him from whom it has been taken away; consequently they miss the end of justice; they are only perverse contracts by which a man sells to another goods which do not belong to him; they are a real depravation of morality, inasmuch as they embolden to commit crimes through the hope of expiating them; wherefore, they have been the real cause of all the evils by which the people among whom those expiatory practices were used, have been continually tormented. Q. Does the law of nature order sincerity? A. Yes; for lying, perfidy, and perjury create distrust, quarrels, hatred, revenge, and a crowd of evils among men, which tend to their common destruction; while sincerity and fidelity establish confidence, concord, and peace, besides the infinite good resulting from such a state of things to society. Q. Does it prescribe mildness and modesty? A. Yes; for harshness and obduracy, by alienating from us the hearts of other men, give them an inclination to hurt us; ostentation and vanity, by wounding their self-love and jealousy, occasion us to miss the end of a real utility. Q. Does it prescribe humility as a virtue? A. No; for it is a propensity in the human heart to despise secretly everything that presents to it the idea of weakness; and self-debasement encourages pride and oppression in others; the balance must be kept in equipoise. Q. You have reckoned simplicity of manners among the social virtues; what do you understand by that word? A. I mean the restricting our wants and desires to what is truly useful to the existence of the citizen and his family; that is to say, the man of simple manners has but few wants, and lives content with a little. Q. How is this virtue prescribed to us? A. By the numerous advantages which the practice of it procures to the individual and to society; for the man whose wants are few, is free at once from a crowd of cares, perplexities, and labors; he avoids many quarrels and contests arising from avidity and a desire of gain; he spares himself the anxiety of ambition, the inquietudes of possession, and the uneasiness of losses; finding superfluity everywhere, he is the real rich man; always content with what he has, he is happy at little expense; and other men, not fearing any competition from him, leave him in quiet, and are disposed to render him the services he should stand in need of. And if this virtue of simplicity extends to a whole people, they insure to themselves abundance; rich in everything they do not consume, they acquire immense means of exchange and commerce; they work, fabricate, and sell at a lower price than others, and attain to all kinds of prosperity, both at home and abroad. Q. What is the vice contrary to this virtue? A. It is cupidity and luxury. Q. Is luxury a vice in the individual and in society? A. Yes, and to that degree, that it may be said to include all the others; for the man who stands in need of many things, imposes thereby on himself all the anxiety, and submits to all the means just or unjust of acquiring them. Does he possess an enjoyment, he covets another; and in the bosom of superfluity, he is never rich; a commodious dwelling is not sufficient for him, he must have a beautiful hotel; not content with a plenteous table, he must have rare and costly viands: he must have splendid furniture, expensive clothes, a train of attendants, horses, carriages, women, theatrical representations and games. Now, to supply so many expenses, much money must be had; and he looks on every method of procuring it as good and even necessary; at first he borrows, afterwards he steals, robs, plunders, turns bankrupt, is at war with every one, ruins and is ruined. Should a nation be involved in luxury, it occasions on a larger scale the same devastations; by reason that it consumes its entire produce, it finds itself poor even with abundance; it has nothing to sell to foreigners; its manufactures are carried on at a great expense, and are sold too dear; it becomes tributary for everything it imports; it attacks externally its consideration, power, strength, and means of defence and preservation, while internally it undermines and falls into the dissolution of its members. All its citizens being covetous of enjoyments, are engaged in a perpetual struggle to obtain them; all injure or are near injuring themselves; and hence arise those habits and actions of usurpation, which constitute what is denominated moral corruption, intestine war between citizen and citizen. From luxury arises avidity, from avidity, invasion by violence and perfidy; from luxury arises the iniquity of the judge, the venality of the witness, the improbity of the husband, the prostitution of the wife, the obduracy of parents, the ingratitude of children, the avarice of the master, the dishonesty of the servant, the dilapidation of the administrator, the perversity of the legislator, lying, perfidy, perjury, assassination, and all the disorders of the social state; so that it was with a profound sense of truth, that ancient moralists have laid the basis of the social virtues on simplicity of manners, restriction of wants, and contentment with a little; and a sure way of knowing the extent of a man's virtues and vices is, to find out if his expenses are proportionate to his fortune, and calculate, from his want of money, his probity, his integrity in fulfilling his engagements, his devotion to the public weal, and his sincere or pretended love of his country. Q. What do you mean by the word country? A. I mean the community of citizens who, united by fraternal sentiments, and reciprocal wants, make of their respective strength one common force, the reaction of which on each of them assumes the noble and beneficent character of paternity. In society, citizens form a bank of interest; in our country we form a family of endearing attachments; it is charity, the love of one's neighbor extended to a whole nation. Now as charity cannot be separated from justice, no member of the family can pretend to the enjoyment of its advantages, except in proportion to his labor; if he consumes more than it produces, he necessarily encroaches on his fellow-citizens; and it is only by consuming less than what he produces or possesses, that he can acquire the means of making sacrifices and being generous. Q. What do you conclude from all this? A. I conclude from it that all the social virtues are only the habitude of actions useful to society and to the individual who practices them; That they refer to the physical object of man's preservation; That nature having implanted in us the want of that preservation, has made a law to us of all its consequences, and a crime of everything that deviates from it; That we carry in us the seed of every virtue, and of every perfection; That it only requires to be developed; That we are only happy inasmuch as we observe the rules established by nature for the end of our preservation; And that all wisdom, all perfection, all law, all virtue, all philosophy, consist in the practice of these axioms founded on our own organization: Preserve thyself; Instruct thyself; Moderate thyself; Live for thy fellow citizens, that they may live for thee. VOLNEY'S ANSWER TO DR. PRIESTLY.* * In 1797, Dr. Priestly published a pamphlet, entitled, "Observation on the increase of infidelity, with animadversions upon the writings of several modern unbelievers, and especially the Ruins of Mr. Volney." The motto to this tract was: "Minds of little penetration rest naturally on the surface of things. They do not like to pierce deep into them, for fear of labor and trouble; sometimes still more for fear of truth." This Letter is an answer from Volney, taken from the Anti-Jacobin Review of March and April, 1799. SIR.--I received in due time your pamphlet on the increase of infidelity, together with the note without date which accompanied it.* My answer has been delayed by the incidents of business, and even by ill health, which you will surely excuse: this delay has, besides, no inconvenience in it. The question between us is not of a very urgent nature: the world would not go on less well with or without my answer as with or without your book. I might, indeed, have dispensed with returning you any answer at all; and I should have been warranted in so doing, by the manner in which you have stated the debate, and by the opinion pretty generally received that, on certain occasions, and with certain persons, the most noble reply is silence. You seem to have been aware of this yourself, considering the extreme precautions you have taken to deprive me of this resource; but as according to our French customs, any answer is an act of civility, I am not willing to concede the advantage of politeness--besides, although silence is sometimes very significant, its eloquence is not understood by every one, and the public which has not leisure to analyze disputes (often of little interest) has a reasonable right to require at least some preliminary explanations; reserving to itself, should the discussion degenerate into the recriminative clamors of an irritated self-love, to allow the right of silence to him in whom it becomes the virtue of moderation. * Dr. Priestly sent his pamphlet to Volney, desiring his answer to the strictures on his opinions in his Ruins of Empires. I have read, therefore, your animadversions on my Ruins, which you are pleased to class among the writings of modern unbelievers, and since you absolutely insist on my expressing my opinion before the public, I shall now fulfill this rather disagreeable task with all possible brevity, for the sake of economizing the time of our readers. In the first place, sir, it appears evidently, from your pamphlet, that your design is less to attack my book than my personal and moral character; and in order that the public may pronounce with accuracy on this point, I submit several passages fitted to throw light on the subject. You say, in the preface of your discourses, p. 12, "There are, however, unbelievers more ignorant than Mr. Paine, Mr. Volney, Lequino, and others in France say," &c. Also in the preface of your present observations, p. 20. "I can truly say that in the writings of Hume, Mr. Gibbon, Voltaire, Mr. Volney--there is nothing of solid argument: all abound in gross mistakes and misrepresentations." Idem, p. 38--"Whereas had he (Mr. Volney) given attention to the history of the times in which Christianity was promulgated . . . he could have no more doubt . . . &c., it is as much in vain to argue with such a person as this, as with a Chinese or even a Hottentot." Idem, p. 119--"Mr. Volney, if we may judge from his numerous quotations of ancient writers in all the learned languages, oriental as well as occidental, must be acquainted with all; for he makes no mention of any translation, and yet if we judge from this specimen of his knowledge of them, he cannot have the smallest tincture of that of the Hebrew or even of the Greek." And, at last, after having published and posted me in your very title page, as an unbeliever and an infidel; after having pointed me out in your motto as one of those superficial spirits who know not how to find out, and are unwilling to encounter, truth; you add, p. 124, immediately after an article in which you speak of me under all these denominations-- "The progress of infidelity, in the present age, is attended with a circumstance which did not so frequently accompany it in any former period, at least, in England, which is, that unbelievers in revelation generally proceed to the disbelief of the being and providence of God so as to become properly Atheists." So that, according to you, I am a Chinese, a Hottentot, an unbeliever, an Atheist, an ignoramus, a man of no sincerity; whose writings are full of nothing but gross mistakes and misrepresentations. Now I ask you, sir, What has all this to do with the main question? What has my book in common with my person? And how can you hold any converse with a man of such bad connexions? In the second place, your invitation, or rather, your summons to me, to point out the mistakes which I think you have made with respect to my opinions, suggest to me several observations. First. You suppose that the public attaches a high importance to your mistakes and to my opinions: but I cannot act upon a supposition. Am I not an unbeliever? Secondly. You say, p. 18, that the public will expect it from me: Where are the powers by which you make the public speak and act? Is this also a revelation? Thirdly. You require me to point out your mistakes. I do not know that I am under any such obligation: I have not reproached you with them; it is not, indeed, very correct to ascribe to me, by selection or indiscriminately, as you have done, all the opinions scattered through my book, since, having introduced many different persons, I was under the necessity of making them deliver different sentiments, according to their different characters. The part which belongs to me is that of a traveler, resting upon the ruins and meditating on the causes of the misfortunes of the human race. To be consistent with yourself you ought to have assigned to me that of the Hottentot or Samoyde savage, who argues with the Doctors, chap. xxiii, and I should have accepted it; you have preferred that of the erudite historian, chap. xxii, nor do I look upon this as a mistake; I discover on the contrary, an insidious design to engage me in a duel of self-love before the public, wherein you would excite the exclusive interest of the spectators by supporting the cause which they approve; while the task which you would impose on me, would only, in the event of success, be attended with sentiments of disapprobation. Such is your artful purpose, that, in attacking me as doubting the existence of Jesus, you might secure to yourself, by surprise, the favor of every Christian sect, although your own incredulity in his divine nature is not less subversive of Christianity than the profane opinion, which does not find in history the proof required by the English law to establish a fact: to say nothing of the extraordinary kind of pride assumed in the silent, but palpable, comparison of yourself to Paul and to Christ, by likening your labors to theirs as tending to the same object, p. 10, preface. Nevertheless, as the first impression of an attack always confers an advantage, you have some ground for expecting you may obtain the apostolic crown; unfortunately for your purpose I entertain no disposition to that of martrydom: and however glorious it might be to me to fall under the arm of him who has overcome Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire and even Frederick II., I find myself under the necessity of declining your theological challenge, for a number of substantial reasons. 1. Because, to religious quarrels there is no end, since the prejudices of infancy and education almost unavoidably exclude impartial reasoning, and besides, the vanity of the champions becomes committed by the very publicity of the contest, never to give up a first assertion, whence result a spirit of sectarism and faction. 2. Because no one has a right to ask of me an account of my religious opinions. Every inquisition of this kind is a pretension to sovereignty, a first step towards persecution; and the tolerant spirit of this country, which you invoke, has much less in view to engage men to speak, than to invite them to be silent. 3. Because, supposing I do hold the opinions you attribute to me, I wish not to engage my vanity so as never to retract, nor to deprive myself of the resource of a conversion on some future day after more ample information. 4. And because, reverend sir, if, in the support of your own thesis, you should happen to be discomfited before the Christian audience, it would be a dreadful scandal; and I will not be a cause for scandal, even for the sake of good. 5. Because in this metaphysical contest our arms are too unequal; you speaking in your mother tongue, which I scarcely lisp, might bring forth huge volumes, while I could hardly oppose pages; and the public, who would read neither production, might take the weight of the books for that of reasoning. 6. And because, being endowed with the gift of faith in a pretty sufficient quantity, you might swallow in a quarter of an hour more articles than my logic would digest in a week. 7. Because again, if you were to oblige me to attend your sermons, as you have compelled me to read your pamphlet, the congregation would never believe that a man powdered and adorned like any worldling, could be in the right against a man dressed out in a large hat, with straight hair,* and a mortified countenance, although the gospel, speaking of the pharisees of other times, who were unpowdered, says that when one fasts he must anoint his head and wash his face.** * Dr. Priestly has discarded his wig since he went to America, and wears his own hair. Editor A. J. Reveiw. ** St. Matthew, Chapter VI. verses 16 and 17. 8. Because, finally, a dispute to one having nothing else to do would be a gratification, while to me, who can employ my time better, it would be an absolute loss. I shall not then, reverend sir, make you my confessor in matters of religion, but I will disclose to you my opinion, as a man of letters, on the composition of your book. Having in former days, read many works of theology, I was curious to learn whether by any chemical process you had discovered real beings in that world of invisibles. Unfortunately, I am obliged to declare to the public, which, according to your expression, p. 19, "hopes to be instructed, to be led into truth, and not into error by me," that I have not found in your book a single new argument, but the mere repetition of what is told over and over in thousands of volumes, the whole fruit of which has been to procure for their authors a cursory mention in the dictionary of heresies. You everywhere lay down that as proved which remains to be proved; with this peculiarity, that, as Gibbon says, firing away your double battery against those who believe too much, and those who believe too little, you hold out your own peculiar sensations, as to the precise criterion of truth; so that we must all be just of your size in order to pass the gate of that New Jerusalem which you are building. After this, your reputation as a divine might have become problematical with me; but recollecting the principle of the association of ideas so well developed by Locke, whom you hold in estimation, and whom, for that reason I am happy to cite to you, although to him I owe that pernicious use of my understanding which makes me disbelieve what I do not comprehend--I perceive why the public having originally attached the idea of talents to the name of Mr. Priestly, doctor in chemistry, continued by habit to associate it with the name of Mr. Priestly, doctor in divinity; which, however, is not the same thing: an association of ideas the more vicious as it is liable to be moved inversely.* Happily you have yourself raised a bar of separation between your admirers, by advising us in the first page of your preface, that your present book is especially destined for believers. To cooperate, however, with you, sir, in this judicious design, I must observe that it is necessary to retrench two passages, seeing they afford the greatest support to the arguments of unbelievers. * Mr. Blair, doctor of divinity, and Mr. Black, doctor in chemistry, met at the coffee house in Edinburg: a new theological pamphlet written by doctor Priestly was thrown upon the table, "Really," said Dr. Blair, "this man had better confine himself to chemistry, for he is absolutely ignorant in theology:"--"I beg your pardon," answered Dr. Black, "he is in the right, he is a minister of the gospel, he ought to adhere to his profession, for in truth he knows nothing of chemistry." You say, p. 15, "What is manifestly contrary to natural reason cannot be received by it;"--and p. 62, "With respect to intellect, men and brute animals are born in the same state, having the same external senses, which are the only inlets to all ideas, and consequently the source of all the knowledge and of all the mental habits they ever acquire." Now if you admit, with Locke, and with us infidels, that every one has the right of rejecting whatever is contrary to his natural reason, and that all our ideas and all our knowledge are acquired only by the inlets of our external senses; What becomes of the system of revelation, and of that order of things in times past, which is so contradictory to that of the time present? unless we consider it as a dream of the human brain during the state of superstitious ignorance. With these two single phrases, I could overturn the whole edifice of your faith. Dread not, however, sir, in me such overflowing zeal. For the same reason that I have not the frenzy of martyrdom, I have not that of making proselytes. It becomes those ardent, or rather acrimonious tempers, who mistake the violence of their sentiments for the enthusiasm of truth; the ambition of noise and rumor, for the love of glory; and for the love of their neighbor, the detestation of his opinions, and the secret desire of dominion. As for me, who have not received from nature the turbulent qualities of an apostle, and never sustained in Europe the character of a dissenter, I am come to America neither to agitate the conscience of men, nor to form a sect, nor to establish a colony, in which, under the pretext of religion, I might erect a little empire to myself. I have never been seen evangelizing my ideas, either in temples or in public meetings. I have never likewise practiced that quackery of beneficence, by which a certain divine, imposing a tax upon the generosity of the public, procures for himself the honors of a more numerous audience, and the merit of distributing at his pleasure a bounty which costs him nothing, and for which he receives grateful thanks dexterously stolen from the original donors. Either in the capacity of a stranger, or in that of a citizen, a sincere friend to peace, I carry into society neither the spirit of dissension, nor the desire of commotion; and because I respect in every one what I wish him to respect in me, the name of liberty is in my mind nothing else but the synonyma of justice. As a man, whether from moderation or indolence, a spectator of the world rather than an actor in it, I am every day less tempted to take on me the management of the minds or bodies of men: it is sufficient for an individual to govern his own passions and caprices. If by one of these caprices, I am induced to think it may be useful, sometimes, to publish my reflections, I do it without obstinacy or pretension to that implicit faith, the ridicule of which you desire to impart to me, p. 123. My whole book of the Ruins which you treat so ungratefully, since you thought it amusing, p. 122, evidently bears this character. By means of the contrasted opinions I have scattered through it, it breathes that spirit of doubt and uncertainty which appears to me the best suited to the weakness of the human mind, and the most adapted to its improvement, inasmuch as it always leaves a door open to new truths; while the spirit of dogmatism and immovable belief, limiting our progress to a first received opinion, binds us at hazard, and without resource, to the yoke of error or falsehood, and occasions the most serious mischiefs to society; since by combining with the passions, it engenders fanaticism, which, sometimes misled and sometimes misleading, though always intolerant and despotic, attacks whatever is not of its own nature; drawing upon itself persecution when it is weak, and practising persecution when it is powerful; establishing a religion of terror, which annihilates the faculties, and vitiates the conscience: so that, whether under a political or a religious aspect, the spirit of doubt is friendly to all ideas of liberty, truth, or genius, while a spirit of confidence is connected with the ideas of tyranny, servility, and ignorance. If, as is the fact, our own experience and that of others daily teaches us that what at one time appeared true, afterwards appeared demonstrably false, how can we connect with our judgments that blind and presumptuous confidence which pursues those of others with so much hatred? No doubt it is reasonable, and even honest, to act according to our present feelings and conviction: but if these feelings and their causes do vary by the very nature of things, how dare we impose upon ourselves or others an invariable conviction? How, above all, dare we require this conviction in cases where there is really no sensation, as happens in purely speculative questions, in which no palpable fact can be presented? Therefore, when opening the book of nature, (a more authentic one and more easy to be read than leaves of paper blackened over with Greek or Hebrew,) and when I reflected that the slightest change in the material world has not been in times past, nor is at present effected by the difference of so many religions and sects which have appeared and still exist on the globe, and that the course of the seasons, the path of the sun, the return of rain and drought, are the same for the inhabitants of each country, whether Christians, Mussulmans, Idolaters, Catholics, Protestants, etc., I am induced to believe that the universe is governed by laws of wisdom and justice, very different from those which human ignorance and intolerance would enact. And as in living with men of very opposite religious persuasions, I have had occasion to remark that their manners were, nevertheless, very analogous; that is to say, among the different Christian sects, among the Mahometans, and even among those people who were of no sect, I have found men who practise all the virtues, public and private, and that too without affectation; while others, who were incessantly declaiming of God and religion, abandoned themselves to every vicious habit which their belief condemned, I thereby became convinced that Ethics, the doctrines of morality, are the only essential, as they are only demonstrable, part of religion. And as, by your own avowal, the only end of religion is to render men better, in order to add to their happiness, p. 62, I have concluded that there are but two great systems of religion in the world, that of good sense and beneficence, and that of malice and hypocrisy. In closing this letter, I find myself embarrassed by the nature of the sentiment which I ought to express to you, for in declaring as you have done, p. 123, that you do not care for the contempt of such as me* (ignorant as you were of my opinion), you tell me plainly that you do not care for their esteem. I leave, therefore, to your discernment and taste to determine the sentiment most congenial to my situation and your desert. * "And what does it do for me here, except, perhaps, expose me to the contempt of such men as Mr. Volney, which, however, I feel myself pretty well able to bear?" p. 124. This language is the more surprising, as Dr. Priestly never received anything from me but civilities. In the year 1791 I sent him a dissertation of mine on the Chronology of the Ancients, in consequence of some charts which he had himself published. His only answer was to abuse me in a pamphlet in 1792. After this first abuse, on meeting me here last winter, he procured me an invitation to dine with his friend Mr. Russell, at whose house he lodged; after having shown me polite attention at that dinner, he abuses me in his new pamphlet. After this second abuse he meets me in Spruce Street, and takes me by the hand as a friend, and speaks of me in a large company under that denomination. Now I ask the public, what kind of a man is Dr. Priestly? C. F. VOLNEY. Philadelphia, March 10, 1797. P. S. I do not accompany this public letter with a private note to Dr. Priestly, because communications of that nature carry an appearance of bravado, which, even in exercising the right of a necessary defence, appear to me imcompatible with decency and politeness. THE ZODIACAL SIGNS AND CONSTELLATIONS. (Compiled by the publisher from recognized authorities.) The Zodiac is an imaginary girdle or belt in the celestial sphere, which extends about eight degrees on each side of the Ecliptic. It is divided into twelve portions, called the signs of the Zodiac, within which all the planets make their revolutions. The Zodiac is so called from the animals represented upon it, and is supposed to have originated in remote ages and in latitudes where the camel and elephant were comparatively unknown. This pictorial representation of the zodiac was probably the origin, as M. Dupuis suggests, of the Arabian and Egyptian adoration of animals and birds, and has led in the natural progress of events to the adoration of images by both Christians and pagans. "The Signs of the Zodiac, (says Godfrey Higgins in The Anacalypsis) with the exception of the Scorpion, which was exchanged by Dan for the Eagle, were carried by the different tribes of the Israelites on their standards; and Taurus, Leo, Aquarius, and Scorpio or the Eagle--the four signs of Reuben, Judah, Ephriam, and Dan--were placed at the four corners, (the four cardinal points), of their encampment, evidently in allusion to the cardinal points of the sphere, the equinoxes and solstices, when the equinox was in Taurus. (See Parkhurst's Lexicon.) These coincidences prove that this religious system had its origin before the bull ceased to be an equinoctial sign, and prove also, that the religion of Moses was originally the same in its secret mysteries as that of the Heathen, or, if my reader likes it better, that the Heathen secret mysteries were the same as those of Moses." The Ecliptic, a great circle of the sphere, (shown on the preceding map by two parallel lines), is supposed to be drawn through the middle of the Zodiac, cutting the Equator at two points, (called the Equinoctial points), at an angle with the equinoctial of 23 degrees 28 minutes, (the sun's greatest declination), and is the path which the earth is supposed to describe amidst the fixed stars in performing its annual circuit around the sun. It is called the Ecliptic because the eclipses of the sun and moon always occur under it. The Signs are each the twelfth part of the Ecliptic or Zodiac, (30 degrees,) and are reckoned from the point of intersection of the ecliptic and equator at the vernal equinox. They are named respectively Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces. These names are borrowed from the constellations of the zodiac of the same denomination, which corresponded when these divisions were originally made; but in consequence of the precession, recession, or retrocession of the equinoxes, (about 50 1/10" yearly, at the rate of about 72 years to a degree, displacing an entire sign in about 2152 years, and making an entire revolution of the equinoctial in about 25,868 years), the positions of these constellations in the heavens no longer correspond with the divisions of the ecliptic of the same name, but are in advance of them. Thus, the constellation Aries is now in that part of the ecliptic called Taurus, and the stars of Taurus are in Gemini, those of Gemini in Cancer, and so on throughout the ecliptic. The relative positions of the signs and constellations in the zodiac and ecliptic seem thus to have gradually changed with the revolving years; and the worship of the three constellations, Taurus, Aries, and Pisces, with which Christianity is so intimately connected, seems to have changed in a corresponding degree. The worship of the bull of Egypt--the celestial Taurus--has given place to that of the lamb of Palestine--the celestial Aries; and under the astronomical emblem Pisces--the twelfth sign of the zodiac--the dominant faith of to-day was appropriately taught by the twelve apostolic fishermen. It is from one of these chosen fishermen, St. Peter, that the Pope of Rome claims to have derived his arbitrary power for binding and loosing on earth those who are to be bound and loosed in heaven. (Matt. xvi, 19.) The grave responsibility of wielding with justice and equity this tremendous power over the future destiny of mankind, seems never to have disconcerted any of the successors of St. Peter. They have all proved to be equally arrogant and intolerant, zealous for both temporal and spiritual domination, and merciless to those who have opposed their pretensions. The present incumbent of the papal chair, who modestly claims the attribute of infallibility, seems proud of his inherited title, The Great Fisherman! and hopes in the progress of time, with the assistance of his monks, bishops, and cardinals, to entangle all nations in his net of faith, and to dictate with unquestioned authority the religious worship of the entire human race. As the precession of the equinoxes still continues as of yore, and as the masses still continue credulous and devout, they may in succeeding ages be again called upon to worship the god Apis, when the sign of Taurus shall again coincide in the zodiac and the ecliptic; and Aries, "the lamb of God," may again be offered in the "fullness of time" as a sacrifice for mankind, again be crucified, and again shed his redeeming blood to wash away the sins of a believing world. M. Dupuis has satisfactorily shown in The History of all Religions that the twelve labors of the god and saviour Hercules were astronomical allegories--the history of the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac--and these labors are so similar to the sufferings of Jesus, that the Rev. Mr. Parkhurst has been obliged, much against his inclination, to acknowledge that they "were types of what the real Saviour was to do and suffer." (Parkhurst, p.47.) An intimate connection, if not identity, is thus shown between ancient and modern belief--between the paganism of the past and the orthodoxy of the present. THE ZODIACAL SIGNS. ARIES, the Ram: (marked [symbol for ARIES])--A northern constellation, usually named as the first sign in the zodiac, into which, when the sun enters at the vernal equinox in March, the days and nights are of equal length. Aries has been regarded by the devout during many ages as the celestial representative, visible in the heavens, of "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." TAURUS, the Bull:(marked thus, [symbol for TAURUS])--The second sign in the zodiac, which by the Arabians is called Ataur. This constellation was worshipped for ages by the idolatrous Egyptians as the heavenly representative of their god Osiris; and derives its name, according to Grecian fable, from the bull into which Jupiter transformed himself in order to carry Europa over into Crete; but the constellation was probably so named by the Egyptians to designate that period of the year, (April), in which cows mostly bring forth their young. "The Rev. Mr. Maurice in his work on the antiquities of India, has shown that the May-day festival and the May-pole of Great Britain with its garlands, etc., are the remains of an ancient festival of Egypt and India, and probably of Phoenicia, when these nations, in countries very distant, and from times very remote, have all, with one consent, celebrated the entrance of the sun into the sign of Taurus at the vernal equinox." GEMINI, the Twins: (marked thus, [symbol for GEMINI])--A zodiacal constellation, visible in May, containing the two bright stars Castor and Pollux, the fabled sons of Leda and Jupiter, who during their lives had cleared the Hellespont and neighboring seas of pirates, and were therefore deemed the protectors of navigators and sailors. CANCER, the Crab: (marked thus, [symbol for CANCER])--Is the fourth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters on the 21st day of June, and is thence called the summer solstice. According to Grecian fable, the crab was transported to heaven at the request of Juno, after it had been slain by Hercules during his battle with the serpent Python, but the evident design of the name is to represent the apparent backward motion of the sun in June, which is said to resemble the motions of a crab. LEO, the Lion: ([symbol for LEO]).--Is the fifth sign in the zodiac, and contains one star of the first magnitude, called Regulus, or Cor Leonis--the Lion's Heart. The fervid heat of July, when the sun has attained its greatest power, is now symbolized in our almanacs by the figure of an enraged lion; and the feasts or sacrifices formerly celebrated among the ancients during this month, in honor of the sun, (which they also represented under the form of a lion,) were called Leonitica. The priests who performed the sacred rites were called Leones. This feast was sometimes called Mithriaca, because Mithra was the name of the sun among the Persians. The sacred writings abound with references to the "king of beasts;" among the most interesting of which is the story of the battle between the lion and Samson, the Jewish Herculus; while the most wonderful example of animal evolution on record is found in the sixty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, where we are gravely informed that "the lion shall eat straw like the bullock." VIRGO, Virgin Mother, Venus, Eve, Isis, &c.--([symbol for VIRGO]).--Is the sixth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters about the 21st of August. The myths and fables regarding the virgin which abound among all nations and all religions, are both various and voluminous, and we may add somewhat improbable. They all agree, however, in this, that the female, shown on the preceding diagram, holding in her right hand a branch of ripened fruit,--the apples of Paradise,--was intended to represent the reproductive powers of nature,--the abundance, satisfaction and contentment which mortals enjoy during the happy period of harvest. LIBRA, the Balance.--The seventh sign of the zodiac, directly opposite to Aries, from which it is distant 180 degrees. It is marked thus [symbol for LIBRA], after the manner of a pair of scales; to denote, probably, that when the sun arrives at this part of the ecliptic, the days and nights are equal, as if weighed in a balance. Hence the period when the sun enters Libra, (about September 21st,) is called the Autumnal equinox. On the 25th of September was born John the Baptist, the forerunner of his cousin Jesus, who came to his exaltation of glory on the 25th of March, the Vernal equinox. "The equinoxes and solstices," says Higgins, "equally marked the births and deaths of John and Jesus." The one preceded and prepared the way for the other, who receded. One advanced, the other declined. Jesus ascended, John descended. Astrologically speaking, "He must increase, but I must decrease." (John iii, 30.) SCORPIO, the Scorpion.--The eighth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters on the 23d of October, is marked thus [symbol for SCORPIO]. Scorpio is fabled to have killed the great hunter Orion, and for that exploit to have been placed among the constellations. For this reason it is also said that when Scorpio rises Orion sets. SAGITTARIUS, the Archer: (marked thus, [symbol for SAGITTARIUS]) is the ninth zodiacal sign, and corresponds with the month of November. This sign is represented like a centaur and was fabled to be Crotus, the son of Eupheme, the nurse of the Muses. CAPRICORNUS, the Goat.([symbol for CAPRICORNUS])--The tenth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters the 21st of December, (the longest night in the year,) called the winter solstice. This sign is drawn to represent the horns of a goat, and is fabled to have been Pan, who in the war of the giants was taken to heaven in the shape of a goat. Others claim that it was the goat of Amalthaea, which fed Jupiter with her milk. Macrobius, who calls Cancer and Capricorn the gates of the sun, makes the latter sign to represent his motion, after the manner of a goat climbing the mountains. AQUARIUS, the Water Bearer.--A constellation in the heavens so called, because during its rising there is usually an abundance of rain. It is the eleventh sign in the zodiac, reckoned from Aries, and is marked thus, [symbol for AQUARIUS]. It rises in January and sets in February, and is supposed by the poets to be Ganymede. PISCES, the Fishes, [symbol for PISCES].--The twelfth sign of the zodiac, rises in February and is represented by two fishes tied together by the tails. These fishes are fabled by the Greeks to be those into which Venus and Cupid were changed to escape from the giant Typhon. This fable may not be true, but that wonderful miracles were once performed with two small fishes is stated in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, where it is said that 5000 hungry mortals were cheaply, if not sumptuously regaled with two small fishes and five loaves of bread; while a large surplus of this piscatory diet, larger indeed than the original stock, still remained intact. In the vestibule or approaches to catholic churches is usually found a vase filled with water, (called Piscina,) and this water is considered holy. The Fish-days are observed as holy days, or fast days, in which Fish may be eaten and meat is forbidden; and learned writers have asserted that in the worship of Pisces may be found the true secret of the origin of the rite of baptism. The Fish-god Oannes, is said to have come out of the Erythraean Sea and taught the Babylonians all kinds of useful knowledge. Ionnes or Jonas went headlong into the sea and into a fish, and has kindly recorded for our instruction his remarkable adventures. The miraculous draughts of fishes in the apostolic age still excite the emulation of modern fishermen, who cannot even hope to rival the wonders that have been recorded. St. Peter is said to have secured ready money from the mouth of a fish that he caught with a hook and line in the sea of Galilee. (Matthew xvii, 27.) His success was justly rewarded, and to him was delegated the power of ruling the infant church. Pisces thus displaced Aries. The fisherman succeeded the shepherd. The precession of the equinoxes produced a new avatar; a new sign arose in the heavens; and a new saviour was born to save mankind. THE CONSTELLATIONS. SIRIUS, the Dog Star.--A bright star of the first magnitude in the mouth of the constellation Canis Major. This is the brightest star that appears in our firmament, and is supposed by some to be the nearest. LEPUS.--One of the southern constellations, placed near Orion, according to Grecian fable, because it was one of the animals which he hunted. ERIDANUS.--A winding southern constellation, near the Cetus, containing the bright star Achemar. CETUS, the Whale.--A southern constellation, and one of the forty-eight old asterisms. It is fabled to have been the sea monster sent by Neptune to devour Andromeda, which was killed by Perseus. CRATER, the Cup.--A southern constellation, near Hydra. This is supposed by Hyainus to be the cup which Apollo gave to the Corvus, or Raven. CORVUS.--One of the old constellations in the southern hemisphere, near Sagittarius. This bird is fabled to have been translated to heaven by Apollo for discovering to him the infidelity of the nymph Coronis. ARGO NAVIS, the Ship.--A constellation near to the Canis Major, and the name of the ship which carried Jason and his fifty-four companions to Colchis in quest of the golden fleece, and was said to have been translated into the heavens. CANOPUS.--The name formerly given to a star in the second bend of Eridanus. A bright star of the first magnitude in the rudder of the ship Argo, which, according to Pliny, was visible at Alexandria in Egypt. CENTAURUS.--One of the forty-eight old constellations in the southern hemisphere, represented in the form of half man and half horse, who was fabled by the Greeks to have been Chiron, the tutor of Achilles. AVA, or ALTAR.--One of the old constellations, and fabled to have been that at which the giants entered into their conspiracy against the gods; wherefore Jupiter, in commemoration of the event, transplanted the altar into the heavens. PEGASUS.--One of the forty-eight old constellations of the northern hemisphere, figured in the form of a flying horse. DELPHINUS, or DOLPHIN.--A northern constellation, near Pegasus. The Dolphin is fabled to have been translated to heaven by Neptune. AQUILA, the Eagle.--In the Arabic Altair, but in the Persian tables the Flying Vulture. This is one of the old constellations, situated near Delphinus in the northern hemisphere. According to Grecian fable, Aquila represented Ganymede or Hebe, who was transported to heaven and made cup-bearer to Jupiter. SAGITTA--the Dart or Arrow, called by the Arabians Schahan. One of the old constellations in the northern hemisphere, near Aquila and Delphinus. It is fabled to have been the arrow with which Hercules slew the vulture that was devouring the liver of Prometheus who was, like Jesus, crucified for loving mankind. CYGNUS, the Swan.--An old constellation in the milky-way, between Equus and the Dragon. This is fabled to be the swan into which Jupiter transformed himself in order to deceive the virtuous Leda, wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta. The Grecian matron, like the Jewish virgin, thus became the mother of a God. LYRA.--A northern constellation between Hercules and Cygnus, containing a white star of the first magnitude. MILKY-WAY.--Galaxy, or Via Lactia.--A broad luminous path or circle encompassing the heavens, which is easily discernible by its white appearance, from which it derives its name. It is supposed to be the blended light of innumerable fixed stars, which are not distinguishable with ordinary telescopes. HYDRA, the Serpent.--A southern constellation of great length, which is drawn to represent a serpent. The Hydra is fabled to have been placed in the heavens by Apollo, to frighten the Raven from drinking. ORION, the hunter.--A constellation of the southern hemisphere with respect to the ecliptic, but half southern and half northern with respect to the equinoctial. It is placed near the feet of the bull, and is composed of seventeen stars in the form of a sword, which has given occasion to the poets to speak of Orion's sword. He was described by the Greeks as a "mighty hunter," who for his exploits was placed in the heavens by Jupiter, between the Canis and the Lepus. He is believed by many to have been the "mighty hunter" spoken of in the bible, under the name of Nimrod. (See Gen. x: 8, 9; 1 Chron. i: 10; Micha v: 6, Job ix, 9; Amos v, 8.) PERSEUS.--This constellation is named from Perseus, the son of Jupiter by Danae, who was translated into the heavens by the assistance of Minerva, for having released Andromeda from her confinement on the rock to which she was chained. He is represented in the preceding illustration holding a drawn sword in his right hand and in his left the head of Medusa, the Gorgon, whose terrifying appearance changed all who beheld her into stone, and whom he had destroyed with the assistance of the wings he had borrowed from Mercury, the helmet from Pluto, the sword from Vulcan, and the shield from Minerva. JOSEPH'S STABLE; AURIGA, the Wagoner:--A northern constellation between Perseus and Gemini, represented by the figure of an old man supporting a goat. He is said to have been taken to heaven by Jupiter after the invention of wagons. URSA MAJOR, the Bear.--One of the prominent northern constellations, situated near the north pole. It contains the stars called the Dipper. Ursa Minor contains the pole-star, which is shown in the extremity of the tail of the bear. ANDROMEDA.--A northern constellation, represented by a woman chained; as, according to Grecian fable, Andromeda, the daughter of Cassiopia, was bound to a rock by the Nereides, and afterwards released by Perseus. Minerva changed her into a constellation after her death, and placed her in the heavens. DRACO OR DRAGON.--A northern constellation, supposed to represent the Dragon that guarded the Hesperian fruit, and was killed by Hercules. It is said that Juno took it up to heaven and placed it among the constellations. BOOTIS, the Ox driver: so called because this constellation seems to follow the Great Bear as the driver follows his oxen. Bootis is represented as grasping in his right hand a sickle and in his left a club, and is fabled to have been Icarius, who was transported to heaven because he was a great cultivator of the vine; for when Bootes rises the works of ploughing and cultivation go forward. CORONA BOREALIS. Northern Crown.--One of the old northern constellations, between Hercules and Bootes. CORONA AUSTRALIS--Southern Crown.--One of the old constellations in the southern hemisphere, between Sagittarius and Scorpio. The Corona were fabled to be Menippe and Metioche, two daughters of Orion, who sacrificed themselves at the suggestion of an oracle, to protect Boeotia, their native country, from the ravages of a pestilence: it being the belief of idolatrous nations that an angry god could be propitiated by human sacrifices, and that the death of the innocent might atone for the sins of the guilty. The deities of Hades were astonished, it is said, at the patriotism and devotion of these Grecian maidens, who had so generously and uselessly sacrificed their lives. After their death two stars were seen to issue from the altars that still smoked with their blood, and these stars were placed in the heavens in the form of a crown or coronet. CEPHEUS AND CASSIOPIA.--One of the old asterism in the northern hemisphere, near the pole. According to Grecian fables, Cassiopia and her husband Cepheus, king of Etheopia, were placed among the constellations to witness the punishment inflicted on their daughter, Andromeda. TRIANGULARIUM.--A name for both one of the old and new constellations in the northern hemisphere, between Andromeda and Aries. SERPENTARIUS, called Ophiucus, is a constellation in the northern hemisphere, between Scorpio and Hercules. HERCULES, one of the old northern constellations. In Grecian mythology it was taught and believed that Hercules, the Theban, was born of a human mother and an immortal father, like other so-called saviours of mankind. His mother, the fair Alcmena, wife of Amphitryon, having found favor in the eyes of the god Jupiter, soon fell an unwilling victim to his celestial wiles. The life of the infant Hercules, born of this unnatural union, was threatened by the jealous Juno, the same as the life of the infant Jesus was threatened by the tyrant Herod. Like Jesus, Hercules devoted his life to the benefit of the human race, and like Jesus he was also worshipped after his death as a God in heaven. He is shown in the astrological chart, enveloped in the skin of the lion he has slain, with his club upraised, and his foot placed threateningly above the head of the Dragon, as if about to fulfill the scriptural prophecy, that "the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." 
22213	----	Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they are listed at the end of the text. Some short Greek renderings in the main text were printed as page footnotes. To avoid confusion with the links to the scholarly notes, these have been moved to parentheses next to the English renderings. * * * * * The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism By Franz Cumont With an Introductory Essay by Grant Showerman Authorized Translation Chicago The Open Court Publishing Company London Agents Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 1911 * * * * * COPYRIGHT BY THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 1911 * * * * * TO MY TEACHER AND FRIEND CHARLES MICHEL * * * * * {iii} TABLE OF CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION.--The Significance of Franz Cumont's Work, By Grant Showerman ... v PREFACE ... xv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ... xxv I. ROME AND THE ORIENT ... 1 Superiority of the Orient, 1.--Its Influence on Political Institutions, 3.--Its Influence on Civil Law, 5.--Its Influence on Science, 6.--Its Influence on Literature and Art, 7.--Its Influence on Industry, 9.--SOURCES: Destruction of Pagan Rituals, 11.--Mythographers, 12.--Historians, 13.--Satirists, 13.--Philosophers, 14.--Christian Polemicists, 15.--Archeological Documents, 16. II. WHY THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS SPREAD ... 20 Difference in the Religions of the Orient and the Occident, 20.--Spread of Oriental Religions, 22.--Economic Influences, 23.--Theory of Degeneration, 25.--Conversions are of Individuals, 27.--Appeal of the Oriental Religions to the Senses, 28.--Appeal to the Intelligence, 31.--Appeal to the Conscience, 35.--Inadequacy of the Roman Religion, 35.--Skepticism, 37.--Imperial Power, 38.--The Purification of Souls, 39.--Hope of Immortality, 42.--Conclusion, 43. III. ASIA MINOR ... 46 Arrival of Cybele at Rome, 46.--Her Religion in Asia Minor, 47.--Religion at Rome under the Republic, 51.--Adoption of the Goddess Ma-Bellona, 53.--Politics of Claudius, 55.--Spring Festival, 56.--Spread of the Phrygian Religion in the Provinces, 57.--Causes of Its Success, 58.--Its Official Recognition, 60.--ARRIVAL OF OTHER CULTS: Mèn, 61.--Judaism, 63.--Sabazius, 64.--Anahita, 65.--The Taurobolium, 66.--Philosophy, 70.--Christianity, 70.--Conclusion, 71. IV. EGYPT ... 73 Foundation of Serapis Worship, 73.--The Egyptian Religion Hellenized, 75.--Diffusion in Greece, 79.--Adoption at Rome, 80.--Persecutions, 82.--Adoption Under Caligula, 84.--Its History, 85.--Its Transformation, 86.--Uncertainty in Egyptian Theology, 87.--Insufficiency of Its Ethics, 90.--Power of Its Ritual, 93.--Daily Liturgy, 95.--Festivals, 97.--Doctrine of Immortality, 99.--The _Refrigerium_, 101. {iv} V. SYRIA ... 103 The Syrian Goddess, 103.--Importation of New Gods by Syrian Slaves, 105.--Syrian Merchants, 107.--Syrian Soldiers, 112.--Heliogabalus and Aurelian, 114.--Value of Semitic Paganism, 115.--Animal Worship, 116.--Baals, 118.--Human Sacrifice, 119.--Transformation of the Sacerdotal Religion, 120.--Purity, 121.--Influence of Babylon, 122.--Eschatology, 125.--THEOLOGY: God is Supreme, 127.--God is Omnipotent, 129.--God is Eternal and Universal, 130.--Semitic Syncretism, 131.--Solar Henotheism, 133. VI. PERSIA ... 135 Persia and Europe, 135.--Influence of the Achemenides, 136.--Influence of Mazdaism, 138.--Conquests of Rome, 139.--Influence of the Sassanides, 140.--Origin of the Mysteries of Mithra, 142.--Persians in Asia Minor, 144.--The Mazdaism of Anatolia, 146.--Its Diffusion in the Occident, 149.--Its Qualities, 150.--Dualism, 151.--The Ethics of Mithraism, 155.--The Future Life, 158.--Conclusion, 159. VII. ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC ... 162 Prestige of Astrology, 162.--Its Introduction in the Occident, 163.--Astrology Under the Empire, 164.--Polemics Powerless Against Astrology, 166.--Astrology a Scientific Religion, 169.--The Primitive Idea of Sympathy, 171.--Divinity of the Stars, 172.--Transformation of the Idea of God, 174.--New Gods, 175.--Big Years, 176.--Astrological Eschatology, 177.--Man's Relation to Heaven, 178.--Fatalism, 179.--Efficacy of Prayer, 180.--Efficacy of Magic, 182.--Treatises on Magic, 182.--Idea of Sympathy, 183.--Magic a Science, 184.--Magic is Religious, 185.--Ancient Italian Sorcery, 186.--Egypt and Chaldea, 187.--Theurgy, 188.--Persian Magic, 189.--Persecutions, 191.--Conclusion, 193. VIII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROMAN PAGANISM ... 196 Paganism Before Constantine, 196.--Religion of Asia Minor, 197.--Religion of Egypt and Syria, 198.--Religion of Persia, 199.--Many Pagan Religions, 200.--Popular Religion and Philosophy, 201.--Christian Polemics, 202.--Roman Paganism Become Oriental, 204.--Mysteries, 205.--Nature Worship, 206.--Supreme God, 207.--Sidereal Worship, 208.--The Ritual Given a Moral Significance, 209.--The End of the World, 209.--Conclusion, 210. NOTES ... 213 Preface, 213.--I. Rome and the Orient, 214,--II. Why the Oriental Religions Spread, 218.--III. Asia Minor, 223.--IV. Egypt, 228.--V. Syria, 241.--VI. Persia, 260.--VII. Astrology and Magic, 270.--VIII. The Transformation of Paganism, 281. INDEX ... 289 * * * * * {v} INTRODUCTION. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FRANZ CUMONT'S WORK. Franz Cumont, born January 3, 1868, and educated at Ghent, Bonn, Berlin, and Paris, resides in Brussels, and has been Professor in the University of Ghent since 1892. His monumental work, _Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra_, published in 1896 and 1899 in two volumes, was followed in 1902 by the separate publication, under the title _Les Mystères de Mithra_, of the second half of Vol. I, the _Conclusions_ in which he interpreted the great mass of evidence contained in the remainder of the work. The year following, this book appeared in the translation of Thomas J. McCormack as _The Mysteries of Mithra_, published by the Open Court Publishing Company. M. Cumont's other work of prime interest to students of the ancient faiths, _Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain_, appeared in 1906, was revised and issued in a second edition in 1909, and is now presented in English in the following pages. M. Cumont is an ideal contributor to knowledge in his chosen field. As an investigator, he combines in one person Teutonic thoroughness and Gallic intuition. As a writer, his virtues are no less pronounced. Recognition of his mastery of an enormous array of detailed learning followed immediately on the publication {vi} of _Textes et monuments_, and the present series of essays, besides a numerous series of articles and monographs, makes manifest the same painstaking and thorough scholarship; but he is something more than the mere _savant_ who has at command a vast and difficult body of knowledge. He is also the literary architect who builds up his material into well-ordered and graceful structure. Above all, M. Cumont is an interpreter. In _The Mysteries of Mithra_ he put into circulation, so to speak, the coin of the ideas he had minted in the patient and careful study of _Textes et Monuments_; and in the studies of _The Oriental Religions_ he is giving to the wider public the interpretation of the larger and more comprehensive body of knowledge of which his acquaintance with the religion of Mithra is only a part, and against which as a background it stands. What his book _The Mysteries of Mithra_ is to his special knowledge of Mithraism, _The Oriental Religions_ is to his knowledge of the whole field. He is thus an example of the highest type of scholar--the exhaustive searcher after evidence, and the sympathetic interpreter who mediates between his subject and the lay intellectual life of his time. And yet, admirable as is M. Cumont's presentation in _The Mysteries of Mithra_ and _The Oriental Religions_, nothing is a greater mistake than to suppose that his popularizations are facile reading. The few specialists in ancient religions may indeed sail smoothly in the current of his thought; but the very nature of a subject which ramifies so extensively and so intricately into the whole of ancient life, concerning itself with practically all the manifestations of ancient {vii} civilization--philosophy, religion, astrology, magic, mythology, literature, art, war, commerce, government--will of necessity afford some obstacle to readers unfamiliar with the study of religion. It is in the hope of lessening somewhat this natural difficulty of assimilating M. Cumont's contribution to knowledge, and above all, to life, that these brief words of introduction are undertaken. The presentation in outline of the main lines of thought which underlie his conception of the importance of the Oriental religions in universal history may afford the uninitiated reader a background against which the author's depiction of the various cults of the Oriental group will be more easily and clearly seen. M. Cumont's work, then, transports us in imagination to a time when Christianity was still--at least in the eyes of Roman pagans--only one of a numerous array of foreign Eastern religions struggling for recognition in the Roman world, and especially in the city of Rome. To understand the conditions under which the new faith finally triumphed, we should first realize the number of these religions, and the apparently chaotic condition of paganism when viewed as a system. "Let us suppose," says M. Cumont, "that in modern Europe the faithful had deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma, to follow the precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits should all be preaching fatalism and {viii} predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation--a confusion in which all those priests should erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which the future may perhaps realize, would offer a pretty accurate picture of the religious chaos in which the ancient world was struggling before the reign of Constantine." But it is no less necessary to realize, in the second place, that, had there not been an essential solidarity of all these different faiths, the triumph of Christianity would have been achieved with much less difficulty and in much less time. We are not to suppose that religions are long-lived and tenacious unless they possess something vital which enables them to resist. In his chapter on "The Transformation of Roman Paganism," M. Cumont thus accounts for the vitality of the old faiths: "The mass of religions at Rome finally became so impregnated by neo-Platonism and Orientalism that paganism may be called a single religion with a fairly distinct theology, whose doctrines were somewhat as follows: adoration of the elements, especially the cosmic bodies; the reign of one God, eternal and omnipotent, with messenger attendants; spiritual interpretation of the gross rites yet surviving from primitive times; assurance of eternal felicity to the faithful; belief that the soul was on earth to be proved before its final return to the universal spirit, of which it was a spark; the existence of an abysmal abode for the evil, against whom the faithful must keep up an unceasing struggle; the destruction of the universe, {ix} the death of the wicked, and the eternal happiness of the good in a reconstructed world."[1] If this formulation of pagan doctrine surprises those who have been told that paganism was "a fashion rather than a faith," and are accustomed to think of it in terms of Jupiter and Juno, Venus and Mars, and the other empty, cold, and formalized deities that have so long filled literature and art, it will be because they have failed to take into account that between Augustus and Constantine three hundred years elapsed, and are unfamiliar with the very natural fact that during all that long period the character of paganism was gradually undergoing change and growth. "The faith of the friends of Symmachus," M. Cumont tells us, "was much farther removed from the religious ideal of Augustus, although they would never have admitted it, than that of their opponents in the senate." To what was due this change in the content of the pagan ideal, so great that the phraseology in which the ideal is described puts us in mind of Christian doctrine itself? First, answers M. Cumont, to neo-Platonism, which attempted the reconciliation of the antiquated religions with the advanced moral and intellectual ideas of its own time by spiritual interpretation of outgrown cult stories and cult practices. A second and more vital cause, however, wrought to bring about the same result. This was the invasion of the Oriental religions, and the slow working, from the advent of the Great Mother of the Gods in B. C. 204 to the downfall of paganism at the end of the fourth {x} century of the Christian era, of the leaven of Oriental sentiment. The cults of Asia and Egypt bridged the gap between the old religions and Christianity, and in such a way as to make the triumph of Christianity an evolution, not a revolution. The Great Mother and Attis, with self-consecration, enthusiasm, and asceticism; Isis and Serapis, with the ideals of communion and purification; Baal, the omnipotent dweller in the far-off heavens; Jehovah, the jealous God of the Hebrews, omniscient and omnipresent; Mithra, deity of the sun, with the Persian dualism of good and evil, and with after-death rewards and punishments--all these, and more, flowed successively into the channel of Roman life and mingled their waters to form the late Roman paganism which proved so pertinacious a foe to the Christian religion. The influence that underlay their pretensions was so real that there is some warrant for the view of Renan that at one time it was doubtful whether the current as it flowed away into the Dark Ages should be Mithraic or Christian. The vitalization of the evidence regarding these cults is M. Cumont's great contribution. His perseverance in the accurate collection of material is equalled only by his power to see the real nature and effect of the religions of which he writes. Assuming that no religion can succeed merely because of externals, but must stand on some foundation of moral excellence, he shows how the pagan faiths were able to hold their own, and even to contest the ground with Christianity. These religions, he asserts, gave greater satisfaction first, to the senses and passions, secondly, to the intelligence, finally, and above all, to the conscience. "The spread of the Oriental religions"--again I quote {xi} a summary from _Classical Philology_--"was due to merit. In contrast to the cold and formal religions of Rome, the Oriental faiths, with their hoary traditions and basis of science and culture, their fine ceremonial, the excitement attendant on their mysteries, their deities with hearts of compassion, their cultivation of the social bond, their appeal to conscience and their promises of purification and reward in a future life, were personal rather than civic, and satisfied the individual soul.... With such a conception of latter-day paganism, we may more easily understand its strength and the bitter rivalry between it and the new faith, as well as the facility with which pagan society, once its cause was proved hopeless, turned to Christianity." The Oriental religions had made straight the way. Christianity triumphed after long conflict because its antagonists also were not without weapons from the armory of God. Both parties to the struggle had their loins girt about with truth, and both wielded the sword of the spirit; but the steel of the Christian was the more piercing, the breastplate of his righteousness was the stronger, and his feet were better shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Nor did Christianity stop there. It took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them; the better elements of paganism were transferred to the new religion. "As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely," writes M. Cumont, "the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we {xii} know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed." M. Cumont is therefore a contributor to our appreciation of the continuity of history. Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation, but a composite of slow and laborious growth. Its four centuries of struggle were not a struggle against an entirely unworthy religion, else would our faith in its divine warrant be diminished; it is to its own great credit, and also to the credit of the opponents that succumbed to it, that it finally overwhelmed them. To quote Emil Aust: "Christianity did not wake into being the religious sense, but it afforded that sense the fullest opportunity of being satisfied; and paganism fell because the less perfect must give place to the more perfect, not because it was sunken in sin and vice. It had out of its own strength laid out the ways by which it advanced to lose itself in the arms of Christianity, and to recognize this does not mean to minimize the significance of Christianity. We are under no necessity of artificially darkening the heathen world; the light of the Evangel streams into it brightly enough without this."[2] Finally, the work of M. Cumont and others in the field of the ancient Oriental religions is not an isolated activity, but part of a larger intellectual movement. Their effort is only one manifestation of the interest of recent years in the study of universal religion; other manifestations of the same interest are to be seen in the histories of the Greek and Roman religions by {xiii} Gruppe, Farnell, and Wissowa, in the anthropological labors of Tylor, Lang, and Frazer, in the publication of Reinach's _Orpheus_, in the study of comparative religion, and in such a phenomenon as a World's Parliament of Religions. In a word, M. Cumont and his companion ancient Orientalists are but one brigade engaged in the modern campaign for the liberation of religious thought. His studies are therefore not concerned alone with paganism, nor alone with the religions of the ancient past; in common with the labors of students of modern religion, they touch our own faith and our own times, and are in vital relation with our philosophy of living, and consequently with our highest welfare. "To us moderns," says Professor Frazer in the preface to his _Golden Bough_, "a still wider vista is vouchsafed, a greater panorama is unrolled by the study which aims at bringing home to us the faith and the practice, the hopes and the ideals, not of two highly gifted races only, but of all mankind, and thus at enabling us to follow the long march, the slow and toilsome ascent, of humanity from savagery to civilization.... But the comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind is fitted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the learned. Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite progress...." It is possible that all this might disquiet the minds of those who have been wont to assume perfection in the primitive Christian church, and who assume also that present-day Christianity is the ultimate form of the Christian religion. Such persons--if there are {xiv} such--should rather take heart from the whole-souled devotion to truth everywhere to be seen in the works of scholars in ancient religion, and from their equally evident sympathy with all manifestations of human effort to establish the divine relation; but most of all from their universal testimony that for all time and in all places and under all conditions the human heart has felt powerfully the need of the divine relation. From the knowledge that the desire to get right with God--the common and essential element in all religions--has been the most universal and the most potent and persistent factor in past history, it is not far to the conviction that it will always continue to be so, and that the struggle toward the divine light of religion pure and undefiled will never perish from the earth. GRANT SHOWERMAN. THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. * * * * * Notes to Introduction. [1] This summary of M. Cumont's chapter is quoted from my review of the first edition of _Les religions orientales_ in _Classical Philology_, III, 4, p. 467. [2] _Die Religion der Römer_, p. 116. For the significance of the pagan faiths, see an essay on "The Ancient Religions in Universal History," _American Journal of Philology_, XXIX, 2. pp. 156-171. * * * * * {xv} PREFACE. In November, 1905, the Collège de France honored the writer by asking him to succeed M. Naville in opening the series of lectures instituted by the Michonis foundation. A few months later the "Hibbert Trust" invited him to Oxford to develop certain subjects which he had touched upon at Paris. In this volume have been collected the contents of both series with the addition of a short bibliography and notes intended for scholars desirous of verifying assertions made in the text.[1] The form of the work has scarcely been changed, but we trust that these pages, intended though they were for oral delivery, will bear reading, and that the title of these studies will not seem too ambitious for what they have to offer. The propagation of the Oriental religions, with the development of neo-Platonism, is the leading fact in the moral history of the pagan empire. May this small volume on a great subject throw at least some light upon this truth, and may the reader receive these essays with the same kind interest shown by the audiences at Paris and Oxford. The reader will please remember that the different chapters were thought out and written as lectures. They do not claim to contain a debit and credit account of what the Latin paganism borrowed from or loaned to the Orient. Certain well-known facts have been {xvi} deliberately passed over in order to make room for others that are perhaps less known. We have taken liberties with our subject matter that would not be tolerated in a didactic treatise, but to which surely no one will object. We are more likely to be reproached for an apparently serious omission. We have investigated only the internal development of paganism in the Latin world, and have considered its relation to Christianity only incidentally and by the way. The question is nevertheless important and has been the subject of celebrated lectures as well as of learned monographs and widely distributed manuals.[2] We wish to slight neither the interest nor the importance of that controversy, and it is not because it seemed negligible that we have not entered into it. By reason of their intellectual bent and education the theologians were for a long time more inclined to consider the continuity of the Jewish tradition than the causes that disturbed it; but a reaction has taken place, and to-day they endeavor to show that the church has borrowed considerably from the conceptions and ritualistic ceremonies of the pagan mysteries. In spite of the prestige that surrounded Eleusis, the word "mysteries" calls up Hellenized Asia rather than Greece proper, because in the first place the earliest Christian communities were founded, formed and developed in the heart of Oriental populations, Semites, Phrygians and Egyptians. Moreover the religions of those people were much farther advanced, much richer in ideas and sentiments, more striking and stirring than the Greco-Latin anthropomorphism. Their liturgy always derives its inspiration from generally accepted beliefs {xvii} about purification embodied in certain acts regarded as sanctifying. These facts were almost identical in the various sects. The new faith poured its revelation into the hallowed moulds of earlier religions because in that form alone could the world in which it developed receive its message. This is approximately the point of view adopted by the latest historians. But, however absorbing this important problem may be, we could not think of going into it, even briefly, in these studies on Roman paganism. In the Latin world the question assumes much more modest proportions, and its aspect changes completely. Here Christianity spread only after it had outgrown the embryonic state and really became established. Moreover like Christianity the Oriental mysteries at Rome remained for a long time chiefly the religion of a foreign minority. Did any exchange take place between these rival sects? The silence of the ecclesiastical writers is not sufficient reason for denying it. We dislike to acknowledge a debt to our adversaries, because it means that we recognize some value in the cause they defend, but I believe that the importance of these exchanges should not be exaggerated. Without a doubt certain ceremonies and holidays of the church were based on pagan models. In the fourth century Christmas was placed on the 25th of December because on that date was celebrated the birth of the sun (_Natalis Invicti_) who was born to a new life each year after the solstice.[3] Certain vestiges of the religions of Isis and Cybele besides other polytheistic practices perpetuated themselves in the adoration of local saints. On the other hand as soon as Christianity became a moral power in {xviii} the world, it imposed itself even on its enemies. The Phrygian priests of the Great Mother openly opposed their celebration of the vernal equinox to the Christian Easter, and attributed to the blood shed in the taurobolium the redemptive power of the blood of the divine Lamb.[4] All these facts constitute a series of very delicate problems of chronology and interrelation, and it would be rash to attempt to solve them _en bloc_. Probably there is a different answer in each particular case, and I am afraid that some cases must always remain unsolved. We may speak of "vespers of Isis" or of a "eucharist of Mithra and his companions," but only in the same sense as when we say "the vassal princes of the empire" or "Diocletian's socialism." These are tricks of style used to give prominence to a similarity and to establish a parallel strongly and closely. A word is not a demonstration, and we must be careful not to infer an influence from an analogy. Preconceived notions are always the most serious obstacles to an exact knowledge of the past. Some modern writers, like the ancient Church Fathers, are fain to see a sacrilegious parody inspired by the spirit of lies in the resemblance between the mysteries and the church ceremonies. Other historians seem disposed to agree with the Oriental priests, who claimed priority for their cults at Rome, and saw a plagiarism of their ancient rituals in the Christian ceremonies. It would appear that both are very much mistaken. Resemblance does not necessarily presuppose imitation, and frequently a similarity of ideas and practices must be explained by common origin, exclusive of any borrowing. {xix} An illustration will make my thought clearer. The votaries of Mithra likened the practice of their religion to military service. When the neophyte joined he was compelled to take an oath (_sacramentum_) similar to the one required of recruits in the army, and there is no doubt that an indelible mark was likewise branded on his body with a hot iron. The third degree of the mystical hierarchy was that of "soldier" (_miles_). Thenceforward the initiate belonged to the sacred militia of the invincible god and fought the powers of evil under his orders. All these ideas and institutions are so much in accord with what we know of Mazdean dualism, in which the entire life was conceived as a struggle against the malevolent spirits; they are so inseparable from the history even of Mithraism, which always was a soldiers' religion, that we cannot doubt they belonged to it before its appearance in the Occident. On the other hand, we find similar conceptions in Christianity. The society of the faithful--the term is still in use--is the "Church Militant." During the first centuries the comparison of the church with an army was carried out even in details;[5] the baptism of the neophyte was the oath of fidelity to the flag taken by the recruits. Christ was the "emperor," the commander-in-chief, of his disciples, who formed cohorts triumphing under his command over the demons; the apostates were deserters; the sanctuaries, camps; the pious practices, drills and sentry-duty, and so on. If we consider that the gospel preached peace, that for a long time the Christians felt a repugnance to military service, where their faith was threatened, we are tempted to admit _a priori_ an influence of the belligerent cult of Mithra upon Christian thought. {xx} But this is not the case. The theme of the _militia Christi_ appears in the oldest ecclesiastical authors, in the epistles of St. Clement and even in those of St. Paul. It is impossible to admit an imitation of the Mithraic mysteries then, because at that period they had no importance whatever. But if we extend our researches to the history of that notion, we shall find that, at least under the empire, the mystics of Isis were also regarded as forming sacred cohorts enlisted in the service of the goddess, that previously in the Stoic philosophy human existence was frequently likened to a campaign, and that even the astrologers called the man who submitted to destiny and renounced all revolt a "soldier of fate."[6] This conception of life, especially of religious life, was therefore very popular from the beginning of our era. It was manifestly prior both to Christianity and to Mithraism. It developed in the military monarchies of the Asiatic Diadochi. Here the soldier was no longer a citizen defending his country, but in most instances a volunteer bound by a sacred vow to the person of his king. In the martial states that fought for the heritage of the Achemenides this personal devotion dominated or displaced all national feeling. We know the oaths taken by those subjects to their deified kings.[7] They agreed to defend and uphold them even at the cost of their own lives, and always to have the same friends and the same enemies as they; they dedicated to them not only their actions and words, but their very thoughts. Their duty was a complete abandonment of their personality in favor of those monarchs who were held the equals of the gods. The sacred _militia_ of the mysteries was nothing but this civic {xxi} morality viewed from the religious standpoint. It confounded loyalty with piety. As we see, the researches into the doctrines or practices common to Christianity and the Oriental mysteries lead almost always beyond the limits of the Roman empire into the Hellenistic Orient. The religious conceptions which imposed themselves on Latin Europe under the Cæsars[8] were developed there, and it is there we must look for the key to enigmas still unsolved. It is true that at present nothing is more obscure than the history of the religions that arose in Asia when Greek culture came in contact with barbarian theology. It is rarely possible to formulate satisfactory conclusions with any degree of certainty, and before further discoveries are made we shall frequently be compelled to weigh contrasting probabilities. We must frequently throw out the sounding line into the shifting sea of possibility in order to find secure anchorage. But at any rate we perceive with sufficient distinctness the direction in which the investigations must be pursued. It is our belief that the main point to be cleared up is the composite religion of those Jewish or Jewish-pagan communities, the worshipers of Hypsistos, the Sabbatists, the Sabaziasts and others in which the new creed took root during the apostolic age. In those communities the Mosaic law had become adapted to the sacred usages of the Gentiles even before the beginning of our era, and monotheism had made concessions to idolatry. Many beliefs of the ancient Orient, as for instance the ideas of Persian dualism regarding the infernal world, arrived in Europe by two roads, the more or less orthodox Judaism of the communities of {xxii} the dispersion in which the gospel was accepted immediately, and the pagan mysteries imported from Syria or Asia Minor. Certain similarities that surprised and shocked the apologists will cease to look strange as soon as we reach the distant sources of the channels that reunited at Rome. But these delicate and complicated researches into origins and relationships belong especially to the history of the Alexandrian period. In considering the Roman empire, the principal fact is that the Oriental religions propagated doctrines, previous to and later side by side with Christianity, that acquired with it universal authority at the decline of the ancient world. The preaching of the Asiatic priests also unwittingly prepared for the triumph of the church which put its stamp on the work at which they had unconsciously labored. Through their popular propaganda they had completely disintegrated the ancient national faith of the Romans, while at the same time the Cæsars had gradually destroyed the political particularism. After their advent it was no longer necessary for religion to be connected with a state in order to become universal. Religion was no longer regarded as a public duty, but as a personal obligation; no longer did it subordinate the individual to the city-state, but pretended above all to assure his welfare in this world and especially in the world to come. The Oriental mysteries offered their votaries radiant perspectives of eternal happiness. Thus the focus of morality was changed. The aim became to realize the sovereign good in the life hereafter instead of in this world, as the Greek philosophy had done. No longer did man act in view of tangible {xxiii} realities, but to attain ideal hopes. Existence in this life was regarded as a preparation for a sanctified life, as a trial whose outcome was to be either everlasting happiness or everlasting pain. As we see, the entire system of ethical values was overturned. The salvation of the soul, which had become the one great human care, was especially promised in these mysteries upon the accurate performance of the sacred ceremonies. The rites possessed a power of purification and redemption. They made man better and freed him from the dominion of hostile spirits. Consequently, religion was a singularly important and absorbing matter, and the liturgy could be performed only by a clergy devoting itself entirely to the task. The Asiatic gods exacted undivided service; their priests were no longer magistrates, scarcely citizens. They devoted themselves unreservedly to their ministry, and demanded of their adherents submission to their sacred authority. All these features that we are but sketching here, gave the Oriental religions a resemblance to Christianity, and the reader of these studies will find many more points in common among them. These analogies are even more striking to us than they were in those times because we have become acquainted in India and China with religions very different from the Roman paganism and from Christianity as well, and because the relationships of the two latter strike us more strongly on account of the contrast. These theological similarities did not attract the attention of the ancients, because they scarcely conceived of the existence of other possibilities, while differences were what they {xxiv} remarked especially. I am not at all forgetting how considerable these were. The principal divergence was that Christianity, by placing God in an ideal sphere beyond the confines of this world, endeavored to rid itself of every attachment to a frequently abject polytheism. But even if we oppose tradition, we cannot break with the past that has formed us, nor separate ourselves from the present in which we live. As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely, the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed. The faith of the friends of Symmachus was much farther removed from the religious ideal of Augustus, although they would never have admitted it, than that of their opponents in the senate. I hope that these studies will succeed in showing how the pagan religions from the Orient aided the long continued effort of Roman society, contented for many centuries with a rather insipid idolatry, toward more elevated and more profound forms of worship. Possibly their credulous mysticism deserves as much blame as is laid upon the theurgy of neo-Platonism, which drew from the same sources of inspiration, but like neo-Platonism it has strengthened man's feeling of eminent dignity by asserting the divine nature of the soul. By making inner purity the main object of earthly existence, they refined and exalted the psychic life and gave it an almost supernatural intensity, which until then was unknown in the ancient world. {xxv} PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. In this second edition the eight lectures forming the reading matter of this book have suffered scarcely any change, and, excepting the chapter on Syria, the additions are insignificant. It would have been an easy matter to expand them, but I did not want these lectures to become erudite dissertations, nor the ideas which are the essential part of a sketch like the present to be overwhelmed by a multiplicity of facts. In general I have therefore limited myself to weeding out certain errors that were overlooked, or introduced, in the proofreading. The notes, however, have been radically revised. I have endeavored to give expression to the suggestions or observations communicated to me by obliging readers; to mention new publications and to utilize the results of my own studies. The index makes it easy to find the subjects discussed. And here I must again thank my friend Charles Michel, who undertook the tedious task of rereading the proofs of this book, and whose scrupulous and sagacious care has saved me from many and many a blunder. F. C. PARIS, FRANCE, February, 1909. * * * * * {1} ROME AND THE ORIENT. We are fond of regarding ourselves as the heirs of Rome, and we like to think that the Latin genius, after having absorbed the genius of Greece, held an intellectual and moral supremacy in the ancient world similar to the one Europe now maintains, and that the culture of the peoples that lived under the authority of the Cæsars was stamped forever by their strong touch. It is difficult to forget the present entirely and to renounce aristocratic pretensions. We find it hard to believe that the Orient has not always lived, to some extent, in the state of humiliation from which it is now slowly emerging, and we are inclined to ascribe to the ancient inhabitants of Smyrna, Beirut or Alexandria the faults with which the Levantines of to-day are being reproached. The growing influence of the Orientals that accompanied the decline of the empire has frequently been considered a morbid phenomenon and a symptom of the slow decomposition of the ancient world. Even Renan does not seem to have been sufficiently free from an old prejudice when he wrote on this subject:[1] "That the oldest and most worn out civilization should by its corruption subjugate the younger was inevitable." But if we calmly consider the real facts, avoiding the optical illusion that makes things in our immediate {2} vicinity look larger, we shall form a quite different opinion. It is beyond all dispute that Rome found the point of support of its military power in the Occident. The legions from the Danube and the Rhine were always braver, stronger and better disciplined than those from the Euphrates and the Nile. But it is in the Orient, especially in these countries of "old civilization," that we must look for industry and riches, for technical ability and artistic productions, as well as for intelligence and science, even before Constantine made it the center of political power. While Greece merely vegetated in a state of poverty, humiliation and exhaustion; while Italy suffered depopulation and became unable to provide for her own support; while the other countries of Europe were hardly out of barbarism; Asia Minor, Egypt and Syria gathered the rich harvests Roman peace made possible. Their industrial centers cultivated and renewed all the traditions that had caused their former celebrity. A more intense intellectual life corresponded with the economic activity of these great manufacturing and exporting countries. They excelled in every profession except that of arms, and even the prejudiced Romans admitted their superiority. The menace of an Oriental empire haunted the imaginations of the first masters of the world. Such an empire seems to have been the main thought of the dictator Cæsar, and the triumvir Antony almost realized it. Even Nero thought of making Alexandria his capital. Although Rome, supported by her army and the right of might, retained the political authority for a long time, she bowed to the fatal moral ascendency of more advanced peoples. Viewed from this standpoint the history of the empire {3} during the first three centuries may be summarized as a "peaceful infiltration" of the Orient into the Occident.[2] This truth has become evident since the various aspects of Roman civilization are being studied in greater detail; and before broaching the special subject of these studies we wish to review a few phases of the slow metamorphosis of which the propagation of the Oriental religions was one phenomenon. In the first place the imitation of the Orient showed itself plainly in political institutions.[3] To be convinced of this fact it is sufficient to compare the government of the empire in the time of Augustus with what it had become under Diocletian. At the beginning of the imperial régime Rome ruled the world but did not govern it. She kept the number of her functionaries down to a minimum, her provinces were mere unorganized aggregates of cities where she only exercised police power, protectorates rather than annexed countries.[4] As long as law and order were maintained and her citizens, functionaries and merchants could transact their business, Rome was satisfied. She saved herself the trouble of looking after the public service by leaving broad authority to the cities that had existed before her domination, or had been modeled after her. The taxes were levied by syndicates of bankers and the public lands rented out. Before the reforms instituted by Augustus, even the army was not an organic and permanent force, but consisted theoretically of troops levied before a war and discharged after victory. Rome's institutions remained those of a city. It was difficult to apply them to the vast territory she attempted to govern with their aid. They were a clumsy {4} apparatus that worked only by sudden starts, a rudimentary system that could not and did not last. What do we find three centuries later? A strongly centralized state in which an absolute ruler, worshiped like a god and surrounded by a large court, commanded a whole hierarchy of functionaries; cities divested of their local liberties and ruled by an omnipotent bureaucracy, the old capital herself the first to be dispossessed of her autonomy and subjected to prefects. Outside of the cities the monarch, whose private fortune was identical with the state finances, possessed immense domains managed by intendants and supporting a population of serf-colonists. The army was composed largely of foreign mercenaries, professional soldiers whose pay or bounty consisted of lands on which they settled. All these features and many others caused the Roman empire to assume the likeness of ancient Oriental monarchies. It would be impossible to admit that like causes produce like results, and then maintain that a similarity is not sufficient proof of an influence in history. Wherever we can closely follow the successive transformations of a particular institution, we notice the action of the Orient and especially of Egypt. When Rome had become a great cosmopolitan metropolis like Alexandria, Augustus reorganized it in imitation of the capital of the Ptolemies. The fiscal reforms of the Cæsars like the taxes on sales and inheritances, the register of land surveys and the direct collection of taxes, were suggested by the very perfect financial system of the Lagides,[5] and it can be maintained that their government was the first source from which those of modern Europe were derived, through the medium {5} of the Romans. The imperial _saltus_, superintended by a procurator and cultivated by metayers reduced to the state of serfs, was an imitation of the ones that the Asiatic potentates formerly cultivated through their agents.[6] It would be easy to increase this list of examples. The absolute monarchy, theocratic and bureaucratic at the same time, that was the form of government of Egypt, Syria and even Asia Minor during the Alexandrine period was the ideal on which the deified Cæsars gradually fashioned the Roman empire. One cannot however deny Rome the glory of having elaborated a system of private law that was logically deduced from clearly formulated principles and was destined to become the fundamental law of all civilized communities. But even in connection with this private law, where the originality of Rome is uncontested and her preeminence absolute, recent researches have shown with how much tenacity the Hellenized Orient maintained its old legal codes, and how much resistance local customs, the woof of the life of nations, offered to unification. In truth, unification never was realized except in theory.[7] More than that, these researches have proved that the fertile principles of that provincial law, which was sometimes on a higher moral plane than the Roman law, reacted on the progressive transformation of the old _ius civile_. And how could it be otherwise? Were not a great number of famous jurists like Ulpian of Tyre and Papinian of Hemesa natives of Syria? And did not the law-school of Beirut constantly grow in importance after the third century, until during the fifth century it became the most brilliant center of legal education? Thus Levantines {6} cultivated even the patrimonial field cleared by Scaevola and Labeo.[8] In the austere temple of law the Orient held as yet only a minor position; everywhere else its authority was predominant. The practical mind of the Romans, which made them excellent lawyers, prevented them from becoming great scholars. They esteemed pure science but little, having small talent for it, and one notices that it ceased to be earnestly cultivated wherever their direct domination was established. The great astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians, like the originators or defenders of the great metaphysical systems, were mostly Orientals. Ptolemy and Plotinus were Egyptians, Porphyry and Iamblichus, Syrians, Dioscorides and Galen, Asiatics. All branches of learning were affected by the spirit of the Orient. The clearest minds accepted the chimeras of astrology and magic. Philosophy claimed more and more to derive its inspiration from the fabulous wisdom of Chaldea and Egypt. Tired of seeking truth, reason abdicated and hoped to find it in a revelation preserved in the mysteries of the barbarians. Greek logic strove to coordinate into an harmonious whole the confused traditions of the Asiatic religions. Letters, as well as science, were cultivated chiefly by the Orientals. Attention has often been called to the fact that those men of letters that were considered the purest representatives of the Greek spirit under the empire belonged almost without exception to Asia Minor, Syria or Egypt. The rhetorician Dion Chrysostom came from Prusa in Bithynia, the satirist Lucian from Samosata in Commagene on the borders of the Euphrates. A number of other names could be cited. {7} From Tacitus and Suetonius down to Ammianus, there was not one author of talent to preserve in Latin the memory of the events that stirred the world of that period, but it was a Bithynian again, Dion Cassius of Nicea, who, under the Severi, narrated the history of the Roman people. It is a characteristic fact that, besides this literature whose language was Greek, others were born, revived and developed. The Syriac, derived from the Aramaic which was the international language of earlier Asia, became again the language of a cultured race with Bardesanes of Edessa. The Copts remembered that they had spoken several dialects derived from the ancient Egyptian and endeavored to revive them. North of the Taurus even the Armenians began to write and polish their barbarian speech. Christian preaching, addressed to the people, took hold of the popular idioms and roused them from their long lethargy. Along the Nile as well as on the plains of Mesopotamia or in the valleys of Anatolia it proclaimed its new ideas in dialects that had been despised hitherto, and wherever the old Orient had not been entirely denationalized by Hellenism, it successfully reclaimed its intellectual autonomy. A revival of native art went hand in hand with this linguistic awakening. In no field of intellect has the illusion mentioned above been so complete and lasting as in this one. Until a few years ago the opinion prevailed that an "imperial" art had come into existence in the Rome of Augustus and that thence its predominance had slowly spread to the periphery of the ancient world. If it had undergone some special modifications in Asia these were due to exotic influences, undoubtedly {8} Assyrian or Persian. Not even the important discoveries of M. de Vogüé in Hauran[9] were sufficient to prove the emptiness of a theory that was supported by our lofty conviction of European leadership. To-day it is fully proven not only that Rome has given nothing or almost nothing to the Orientals but also that she has received quite a little from them. Impregnated with Hellenism, Asia produced an astonishing number of original works of art in the kingdoms of the Diadochs. The old processes, the discovery of which dates back to the Chaldeans, the Hittites or the subjects of the Pharaohs, were first utilized by the conquerors of Alexander's empire who conceived a rich variety of new types, and created an original style. But if during the three centuries preceding our era, sovereign Greece played the part of the demiurge who creates living beings out of preexisting matter, during the three following centuries her productive power became exhausted, her faculty of invention weakened, the ancient local traditions revolted against her empire and with the help of Christianity overcame it. Transferred to Byzantium they expanded in a new efflorescence and spread over Europe where they paved the way for the formation of the Romanesque art of the early Middle Ages.[10] Rome, then, far from having established her suzerainty, was tributary to the Orient in this respect. The Orient was her superior in the extent and precision of its technical knowledge as well as in the inventive genius and ability of its workmen. The Cæsars were great builders but frequently employed foreign help. Trajan's principal architect, a magnificent builder, was a Syrian, Apollodorus of Damascus.[11] {9} Her Levantine subjects not only taught Italy the artistic solution of architectonic problems like the erection of a cupola on a rectangular or octagonal edifice, but also compelled her to accept their taste, and they saturated her with their genius. They imparted to her their love of luxuriant decoration, and of violent polychromy, and they gave religious sculpture and painting the complicated symbolism that pleased their abstruse and subtle minds. In those times art was closely connected with industry, which was entirely manual and individual. They learned from each other, they improved and declined together, in short they were inseparable. Shall we call the painters that decorated the architecturally fantastic and airy walls of Pompeii in Alexandrian or perhaps Syrian taste artisans or artists? And how shall we classify the goldsmiths, Alexandrians also, who carved those delicate leaves, those picturesque animals, those harmoniously elegant or cunningly animated groups that cover the phials and goblets of Bosco Reale? And descending from the productions of the industrial arts to those of industry itself, one might also trace the growing influence of the Orient; one might show how the action of the great manufacturing centers of the East gradually transformed the material civilization of Europe; one might point out how the introduction into Gaul[12] of exotic patterns and processes changed the old native industry and gave its products a perfection and a popularity hitherto unknown. But I dislike to insist overmuch on a point apparently so foreign to the one now before us. It was important however to mention this subject at the beginning because in whatever direction scholars of {10} to-day pursue their investigations they always notice Asiatic culture slowly supplanting that of Italy. The latter developed only by absorbing elements taken from the inexhaustible reserves of the "old civilizations" of which we spoke at the beginning. The Hellenized Orient imposed itself everywhere through its men and its works; it subjected its Latin conquerors to its ascendancy in the same manner as it dominated its Arabian conquerors later when it became the civilizer of Islam. But in no field of thought was its influence, under the empire, so decisive as in religion, because it finally brought about the complete destruction of the Greco-Latin paganism.[13] The invasion of the barbarian religions was so open, so noisy and so triumphant that it could not remain unnoticed. It attracted the anxious or sympathetic attention of the ancient authors, and since the Renaissance modern scholars have frequently taken interest in it. Possibly however they did not sufficiently understand that this religious evolution was not an isolated and extraordinary phenomenon, but that it accompanied and aided a more general evolution, just as that aided it in turn. The transformation of beliefs was intimately connected with the establishment of the monarchy by divine right, the development of art, the prevailing philosophic tendencies, in fact with all the manifestations of thought, sentiment and taste. We shall attempt to sketch this religious movement with its numerous and far-reaching ramifications. First we shall try to show what caused the diffusion of the Oriental religions. In the second place we shall examine those in particular that originated in Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria and Persia, and we shall endeavor to {11} distinguish their individual characteristics and estimate their value. We shall see, finally, how the ancient idolatry was transformed and what form it assumed in its last struggle against Christianity, whose victory was furthered by Asiatic mysteries, although they opposed its doctrine. * * * * * But before broaching this subject a preliminary question must be answered. Is the study which we have just outlined possible? What items will be of assistance to us in this undertaking? From what sources are we to derive our knowledge of the Oriental religions in the Roman empire? It must be admitted that the sources are inadequate and have not as yet been sufficiently investigated. Perhaps no loss caused by the general wreck of ancient literature has been more disastrous than that of the liturgic books of paganism. A few mystic formulas quoted incidentally by pagan or Christian authors and a few fragments of hymns in honor of the gods[14] are practically all that escaped destruction. In order to obtain an idea of what those lost rituals may have been one must turn to their imitations contained in the chorus of tragedies, and to the parodies comic authors sometimes made; or look up in books of magic the plagiarisms that writers of incantations may have committed.[15] But all this gives us only a dim reflection of the religious ceremonies. Shut out from the sanctuary like profane outsiders, we hear only the indistinct echo of the sacred songs and not even in imagination can we attend the celebration of the mysteries. We do not know how the ancients prayed, we cannot penetrate into the intimacy of their religious life, {12} and certain depths of the soul of antiquity we must leave unsounded. If a fortunate windfall could give us possession of some sacred book of the later paganism its revelations would surprise the world. We could witness the performance of those mysterious dramas whose symbolic acts commemorated the passion of the gods; in company with the believers we could sympathize with their sufferings, lament their death and share in the joy of their return to life. In those vast collections of archaic rites that hazily perpetuated the memory of abolished creeds we would find traditional formulas couched in obsolete language that was scarcely understood, naive prayers conceived by the faith of the earliest ages, sanctified by the devotion of past centuries, and almost ennobled by the joys and sufferings of past generations. We would also read those hymns in which philosophic thought found expression in sumptuous allegories[16] or humbled itself before the omnipotence of the infinite, poems of which only a few stoic effusions celebrating the creative or destructive fire, or expressing a complete surrender to divine fate can give us some idea.[17] But everything is gone, and thus we lose the possibility of studying from the original documents the internal development of the pagan religions. We should feel this loss less keenly if we possessed at least the works of Greek and Latin mythographers on the subject of foreign divinities like the voluminous books published during the second century by Eusebius and Pallas on the Mysteries of Mithra. But those works were thought devoid of interest or even dangerous by the devout Middle Ages, and they are not likely to have survived the fall of paganism. The {13} treatises on mythology that have been preserved deal almost entirely with the ancient Hellenic fables made famous by the classic writers, to the neglect of the Oriental religions.[18] As a rule, all we find in literature on this subject are a few incidental remarks and passing allusions. History is incredibly poor in that respect. This poverty of information was caused in the first place by a narrowness of view characteristic of the rhetoric cultivated by historians of the classical period and especially of the empire. Politics and the wars of the rulers, the dramas, the intrigues and even the gossip of the courts and of the official world were of much higher interest to them than the great economic or religious transformations. Moreover, there is no period of the Roman empire concerning which we are so little informed as the third century, precisely the one during which the Oriental religions reached the apogee of their power. From Herodianus and Dion Cassius to the Byzantines, and from Suetonius to Ammianus Marcellinus, all narratives of any importance have been lost, and this deplorable blank in historic tradition is particularly fatal to the study of paganism. It is a strange fact that light literature concerned itself more with these grave questions. The rites of the exotic religions stimulated the imagination of the satirists, and the pomp of the festivities furnished the novelists with brilliant descriptive matter. Juvenal laughs at the mortifications of the devotees of Isis; in his _Necromancy_ Lucian parodies the interminable purifications of the magi, and in the _Metamorphoses_ Apuleius relates the various scenes of an initiation into the mysteries of Isis with the fervor of a neophyte and {14} the studied refinement of a rhetorician. But as a rule we find only incidental remarks and superficial observations in the authors. Not even the precious treatise _On the Syrian Goddess_, in which Lucian tells of a visit to the temple of Hierapolis and repeats his conversation with the priests, has any depth. What he relates is the impression of an intelligent, curious and above all an ironical traveler.[19] In order to obtain a more perfect initiation and a less fragmentary insight into the doctrines taught by the Oriental religions, we are compelled to turn to two kinds of testimony, inspired by contrary tendencies, but equally suspicious: the testimony of the philosophers, and that of the fathers of the church. The Stoics and the Platonists frequently took an interest in the religious beliefs of the barbarians, and it is to them that we are indebted for the possession of highly valuable data on this subject. Plutarch's treatise _Isis and Osiris_ is a source whose importance is appreciated even by Egyptologists, whom it aids in reconstructing the legends of those divinities.[20] But the philosophers very seldom expounded foreign doctrines objectively and for their own sake. They embodied them in their systems as a means of proof or illustration; they surrounded them with personal exegesis or drowned them in transcendental commentaries; in short, they claimed to discover their own ideas in them. It is always difficult and sometimes impossible to distinguish the dogmas from the self-confident interpretations which are usually as incorrect as possible. The writings of the ecclesiastical authors, although prejudiced, are very fertile sources of information, but in perusing them one must guard against another kind {15} of error. By a peculiar irony of fate those controversialists are to-day in many instances our only aid in reviving the idolatry they attempted to destroy. Although the Oriental religions were the most dangerous and most persistent adversaries of Christianity, the works of the Christian writers do not supply as abundant information as one might suppose. The reason for this is that the fathers of the church often show a certain reserve in speaking of idolatry, and affect to recall its monstrosities only in guarded terms. Moreover, as we shall see later on,[21] the apologists of the fourth century were frequently behind the times as to the evolution of doctrines, and drawing on literary tradition, from epicureans and skeptics, they fought especially the beliefs of the ancient Grecian and Italian religions that had been abolished or were dying out, while they neglected the living beliefs of the contemporary world. Some of these polemicists nevertheless directed their attacks against the divinities of the Orient and their Latin votaries. Either they derived their information from converts or they had been pagans themselves during their youth. This was the case with Firmicus Maternus who has written a bad treatise on astrology and finally fought the _Error of the Profane Religions_. However, the question always arises as to how much they can have known of the esoteric doctrines and the ritual ceremonies, the secret of which was jealously guarded. They boast so loudly of their power to disclose these abominations, that they incur the suspicion that the discretion of the initiates baffled their curiosity. In addition they were too ready to believe all the calumnies that were circulated against the pagan mysteries, {16} calumnies directed against occult sects of all times and against the Christians themselves. In short, the literary tradition is not very rich and frequently little worthy of belief. While it is comparatively considerable for the Egyptian religions because they were received by the Greek world as early as the period of the Ptolemies, and because letters and science were always cultivated at Alexandria, it is even less important for Phrygia, although Cybele was Hellenized and Latinized very early, and excepting the tract by Lucian on the goddess of Hierapolis it is almost nothing for the Syrian, Cappadocian and Persian religions. The insufficiency of the data supplied by writers increases the value of information furnished by epigraphic and archeological documents, whose number is steadily growing. The inscriptions possess a certainty and precision that is frequently absent in the phrases of the writers. They enable one to draw important conclusions as to the dates of propagation and disappearance of the various religions, their extent, the quality and social rank of their votaries, the sacred hierarchy and sacerdotal personnel, the constitution of the religious communities, the offerings made to the gods, and the ceremonies performed in their honor; in short, conclusions as to the secular and profane history of these religions, and in a certain measure their ritual. But the conciseness of the lapidary style and the constant repetition of stereotyped formulas naturally render that kind of text hardly explicit and sometimes enigmatical. There are dedications like the _Nama Sebesio_ engraved upon the great Mithra bas-relief preserved in the Louvre, that caused a number of {17} dissertations to be written without any one explaining it. And besides, in a general way, epigraphy gives us but little information about the liturgy and almost nothing regarding the doctrines. Archeology must endeavor to fill the enormous blanks left by the written tradition; the monuments, especially the artistic ones, have not as yet been collected with sufficient care nor interpreted with sufficient method. By studying the arrangement of the temples and the religious furniture that adorned them, one can at the same time determine part of the liturgic ceremonies which took place there. On the other hand, the critical interpretation of statuary relics enables us to reconstruct with sufficient correctness certain sacred legends and to recover part of the theology of the mysteries. Unlike Greek art, the religious art at the close of paganism did not seek, or sought only incidentally, to elevate the soul through the contemplation of an ideal of divine beauty. True to the traditions of the ancient Orient, it tried to edify and to instruct at the same time.[22] It told the history of the gods and the world in cycles of pictures, or it expressed through symbols the subtle conceptions of theology and even certain doctrines of profane science, like the struggle of the four elements; just as during the Middle Ages, so the artist of the empire interpreted the ideas of the clergy, teaching the believers by means of pictures and rendering the highest religious conceptions intelligible to the humblest minds. But to read this mystic book whose pages are scattered in our museums we must laboriously look for its key, and we cannot take for a guide and exegetist some Vincent de Beauvais of Diocletian's period[23] as when looking over the marvelous {18} sculptured encyclopedias in our Gothic cathedrals. Our position is frequently similar to that of a scholar of the year 4000 who would undertake to write the history of the Passion from the pictures of the fourteen stations, or to study the veneration of the saints from the statues found in the ruins of our churches. But, as far as the Oriental religions are concerned, the results of all the laborious investigations now being made in the classical countries can be indirectly controlled, and this is a great advantage. To-day we are tolerably well acquainted with the old religions of Egypt, Babylonia and Persia. We read and translate correctly the hieroglyphics of the Nile, the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia and the sacred books, Zend or Pahlavi, of Parseeism. Religious history has profited more by their deciphering than the history of politics or of civilization. In Syria also, the discovery of Aramaic and Phoenician inscriptions and the excavations made in temples have in a certain measure covered the deficiency of information in the Bible or in the Greek writers on Semitic paganism. Even Asia Minor, that is to say the uplands of Anatolia, is beginning to reveal herself to explorers although almost all the great sanctuaries, Pessinus, the two Comanas, Castabala, are as yet buried underground. We can, therefore, even now form a fairly exact idea of the beliefs of some of the countries that sent the Oriental mysteries to Rome. To tell the truth, these researches have not been pushed far enough to enable us to state precisely what form religion had assumed in those regions at the time they came into contact with Italy, and we should be likely to commit very strange errors, if we brought together practices that may have been {19} separated by thousands of years. It is a task reserved for the future to establish a rigorous chronology in this matter, to determine the ultimate phase that the evolution of creeds in all regions of the Levant had reached at the beginning of our era, and to connect them without interruption of continuity to the mysteries practiced in the Latin world, the secrets of which archeological researches are slowly bringing to light. We are still far from welding all the links of this long chain firmly together; the orientalists and the classical philologists cannot, as yet, shake hands across the Mediterranean. We raise only one corner of Isis's veil, and scarcely guess a part of the revelations that were, even formerly, reserved for a pious and chosen few. Nevertheless we have reached, on the road of certainty, a summit from which we can overlook the field that our successors will clear. In the course of these lectures I shall attempt to give a summary of the essential results achieved by the erudition of the nineteenth century and to draw from them a few conclusions that will, possibly, be provisional. The invasion of the Oriental religions that destroyed the ancient religions and national ideals of the Romans also radically transformed the society and government of the empire, and in view of this fact it would deserve the historian's attention even if it had not foreshadowed and prepared the final victory of Christianity. * * * * * {20} WHY THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS SPREAD. When, during the fourth century, the weakened empire split asunder like an overburdened scale whose beam is broken, this political divorce perpetuated a moral separation that had existed for a long time. The opposition between the Greco-Oriental and the Latin worlds manifests itself especially in religion and in the attitude taken by the central power toward it. Occidental paganism was almost exclusively Latin under the empire. After the annexation of Spain, Gaul and Brittany, the old Iberian, Celtic and other religions were unable to keep up the unequal struggle against the more advanced religion of the conquerors. The marvelous rapidity with which the literature of the civilizing Romans was accepted by the subject peoples has frequently been pointed out. Its influence was felt in the temples as well as in the forum; it transformed the prayers to the gods as well as the conversation between men. Besides, it was part of the political program of the Cæsars to make the adoption of the Roman divinities general, and the government imposed the rules of its sacerdotal law as well as the principles of its public and civil law upon its new subjects. The municipal laws prescribed the election of pontiffs and augurs in common with the judicial duumvirs. In Gaul druidism, with its oral traditions embodied in {21} long poems, perished and disappeared less on account of the police measures directed against it than in consequence of its voluntary relinquishment by the Celts, as soon as they came under the ascendency of Latin culture. In Spain it is difficult to find any traces of the aboriginal religions. Even in Africa, where the Punic religion was far more developed, it maintained itself only by assuming an entirely Roman appearance. Baal became Saturn and Eshmoun Æsculapius. It is doubtful if there was one temple in all the provinces of Italy and Gaul where, at the time of the disappearance of idolatry, the ceremonies were celebrated according to native rites and in the local idiom. To this exclusive predominance of Latin is due the fact that it remained the only liturgic language of the Occidental church, which here as in many other cases perpetuated a preexisting condition and maintained a unity previously established. By imposing her speech upon the inhabitants of Ireland and Germany, Christian Rome simply continued the work of assimilation in the barbarian provinces subject to her influence that she had begun while pagan.[1] In the Orient, however, the churches that are separate from the Greek orthodoxy use, even to-day, a variety of dialects calling to mind the great diversity of races formerly subject to Rome. In those times twenty varieties of speech translated the religious thought of the peoples joined under the dominion of the Cæsars. At the beginning of our era Hellenism had not yet conquered the uplands of Anatolia,[2] nor central Syria, nor the divisions of Egypt. Annexation to the empire might retard and in certain regions weaken the power of expansion of Greek civilization, {22} but it could not substitute Latin culture for it[3] except around the camps of the legions guarding the frontier, and in a very few colonies. It especially benefitted the individuality of each region. The native religions retained all their prestige and independence. In their ancient sanctuaries that took rank with the richest and most famous of the world, a powerful clergy continued to practise ancestral devotions according to barbarian rites, and frequently in a barbarian tongue. The traditional liturgy, everywhere performed with scrupulous respect, remained Egyptian or Semitic, Phrygian or Persian, according to the locality. Neither pontifical law nor augural science ever obtained credit outside of the Latin world. It is a characteristic fact that the worship of the deified emperors, the only official worship required of every one by the government as a proof of loyalty, should have originated of its own accord in Asia, received its inspiration from the purest monarchic traditions, and revived in form and spirit the veneration accorded to the Diadochi by their subjects. Not only were the gods of Egypt and Asia never supplanted like those of Gaul or Spain, but they soon crossed the seas and gained worshipers in every Latin province. Isis and Serapis, Cybele and Attis, the Syrian Baals, Sabazius and Mithra were honored by brotherhoods of believers as far as the remotest limits of Germany. The Oriental reaction that we perceive from the beginning of our era, in studying the history of art, literature, and philosophy, manifested itself with incomparably greater power in the religious sphere. First, there was a slow infiltration of despised exotic religions, then, toward the end of the first {23} century, the Orontes, the Nile and the Halys, to use the words of Juvenal, flowed into the Tiber, to the great indignation of the old Romans. Finally, a hundred years later, an influx of Egyptian, Semitic and Persian beliefs and conceptions took place that threatened to submerge all that the Greek and Roman genius had laboriously built up. What called forth and permitted this spiritual commotion, of which the triumph of Christianity was the outcome? Why was the influence of the Orient strongest in the religious field? These questions claim our attention. Like all great phenomena of history, this particular one was determined by a number of influences that concurred in producing it. In the mass of half-known particulars that brought it about, certain factors or leading causes, of which every one has in turn been considered the most important, may be distinguished. If we yielded to the tendency of many excellent minds of to-day and regarded history as the resultant of economic and social forces, it would be easy to show their influence in that great religious movement. The industrial and commercial preponderance of the Orient was manifest, for there were situated the principal centers of production and export. The ever increasing traffic with the Levant induced merchants to establish themselves in Italy, in Gaul, in the Danubian countries, in Africa and in Spain; in some cities they formed real colonies. The Syrian emigrants were especially numerous. Compliant, quick and diligent, they went wherever they expected profit, and their colonies, scattered as far as the north of Gaul, were centers for the religious propaganda of paganism just as the Jewish communities of the Diaspora were for Christian {24} preaching. Italy not only bought her grain from Egypt, she imported men also; she ordered slaves from Phrygia, Cappadocia, Syria and Alexandria to cultivate her depopulated fields and perform the domestic duties in her palaces. Who can tell what influence chambermaids from Antioch or Memphis gained over the minds of their mistresses? At the same time the necessities of war removed officers and men from the Euphrates to the Rhine or to the outskirts of the Sahara, and everywhere they remained faithful to the gods of their far-away country. The requirements of the government transferred functionaries and their clerks, the latter frequently of servile birth, into the most distant provinces. Finally, the ease of communication, due to the good roads, increased the frequency and extent of travel. Thus the exchange of products, men and ideas necessarily increased, and it might be maintained that theocracy was a necessary consequence of the mingling of the races, that the gods of the Orient followed the great commercial and social currents, and that their establishment in the Occident was a natural result of the movement that drew the excess population of the Asiatic cities and rural districts into the less thickly inhabited countries. These reflections, which could be developed at some length, surely show the way in which the Oriental religions spread. It is certain that the merchants acted as missionaries in the seaports and places of commerce, the soldiers on the frontiers and in the capital, the slaves in the city homes,[4] in the rural districts and in public affairs. But while this acquaints us with the means and the agents of the diffusion of those religions, {25} it tells us nothing of the reasons for their adoption by the Romans. We perceive the how, but not the why, of their sudden expansion. Especially imperfect is our understanding of the reasons for the difference between the Orient and the Occident pointed out above. An example will make my meaning clear. A Celtic divinity, Epona,[5] was held in particular honor as the protectress of horses, as we all know. The Gallic horsemen worshiped her wherever they were cantoned; her monuments have been found scattered from Scotland to Transylvania. And yet, although this goddess enjoyed the same conditions as, for instance Jupiter _Dolichenus_ whom the cohorts of Commagene introduced into Europe, it does not appear that she ever received the homage of many strangers; it does not appear, above all, that druidism ever assumed the shape of "mysteries of Epona" into which Greeks and Romans would have asked to be initiated. It was too deficient in the intrinsic strength of the Oriental religions, to make proselytes. Other historians and thinkers of to-day prefer to apply the laws of natural science to religious phenomena; and the theories about the variation of species find an unforeseen application here. It is maintained that the immigration of Orientals, of Syrians in particular, was considerable enough to provoke an alteration and rapid deterioration in the robust Italic and Celtic races. In addition, a social status contrary to nature, and a bad political régime effected the destruction of the strongest, the extermination of the best and the ascendancy of the worst elements of the population. This multitude, corrupted by deleterious cross-breeding and weakened by bad selection, became unable to {26} oppose the invasion of the Asiatic chimeras and aberrations. A lowering of the intellectual level and the disappearance of the critical spirit accompanied the decline of morals and the weakening of character. In the evolution of beliefs the triumph of the Orient denoted a regression toward barbarism, a return to the remote origins of faith and to the worship of natural forces. This is a brief outline of explanations recently proposed and received with some favor.[6] It cannot be denied that souls and morals appear to have become coarser during the Roman decline. Society as a whole was deplorably lacking in imagination, intellect and taste. It seemed afflicted with a kind of cerebral anemia and incurable sterility. The impaired reason accepted the coarsest superstitions, the most extreme asceticism and most extravagant theurgy. It resembled an organism incapable of defending itself against contagion. All this is partly true; but the theories summarized proceed from an incorrect conception of things; in reality they are based on the illusion that Asia, under the empire, was inferior to Europe. While the triumph of the Oriental religions sometimes assumed the appearance of an awakening of savagery, these religions in reality represented a more advanced type in the evolution of religious forms than the ancient national devotions. They were less primitive, less simple, and, if I may use the expression, provided with more organs than the old Greco-Roman idolatry. We have indicated this on previous occasions, and hope to bring it out with perfect clearness in the course of these studies. It is hardly necessary to state that a great religious conquest can be explained only on moral grounds. {27} Whatever part must be ascribed to the instinct of imitation and the contagion of example, in the last analysis we are always face to face with a series of individual conversions. The mysterious affinity of minds is as much due to reflection as to the continued and almost unconscious influence of confused aspirations that produce faith. The obscure gestation of a new ideal is accomplished with pangs of anguish. Violent struggles must have disturbed the souls of the masses when they were torn away from their old ancestral religions, or more often from indifference, by those exacting gods who demanded a surrender of the entire person, a _devotion_ in the etymological meaning of the word. The consecration to Isis of the hero of Apuleius was the result of a call, of an appeal, by the goddess who wanted the neophyte to enlist in her sacred militia.[7] If it is true that every conversion involves a psychological crisis, a transformation of the intimate personality of the individual, this is especially true of the propagation of the Oriental religions. Born outside of the narrow limits of the Roman city, they grew up frequently in hostility to it, and were international, consequently individual. The bond that formerly kept devotion centered upon the city or the tribe, upon the _gens_ or the family, was broken. In place of the ancient social groups communities of initiates came into existence, who considered themselves brothers no matter where they came from.[8] A god, conceived of as being universal, received every mortal as his child. Whenever these religions had any relation to the state they were no longer called upon to support old municipal or social institutions, but to lend their strength to the {28} authority of a sovereign regarded as the eternal lord of the whole world jointly with God himself. In the circles of the mystics, Asiatics mingled with Romans, and slaves with high functionaries. The adoption of the same faith made the poor freedman the equal and sometimes the superior, of the decurion and the _clarissimus_. All submitted to the same rules and participated in the same festivities, in which the distinctions of an aristocratic society and the differences of blood and country were obliterated. The distinctions of race and nationality, of magistrate and father of a family, of patrician and plebeian, of citizen and foreigner, were abolished; all were but men, and in order to recruit members, those religions worked upon man and his character. In order to gain the masses and the cream of Roman society (as they did for a whole century) the barbarian mysteries had to possess a powerful charm, they had to satisfy the deep wants of the human soul, and their strength had to be superior to that of the ancient Greco-Roman religion. To explain the reasons for their victory we must try to reveal the nature of this superiority--I mean their superiority in the struggle, without assuming innate superiority. I believe that we can define it by stating that those religions gave greater satisfaction first, to the senses and passions, secondly, to the intelligence, finally, and above all, to the conscience. In the first place, they appealed more strongly to the senses. This was their most obvious feature, and it has been pointed out more often than any other. Perhaps there never was a religion so cold and prosaic as the Roman. Being subordinated to politics, it sought, {29} above all, to secure the protection of the gods for the state and to avert the effects of their malevolence by the strict execution of appropriate practices. It entered into a contract with the celestial powers from which mutual obligations arose: sacrifices on one side, favors on the other. The pontiffs, who were also magistrates, regulated the religious practices with the exact precision of jurists;[9] as far as we know the prayers were all couched in formulas as dry and verbose as notarial instruments. The liturgy reminds one of the ancient civil law on account of the minuteness of its prescriptions. This religion looked suspiciously at the abandonment of the soul to the ecstasies of devotion. It repressed, by force if necessary, the exuberant manifestations of too ardent faith and everything that was not in keeping with the grave dignity befitting the relations of a _civis Romanus_ with a god. The Jews had the same scrupulous respect as the Romans for a religious code and formulas of the past, "but in spite of their dry and minute practices, the legalism of the Pharisees stirred the heart more strongly than did Roman formalism."[10] Lacking the recognized authority of official creeds, the Oriental religions had to appeal to the passions of the individual in order to make proselytes. They attracted men first by the disturbing seductiveness of their mysteries, where terror and hope were evoked in turns, and charmed them by the pomp of their festivities and the magnificence of their processions. Men were fascinated by the languishing songs and intoxicating melodies. Above all these religions taught men how to reach that blissful state in which the soul was freed from the tyranny of the body and of suffering, {30} and lost itself in raptures. They led to ecstasy either by means of nervous tension resulting from continued maceration and fervent contemplation or by more material means like the stimulation of vertiginous dances and dizzy music, or even by the absorption of fermented liquors after a long abstinence,[11] as in the case of the priests of the Great Mother. In mysticism it is easy to descend from the sublime to the vile. Even the gods, with whom the believers thought they were uniting themselves in their mystic outbursts, were more human and sometimes more sensual than those of the Occident. The latter had that quietude of soul in which the philosophic morality of the Greeks saw a privilege of the sage; in the serenity of Olympus they enjoyed perpetual youth; they were Immortals. The divinities of the Orient, on the contrary, suffered and died, but only to revive again.[12] Osiris, Attis and Adonis were mourned like mortals by wife or mistress, Isis, Cybele or Astarte. With them the mystics moaned for their deceased god and later, after he had revived, celebrated with exultation his birth to a new life. Or else they joined in the passion of Mithra, condemned to create the world in suffering. This common grief and joy were often expressed with savage violence, by bloody mutilations, long wails of despair, and extravagant acclamations. The manifestations of the extreme fanaticism of those barbarian races that had not been touched by Greek skepticism and the very ardor of their faith inflamed the souls of the multitudes attracted by the exotic gods. The Oriental religions touched every chord of sensibility and satisfied the thirst for religious emotion that the austere Roman creed had been unable to quench. {31} But at the same time they satisfied the intellect more fully, and this is my second point. In very early times Greece--later imitated by Rome--became resolutely rationalistic: her greatest originality lies here. Her philosophy was purely laical; thought was unrestrained by any sacred tradition; it even pretended to pass judgment upon these traditions and condemned or approved of them. Being sometimes hostile, sometimes indifferent and some times conciliatory, it always remained independent of faith. But while Greece thus freed herself from the fetters of a superannuated mythology, and openly and boldly constructed those systems of metaphysics by means of which she claimed to solve the enigmas of the universe, her religion lost its vitality and dried up because it lacked the strengthening nourishment of reflection. It became a thing devoid of sense, whose _raison d'être_ was no longer understood; it embodied dead ideas and an obsolete conception of the world. In Greece as well as at Rome it was reduced to a collection of unintelligible rites, scrupulously and mechanically reproduced without addition or omission because they had been practised by the ancestors of long ago, and formulas hallowed by the _mos maiorum_, that were no longer understood or sincerely cherished. Never did a people of advanced culture have a more infantile religion. The Oriental civilizations on the contrary were sacerdotal in character. As in medieval Europe, the scholars of Asia and Egypt were priests. In the temples the nature of the gods and of man were not the only subjects of discussion; mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philology and history were also studied. The successors of Berosus, a priest from Babylonia, and {32} Manetho, a priest from Heliopolis, were considered deeply versed in all intellectual disciplines as late as the time of Strabo.[13] This state of affairs proved detrimental to the progress of science. Researches were conducted according to preconceived ideas and were perverted through strange prejudices. Astrology and magic were the monstrous fruit of a hybrid union. But all this certainly gave religion a power it had never possessed either in Greece or Rome. All results of observation, all conquests of thought, were used by an erudite clergy to attain the principal object of their activities, the solution of the problem of the destiny of man and matter, and of the relations of heaven and earth. An ever enlarging conception of the universe kept transforming the modes of belief. Faith presumed to enslave both physics and metaphysics. The credit of every discovery was given to the gods. Thoth in Egypt and Bel in Chaldea were the revealers not only of theology and the ritual, but of all human knowledge.[14] The names of the Oriental Hipparchi and Euclids who solved the first problems of astronomy and geometry were unknown; but a confused and grotesque literature made use of the name and authority of Hermes Trismegistus. The doctrines of the planetary spheres and the opposition of the four elements were made to support systems of anthropology and of morality; the theorems of astronomy were used to establish an alleged method of divination; formulas of incantation, supposed to subject divine powers to the magician, were combined with chemical experiments and medical prescriptions. This intimate union of erudition and faith continued {33} in the Latin world. Theology became more and more a process of deification of the principles or agents discovered by science and a worship of time regarded as the first cause, the stars whose course determined the events of this world, the four elements whose innumerable combinations produced the natural phenomena, and especially the sun which preserved heat, fertility and life. The dogmas of the mysteries of Mithra were, to a certain extent, the religious expression of Roman physics and astronomy. In all forms of pantheism the knowledge of nature appears to be inseparable from that of God.[15] Art itself complied more and more with the tendency to express erudite ideas by subtle symbolism, and it represented in allegorical figures the relations of divine powers and cosmic forces, like the sky, the earth, the ocean, the planets, the constellations and the winds. The sculptors engraved on stone everything man thought and taught. In a general way the belief prevailed that redemption and salvation depended on the revelation of certain truths, on a knowledge of the gods, of the world and of our person, and piety became gnosis.[16] But, you will say, since in the classic age philosophy also claimed to lead to morality through instruction and to acquaint man with the supreme good, why did it yield to Oriental religions that were in reality neither original nor innovating? Quite right, and if a powerful rationalist school, possessed of a good critical method, had led the minds, we may believe that it would have checked the invasion of the barbarian mysteries or at least limited their field of action. However, as has frequently been pointed out, even in ancient Greece the philosophic critics had very little hold on {34} popular religion obstinately faithful to its inherited superstitious forms. But how many second century minds shared Lucian's skepticism in regard to the dogmatic systems! The various sects were fighting each other for ever so long without convincing one another of their alleged error. The satirist of Samosata enjoyed opposing their exclusive pretensions while he himself reclined on the "soft pillow of doubt." But only intelligent minds could delight in doubt or surrender to it; the masses wanted certainties. There was nothing to revive confidence in the power of a decrepit and threadbare science. No great discovery transformed the conception of the universe. Nature no longer betrayed her secrets, the earth remained unexplored and the past inscrutable. Every branch of knowledge was forgotten. The world cursed with sterility, could but repeat itself; it had the poignant appreciation of its own decay and impotence. Tired of fruitless researches, the mind surrendered to the necessity of believing. Since the intellect was unable to formulate a consistent rule of life faith alone could supply it, and the multitudes gravitated toward the temples, where the truths taught to man in earlier days by the Oriental gods were revealed. The stanch adherence of past generations to beliefs and rites of unlimited antiquity seemed to guarantee their truth and efficacy. This current was so strong that philosophy itself was swept toward mysticism and the neo-Platonist school became a theurgy. The Oriental mysteries, then, could stir the soul by arousing admiration and terror, pity and enthusiasm in turn. They gave the intellect the illusion of learned depth and absolute certainty and finally--our third {35} point--they satisfied conscience as well as passion and reason. Among the complex causes that guaranteed their domination, this was without doubt the most effective. In every period of their history the Romans, unlike the Greeks in this respect, judged theories and institutions especially by their practical results. They always had a soldier's and business man's contempt for metaphysicians. It is a matter of frequent observation that the philosophy of the Latin world neglected metaphysical speculations and concentrated its attention on morals, just as later the Roman church left to the subtle Hellenes the interminable controversies over the essence of the divine logos and the double nature of Christ. Questions that could rouse and divide her were those having a direct application to life, like the doctrine of grace. The old religion of the Romans had to respond to this demand of their genius. Its poverty was honest.[17] Its mythology did not possess the poetic charm of that of Greece, nor did its gods have the imperishable beauty of the Olympians, but they were more moral, or at least pretended to be. A large number were simply personified qualities, like chastity and piety. With the aid of the censors they imposed the practice of the national virtues, that is to say of the qualities useful to society, temperance, courage, chastity, obedience to parents and magistrates, reverence for the oath and the law, in fact, the practice of every form of patriotism. During the last century of the republic the pontiff Scaevola, one of the foremost men of his time, rejected as futile the divinities of fable and poetry, as superfluous or obnoxious those of the philosophers and the exegetists, {36} and reserved all his favors for those of the statesmen, as the only ones fit for the people.[18] These were the ones protecting the old customs, traditions and frequently even the old privileges. But in the perpetual flux of things conservatism ever carries with it a germ of death. Just as the law failed to maintain the integrity of ancient principles, like the absolute power of the father of the family, principles that were no longer in keeping with the social realities, so religion witnessed the foundering of a system of ethics contrary to the moral code that had slowly been established. The idea of collective responsibility contained in a number of beliefs is one instance. If a vestal violated her vow of chastity the divinity sent a pest that ceased only on the day the culprit was punished. Sometimes the angry heavens granted victory to the army only on condition that a general or soldier dedicate himself to the infernal gods as an expiatory victim. However, through the influence of the philosophers and the jurists the conviction slowly gained ground that each one was responsible for his own misdeeds, and that it was not equitable to make a whole city suffer for the crime of an individual. People ceased to admit that the gods crushed the good as well as the wicked in one punishment. Often, also, the divine anger was thought to be as ridiculous in its manifestations as in its cause. The rural superstitions of the country districts of Latium continued to live in the pontifical code of the Roman people. If a lamb with two heads or a colt with five legs was born, solemn supplications were prescribed to avert the misfortunes foreboded by those terrifying prodigies.[19] All these puerile and monstrous beliefs that burdened {37} the religion of the Latins had thrown it into disrepute. Its morality no longer responded to the new conception of justice beginning to prevail. As a rule Rome remedied the poverty of her theology and ritual by taking what she needed from the Greeks. But here this resource failed her because the poetic, artistic and even intellectual religion of the Greeks was hardly moral. And the fables of a mythology jeered at by the philosophers, parodied on the stage and put to verse by libertine poets were anything but edifying. Moreover--this was its second weakness--whatever morality it demanded of a pious man went unrewarded. People no longer believed that the gods continually intervened in the affairs of men to reveal hidden crimes and to punish triumphant vice, or that Jupiter would hurl his thunderbolt to crush the perjurer. At the time of the proscriptions and the civil wars under Nero or Commodus it was more than plain that power and possessions were for the strongest, the ablest or even the luckiest, and not for the wisest or the most pious. The idea of reward or punishment beyond the grave found little credit. The notions of future life were hazy, uncertain, doubtful and contradictory. Everybody knows Juvenal's famous lines: "That there are manes, a subterranean kingdom, a ferryman with a long pole, and black frogs in the whirlpools of the Styx; that so many thousand men could cross the waves in a single boat, to-day even children refuse to believe."[20] After the fall of the republic indifference spread, the temples were abandoned and threatened to tumble into ruins, the clergy found it difficult to recruit members, the festivities, once so popular, fell into desuetude, and {38} Varro, at the beginning of his _Antiquities_, expressed his fear lest "the gods might perish, not from the blows of foreign enemies, but from very neglect on the part of the citizens."[21] It is well known that Augustus, prompted by political rather than by religious reasons, attempted to revive the dying religion. His religious reforms stood in close relation to his moral legislation and the establishment of the imperial dignity. Their tendency was to bring the people back to the pious practice of ancient virtues but also to chain them to the new political order. The alliance of throne and altar in Europe dates from that time. This attempted reform failed entirely. Making religion an auxiliary to moral policing is not a means of establishing its empire over souls. Formal reverence for the official gods is not incompatible with absolute and practical skepticism. The restoration attempted by Augustus is nevertheless very characteristic because it is so consistent with the Roman spirit which by temperament and tradition demanded that religion should support morality and the state. The Asiatic religions fulfilled the requirements. The change of régime, although unwelcome, brought about a change of religion. The increasing tendency of Cæsarism toward absolute monarchy made it lean more and more upon the Oriental clergy. True to the traditions of the Achemenides and the Pharaohs, those priests preached doctrines tending to elevate the sovereign above humanity, and they supplied the emperors with dogmatic justification for their despotism.[22] It is a noteworthy fact that the rulers who most loudly proclaimed their autocratic pretentions, like {39} Domitian and Commodus, were also those that favored foreign creeds most openly. But his selfish support merely sanctioned a power already established. The propaganda of the Oriental religions was originally democratic and sometimes even revolutionary like the Isis worship. Step by step they advanced, always reaching higher social classes and appealing to popular conscience rather than to the zeal of functionaries. As a matter of fact all these religions, except that of Mithra, seem at first sight to be far less austere than the Roman creed. We shall have occasion to note that they contained coarse and immodest fables and atrocious or vile rites. The Egyptian gods were expelled from Rome by Augustus and Tiberius on the charge of being immoral, but they were called immoral principally because they opposed a certain conception of the social order. They gave little attention to the public interest but attached considerable importance to the inner life and consequently to the value of the individual. Two new things, in particular, were brought to Italy by the Oriental priests: mysterious methods of purification, by which they claimed to wash away the impurities of the soul, and the assurance that a blessed immortality would be the reward of piety.[23] These religions pretended to restore lost purity[24] to the soul either through the performance of ritual ceremonies or through mortifications and penance. They had a series of ablutions and lustrations supposed to restore original innocence to the mystic. He had to wash himself in the sacred water according to certain prescribed forms. This was really a magic rite, because bodily purity acted sympathetically upon the soul, or {40} else it was a real spiritual disinfection with the water driving out the evil spirits that had caused pollution. The votary, again, might drink or besprinkle himself with the blood of a slaughtered victim or of the priests themselves, in which case the prevailing idea was that the liquid circulating in the veins was a vivifying principle capable of imparting a new existence.[25] These and similar rites[26] used in the mysteries were supposed to regenerate the initiated person and to restore him to an immaculate and incorruptible life.[27] Purgation of the soul was not effected solely by liturgic acts but also by self-denial and suffering.[28] The meaning of the term _expiatio_ changed. Expiation, or atonement, was no longer accomplished by the exact performance of certain ceremonies pleasing to the gods and required by a sacred code like a penalty for damages, but by privation and personal suffering. Abstinence, which prevented the introduction of deadly elements into the system, and chastity, which preserved man from pollution and debility, became means of getting rid of the domination of the evil powers and of regaining heavenly favor.[29] Macerations, laborious pilgrimages, public confessions, sometimes flagellations and mutilations, in fact all forms of penance and mortifications uplifted the fallen man and brought him nearer to the gods. In Phrygia a sinner would write his sin and the punishment he suffered upon a stela for every one to see and would return thanks to heaven that his prayer of repentance had been heard.[30] The Syrian, who had offended his goddess by eating her sacred fish, dressed in sordid rags, covered himself with a sack and sat in the public highway humbly to proclaim his misdeed in order to obtain forgiveness.[31] {41} "Three times, in the depths of winter," says Juvenal, "the devotee of Isis will dive into the chilly waters of the Tiber, and shivering with cold, will drag herself around the temple upon her bleeding knees; if the goddess commands, she will go to the outskirts of Egypt to take water from the Nile and empty it within the sanctuary."[32] This shows the introduction into Europe of Oriental asceticism. But there were impious acts and impure passions that contaminated and defiled the soul. Since this infection could be destroyed only by expiations prescribed by the gods, the extent of the sin and the character of the necessary penance had to be estimated. It was the priest's prerogative to judge the misdeeds and to impose the penalties. This circumstance gave the clergy a very different character from the one it had at Rome. The priest was no longer simply the guardian of sacred traditions, the intermediary between man or the state and the gods, but also a spiritual guide. He taught his flock the long series of obligations and restrictions for shielding their weakness from the attacks of evil spirits. He knew how to quiet remorse and scruples, and to restore the sinner to spiritual calm. Being versed in sacred knowledge, he had the power of reconciling the gods. Frequent sacred repasts maintained a spirit of fellowship among the mystics of Cybele, Mithra or the Baals,[33] and a daily service unceasingly revived the faith of the Isis worshipers. In consequence, the clergy were entirely absorbed in their holy office and lived only for and by their temples. Unlike the sacerdotal colleges of Rome in which the secular and religious functions were not yet clearly differentiated,[34] they were not an {42} administrative commission ruling the sacred affairs of the state under the supervision of the senate; they formed what might almost be called a caste of recluses distinguished from ordinary men by their insignia, garb, habits and food, and constituting an independent body with a hierarchy, formulary and even councils of their own.[35] They did not return to every-day duties as private citizens or to the direction of public affairs as magistrates as the ancient pontiffs had done after the solemn festival service. We can readily understand that these beliefs and institutions were bound to establish the Oriental religions and their priests on a strong basis. Their influence must have been especially powerful at the time of the Cæsars. The laxity of morals at the beginning of our era has been exaggerated but it was real. Many unhealthy symptoms told of a profound moral anarchy weighing on a weakened and irresolute society. The farther we go toward the end of the empire the more its energy seems to fail and the character of men to weaken. The number of strong healthy minds incapable of a lasting aberration and without need of guidance or comfort was growing ever smaller. We note the spread of that feeling of exhaustion and debility which follows the aberrations of passion, and the same weakness that led to crime impelled men to seek absolution in the formal practices of asceticism. They applied to the Oriental priests for spiritual remedies. People flattered themselves that by performing the rites they would attain a condition of felicity after death. All barbarian mysteries pretended to reveal to their adherents the secret of blessed immortality. Participation in the occult ceremonies of the sect was a {43} chief means of salvation.[36] The vague and disheartening beliefs of ancient paganism in regard to life after death were transformed into the firm hope of a well-defined form of happiness.[37] This faith in a personal survival of the soul and even of the body was based upon a strong instinct of human nature, the instinct of self-preservation. Social and moral conditions in the empire during its decline gave it greater strength than it had ever possessed before.[38] The third century saw so much suffering, anguish and violence, so much unnecessary ruin and so many unpunished crimes, that the Roman world took refuge in the expectation of a better existence in which all the iniquity of this world would be retrieved. No earthly hope brightened life. The tyranny of a corrupt bureaucracy choked all disposition for political progress. Science stagnated and revealed no more unknown truths. Growing poverty discouraged the spirit of enterprise. The idea gained ground that humanity was afflicted with incurable decay, that nature was approaching her doom and that the end of world was near.[39] We must remember all these causes of discouragement and despondency to understand the power of the idea, expressed so frequently, that the spirit animating man was forced by bitter necessity to imprison itself in matter and that it was delivered from its carnal captivity by death. In the heavy atmosphere of a period of oppression and impotence the dejected soul longed with incredible ardor to fly to the radiant abode of heaven. To recapitulate, the Oriental religions acted upon the senses, the intellect and the conscience at the same time, and therefore gained a hold on the entire man. {44} Compared with the ancient creeds, they appear to have offered greater beauty of ritual, greater truth of doctrine and a far superior morality. The imposing ceremonial of their festivities and the alternating pomp and sensuality, gloom and exaltation of their services appealed especially to the simple and the humble, while the progressive revelation of ancient wisdom, inherited from the old and distant Orient, captivated the cultured mind. The emotions excited by these religions and the consolations offered strongly attracted the women, who were the most fervent and generous followers and most passionate propagandists[40] of the religions of Isis and Cybele. Mithra was worshiped almost exclusively by men, whom he subjected to a rigid moral discipline. Thus souls were gained by the promise of spiritual purification and the prospect of eternal happiness. The worship of the Roman gods was a civic duty, the worship of the foreign gods the expression of a personal belief. The latter were the objects of the thoughts, feelings and intimate aspirations of the individual, not merely of the traditional and, one might say, functional adoration of the citizen. The ancient municipal devotions were connected with a number of earthly interests that helped to support each other. They were one of various forms of family spirit and patriotism and guaranteed the prosperity of the community. The Oriental mysteries, directing the will toward an ideal goal and exalting the inner spirit, were less mindful of economic utility, but they could produce that vibration of the moral being that caused emotions, stronger than any rational faculty, to gush forth from the depths of the soul. Through a sudden illumination {45} they furnished the intuition of a spiritual life whose intensity made all material happiness appear insipid and contemptible. This stirring appeal of supernatural life made the propaganda irresistible. The same ardent enthusiasm guaranteed at the same time the uncontested domination of neo-Platonism among the philosophers. Antiquity expired and a new era was born. * * * * * {46} ASIA MINOR. The first Oriental religion adopted by the Romans was that of the goddess of Phrygia, whom the people of Pessinus and Mount Ida worshiped, and who received the name of _Magna Mater deum Idea_ in the Occident. Its history in Italy covers six centuries, and we can trace each phase of the transformation that changed it in the course of time from a collection of very primitive nature beliefs into a system of spiritualized mysteries used by some as a weapon against Christianity. We shall now endeavor to outline the successive phases of that slow metamorphosis. This religion is the only one whose success in the Latin world was caused originally by a mere chance circumstance. In 205 B. C, when Hannibal, vanquished but still threatening, made his last stand in the mountains of Bruttium, repeated torrents of stones frightened the Roman people. When the books were officially consulted in regard to this prodigy they promised that the enemy would be driven from Italy if the Great Mother of Ida could be brought to Rome. Nobody but the Sibyls themselves had the power of averting the evils prophesied by them. They had come to Italy from Asia Minor, and in this critical situation their sacred poem recommended the practice of their native religion as a remedy. In token of his {47} friendship, King Attalus presented the ambassadors of the senate with the black aerolite, supposed to be the abode of the goddess, that this ruler had shortly before transferred from Pessinus to Pergamum. According to the mandate of the oracle the stone was received at Ostia by the best citizen of the land, an honor accorded to Scipio Nasica--and carried by the most esteemed matrons to the Palatine, where, hailed by the cheers of the multitude and surrounded by fumes of incense, it was solemnly installed (Nones of April, 204). This triumphal entry was later glorified by marvelous legends, and the poets told of edifying miracles that had occurred during Cybele's voyage. In the same year Scipio transferred the seat of war to Africa, and Hannibal, compelled to meet him there, was beaten at Zama. The prediction of the Sybils had come true and Rome was rid of the long Punic terror. The foreign goddess was honored in recognition of the service she had rendered. A temple was erected to her on the summit of the Palatine, and every year a celebration enhanced by scenic plays, the _ludi Megalenses_, commemorated the date of dedication of the sanctuary and the arrival of the goddess (April 4th-10th). What was this Asiatic religion that had suddenly been transferred into the heart of Rome by an extraordinary circumstance? Even then it could look back upon a long period of development. It combined beliefs of various origin. It contained primitive usages of the religion of Anatolia, some of which have survived to this day in spite of Christianity and Islam. Like the Kizil-Bash peasants of to-day, the ancient inhabitants of the peninsula met on the summits of mountains covered with woods no ax had desecrated, and {48} celebrated their festal days.[1] They believed that Cybele resided on the high summits of Ida and Berecyntus, and the perennial pines, in conjunction with the prolific and early maturing almond tree, were the sacred trees of Attis. Besides trees, the country people worshiped stones, rocks or meteors that had fallen from the sky like the one taken from Pessinus to Pergamum and thence to Rome. They also venerated certain animals, especially the most powerful of them all, the lion, who may at one time have been the totem of savage tribes.[2] In mythology as well as in art the lion remained the riding or driving animal of the Great Mother. Their conception of the divinity was indistinct and impersonal. A goddess of the earth, called Mâ or Cybele, was revered as the fecund mother of all things, the "mistress of the wild beasts"[3] that inhabit the woods. A god Attis, or Papas, was regarded as her husband, but the first place in this divine household belonged to the woman, a reminiscence of the period of matriarchy.[4] When the Phrygians at a very early period came from Thrace and inserted themselves like a wedge in the old Anatolian races, they adopted the vague deities of their new country by identifying them with their own, after the habit of pagan nations. Thus Attis became one with the Dionysus-Sabazius of the conquerors, or at least assumed some of his characteristics. This Thracian Dionysus was a god of vegetation. Foucart has thus admirably pictured his savage nature: "Wooded summits, deep oak and pine forests, ivy-clad caverns were at all times his favorite haunts. Mortals who were anxious to know the powerful divinity ruling these solitudes had to observe the life of his kingdom, {49} and to guess the god's nature from the phenomena through which he manifested his power. Seeing the creeks descend in noisy foaming cascades, or hearing the roaring of steers in the uplands and the strange sounds of the wind-beaten forests, the Thracians thought they heard the voice and the calls of the lord of that empire, and imagined a god who was fond of extravagant leaps and of wild roaming over the wooded mountains. This conception inspired their religion, for the surest way for mortals to ingratiate themselves with a divinity was to imitate him, and as far as possible to make their lives resemble his. For this reason the Thracians endeavored to attain the divine delirium that transported their Dionysus, and hoped to realize their purpose by following their invisible yet ever-present lord in his chase over the mountains."[5] In the Phrygian religion we find the same beliefs and rites, scarcely modified at all, with the one difference that Attis, the god of vegetation, was united to the goddess of the earth instead of living "in sullen loneliness." When the tempest was beating the forests of the Berecyntus or Ida, it was Cybele traveling about in her car drawn by roaring lions mourning her lover's death. A crowd of worshipers followed her through woods and thickets, mingling their shouts with the shrill sound of flutes, with the dull beat of tambourines, with the rattling of castanets and the dissonance of brass cymbals. Intoxicated with shouting and with uproar of the instruments, excited by their impetuous advance, breathless and panting, they surrendered to the raptures of a sacred enthusiasm. Catullus has left us a dramatic description of this divine ecstasy.[6] {50} The religion of Phrygia was perhaps even more violent than that of Thrace. The climate of the Anatolian uplands is one of extremes. Its winters are rough, long and cold, the spring rains suddenly develop a vigorous vegetation that is scorched by the hot summer sun. The abrupt contrasts of a nature generous and sterile, radiant and bleak in turn, caused excesses of sadness and joy that were unknown in temperate and smiling regions, where the ground was never buried under snow nor scorched by the sun. The Phrygians mourned the long agony and death of the vegetation, but when the verdure reappeared in March they surrendered to the excitement of a tumultuous joy. In Asia savage rites that had been unknown in Thrace or practiced in milder form expressed the vehemence of those opposing feelings. In the midst of their orgies, and after wild dances, some of the worshipers voluntarily wounded themselves and, becoming intoxicated with the view of the blood, with which they besprinkled their altars, they believed they were uniting themselves with their divinity. Or else, arriving at a paroxysm of frenzy, they sacrificed their virility to the gods as certain Russian dissenters still do to-day. These men became priests of Cybele and were called Galli. Violent ecstasis was always an endemic disease in Phrygia. As late as the Antonines, montanist prophets that arose in that country attempted to introduce it into Christianity. All these excessive and degrading demonstrations of an extreme worship must not cause us to slight the power of the feeling that inspired it. The sacred ecstasy, the voluntary mutilations and the eagerly sought sufferings manifested an ardent longing for {51} deliverance from subjection to carnal instincts, and a fervent desire to free the soul from the bonds of matter. The ascetic tendencies went so far as to create a kind of begging monachism--the _métragyrtes_. They also harmonized with some of the ideas of renunciation taught by Greek philosophy, and at an early period Hellenic theologians took an interest in this devotion that attracted and repelled them at the same time. Timotheus the Eumolpid, who was one of the founders of the Alexandrian religion of Serapis, derived the inspiration for his essays on religious reform, among other sources, from the ancient Phrygian myths. Those thinkers undoubtedly succeeded in making the priests of Pessinus themselves admit many speculations quite foreign to the old Anatolian nature worship. The votaries of Cybele began at a very remote period to practise "mysteries"[7] in which the initiates were made acquainted, by degrees, with a wisdom that was always considered divine, but underwent peculiar variations in the course of time. * * * * * Such is the religion which the rough Romans of the Punic wars accepted and adopted. Hidden under theological and cosmological doctrines it contained an ancient stock of very primitive and coarse religious ideas, such as the worship of trees, stones and animals. Besides this superstitious fetichism it involved ceremonies that were both sensual and ribald, including all the wild and mystic rites of the bacchanalia which the public authorities were to prohibit a few years later. When the senate became better acquainted with the divinity imposed upon it by the Sibyls, it must have been quite embarrassed by the present of King Attalus. {52} The enthusiastic transports and the somber fanaticism of the Phrygian worship contrasted violently with the calm dignity and respectable reserve of the official religion, and excited the minds of the people to a dangerous degree. The emasculated Galli were the objects of contempt and disgust and what in their own eyes was a meritorious act was made a crime punishable by law, at least under the empire.[8] The authorities hesitated between the respect due to the powerful goddess that had delivered Rome from the Carthaginians and the reverence for the _mos maiorum_. They solved the difficulty by completely isolating the new religion in order to prevent its contagion. All citizens were forbidden to join the priesthood of the foreign goddess or to participate in her sacred orgies. The barbarous rites according to which the Great Mother was to be worshiped were performed by Phrygian priests and priestesses. The holidays celebrated in her honor by the entire nation, the _Megalensia_, contained no Oriental feature and were organized in conformity with Roman traditions. A characteristic anecdote told by Diodorus[9] shows what the public feeling was towards this Asiatic worship at the end of the republic. In Pompey's time a high priest from Pessinus came to Rome, presented himself at the forum in his sacerdotal garb, a golden diadem and a long embroidered robe--and pretending that the statue of his goddess had been profaned demanded public expiation. But a tribune forbade him to wear the royal crown, and the populace rose against him in a mob and compelled him to seek refuge in his house. Although apologies were made later, this story shows how little the people of that period felt {53} the veneration that attached to Cybele and her clergy after a century had passed. Kept closely under control, the Phrygian worship led an obscure existence until the establishment of the empire. That closed the first period of its history at Rome. It attracted attention only on certain holidays, when its priests marched the streets in procession, dressed in motley costumes, loaded with heavy jewelry, and beating tambourines. On those days the senate granted them the right to go from house to house to collect funds for their temples. The remainder of the year they confined themselves to the sacred enclosure of the Palatine, celebrating foreign ceremonies in a foreign language. They aroused so little notice during this period that almost nothing is known of their practices or of their creed. It has even been maintained that Attis was not worshiped together with his companion, the Great Mother, during the times of the republic, but this is undoubtedly wrong, because the two persons of this divine couple must have been as inseparable in the ritual as they were in the myths.[10] But the Phrygian religion kept alive in spite of police surveillance, in spite of precautions and prejudices; a breach had been made in the cracked wall of the old Roman principles, through which the entire Orient finally gained ingress. Directly after the fall of the republic a second divinity from Asia Minor, closely related to the Great Mother, became established in the capital. During the wars against Mithridates the Roman soldiers learned to revere Mâ, the great goddess of the two Comanas, who was worshiped by a whole people of hierodules in the ravines of the Taurus and along the banks of the {54} Iris. Like Cybele she was an ancient Anatolian divinity and personified fertile nature. Her worship, however, had not felt the influence of Thrace, but rather that of the Semites and the Persians,[11] like the entire religion of Cappadocia. It is certain that she was identical with the Anâhita of the Mazdeans, who was of much the same nature. The rites of her cult were even more sanguinary and savage than those of Pessinus, and she had assumed or preserved a warlike character that gave her a resemblance to the Italian Bellona. The dictator Sulla, to whom this invincible goddess of combats had appeared in a dream, was prompted by his superstition to introduce her worship into Rome. The terrible ceremonies connected with it produced a deep impression. Clad in black robes, her "fanatics," as they were called, would turn round and round to the sound of drums and trumpets, with their long, loose hair streaming, and when vertigo seized them and a state of anesthesia was attained, they would strike their arms and bodies great blows with swords and axes. The view of the running blood excited them, and they besprinkled the statue of the goddess and her votaries with it, or even drank it. Finally a prophetic delirium would overcome them, and they foretold the future. This ferocious worship aroused curiosity at first, but it never gained great consideration. It appears that the Cappadocian Bellona joined the number of divinities that were subordinated to the _Magna Mater_ and, as the texts put it, became her follower (_pedisequa_).[12] The brief popularity enjoyed by this exotic _Mâ_ at the beginning of our era shows, nevertheless, the growing {55} influence of the Orient, and of the religions of Asia Minor in particular. After the establishment of the empire the apprehensive distrust in which the worship of Cybele and Attis had been held gave way to marked favor and the original restrictions were withdrawn. Thereafter Roman citizens were chosen for _archigalli_, and the holidays of the Phrygian deities were solemnly and officially celebrated in Italy with even more pomp than had been displayed at Pessinus. According to Johannes Lydus, the Emperor Claudius was the author of this change. Doubts have been expressed as to the correctness of the statement made by this second-rate compiler, and it has been claimed that the transformation in question took place under the Antonines. This is erroneous. The testimony of inscriptions corroborates that of the Byzantine writer.[13] In spite of his love of archaism, it was Claudius who permitted this innovation to be made, and we believe that we can divine the motives of his action. Under his predecessor, Caligula, the worship of Isis had been authorized after a long resistance. Its stirring festivities and imposing processions gained considerable popularity. This competition must have been disastrous to the priests of the _Magna Mater_, who were secluded in their temple on the Palatine, and Caligula's successor could not but grant to the Phrygian goddess, so long established in the city, the favor accorded the Egyptian divinity who had been admitted into Rome but very recently. In this way Claudius prevented too great an ascendency in Italy of this second stranger and supplied a distributary to the current of popular superstition. Isis must have been held under great {56} suspicion by a ruler who clung to old national institutions.[14] The Emperor Claudius introduced a new cycle of holidays that were celebrated from March 15th to March 27th, the beginning of spring at the time of the revival of vegetation, personified in Attis. The various acts of this grand mystic drama are tolerably well known. The prelude was a procession of _cannophori_ or reed-bearers on the fifteenth; undoubtedly they commemorated Cybele's discovery of Attis, who, according to the legends, had been exposed while a child on the banks of the Sangarius, the largest river of Phrygia, or else this ceremony may have been the transformation of an ancient phallephory intended to guarantee the fertility of the fields.[15] The ceremonies proper began with the equinox. A pine was felled and transferred to the temple of the Palatine by a brotherhood that owed to this function its name of "tree-bearers" (_dendrophori_). Wrapped like a corpse in woolen bands and garlands of violets, this pine represented Attis dead. This god was originally only the spirit of the plants, and the honors given to the "March-tree"[16] in front of the imperial palace perpetuated a very ancient agrarian rite of the Phrygian peasants. The next day was a day of sadness and abstinence on which the believers fasted and mourned the defunct god. The twenty-fourth bore the significant name of _Sanguis_ in the calendars. We know that it was the celebration of the funeral of Attis, whose manes were appeased by means of libations of blood, as was done for any mortal. Mingling their piercing cries with the shrill sound of flutes, the Galli flagellated themselves and cut their flesh, and neophytes performed the supreme {57} sacrifice with the aid of a sharp stone, being insensible to pain in their frenzy.[17] Then followed a mysterious vigil during which the mystic was supposed to be united as a new Attis with the great goddess.[18] On March 25th there was a sudden transition from the shouts of despair to a delirious jubilation, the _Hilaria_. With springtime Attis awoke from his sleep of death, and the joy created by his resurrection burst out in wild merry-making, wanton masquerades, and luxurious banquets. After twenty-four hours of an indispensable rest (_requietio_), the festivities wound up, on the twenty-seventh, with a long and gorgeous procession through the streets of Rome and surrounding country districts. Under a constant rain of flowers the silver statue of Cybele was taken to the river Almo and bathed and purified according to an ancient rite (_lavatio_). The worship of the Mother of the Gods had penetrated into the Hellenic countries long before it was received at Rome, but in Greece it assumed a peculiar form and lost most of its barbarous character. The Greek mind felt an unconquerable aversion to the dubious nature of Attis. The _Magna Mater_, who is thoroughly different from her Hellenized sister, penetrated into all Latin provinces and imposed herself upon them with the Roman religion. This was the case in Spain, Brittany, the Danubian countries, Africa and especially in Gaul.[19] As late as the fourth century the car of the goddess drawn by steers was led in great state through the fields and vineyards of Autun in order to stimulate their fertility.[20] In the provinces the _dendrophori_, who carried the sacred pine in the spring festivities, formed associations recognized by the state. These associations had charge of the work of our {58} modern fire departments, besides their religious mission. In case of necessity these woodcutters and carpenters, who knew how to fell the divine tree of Attis, were also able to cut down the timbers of burning buildings. All over the empire religion and the brotherhoods connected with it were under the high supervision of the quindecimvirs of the capital, who gave the priests their insignia. The sacerdotal hierarchy and the rights granted to the priesthood and believers were minutely defined in a series of senate decrees. These Phrygian divinities who had achieved full naturalization and had been placed on the official list of gods, were adopted by the populations of the Occident as Roman gods together with the rest. This propagation was clearly different from that of any other Oriental religion, for here the action of the government aided the tendencies that attracted the devout masses to these Asiatic divinities. This popular zeal was the result of various causes. Ancient authors describe the impression produced upon the masses by those magnificent processions in which Cybele passed along on her car, preceded by musicians playing captivating melodies, by priests wearing gorgeous costumes covered with amulets, and by the long line of votaries and members of the fraternities, all barefoot and wearing their insignia. All this, however, created only a fleeting and exterior impression upon the neophyte, but as soon as he entered the temple a deeper sensation took hold of him. He heard the pathetic story of the goddess seeking the body of her lover cut down in the prime of his life like the grass of the fields. He saw the bloody funeral services in which the cruel death of the young man was mourned, {59} and heard the joyful hymns of triumph, and the gay songs that greeted his return to life. By a skilfully arranged gradation of feelings the onlookers were uplifted to a state of rapturous ecstasy. Feminine devotion in particular found encouragement and enjoyment in these ceremonies, and the Great Mother, the fecund and generous goddess, was always especially worshiped by the women. Moreover, people founded great hopes on the pious practice of this religion. Like the Thracians, the Phrygians began very early to believe in the immortality of the soul. Just as Attis died and came to life again every year, these believers were to be born to new life after their death. One of the sacred hymns said: "Take courage, oh mystics, because the god is saved; and for you also will come salvation from your trials."[21] Even the funeral ceremonies were affected by the strength of that belief. In some cities, especially at Amphipolis in Macedonia, graves have been found adorned with earthenware statuettes representing the shepherd Attis;[22] and even in Germany the gravestones are frequently decorated with the figure of a young man in Oriental costume, leaning dejectedly upon a knotted stick (_pedum_), who represented the same Attis. We are ignorant of the conception of immortality held by the Oriental disciples of the Phrygian priests. Maybe, like the votaries of Sabazius, they believed that the blessed ones were permitted to participate with Hermes Psychopompos in a great celestial feast, for which they were prepared by the sacred repasts of the mysteries.[23] {60} Another agent in favor of this imported religion was, as we have stated above, the fact of its official recognition. This placed it in a privileged position among Oriental religions, at least at the beginning of the imperial régime. It enjoyed a toleration that was neither precarious nor limited; it was not subjected to arbitrary police measures nor to coercion on the part of magistrates; its fraternities were not continually threatened with dissolution, nor its priests with expulsion. It was publicly authorized and endowed, its holidays were marked in the calendars of the pontiffs, its associations of dendrophori were organs of municipal life in Italy and in the provinces, and had a corporate entity. Therefore it is not surprising that other foreign religions, after being transferred to Rome, sought to avert the dangers of an illicit existence by an alliance with the Great Mother. The religion of the latter frequently consented to agreements and compromises, from which it gained in reality as much as it gave up. In exchange for material advantages it acquired complete moral authority over the gods that accepted its protection. Thus Cybele and Attis absorbed a majority of the divinities from Asia Minor that had crossed the Ionian Sea. Their clergy undoubtedly intended to establish a religion complex enough to enable the emigrants from every part of the vast peninsula, slaves, merchants, soldiers, functionaries, scholars, in short, people of all classes of society, to find their national and favorite devotions in it. As a matter of fact no other Anatolian god could maintain his independence side by side with the deities of Pessinus.[24] We do not know the internal development of the {61} Phrygian mysteries sufficiently to give details of the addition of each individual part. But we can prove that in the course of time certain religions were added to the one that had been practised in the temple of the Palatine ever since the republic. In the inscriptions of the fourth century, Attis bears the cognomen of _menotyrannus_. At that time this name was undoubtedly understood to mean "lord of the months," because Attis represented the sun who entered a new sign of the zodiac every month.[25] But that was not the original meaning of the term. "_Mèn tyrannus_" appears with quite a different meaning in many inscriptions found in Asia Minor. _Tyrannos_ ([Greek: Turannos]), "lord," is a word taken by the Greeks from the Lydian, and the honorable title of "tyrant" was given to Mèn, an old barbarian divinity worshiped by all Phrygia and surrounding regions.[26] The Anatolian tribes from Caria to the remotest mountains of Pontus worshiped a lunar god under that name who was supposed to rule not only the heavens but also the underworld, because the moon was frequently brought into connection with the somber kingdom of the dead. The growth of plants and the increase of cattle and poultry were ascribed to his celestial influence, and the villagers invoked his protection for their farms and their district. They also placed their rural burial grounds under the safeguard of this king of shadows. No god enjoyed greater popularity in the country districts. This powerful divinity penetrated into Greece at an early period. Among the mixed populations of the Ægean seaports, in the Piræus, at Rhodes, Delos and Thasos, religious associations for his worship were {62} founded. In Attica the presence of the cult can be traced back to the fourth century, and its monuments rival those of Cybele in number and variety. In the Latin Occident, however, no trace of it can be found, because it had been absorbed by the worship of _Magna Mater_. In Asia itself, Attis and Mèn were sometimes considered identical, and this involved the Roman world in a complete confusion of those two persons, who in reality were very different. A marble statue discovered at Ostia represents Attis holding the lunar crescent, which was the characteristic emblem of Mèn. His assimilation to the "tyrant" of the infernal regions transformed the shepherd of Ida into a master of the underworld, an office that he combined with his former one as author of resurrection. A second title that was given to him reveals another influence. A certain Roman inscription is dedicated to Attis the Supreme ([Greek: Attei hupsistôi]).[27] This epithet is very significant. In Asia Minor "Hypsistos" was the appellation used to designate the god of Israel.[28] A number of pagan thiasi had arisen who, though not exactly submitting to the practice of the synagogue, yet worshiped none but the Most High, the Supreme God, the Eternal God, God the Creator, to whom every mortal owed service. These must have been the attributes ascribed to Cybele's companion by the author of the inscription, because the verse continues: ([Greek: kai sunechonti to pan]) "To thee, who containest and maintainest all things."[29] Must we then believe that Hebraic monotheism had some influence upon the mysteries of the Great Mother? This is not at all improbable. We know that numerous Jewish colonies were established in Phrygia by the Seleucides, and that {63} these expatriated Jews agreed to certain compromises in order to conciliate their hereditary faith with that of the pagans in whose midst they lived. It is also possible that the clergy of Pessinus suffered the ascendancy of the Biblical theology. Under the empire Attis and Cybele became the "almighty gods" (_omnipotentes_) _par excellence_, and it is easy to see in this new conception a leaning upon Semitic or Christian doctrines, more probably upon Semitic ones.[30] We shall now take up the difficult question of the influence of Judaism upon the mysteries during the Alexandrian period and at the beginning of the empire. Many scholars have endeavored to define the influence exercised by the pagan beliefs on those of the Jews; it has been shown how the Israelitic monotheism became Hellenized at Alexandria and how the Jewish propaganda attracted proselytes who revered the one God, without, however, observing all the prescriptions of the Mosaic law. But no successful researches have been made to ascertain how far paganism was modified through an infiltration of Biblical ideas. Such a modification must necessarily have taken place to some extent. A great number of Jewish colonies were scattered everywhere on the Mediterranean, and these were long animated with such an ardent spirit of proselytism that they were bound to impose some of their conceptions on the pagans that surrounded them. The magical texts which are almost the only original literary documents of paganism we possess, clearly reveal this mixture of Israelitic theology with that of other peoples. In them we frequently find names like Iao (Yahveh), Sabaoth, or the names of angels side by side with those of Egyptian or Greek divinities. Especially in Asia {64} Minor, where the Israelites formed a considerable and influential element of the population, an intermingling of the old native traditions and the religion of the strangers from the other side of the Taurus must have occurred. This mixture certainly took place in the mysteries of Sabazius, the Phrygian Jupiter or Dionysus.[31] They were very similar to those of Attis, with whom he was frequently confounded. By means of an audacious etymology that dates back to the Hellenistic period, this old Thraco-Phrygian divinity has been identified with "Yahveh Zebaoth," the Biblical "Lord of Hosts." The corresponding expression ([Greek: kurios Sabaôth]) in the Septuagint has been regarded as the equivalent of the _kurios Sabazios_ ([Greek: kurios Sabazios]) of the barbarians. The latter was worshiped as the supreme, almighty and holy Lord. In the light of a new interpretation the purifications practised in the mysteries were believed to wipe out the hereditary impurity of a guilty ancestor who had aroused the wrath of heaven against his posterity, much as the original sin with which Adam's disobedience had stained the human race was to be wiped out. The custom observed by the votaries of Sabazius of dedicating votive hands which made the liturgic sign of benediction with the first three fingers extended (the _benedictio latina_ of the church) was probably taken from the ritual of the Semitic temples through the agency of the Jews. The initiates believed, again like the Jews, that after death their good angel (_angelus bonus_) would lead them to the banquet of the eternally happy, and the everlasting joys of these banquets were anticipated on earth by the liturgic repasts. This celestial feast can {65} be seen in a fresco painting on the grave of a priest of Sabazius called Vincentius, who was buried in the Christian catacomb of Prætextatus, a strange fact for which no satisfactory explanation has as yet been furnished. Undoubtedly he belonged to a Jewish-pagan sect that admitted neophytes of every race to its mystic ceremonies. In fact, the church itself formed a kind of secret society sprung from the synagogue but distinct from it, in which Gentiles and the Children of Israel joined in a common adoration. If it is a fact, then, that Judaism influenced the worship of Sabazius, it is very probable that it influenced the cult of Cybele also, although in this case the influence cannot be discerned with the same degree of certainty. The religion of the Great Mother did not receive rejuvenating germs from Palestine only, but it was greatly changed after the gods of more distant Persia came and joined it. In the ancient religion of the Achemenides, Mithra, the genius of light, was coupled with Anâhita, the goddess of the fertilizing waters. In Asia Minor the latter was assimilated with the fecund Great Mother, worshiped all over the peninsula,[32] and when at the end of the first century of our era the mysteries of Mithra spread over the Latin provinces, its votaries built their sacred crypts in the shadow of the temples of the _Magna Mater_. Everywhere in the empire the two religions lived in intimate communion. By ingratiating themselves with the Phrygian priests, the priests of Mithra obtained the support of an official institution and shared in the protection granted by the state. Moreover, men alone could participate in the secret ceremonies of the Persian liturgy, at least in the Occident. Other {66} mysteries, to which women could be admitted, had therefore to be added in order to complete them, and so the mysteries of Cybele received the wives and daughters of the Mithraists. This union had even more important consequences for the old religion of Pessinus than the partial infusion of Judaic beliefs had had. Its theology gained a deeper meaning and an elevation hitherto unknown, after it had adopted some of the conceptions of Mazdaism. The introduction of the taurobolium in the ritual of the _Magna Mater_, where it appeared after the middle of the first century, was probably connected with this transformation. We know the nature of this sacrifice, of which Prudentius gives a stirring description based on personal recollection of the proceeding. On an open platform a steer was killed, and the blood dropped down upon the mystic, who was standing in an excavation below. "Through the thousand crevices in the wood," says the poet, "the bloody dew runs down into the pit. The neophyte receives the falling drops on his head, clothes and body. He leans backward to have his cheeks, his ears, his lips and his nostrils wetted; he pours the liquid over his eyes, and does not even spare his palate, for he moistens his tongue with blood and drinks it eagerly."[33] After submitting to this repulsive sprinkling he offered himself to the veneration of the crowd. They believed that he was purified of his faults, and had become the equal of the deity through his red baptism. Although the origin of this sacrifice that took place in the mysteries of Cybele at Rome is as yet shrouded in obscurity, recent discoveries enable us to trace back {67} very closely the various phases of its development. In accordance with a custom prevalent in the entire Orient at the beginning of history, the Anatolian lords were fond of pursuing and lassoing wild buffalos, which they afterwards sacrificed to the gods. Beasts caught during a hunt were immolated, and frequently also prisoners of war. Gradually the savagery of this primitive rite was modified until finally nothing but a circus play was left. During the Alexandrian period people were satisfied with organizing a _corrida_ in the arena, in the course of which the victim intended for immolation was seized. This is the proper meaning of the terms taurobolium and criobolium ([Greek: taurobolion, kriobolion.]), which had long been enigmas,[34] and which denoted the act of catching a steer or a ram by means of a hurled weapon, probably the thong of a lasso. Without doubt even this act was finally reduced to a mere sham under the Roman empire, but the weapon with which the animal was slain always remained a hunting weapon, a sacred boar spear.[35] The ideas on which the immolation was based were originally just as barbarous as the sacrifice itself. It is a matter of general belief among savage peoples that one acquires the qualities of an enemy slain in battle or of a beast killed in the chase by drinking or washing in the blood, or by eating some of the viscera of the body. The blood especially has often been considered as the seat of vital energy. By moistening his body with the blood of the slaughtered steer, the neophyte believed that he was transfusing the strength of the formidable beast into his own limbs. This naive and purely material conception was soon {68} modified and refined. The Thracians brought into Phrygia, and the Persian magi into Cappadocia, the fast spreading belief in the immortality of mankind. Under their influence, especially under that of Mazdaism, which made the mythical steer the author of creation and of resurrection, the old savage practice assumed a more spiritual and more elevated meaning. By complying with it, people no longer thought they were acquiring the buffalo's strength; the blood, as the principle of life, was no longer supposed to renew physical energy, but to cause a temporary or even an eternal rebirth of the soul. The descent into the pit was regarded as burial, a melancholy dirge accompanied the burial of the old man who had died. When he emerged purified of all his crimes by the sprinkling of blood and raised to a new life, he was regarded as the equal of a god, and the crowd worshiped him from a respectful distance.[36] The vogue obtained in the Roman empire by the practice of this repugnant rite can only be explained by the extraordinary power ascribed to it. He who submitted to it was _in aeternum renatus_,[37] according to the inscriptions. We could also outline the transformation of other Phrygian ceremonies, of which the spirit and sometimes the letter slowly changed under the influence of more advanced moral ideas. This is true of the sacred feasts attended by the initiates. One of the few liturgic formulas antiquity has left us refers to these Phrygian banquets. One hymn says: "I have eaten from the tambourine, I have drunk from the cymbal, I have become a mystic of Attis." The banquet, which is found in several Oriental religions, was sometimes simply the {69} external sign indicating that the votaries of the same divinity formed one large family. Admitted to the sacred table, the neophyte was received as the guest of the community and became a brother among brothers. The religious bond of the thiasus or _sodalicium_ took the place of the natural relationship of the family, the gens or the clan, just as the foreign religion replaced the worship of the domestic hearth. Sometimes other effects were expected of the food eaten in common. When the flesh of some animal supposed to be of a divine nature was eaten, the votary believed that he became identified with the god and that he shared in his substance and qualities. In the beginning the Phrygian priests probably attributed the first of these two meanings to their barbarous communions.[38] Towards the end of the empire, moral ideas were particularly connected with the assimilation of sacred liquor and meats taken from the tambourine and cymbal of Attis. They became the staff of the spiritual life and were to sustain the votary in his trials; at that period he considered the gods as especially "the guardians of his soul and thoughts."[39] As we see, every modification of the conception of the world and of man in the society of the empire had its reflection in the doctrine of the mysteries. Even the conception of the old deities of Pessinus was constantly changing. When astrology and the Semitic religions caused the establishment of a solar henotheism as the leading religion at Rome, Attis was considered as the sun, "the shepherd of the twinkling stars." He was identified with Adonis, Bacchus, Pan, Osiris and Mithra; he was made a "polymorphous"[40] being in which all celestial powers manifested {70} themselves in turn; a _pantheos_ who wore the crown of rays and the lunar crescent at the same time, and whose various emblems expressed an infinite multiplicity of functions. When neo-Platonism was triumphing, the Phrygian fable became the traditional mould into which subtle exegetists boldly poured their philosophic speculations on the creative and stimulating forces that were the principles of all material forms, and on the deliverance of the divine soul that was submerged in the corruption of this earthly world. In his hazy oration on the Mother of the Gods, Julian lost all notion of reality on account of his excessive use of allegory and was swept away by an extravagant symbolism.[41] Any religion as susceptible to outside influences as this one was bound to yield to the ascendancy of Christianity. From the explicit testimony of ecclesiastical writers we know that attempts were made to oppose the Phrygian mysteries to those of the church. It was maintained that the sanguinary purification imparted by the taurobolium was more efficacious than baptism. The food that was taken during the mystic feasts was likened to the bread and wine of the communion; the Mother of the Gods was undoubtedly placed above the Mother of God, whose son also had risen again. A Christian author, writing at Rome about the year 375, furnishes some remarkable information on this subject. As we have seen, a mournful ceremony was celebrated on March 24th, the _dies sanguinis_ in the course of which the _galli_ shed their blood and sometimes mutilated themselves in commemoration of the wound that had caused Attis's death, ascribing an expiatory and atoning power to the blood thus shed. The pagans {71} claimed that the church had copied their most sacred rites by placing her Holy Week at the vernal equinox in commemoration of the sacrifice of the cross on which the divine Lamb, according to the church, had redeemed the human race. Indignant at these blasphemous pretensions, St. Augustine tells of having known a priest of Cybele who kept saying: _Et ipse Pileatus christianus est_--"and even the god with the Phrygian cap [i. e., Attis] is a Christian."[42] But all efforts to maintain a barbarian religion stricken with moral decadence were in vain. On the very spot on which the last taurobolia took place at the end of the fourth century, in the _Phrygianum_, stands to-day the basilica of the Vatican. * * * * * There is no Oriental religion whose progressive evolution we could follow at Rome so closely as the cult of Cybele and Attis, none that shows so plainly one of the reasons that caused their common decay and disappearance. They all dated back to a remote period of barbarism, and from that savage past they inherited a number of myths the odium of which could be masked but not eradicated by philosophical symbolism, and practices whose fundamental coarseness had survived from a period of rude nature worship, and could never be completely disguised by means of mystic interpretations. Never was the lack of harmony greater between the moralizing tendencies of theologians and the cruel shamelessness of tradition. A god held up as the august lord of the universe was the pitiful and abject hero of an obscene love affair; the taurobolium, performed to satisfy man's most exalted aspirations for spiritual purification and immortality, looked like a {72} shower bath of blood and recalled cannibalistic orgies. The men of letters and senators attending those mysteries saw them performed by painted eunuchs, ill reputed for their infamous morals, who went through dizzy dances similar to those of the dancing dervishes and the Aissaouas. We can imagine the repugnance these ceremonies caused in everybody whose judgment had not been destroyed by a fanatical devotion. Of no other pagan superstition do the Christian polemicists speak with such profound contempt, and there is undoubtedly a reason for their attitude. But they were in a more fortunate position than their pagan antagonists; their doctrine was not burdened with barbarous traditions dating back to times of savagery; and all the ignominies that stained the old Phrygian religion must not prejudice us against it nor cause us to slight the long continued efforts that were made to refine it gradually and to mould it into a form that would fulfil the new demands of morality and enable it to follow the laborious march of Roman society on the road of religious progress. * * * * * {73} EGYPT. We know more about the religion of the early Egyptians than about any other ancient religion. Its development can be traced back three or four thousand years; we can read its sacred texts, mythical narratives, hymns, rituals, and the Book of the Dead in the original, and we can ascertain its various ideas as to the nature of the divine powers and of future life. A great number of monuments have preserved for our inspection the pictures of divinities and representations of liturgic scenes, while numerous inscriptions and papyri enlighten us in regard to the sacerdotal organization of the principal temples. It would seem that the enormous quantity of documents of all kinds that have been deciphered in the course of nearly an entire century should have dispelled every uncertainty about the creed of ancient Egypt, and should have furnished exact information with regard to the sources and original character of the worship which the Greeks and the Romans borrowed from the subjects of the Ptolemies. And yet, this is not the case. While of the four great Oriental religions which were transplanted into the Occident, the religion of Isis and Serapis is the one whose relation to the ancient belief of the mother country we can establish with greatest accuracy, we {74} know very little of its first form and of its nature before the imperial period, when it was held in high esteem. One fact, however, appears to be certain. The Egyptian worship that spread over the Greco-Roman world came from the Serapeum founded at Alexandria by Ptolemy Soter, somewhat in the manner of Judaism that emanated from the temple of Jerusalem. But the earliest history of that famous sanctuary is surrounded by such a thick growth of pious legends, that the most sagacious investigators have lost their way in it. Was Serapis of native origin, or was he imported from Sinope or Seleucia, or even from Babylon? Each of these opinions has found supporters very recently. Is his name derived from that of the Egyptian god Osiris-Apis, or from that of the Chaldean deity Sar-Apsi? _Grammatici certant_.[1] Whichever solution we may adopt, one fact remains, namely, that Serapis and Osiris were either immediately identified or else were identical from the beginning. The divinity whose worship was started at Alexandria by Ptolemy was the god that ruled the dead and shared his immortality with them. He was fundamentally an Egyptian god, and the most popular of the deities of the Nile. Herodotus says that Isis and Osiris were revered by every inhabitant of the country, and their traditional holidays involved secret ceremonies whose sacred meaning the Greek writer dared not reveal.[2] Recognizing their Osiris in Serapis, the Egyptians readily accepted the new cult. There was a tradition that a new dynasty should introduce a new god or give a sort of preeminence to the god of its own district. From time immemorial politics had changed the {75} government of heaven when changing that of earth. Under the Ptolemies the Serapis of Alexandria naturally became one of the principal divinities of the country, just as the Ammon of Thebes had been the chief of the celestial hierarchy under the Pharaohs of that city, or as, under the sovereigns from Sais, the local Neith had the primacy. At the time of the Antonines there were forty-two Serapeums in Egypt.[3] But the purpose of the Ptolemies was not to add one more Egyptian god to the countless number already worshiped by their subjects. They wanted this god to unite in one common worship the two races inhabiting the kingdom, and thus to further a complete fusion. The Greeks were obliged to worship him side by side with the natives. It was a clever political idea to institute a Hellenized Egyptian religion at Alexandria. A tradition mentioned by Plutarch[4] has it that Manetho, a priest from Heliopolis, a man of advanced ideas, together with Timotheus, a Eumolpid from Eleusis, thought out the character that would best suit the newcomer. The result was that the composite religion founded by the Lagides became a combination of the old creed of the Pharaohs and the Greek mysteries. First of all, the liturgic language was no longer the native idiom but Greek. This was a radical change. The philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum, who had been cured of blindness by Serapis, composed poems in honor of the god that were still sung under the Cæsars several centuries later.[5] We can easily imagine that the poets, who lived on the bounty of the Ptolemies, vied with each other in their efforts to celebrate their benefactors' god, and the old rituals that were translated from the Egyptian were also enriched with {76} edifying bits of original inspiration. A hymn to Isis, found on a marble monument in the island of Andros,[6] gives us some idea of these sacred compositions, although it is of more recent date. In the second place, the artists replaced the old hieratic idols by more attractive images and gave them the beauty of the immortals. It is not known who created the figure of Isis draped in a linen gown with a fringed cloak fastened over the breast, whose sweet meditative, graciously maternal face is a combination of the ideals imagined for Hera and Aphrodite. But we know the sculptor of the first statue of Serapis that stood in the great sanctuary of Alexandria until the end of paganism. This statue, the prototype of all the copies that have been preserved, is a colossal work of art made of precious materials by a famous Athenian sculptor named Bryaxis, a contemporary of Scopas. It was one of the last divine creations of Hellenic genius. The majestic head, with its somber and yet benevolent expression, with its abundance of hair, and with a crown in the shape of a bushel, bespoke the double character of a god ruling at the same time both the fertile earth and the dismal realm of the dead.[7] As we see, the Ptolemies had given their new religion a literary and artistic shape that was capable of attracting the most refined and cultured minds. But the adaptation to the Hellenic feeling and thinking was not exclusively external. Osiris, the god whose worship was thus renewed, was more adapted than any other to lend his authority to the formation of a syncretic faith. At a very early period, in fact before the time of Herodotus, Osiris had been identified with Dionysus, and Isis with Demeter. M. Foucart has {77} endeavored to prove in an ingenious essay that this assimilation was not arbitrary, that Osiris and Isis came into Crete and Attica during the prehistoric period, and that they were mistaken for Dionysus and Demeter[8] by the people of those regions. Without going back to those remote ages, we shall merely say with him that the mysteries of Dionysus were connected with those of Osiris by far-reaching affinities, not simply by superficial and fortuitous resemblances. Each commemorated the history of a god governing both vegetation and the underworld at the same time, who was put to death and torn to pieces by an enemy, and whose scattered limbs were collected by a goddess, after which he was miraculously revived. The Greeks must have been very willing to adopt a worship in which they found their own divinities and their own myths again with something more poignant and more magnificent added. It is a very remarkable fact that of all the many deities worshiped by the Egyptian districts those of the immediate neighborhood, or if you like, the cycle of Osiris, his wife Isis, their son Harpocrates and their faithful servant Anubis, were the only ones that were adopted by the Hellenic populations. All other heavenly or infernal spirits worshiped by the Egyptians remained strangers to Greece.[9] In the Greco-Latin literature we notice two opposing attitudes toward the Egyptian religion. It was regarded as the highest and the lowest of religions at the same time, and as a matter of fact there was an abyss between the always ardent popular beliefs and the enlightened faith of the official priests. The Greeks and Romans gazed with admiration upon the splendor of the temples and ceremonial, upon the fabulous {78} antiquity of the sacred traditions and upon the erudition of a clergy possessed of a wisdom that had been revealed by divinity. In becoming the disciples of that clergy, they imagined they were drinking from the pure fountain whence their own myths had sprung. They were overawed by the pretensions of a clergy that prided itself on a past in which it kept on living, and they strongly felt the attraction of a marvelous country where everything was mysterious, from the Nile that had created it to the hieroglyphs engraved upon the walls of its gigantic edifices.[10] At the same time they were shocked by the coarseness of its fetichism and by the absurdity of its superstitions. Above all they felt an unconquerable repulsion at the worship of animals and plants, which had always been the most striking feature of the vulgar Egyptian religion and which, like all other archaic devotions, seems to have been practised with renewed fervor after the accession of the Saite dynasty. The comic writers and the satirists never tired of scoffing at the adorers of the cat, the crocodile, the leek and the onion. Juvenal says ironically: "O holy people, whose very kitchen-gardens produce gods."[11] In a general way, this strange people, entirely separated from the remainder of the world, were regarded with about the same kind of feeling that Europeans entertained toward the Chinese for a long time. A purely Egyptian worship would not have been acceptable to the Greco-Latin world. The main merit of the mixed creation of the political genius of the Ptolemies consisted in the rejection or modification of everything repugnant or monstrous like the phallophories of Abydos, and in the retention of none but {79} stirring or attractive elements. It was the most civilized of all barbarian religions; it retained enough of the exotic element to arouse the curiosity of the Greeks, but not enough to offend their delicate sense of proportion, and its success was remarkable. It was adopted wherever the authority or the prestige of the Lagides was felt, and wherever the relations of Alexandria, the great commercial metropolis, extended. The Lagides induced the rulers and the nations with whom they concluded alliances to accept it. King Nicocreon introduced it into Cyprus after having consulted the oracle of the Serapeum,[12] and Agathocles introduced it into Sicily, at the time of his marriage with the daughter-in-law of Ptolemy I (298).[13] At Antioch, Seleucus Callinicus built a sanctuary for the statue of Isis sent to him from Memphis by Ptolemy Euergetes.[14] In token of his friendship Ptolemy Soter introduced his god Serapis into Athens, where the latter had a temple at the foot of the Acropolis[15] ever after, and Arsinoë, his mother or wife, founded another at Halicarnassus, about the year 307.[16] In this manner the political activity of the Egyptian dynasty was directed toward having the divinities, whose glory was in a certain measure connected with that of their house, recognized everywhere. Through Apuleius we know that under the empire the priests of Isis mentioned the ruling sovereign first of all in their prayers.[17] And this was simply an imitation of the grateful devotion which their predecessors had felt toward the Ptolemies. Protected by the Egyptian squadrons, sailors and merchants propagated the worship of Isis, the goddess of navigators, simultaneously on the coasts of Syria, {80} Asia Minor and Greece, in the islands of the Archipelago,[18] and as far as the Hellespont and Thrace.[19] At Delos, where the inscriptions enable us to study this worship somewhat in detail, it was not merely practised by strangers, but the very sacerdotal functions were performed by members of the Athenian aristocracy. A number of funereal bas-reliefs, in which the deified dead wears the _calathos_ of Serapis on his head, prove the popularity of the belief in future life propagated by these mysteries. According to the Egyptian faith he was identified with the god of the dead.[20] Even after the splendor of the court of Alexandria had faded and vanished; even after the wars against Mithridates and the growth of piracy had ruined the traffic of the Ægean Sea, the Alexandrian worship was too deeply rooted in the soil of Greece to perish, although it became endangered in certain seaports like Delos. Of all the gods of the Orient, Isis and Serapis were the only ones that retained a place among the great divinities of the Hellenic world until the end of paganism.[21] * * * * * It was this syncretic religion that came to Rome after having enjoyed popularity in the eastern Mediterranean. Sicily and the south of Italy were more than half Hellenized, and the Ptolemies had diplomatic relations with these countries, just as the merchants of Alexandria had commercial relations with them. For this reason the worship of Isis spread as rapidly in those regions as on the coasts of Ionia or in the Cyclades.[22] It was introduced into Syracuse and Catana during the earliest years of the third century by {81} Agathocles. The Serapeum of Pozzuoli, at that time the busiest seaport of Campania, was mentioned in a city ordinance of the year 105 B. C.[23] About the same time an Iseum was founded at Pompeii, where the decorative frescos attest to this day the power of expansion possessed by the Alexandrian culture. After its adoption by the southern part of the Italian peninsula, this religion was bound to penetrate rapidly to Rome. Ever since the second century before our era, it could not help but find adepts in the chequered multitude of slaves and freedmen. Under the Antonines the college of the _pastophori_ recalled that it had been founded in the time of Sulla.[24] In vain did the authorities try to check the invasion of the Alexandrian gods. Five different times, in 59, 58, 53, and 48 B. C., the senate ordered their altars and statues torn down,[25] but these violent measures did not stop the diffusion of the new beliefs. The Egyptian mysteries were the first example at Rome of an essentially popular religious movement that was triumphant over the continued resistance of the public authorities and the official clergy. Why was this Egyptian worship the only one of all Oriental religions to suffer repeated persecutions? There were two motives, one religious and one political. In the first place, this cult was said to exercise a corrupting influence perversive of piety. Its morals were loose, and the mystery surrounding it excited the worst suspicions. Moreover, it appealed violently to the emotions and senses. All these factors offended the grave decency that a Roman was wont to {82} maintain in the presence of the gods. The innovators had every defender of the _mos maiorum_ for an adversary. In the second place, this religion had been founded, supported and propagated by the Ptolemies; it came from a country that was almost hostile to Italy during the last period of the republic;[26] it issued from Alexandria, whose superiority Rome felt and feared. Its secret societies, made up chiefly of people of the lower classes, might easily become clubs of agitators and haunts of spies. All these motives for suspicion and hatred were undoubtedly more potent in exciting persecution than the purely theological reasons, and persecution was stopped or renewed according to the vicissitudes of general politics. As we have stated, the chapels consecrated to Isis were demolished in the year 48 B. C. After Cæsar's death, the triumvirs decided in 43 B. C. to erect a temple in her honor out of the public funds, undoubtedly to gain the favor of the masses. This action would have implied official recognition, but the project appears never to have been executed. If Antony had succeeded at Actium, Isis and Serapis would have entered Rome in triumph, but they were vanquished with Cleopatra; and when Augustus had become the master of the empire, he professed a deep aversion for the gods of his former enemies. Moreover, he could not have suffered the intrusion of the Egyptian clergy into the Roman sacerdotal class, whose guardian, restorer and chief he was. In 28 B. C. an ordinance was issued forbidding the erecting of altars to the Alexandrian divinities inside the sacred enclosure of the _pomerium_, and seven years later Agrippa extended this prohibitive regulation to a radius of a thousand paces around the {83} city. Tiberius acted on the same principle and in 19 A. D. instituted the bloodiest persecution against the priests of Isis that they ever suffered, in consequence of a scandalous affair in which a matron, a noble and some priests of Isis were implicated. All these police measures, however, were strangely ineffectual. The Egyptian worship was excluded from Rome and her immediate neighborhood in theory if not in fact, but the rest of the world remained open to its propaganda.[27] With the beginning of the empire it slowly invaded the center and the north of Italy and spread into the provinces. Merchants, sailors, slaves, artisans, Egyptian men of letters, even the discharged soldiers of the three legions cantoned in the valley of the Nile contributed to its diffusion. It entered Africa by way of Carthage, and the Danubian countries through the great emporium of Aquileia. The new province of Gaul was invaded through the valley of the Rhone. At that period many Oriental emigrants went to seek their fortunes in these new countries. Intimate relations existed between the cities of Arles and Alexandria, and we know that a colony of Egyptian Greeks, established at Nimes by Augustus, took the gods of their native country thither.[28] At the beginning of our era there set in that great movement of conversion that soon established the worship of Isis and Serapis from the outskirts of the Sahara to the vallum of Britain, and from the mountains of Asturias to the mouths of the Danube. The resistance still offered by the central power could not last much longer. It was impossible to dam in this overflowing stream whose thundering waves struck the {84} shaking walls of the _pomerium_ from every side. The prestige of Alexandria seemed invincible. At that period the city was more beautiful, more learned, and better policed than Rome. She was the model capital, a standard to which the Latins strove to rise. They translated the works of the scholars of Alexandria, imitated her authors, invited her artists and copied her institutions. It is plain that they had also to undergo the ascendancy of her religion. As a matter of fact, her fervent believers maintained her sanctuaries, despite the law, on the very Capitol. Under Cæsar, Alexandrian astronomers had reformed the calendar of the pontiffs, and Alexandrian priests soon marked the dates of Isis holidays upon it. The decisive step was taken soon after the death of Tiberius. Caligula erected the great temple of Isis Campensis on the Campus Martius probably in the year 38.[29] In order to spare the sacerdotal susceptibilities, he founded it outside of the sacred enclosure of the city of Servius. Later Domitian made one of Rome's most splendid monuments of that temple. From that time Isis and Serapis enjoyed the favor of every imperial dynasty, the Flavians as well as the Antonines and the Severi. About the year 215 Caracalla built an Isis temple, even more magnificent than that of Domitian, on the Quirinal, in the heart of the city, and perhaps another one on the Coelian. As the apologist Minucius Felix states, the Egyptian gods had become entirely Roman.[30] The climax of their power seems to have been reached at the beginning of the third century; later on the popular vogue and official support went to other divinities, like the Syrian Baals and the Persian {85} Mithras. The progress of Christianity also deprived them of their power, which was, however, still considerable until the end of the ancient world. The Isis processions that marched the streets of Rome were described by an eye witness as late as the year 394,[31] but in 391 the patriarch Theophilus had consigned the Serapeum of Alexandria to the flames, having himself struck the first blow with an ax against the colossal statue of the god that had so long been the object of a superstitious veneration. Thus the prelate destroyed the "very head of idolatry," as Rufinus put it.[32] As a matter of fact, idolatry received its death blow. The worship of the gods of the Ptolemies died out completely between the reigns of Theodosius and Justinian,[33] and in accordance with the sad prophecy of Hermes Trismegistus[34] Egypt, Egypt herself, lost her divinities and became a land of the dead. Of her religions nothing remained but fables that were no longer believed, and the only thing that reminded the barbarians who came to inhabit the country of its former piety, were words engraved on stone. * * * * * This rapid sketch of the history of Isis and Serapis shows that these divinities were worshiped in the Latin world for more than five centuries. The task of pointing out the transformations of the cult during that long period, and the local differences there may have been in the various provinces, is reserved for future researches. These will undoubtedly find that the Alexandrian worship did not become Latinized under the empire, but that its Oriental character became more and more pronounced. When Domitian restored the Iseum of the Campus Martius and that of Beneventum, he {86} transferred from the valley of the Nile sphinxes, cynocephali and obelisks of black or pink granite bearing borders of hieroglyphics of Amasis, Nectanebos or even Rameses II. On other obelisks that were erected in the propyleums even the inscriptions of the emperors were written in hieroglyphics.[35] Half a century later that true dilettante, Hadrian, caused the luxuries of Canopus to be reproduced, along with the vale of Tempe, in his immense villa at Tibur, to enable him to celebrate his voluptuous feasts under the friendly eyes of Serapis. He extolled the merits of the deified Antinous in inscriptions couched in the ancient language of the Pharaohs, and set the fashion of statues hewn out of black basalt in the Egyptian style.[36] The amateurs of that period affected to prefer the hieratic rigidity of the barbarian idols to the elegant freedom of Alexandrian art. Those esthetic manifestations probably corresponded to religious prejudices, and the Latin worship always endeavored to imitate the art of temples in the Nile valley more closely than did the Greek. This evolution was in conformity with all the tendencies of the imperial period. By what secret virtue did the Egyptian religion exercise this irresistible influence over the Roman world? What new elements did those priests, who made proselytes in every province, give the Roman world? Did the success of their preaching mean progress or retrogression from the standard of the ancient Roman faith? These are complex and delicate questions that would require minute analysis and cautious treatment with a constant and exact observation of shades. I am compelled to limit myself to a rapid sketch, which, I {87} fear, will appear rather dry and arbitrary, like every generalization. The particular doctrines of the mysteries of Isis and Serapis in regard to the nature and power of the gods were not, or were but incidentally, the reasons for the triumph of these mysteries. It has been said that the Egyptian theology always remained in a "fluid state,"[37] or better in a state of chaos. It consisted of an amalgamation of disparate legends, of an aggregate of particular cults, as Egypt herself was an aggregate of a number of districts. This religion never formulated a coherent system of generally accepted dogmas. It permitted the coexistence of conflicting conceptions and traditions, and all the subtlety of its clergy never accomplished, or rather never began, the task of fusing those irreconcilable elements into one harmonious synthesis.[38] For the Egyptians there was no principle of contradiction. All the heterogeneous beliefs that ever obtained in the various districts during the different periods of a very long history, were maintained concurrently and formed an inextricable confusion in the sacred books. About the same state of affairs prevailed in the Occidental worship of the Alexandrian divinities. In the Occident, just as in Egypt, there were "prophets" in the first rank of the clergy, who learnedly discussed religion, but never taught a theological system that found universal acceptance. The sacred scribe Cheremon, who became Nero's tutor, recognized the stoical theories in the sacerdotal traditions of his country.[39] When the eclectic Plutarch speaks of the character of the Egyptian gods, he finds it agrees surprisingly with his own philosophy,[40] and when the neo-Platonist {88} Iamblichus examines them, their character seems to agree with his doctrines. The hazy ideas of the Oriental priests enabled every one to see in them the phantoms he was pursuing. The individual imagination was given ample scope, and the dilettantic men of letters rejoiced in molding these malleable doctrines at will. They were not outlined sharply enough, nor were they formulated with sufficient precision to appeal to the multitude. The gods were everything and nothing; they got lost in a _sfumato_. A disconcerting anarchy and confusion prevailed among them. By means of a scientific mixture of Greek, Egyptian and Semitic elements "Hermetism"[41] endeavored to create a theological system that would be acceptable to all minds, but it seems never to have imposed itself generally on the Alexandrian mysteries which were older than itself, and furthermore it could not escape the contradictions of Egyptian thought. The religion of Isis did not gain a hold on the soul by its dogmatism. It must be admitted, however, that, owing to its extreme flexibility, this religion was easily adapted to the various centers to which it was transferred, and that it enjoyed the valuable advantage of being always in perfect harmony with the prevailing philosophy. Moreover, the syncretic tendencies of Egypt responded admirably to those that began to obtain at Rome. At a very early period henotheistic theories had been favorably received in sacerdotal circles, and while crediting the god of their own temple with supremacy, the priests admitted that he might have a number of different personalities, under which he was worshiped simultaneously. In this way the unity of the supreme being was affirmed for the thinkers, and polytheism with its {89} intangible traditions maintained for the masses. In the same manner Isis and Osiris had absorbed several local divinities under the Pharaohs, and had assumed a complex character that was capable of indefinite extension. The same process continued under the Ptolemies when the religion of Egypt came into contact with Greece. Isis was identified simultaneously with Demeter, Aphrodite, Hera, Semele, Io, Tyche, and others. She was considered the queen of heaven and hell, of earth and sea. She was "the past, the present and the future,"[42] "nature the mother of things, the mistress of the elements, born at the beginning of the centuries."[43] She had numberless names, an infinity of different aspects and an inexhaustible treasure of virtues. In short, she became a pantheistic power that was everything in one, _una quae est omnia_.[44] The authority of Serapis was no less exalted, and his field no less extensive. He also was regarded as a universal god of whom men liked to say that he was "unique." ([Greek: Heis Zeus Sarapis]) In him all energies were centered, although the functions of Zeus, of Pluto or of Helios were especially ascribed to him. For many centuries Osiris had been worshiped at Abydos both as author of fecundity and lord of the underworld,[45] and this double character early caused him to be identified with the sun, which fertilizes the earth during its diurnal course and travels through the subterranean realms at night. Thus the conception of this nature divinity, that had already prevailed along the Nile, accorded without difficulty with the solar pantheism that was the last form of Roman paganism. This theological system, which did not gain the upper hand in the Occident until the {90} second century of our era, was not brought in by Egypt. It did not have the exclusive predominance there that it had held under the empire, and even in Plutarch's time it was only one creed among many.[46] The deciding influence in this matter was exercised by the Syrian Baals and the Chaldean astrology. The theology of the Egyptian mysteries, then, followed rather than led the general influx of ideas. The same may be said of their ethics. It did not force itself upon the world by lofty moral precepts, nor by a sublime ideal of holiness. Many have admired the edifying list in the Book of the Dead, that rightfully or otherwise sets forth the virtues which the deceased claims to have practised in order to obtain a favorable judgment from Osiris. If one considers the period in which it appears, this ethics is undoubtedly very elevated, but it seems rudimentary and even childish if one compares it with the principles formulated by the Roman jurists, to say nothing of the minute psychological analyses of the Stoic casuists. In this range of ideas also, the maintenance of the most striking contrasts characterizes Egyptian mentality, which was never shocked by the cruelties and obscenities that sullied the mythology and the ritual. Like Epicurus at Athens, some of the sacred texts actually invited the believers to enjoy life before the sadness of death.[47] Isis was not a very austere goddess at the time she entered Italy. Identified with Venus, as Harpocrates was with Eros, she was honored especially by the women with whom love was a profession. In Alexandria, the city of pleasure, she had lost all severity, and at Rome this good goddess remained very indulgent to human weaknesses. Juvenal harshly refers to {91} her as a procuress,[48] and her temples had a more than doubtful reputation, for they were frequented by young men in quest of gallant adventures. Apuleius himself chose a lewd tale in which to display his fervor as an initiate. But we have said that Egypt was full of contradictions, and when a more exacting morality demanded that the gods should make man virtuous, the Alexandrian mysteries offered to satisfy that demand. At all times the Egyptian ritual attributed considerable importance to purity, or, to use a more adequate term, to cleanliness. Before every ceremony the officiating priest had to submit to ablutions, sometimes to fumigations or anointing, and to abstain from certain foods and from incontinence for a certain time. Originally no moral idea was connected with this purification. It was considered a means of exorcising malevolent demons or of putting the priest into a state in which the sacrifice performed by him could have the expected effect. It was similar to the diet, shower-baths and massage prescribed by physicians for physical health. The internal status of the officiating person was a matter of as much indifference to the celestial spirits as the actual worth of the deceased was to Osiris, the judge of the underworld. All that was necessary to have him open the fields of Aalu to the soul was to pronounce the liturgic formulas, and if the soul declared its innocence in the prescribed terms its word was readily accepted. But in the Egyptian religion, as in all the religions of antiquity,[49] the original conception was gradually transformed and a new idea slowly took its place. The sacramental acts of purification were now {92} expected to wipe out moral stains, and people became convinced that they made man better. The devout female votaries of Isis, whom Juvenal[50] pictures as breaking the ice to bathe in the Tiber, and crawling around the temple on their bleeding knees, hoped to atone for their sins and to make up for their shortcomings by means of these sufferings. When a new ideal grew up in the popular conscience during the second century, when the magicians themselves became pious and serious people, free from passions and appetites, and were honored because of the dignity of their lives more than for their white linen robes,[51] then the virtues of which the Egyptian priests enjoined the practice also became less external. Purity of the heart rather than cleanliness of the body was demanded. Renunciation of sensual pleasures was the indispensable condition for the knowledge of divinity, which was the supreme good.[52] No longer did Isis favor illicit love. In the novel by Xenophon of Ephesus (about 280 A. D.) she protects the heroine's chastity against all pitfalls and assures its triumph. According to the ancient belief man's entire existence was a preparation for the formidable judgment held by Serapis after death, but to have him decide in favor of the mystic, it was not enough to know the rites of the sect; the individual life had to be free from crime; and the master of the infernal regions assigned everybody a place according to his deserts.[53] The doctrine of future retribution was beginning to develop. However, in this regard, as in their conception of the divinity, the Egyptian mysteries followed the general progress of ideas more than they directed it. {93} Philosophy transformed them, but found in them little inspiration. * * * * * How could a religion, of which neither the theology nor the ethics was really new, stir up at the same time so much hostility and fervor among the Romans? To many minds of to-day theology and ethics constitute religion, but during the classical period it was different, and the priests of Isis and Serapis conquered souls mainly by other means. They seduced them by the powerful attraction of the ritual and retained them by the marvelous promises of their doctrine of immortality. To the Egyptians ritual had a value far superior to that we ascribe to it to-day. It had an operative strength of its own that was independent of the intentions of the officiating priest. The efficacy of prayer depended not on the inner disposition of the believer, but on the correctness of the words, gestures and intonation. Religion was not clearly differentiated from magic. If a divinity was invoked according to the correct forms, especially if one knew how to pronounce its real name, it was compelled to act in conformity to the will of its priest. The sacred words were an incantation that compelled the superior powers to obey the officiating person, no matter what purpose he had in view. With the knowledge of the liturgy men acquired an immense power over the world of spirits. Porphyry was surprised and indignant because the Egyptians sometimes dared to threaten the gods in their orations.[54] In the consecrations the priest's summons compelled the gods to come and animate their {94} statues, and thus his voice created divinities,[55] as originally the almighty voice of Thoth had created the world.[56] The ritual that conferred such superhuman power[57] developed in Egypt into a state of perfection, completeness and splendor unknown in the Occident. It possessed a unity, a precision and a permanency that stood in striking contrast to the variety of the myths, the uncertainty of the dogmas and the arbitrariness of the interpretations. The sacred books of the Greco-Roman period are a faithful reproduction of the texts that were engraved upon the walls of the pyramids at the dawn of history, notwithstanding the centuries that had passed. Even under the Cæsars the ancient ceremonies dating back to the first ages of Egypt, were scrupulously performed because the smallest word and the least gesture had their importance. This ritual and the attitude toward it found their way for the most part into the Latin temples of Isis and Serapis. This fact has long been ignored, but there can be no doubt about it. A first proof is that the clergy of those temples were organized just like those of Egypt during the period of the Ptolemies.[58] There was a hierarchy presided over by a high priest, which consisted of _prophetes_ skilled in the sacred science, _stolistes_, or _ornatrices_,[59] whose office it was to dress the statues of the gods, _pastophori_ who carried the sacred temple plates in the processions, and so on, just as in Egypt. As in their native country, the priests were distinguished from common mortals by a tonsure, by a linen tunic, and by their habits as well as by their garb. They devoted themselves entirely to their ministry and had no other profession. This {95} sacerdotal body always remained Egyptian in character, if not in nationality, because the liturgy it had to perform remained so. In a similar manner the priests of the Baals were Syrians,[60] because they were the only ones that knew how to honor the gods of Syria. In the first place a daily service had to be held just as in the Nile valley. The Egyptian gods enjoyed a precarious immortality, for they were liable to destruction and dependent on necessities. According to a very primitive conception that always remained alive, they had to be fed, clothed and refreshed every day or else perish. From this fact arose the necessity of a liturgy that was practically the same in every district. It was practised for thousands of years and opposed its unaltering form to the multiplicity of legends and local beliefs.[61] This daily liturgy was translated into Greek, perhaps later into Latin also; it was adapted to the new requirements by the founders of the Serapeum, and faithfully observed in the Roman temples of the Alexandrian gods. The essential ceremony always was the opening (_apertio_)[62] of the sanctuary. At dawn the statue of the divinity was uncovered and shown to the community in the _naos_, that had been closed and sealed during the night.[63] Then, again as in Egypt, the priest lit the sacred fire and offered libations of water supposed to be from the deified Nile,[64] while he chanted the usual hymns to the sound of flutes. Finally, "erect upon the threshold"--I translate literally from Porphyry--"he awakens the god by calling to him in the Egyptian language."[65] As we see, the god was revived by the sacrifice and, as under the Pharaohs, awoke from his slumber at the calling of {96} his name. As a matter of fact the name was indissolubly connected with the personality; he who could pronounce the exact name of an individual or of a divinity was obeyed as a master by his slave.[66] This fact made it necessary to maintain the original form of that mysterious word. There was no other motive for the introduction of a number of barbarian appellatives into the magical incantations. It is also probable that the toilet of the statue was made every day, that its body and head were dressed,[67] as in the Egyptian ritual. We have seen that the _ornatrices_ or _stolistes_ were especially entrusted with these duties. The idol was covered with sumptuous raiment and ornamented with jewels and gems. An inscription furnishes us with an inventory of the jewels worn by an Isis of ancient Cadiz;[68] her ornaments were more brilliant than those of a Spanish madonna. During the entire forenoon, from the moment that a noisy acclamation had greeted the rising of the sun, the images of the gods were exposed to the silent adoration of the initiates.[69] Egypt is the country whence contemplative devotion penetrated into Europe. Then, in the afternoon, a second service was held to close the sanctuary.[70] The daily liturgy must have been very absorbing. This innovation in the Roman paganism was full of consequences. No longer were sacrifices offered to the god on certain occasions only, but twice a day elaborate services were held. As with the Egyptians, whom Herodotus had termed the most religious of all peoples,[71] devotion assumed a tendency to fill out the whole existence and to dominate private and public interests. The constant repetition of the same prayers {97} kept up and renewed faith, and, we might say, people lived continually under the eyes of the gods. Besides the daily rites of the Abydos liturgy the holidays marking the beginning of the different seasons were celebrated at the same date every year.[72] It was the same in Italy. The calendars have preserved the names of several of them, and of one, the _Navigium Isidis_, the rhetorician Apuleius[73] has left us a brilliant description on which, to speak with the ancients, he emptied all his color tubes. On March 5th, when navigation reopened after the winter months, a gorgeous procession[74] marched to the coast, and a ship consecrated to Isis, the protectress of sailors, was launched. A burlesque group of masked persons opened the procession, then came the women in white gowns strewing flowers, the _stolistes_ waving the garments of the goddess and the _dadophori_ with lighted torches. After these came the _hymnodes_, whose songs mingled in turn with the sharp sound of the cross-flutes and the ringing of the brass timbrels; then the throngs of the initiates, and finally the priests, with shaven heads and clad in linen robes of a dazzling white, bearing the images of animal-faced gods and strange symbols, as for instance a golden urn containing the sacred water of the Nile. The procession stopped in front of altars[75] erected along the road, and on these altars the sacred objects were uncovered for the veneration of the faithful. The strange and sumptuous magnificence of these celebrations made a deep impression on the common people who loved public entertainments. But of all the celebrations connected with the worship of Isis the most stirring and the most suggestive {98} was the commemoration of the "Finding of Osiris" (_Inventio_, [Greek: Heuresis]). Its antecedents date back to remote antiquity. Since the time of the twelfth dynasty, and probably much earlier, there had been held at Abydos and elsewhere a sacred performance similar to the mysteries of our Middle Ages, in which the events of Osiris's passion and resurrection were reproduced. We are in possession of the ritual of those performances.[76] Issuing from the temple, the god fell under Set's blows; around his body funeral lamentations were simulated, and he was buried according to the rites; then Set was vanquished by Horus, and Osiris, restored to life, reentered his temple triumphant over death. The same myth was represented in almost the same manner at Rome at the beginning of each November.[77] While the priests and the believers moaned and lamented, Isis in great distress sought the divine body of Osiris, whose limbs had been scattered by Typhon. Then, after the corpse had been found, rehabilitated and revived, there was a long outburst of joy, an exuberant jubilation that rang through the temples and the streets so loudly that it annoyed the passers-by. This mingled despair and enthusiasm acted as strongly upon the feelings of the believers as did the spring-holiday ceremony in the Phrygian religion, and it acted through the same means. Moreover, there was an esoteric meaning attached to it that none but the pious elect understood. Besides the public ceremonies there was a secret worship to which one was admitted only after a gradual initiation. The hero of Apuleius had to submit to the ordeal three times in order to obtain the whole revelation. In Egypt the {99} clergy communicated certain rites and interpretations only upon a promise not to reveal them. In fact this was the case in the worship of Isis at Abydos and elsewhere.[78] When the Ptolemies regulated the Greek ritual of their new religion, it assumed the form of the mysteries spread over the Hellenic world and became very like those of Eleusis. The hand of the Eumolpid Timotheus is noticeable in this connection.[79] But while the ceremonial of the initiations and even the production of the liturgic drama were thus adapted to the religious habits of the Greeks, the doctrinal contents of the Alexandrian mysteries remained purely Egyptian. The old belief that immortality could be secured by means of an identification of the deceased with Osiris or Serapis never died out. Perhaps in no other people did the epigram of Fustel de Coulanges find so complete a verification as in the Egyptians: "Death was the first mystery; it started man on the road to the other mysteries."[80] Nowhere else was life so completely dominated by preoccupation with life after death; nowhere else was such minute and complicated care taken to secure and perpetuate another existence for the deceased. The funeral literature, of which we have found a very great number of documents, had acquired a development equaled by no other, and the architecture of no other nation can exhibit tombs comparable with the pyramids or the rock-built sepulchers of Thebes. This constant endeavor to secure an after-existence for one's self and relatives manifested itself in various ways, but it finally assumed a concrete form in the worship of Osiris. The fate of Osiris, the god who died and returned to life, became the prototype of the {100} fate of every human being that observed the funeral rites. "As truly as Osiris lives," says an Egyptian text, "he also shall live; as truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die; as truly as Osiris is not annihilated, shall he not be annihilated."[81] If, then, the deceased had piously served Osiris-Serapis, he was assimilated to that god, and shared his immortality in the underworld, where the judge of the dead held forth. He lived not as a tenuous shade or as a subtle spirit, but in full possession of his body as well as of his soul. That was the Egyptian doctrine, and that certainly was also the doctrine of the Greco-Latin mysteries.[82] Through the initiation the mystic was born again, but to a superhuman life, and became the equal of the immortals.[83] In his ecstasy he imagined that he was crossing the threshold of death and contemplating the gods of heaven and hell face to face.[84] If he had accurately followed the prescriptions imposed upon him by Isis and Serapis through their priests, those gods prolonged his life after his decease beyond the duration assigned to it by destiny, and he participated eternally in their beatitude and offered them his homage in their realm.[85] The "unspeakable pleasure" he felt when contemplating the sacred images in the temple[86] became perpetual rapture when he was in the divine presence instead of in the presence of the image, and drawn close to divinity his thirsting soul enjoyed the delights of that ineffable beauty.[87] When the Alexandrian mysteries spread over Italy under the republic, no religion had ever brought to mankind so formal a promise of blest immortality as these, and this, more than anything else, lent them an {101} irresistible power of attraction. Instead of the vague and contradictory opinions of the philosophers in regard to the destiny of the soul, Serapis offered certainty founded on divine revelation corroborated by the faith of the countless generations that had adhered to it. What the votaries of Orpheus had confusedly discovered through the veil of the legends, and taught to Magna Grecia,[88] namely, that this earthly life was a trial, a preparation for a higher and purer life, that the happiness of an after-life could be secured by means of rites and observances revealed by the gods themselves, all this was now preached with a firmness and precision hitherto unknown. These eschatological doctrines in particular, helped Egypt to conquer the Latin world and especially the miserable masses, on whom the weight of all the iniquities of Roman society rested heavily. * * * * * The power and popularity of that belief in future life has left traces even in the French language, and in concluding this study, from which I have been compelled to exclude every picturesque detail, I would like to point out how a French word of to-day dimly perpetuates the memory of the old Egyptian ideas. During the cold nights of their long winters the Scandinavians dreamed of a Walhalla where the deceased warriors sat in well-closed brilliantly illuminated halls, warming themselves and drinking the strong liquor served by the Valkyries; but under the burning sky of Egypt, near the arid sand where thirst kills the traveler, people wished that their dead might find a limpid spring in their future wanderings to assuage the heat that devoured them, and that they might be {102} refreshed by the breezes of the north wind.[89] Even at Rome the adherents of the Alexandrian gods frequently inscribed the following wish on their tombs: "May Osiris give you fresh water."[90] Soon this water became, in a figurative sense, the fountain of life pouring out immortality to thirsting souls. The metaphor obtained such popularity that in Latin _refrigerium_ became synonymous with comfort and happiness. The term retained this meaning in the liturgy of the church,[91] and for that reason people continue to pray for spiritual _rafraîchissement_ of the dead although the Christian paradise has very little resemblance to the fields of Aalu. * * * * * {103} SYRIA. The religions of Syria never had the same solidarity in the Occident as those from Egypt or Asia Minor. From the coasts of Phoenicia and the valleys of Lebanon, from the borders of the Euphrates and the oases of the desert, they came at various periods, like the successive waves of the incoming tide, and existed side by side in the Roman world without uniting, in spite of their similarities. The isolation in which they remained and the persistent adherence of their believers to their particular rites were a consequence and reflection of the disunited condition of Syria herself, where the different tribes and districts remained more distinct than anywhere else, even after they had been brought together under the domination of Rome. They doggedly preserved their local gods and Semitic dialects. It would be impossible to outline each one of these religions in detail at this time and to reconstruct their history, because our meager information would not permit it, but we can indicate, in a general way, how they penetrated into the Occidental countries at various periods, and we can try to define their common characteristics by showing what new elements the Syrian paganism brought to the Romans. The first Semitic divinity to enter Italy was {104} _Atargatis_, frequently mistaken for the Phoenician Astarte, who had a famous temple at Bambyce or Hierapolis, not far from the Euphrates, and was worshiped with her husband, Hadad, in a considerable part of Syria besides. The Greeks considered her as the principal Syrian goddess ([Greek: Suria thea]), and in the Latin countries she was commonly known as _dea Syria_, a name corrupted into _Iasura_ by popular use. We all remember the unedifying descriptions of her itinerant priests that Lucian and Apuleius[1] have left. Led by an old eunuch of dubious habits, a crowd of painted young men marched along the highways with an ass that bore an elaborately adorned image of the goddess. Whenever they passed through a village or by some rich villa, they went through their sacred exercises. To the shrill accompaniment of their Syrian flutes they turned round and round, and with their heads thrown back fluttered about and gave vent to hoarse clamors until vertigo seized them and insensibility was complete. Then they flagellated themselves wildly, struck themselves with swords and shed their blood in front of a rustic crowd which pressed closely about them, and finally they took up a profitable collection from the wondering spectators. They received jars of milk and wine, cheeses, flour, bronze coins of small denominations and even some silver pieces, all of which disappeared in the folds of their capacious robes. If opportunity presented they knew how to increase their profits by means of clever thefts or by making commonplace predictions for a moderate consideration. This picturesque description, based on a novel by {105} Lucius of Patras, is undoubtedly extreme. It is difficult to believe that the sacerdotal corps of the goddess of Hierapolis should have consisted only of charlatans and thieves. But how can the presence in the Occident of that begging and low nomadic clergy be explained? It is certain that the first worshipers of the Syrian goddess in the Latin world were slaves. During the wars against Antiochus the Great a number of prisoners were sent to Italy to be sold at public auction, as was the custom, and the first appearance in Italy of the _Chaldaei_[2] has been connected with that event. The _Chaldaei_ were Oriental fortune-tellers who asserted that their predictions were based on the Chaldean astrology. They found credulous clients among the farm laborers, and Cato gravely exhorts the good landlord to oust them from his estate.[3] Beginning with the second century before Christ, merchants began to import Syrian slaves. At that time Delos was the great trade center in this human commodity, and in that island especially Atargatis was worshiped by citizens of Athens and Rome.[4] Trade spread her worship in the Occident.[5] We know that the great slave revolution that devastated Sicily in 134 B. C. was started by a slave from Apamea, a votary of the Syrian goddess. Simulating divine madness, he called his companions to arms, pretending to act in accordance with orders from heaven.[6] This detail, which we know by chance, shows how considerable a proportion of Semites there was in the gangs working the fields, and how much authority Atargatis enjoyed in the rural centers. Being too poor to build temples for their national goddess, those agricultural laborers {106} waited with their devotions until a band of itinerant _galli_ passed through the distant hamlet where the lot of the auction had sent them. The existence of those wandering priests depended, therefore, on the number of fellow-countrymen they met in the rural districts, who supported them by sacrificing a part of their poor savings. Towards the end of the republic those diviners appear to have enjoyed rather serious consideration at Rome. It was a pythoness from Syria that advised Marius on the sacrifices he was to perform.[7] Under the empire the importation of slaves increased. Depopulated Italy needed more and more foreign hands, and Syria furnished a large quota of the forced immigration of cultivators. But those Syrians, quick and intelligent as they were strong and industrious, performed many other functions. They filled the countless domestic positions in the palaces of the aristocracy and were especially appreciated as litter-bearers.[8] The imperial and municipal administrations, as well as the big contractors to whom customs and the mines were farmed out, hired or bought them in large numbers, and even in the remotest border provinces the _Syrus_ was found serving princes, cities or private individuals. The worship of the Syrian goddess profited considerably by the economic current that continually brought new worshipers. We find her mentioned in the first century of our era in a Roman inscription referring in precise terms to the slave market, and we know that Nero took a devout fancy to the stranger that did not, however, last very long.[9] In the popular Trastevere quarter she had a temple until the end of paganism.[10] {107} During the imperial period, however, the slaves were no longer the only missionaries that came from Syria, and Atargatis was no longer the only divinity from that country to be worshiped in the Occident. The propagation of the Semitic worship progressed for the most part in a different manner under the empire. At the beginning of our era the Syrian merchants, _Syri negotiatores_, undertook a veritable colonization of the Latin provinces.[11] During the second century before Christ the traders of that nation had established settlements along the coast of Asia Minor, on the Piraeus, and in the Archipelago. At Delos, a small island but a large commercial center, they maintained several associations that worshiped their national gods, in particular Hadad and Atargatis. But the wars that shook the Orient at the end of the republic, and above all the growth of piracy, ruined maritime commerce and stopped emigration. This began again with renewed vigor when the establishment of the empire guaranteed the safety of the seas and when the Levantine traffic attained a development previously unknown. We can trace the history of the Syrian establishments in the Latin provinces from the first to the seventh century, and recently we have begun to appreciate their economic, social and religious importance at its true value. The Syrians' love of lucre was proverbial. Active, compliant and able, frequently little scrupulous, they knew how to conclude first small deals, then larger ones, everywhere. Using the special talents of their race to advantage, they succeeded in establishing themselves on all coasts of the Mediterranean, even in {108} Spain.[12] At Malaga an inscription mentions a corporation formed by them. The Italian ports where business was especially active, Pozzuoli, Ostia, later Naples, attracted them in great numbers. But they did not confine themselves to the seashore; they penetrated far into the interior of the countries, wherever they hoped to find profitable trade. They followed the commercial highways and traveled up the big rivers. By way of the Danube they went as far as Pannonia, by way of the Rhone they reached Lyons. In Gaul they were especially numerous. In this new country that had just been opened to commerce fortunes could be made rapidly. A rescript discovered on the range of the Lebanon is addressed to sailors from Arles, who had charge of the transportation of grain, and in the department of Ain a bilingual epitaph has been found mentioning a merchant of the third century, Thaïm or Julian, son of Saad, decurion of the city of Canatha in Syria, who owned two factories in the Rhone basin, where he handled goods from Aquitania.[13] Thus the Syrians spread over the entire province as far as Treves, where they had a strong colony. Not even the barbarian invasions of the fifth century stopped their immigration. Saint Jerome describes them traversing the entire Roman world amidst the troubles of the invasion, prompted by the lust of gain to defy all dangers. In the barbarian society the part played by this civilized and city-bred element was even more considerable. Under the Merovingians in about 591 they had sufficient influence at Paris to have one of their number elected bishop and to gain possession of all ecclesiastical offices. Gregory of Tours tells how King Gontrand, on entering the city of Orleans {109} in 585, was received by a crowd praising him "in the language of the Latins, the Jews and the Syrians."[14] The merchant colonies existed until the Saracen corsairs destroyed the commerce of the Mediterranean. Those establishments exercised a strong influence upon the economic and material life of the Latin provinces, especially in Gaul. As bankers the Syrians concentrated a large share of the money business in their hands and monopolized the importing of the valuable Levantine commodities as well as of the articles of luxury; they sold wines, spices, glassware, silks and purple fabrics, also objects wrought by goldsmiths, to be used as patterns by the native artisans. Their moral and religious influence was not less considerable: for instance, it has been shown that they furthered the development of monastic life during the Christian period, and that the devotion to the crucifix[15] that grew up in opposition to the monophysites, was introduced into the Occident by them. During the first five centuries Christians felt an unconquerable repugnance to the representation of the Saviour of the world nailed to an instrument of punishment more infamous than the guillotine of to-day. The Syrians were the first to substitute reality in all its pathetic horror for a vague symbolism. In pagan times the religious ascendency of that immigrant population was no less remarkable. The merchants always took an interest in the affairs of heaven as well as in those of earth. At all times Syria was a land of ardent devotion, and in the first century its children were as fervid in propagating their barbarian gods in the Occident as after their conversion they were enthusiastic in spreading Christianity as far {110} as Turkestan and China. As soon as the merchants had established their places of business in the islands of the Archipelago during the Alexandrian period, and in the Latin period under the empire, they founded chapels in which they practised their exotic rites. It was easy for the divinities of the Phoenician coast to cross the seas. Among them were Adonis, whom the women of Byblos mourned; Balmarcodes, "the Lord of the dances," who came from Beirut; Marna, the master of rain, worshiped at Gaza; and Maiuma,[16] whose nautical holiday was celebrated every spring on the coast near Ostia as well as in the Orient. Besides these half Hellenized religions, others of a more purely Semitic nature came from the interior of the country, because the merchants frequently were natives of the cities of the _Hinterland_, as for instance Apamea or Epiphanea in Coele-Syria, or even of villages in that flat country. As Rome incorporated the small kingdoms beyond the Lebanon and the Orontes that had preserved a precarious independence, the current of emigration increased. In 71 Commagene, which lies between the Taurus and the Euphrates, was annexed by Vespasian, a little later the dynasties of Chalcis and Emesa were also deprived of their power. Nero, it appears, took possession of Damascus; half a century later Trajan established the new province of Arabia in the south (106 A. D.), and the oasis of Palmyra, a great mercantile center, lost its autonomy at the same time. In this manner Rome extended her direct authority as far as the desert, over countries that were only superficially Hellenized, and where the native devotions had preserved all their {111} savage fervor. From that time constant communication was established between Italy and those regions which had heretofore been almost inaccessible. As roads were built commerce developed, and together with the interests of trade the needs of administration created an incessant exchange of men, of products and of beliefs between those out-of-the-way countries and the Latin provinces. These annexations, therefore, were followed by a renewed influx of Syrian divinities into the Occident. At Pozzuoli, the last port of call of the Levantine vessels, there was a temple to the Baal of Damascus (_Jupiter Damascenus_) in which leading citizens officiated, and there were altars on which two golden camels[17] were offered to Dusares, a divinity who had come from the interior of Arabia. They kept company with a divinity of more ancient repute, the Hadad of Baabek-Heliopolis (_Jupiter Heliopolitanus_), whose immense temple, considered one of the world's wonders,[18] had been restored by Antoninus Pius, and may still be seen facing Lebanon in majestic elegance. Heliopolis and Beirut had been the most ancient colonies founded by Augustus in Syria. The god of Heliopolis participated in the privileged position granted to the inhabitants of those two cities, who worshiped in a common devotion,[19] and he was naturalized as a Roman with greater ease than the others. The conquest of all Syria as far as Euphrates and the subjection of even a part of Mesopotamia aided the diffusion of the Semitic religions in still another manner. From these regions, which were partly inhabited by fighting races, the Cæsars drew recruits for the imperial army. They levied a great number of {112} legionaries, but especially auxiliary troops, who were transferred to the frontiers. Troopers and foot-soldiers from those provinces furnished important contingents to the garrisons of Europe and Africa. For instance, a cohort of one thousand archers from Emesa was established in Pannonia, another of archers from Damascus in upper Germany; Mauretania received irregulars from Palmyra, and bodies of troops levied in Ituraea, on the outskirts of the Arabian desert, were encamped in Dacia, Germany, Egypt and Cappadocia at the same time. Commagene alone furnished no less than six cohorts of five hundred men each that were sent to the Danube and into Numidia.[20] The number of inscriptions consecrated by soldiers proves both the ardor of their faith and the diversity of their beliefs. Like the sailors of to-day who are transferred to strange climes and exposed to incessant danger, they were constantly inclined to invoke the protection of heaven, and remained attached to the gods who seemed to remind them in their exile of the distant home country. Therefore it is not surprising that the Syrians who served in the army should have practised the religion of their Baals in the neighborhood of their camps. In the north of England, near the wall of Hadrian, an inscription in verse in honor of the goddess of Hierapolis has been found; its author was a prefect, probably of a cohort of Hamites stationed at this distant post.[21] Not all the soldiers, however, went to swell the ranks of believers worshiping divinities that had long been adopted by the Latin world, as did that officer. They also brought along new ones that had come from a still greater distance than their predecessors, in fact {113} from the outskirts of the barbarian world, because from those regions in particular trained men could be obtained. There were, for instance, _Baltis_, an "Our Lady" from Osroene beyond the Euphrates;[22] _Aziz_, the "strong god" of Edessa, who was identified with the star Lucifer;[23] _Malakbel_, the "Lord's messenger," patron of the soldiers from Palmyra, who appeared with several companions at Rome, in Numidia and in Dacia.[24] The most celebrated of those gods then was the Jupiter of Doliche, a small city of Commagene, that owed its fame to him. Because of the troops coming from that region, this obscure Baal, whose name is mentioned by no author, found worshipers in every Roman province as far as Africa, Germany and Brittany. The number of known inscriptions consecrated to him exceeds a hundred, and it is still growing. Being originally nothing but a god of lightning, represented as brandishing an ax, this local genius of the tempest was elevated to the rank of tutelary divinity of the imperial armies.[25] The diffusion of the Semitic religions in Italy that commenced imperceptibly under the republic became more marked after the first century of our era. Their expansion and multiplication were rapid, and they attained the apogee of their power during the third century. Their influence became almost predominant when the accession of the Severi lent them the support of a court that was half Syrian. Functionaries of all kinds, senators and officers, vied with each other in devotion to the patron gods of their sovereigns, gods which the sovereigns patronized in turn. Intelligent and ambitious princesses like Julia Domna, Julia Maesa, Julia Mammea, whose ascendency was very {114} considerable, became propagators of their national religion. We all know the audacious pronunciamento of the year 218 that placed upon the throne the fourteen-year-old emperor Heliogabalus, a worshiper of the Baal of Emesa. His intention was to give supremacy over all other gods to his barbarian divinity, who had heretofore been almost unknown. The ancient authors narrate with indignation how this crowned priest attempted to elevate his black stone, the coarse idol brought from Emesa, to the rank of supreme divinity of the empire by subordinating the whole ancient pantheon to it; they never tire of giving revolting details about the dissoluteness of the debaucheries for which the festivities of the new _Sol invictus Elagabal_ furnished a pretext.[26] However, the question arises whether the Roman historians, being very hostile to that foreigner who haughtily favored the customs of his own country, did not misrepresent or partly misunderstand the facts. Heliogabalus's attempt to have his god recognized as supreme, and to establish a kind of monotheism in heaven as there was monarchy on earth, was undoubtedly too violent, awkward and premature, but it was in keeping with the aspirations of the time, and it must be remembered that the imperial policy could find the support of powerful Syrian colonies not only at Rome but all over the empire. Half a century later Aurelian[27] was inspired by the same idea when he created a new worship, that of the "Invincible Sun." Worshiped in a splendid temple, by pontiffs equal in rank to those of ancient Rome, having magnificent plays held in his honor every fourth year, _Sol invictus_ was also elevated to the supreme rank in the divine hierarchy, and became the special {115} protector of the emperors and the empire. The country where Aurelian found the pattern he sought to reproduce, was again Syria. Into the new sanctuary he transferred the images of Bel and Helios, taken from Palmyra, after it had fallen before his arms. * * * * * The sovereigns, then, twice attempted to replace the Capitoline Jupiter by a Semitic god and to make a Semitic religion the principal and official religion of the Romans. They proclaimed the fall of the old Latin idolatry and the accession of a new paganism taken from Syria. What was the superiority attributed to the creeds of that country? Why did even an Illyrian general like Aurelian look for the most perfect type of pagan religion in that country? That is the problem to be solved, but it must remain unsolved unless an exact account is given of the fate of the Syrian beliefs under the empire. That question has not as yet been very completely elucidated. Besides the superficial opuscule of Lucian on the _dea Syria_, we find scarcely any reliable information in the Greek or Latin writers. The work by Philo of Byblos is a euhemeristic interpretation of an alleged Phoenician cosmogony, and a composition of little merit. Neither have we the original texts of the Semitic liturgies, as we have for Egypt. Whatever we have learned we owe especially to the inscriptions, and while these furnish highly valuable indications as to the date and area of expansion of these religions, they tell us hardly anything about their doctrines. Light on this subject may be expected from the excavations that are being made in the great sanctuaries of Syria, and also from a more exact interpretation {116} of the sculptured monuments that we now possess in great numbers, especially those of Jupiter Dolichenus. Some characteristics of the Semitic paganism, however, are known at present, and it must be admitted that it would appear at a disadvantage if judged by those noticeable features that first attract our attention. It had retained a stock of very primitive ideas and some aboriginal nature worship that had lasted through many centuries and was to persist, in part, under Christianity and Islam until the present day.[28] Such were the worship of high elevations on which a rustic enclosure sometimes marked the limits of the consecrated territory; the worship of the waters that flow to the sea, the streams that arise in the mountains, the springs that gush out of the soil, the ponds, the lakes and the wells, into all of which offerings were thrown with the idea either of venerating in them the thirst-quenching liquid or else the fecund nature of the earth; the worship of the trees that shaded the altars and that nobody dared to fell or mutilate; the worship of stones, especially of the rough stones called bethels that were regarded, as their name (_beth-El_) indicates, as the residence of the god, or rather, as the matter in which the god was embodied.[29] Aphrodite Astarte was worshiped in the shape of a conical stone at Paphos, and a black aerolite covered with projections and depressions to which a symbolic meaning was attributed represented Elagabal, and was transferred from Emesa to Rome, as we have said. The animals, as well as inanimate things, received their share of homage. Remnants of the old Semitic zoolatry perpetuated themselves until the end of paganism and even later. Frequently the gods were {117} represented standing erect on animals. Thus the Dolichean Baal stood on a steer, and his spouse on a lion. Around certain temples there were sacred parks, in which savage beasts roamed at liberty,[30] a reminder of the time when they were considered divine. Two animals especially were the objects of universal veneration, the pigeon and the fish. Vagrant multitudes of pigeons received the traveler landing at Ascalon,[31] and they played about the enclosures of all the temples of Astarte[32] in flocks resembling white whirlwinds. The pigeon belonged, properly speaking, to the goddess of love, whose symbol it has remained above all to the people worshiping that goddess. "Quid referam ut volitet crebras intacta per urbes Alba Palaestino sancta columba Syro?"[33] The fish was sacred to Atargatis, who undoubtedly had been represented in that shape at first, as Dagon always was.[34] The fish were kept in ponds in the proximity of the temples.[35] A superstitious fear prevented people from touching them, because the goddess punished the sacrilegious by covering their bodies with ulcers and tumors.[36] At certain mystic repasts, however, the priests and initiates consumed the forbidden food in the belief that they were absorbing the flesh of the divinity herself. That worship and its practices, which were spread over Syria, probably suggested the ichthus symbolism in the Christian period.[37] However, over this lower and primordial stratum that still cropped out here and there, other less rudimentary beliefs had formed. Besides inanimate objects and animals, the Syrian paganism worshiped personal divinities especially. The character of the gods that were originally adored by the Semitic tribes has been {118} ingeniously reconstructed.[38] Each tribe had its Baal and Baalat who protected it and whom only its members were permitted to worship. The name of _Ba'al_, "master," summarizes the conception people had of him. In the first place he was regarded as the sovereign of his votaries, and his position in regard to them was that of an Oriental potentate towards his subjects; they were his servants, or rather his slaves.[39] The Baal was at the same time the "master" or proprietor of the country in which he resided and which he made fertile by causing springs to gush from its soil. Or his domain was the firmament and he was the _dominus caeli_, whence he made the waters fall to the roar of tempests. He was always united with a celestial or earthly "queen" and, in the third place, he was the "lord" or husband of the "lady" associated with him. The one represented the male, the other the female principle; they were the authors of all fecundity, and as a consequence the worship of the divine couple often assumed a sensual and voluptuous character. As a matter of fact, immorality was nowhere so flagrant as in the temples of Astarte, whose female servants honored the goddess with untiring ardor. In no country was sacred prostitution so developed as in Syria, and in the Occident it was to be found practically only where the Phoenicians had imported it, as on Mount Eryx. Those aberrations, that were kept up until the end of paganism,[40] probably have their explanation in the primitive constitution of the Semitic tribe, and the religious custom must have been originally one of the forms of exogamy, which compelled the woman to unite herself first with a stranger.[41] {119} As a second blemish, the Semitic religions practised human immolations longer than any other religion, sacrificing children and grown men in order to please sanguinary gods. In spite of Hadrian's prohibition of those murderous offerings,[42] they were maintained in certain clandestine rites and in the lowest practices of magic, up to the fall of the idols, and even later. They corresponded to the ideas of a period during which the life of a captive or slave had no greater value than that of an animal. These sacred practices and many others, on which Lucian complacently enlarges in his opuscule on the goddess of Hierapolis, daily revived the habits of a barbarous past in the temples of Syria. Of all the conceptions that had successively dominated the country, none had completely disappeared. As in Egypt, beliefs of very different date and origin coexisted, without any attempt to make them agree, or without success when the task was undertaken. In these beliefs zoolatry, litholatry and all the other nature worships outlived the savagery that had created them. More than anywhere else the gods had remained the chieftains of clans[43] because the tribal organizations of Syria were longer lived and more developed than those of any other region. Under the empire many districts were still subjected to the tribal régime and commanded by "ethnarchs" or "phylarchs."[44] Religion, which sacrificed the lives of the men and the honor of the women to the divinity, had in many regards remained on the moral level of unsocial and sanguinary tribes. Its obscene and atrocious rites called forth exasperated indignation on the part of {120} the Roman conscience when Heliogabalus attempted to introduce them into Italy with his Baal of Emesa. * * * * * How, then, can one explain the fact that in spite of all, the Syrian gods imposed themselves upon the Occident and made even the Cæsars accept them? The reason is that the Semitic paganism can no more be judged by certain revolting practices, that perpetuated in the heart of civilization the barbarity and puerilities of an uncultivated society, than the religion of the Nile can be so judged. As in the case of Egypt we must distinguish between the sacerdotal religion and the infinitely varied popular religion that was embodied in local customs. Syria possessed a number of great sanctuaries in which an educated clergy meditated and expatiated upon the nature of the divine beings and on the meaning of traditions inherited from remote ancestors. As their own interests demanded, that clergy constantly amended the sacred traditions and modified their spirit when the letter was immutable, in order to make them agree with the new aspirations of a more advanced period. They had their mysteries and their initiates to whom they revealed a wisdom that was above the vulgar beliefs of the masses.[45] Frequently we can draw diametrically opposite conclusions from the same principle. In that manner the old idea of _tabu_, that seems to have transformed the temples of Astarte into houses of debauchery, also became the source of a severe code of morals. The Semitic tribes were haunted with the fear of the tabu. A multitude of things were either impure or sacred because, in the original confusion, those two notions {121} had not been clearly differentiated. Man's ability to use the products of nature to satisfy his needs, was thus limited by a number of prohibitions, restrictions and conditions. He who touched a forbidden object was soiled and corrupted, his fellows did not associate with him and he could no longer participate in the sacrifices. In order to wipe out the blemish, he had recourse to ablutions and other ceremonies known to the priests. Purity, that had originally been considered simply physical, soon became ritualistic and finally spiritual. Life was surrounded by a network of circumstances subject to certain conditions, every violation of which meant a fall and demanded penance. The anxiety to remain constantly in a state of holiness or regain that state when it had been lost, filled one's entire existence. It was not peculiar to the Semitic tribes, but they ascribed a prime importance to it.[46] And the gods, who necessarily possessed this quality in an eminent degree, were holy beings ([Greek: hagioi])[47] _par excellence_. In this way principles of conduct and dogmas of faith have frequently been derived from instinctive and absurd old beliefs. All theological doctrines that were accepted in Syria modified the prevailing ancient conception of the Baals. But in our present state of knowledge it is very difficult indeed to determine the shares that the various influences contributed, from the conquests of Alexander to the Roman domination, to make the Syrian paganism what it became under the Cæsars. The civilization of the Seleucid empire is little known, and we cannot determine what caused the alliance of Greek thought with the Semitic traditions.[48] The religions of the neighboring nations {122} also had an undeniable influence. Phoenicia and Lebanon remained moral tributaries of Egypt long after they had liberated themselves from the suzerainty of the Pharaohs. The theogony of Philo of Byblos took gods and myths from that country, and at Heliopolis Hadad was honored "according to Egyptian rather than Syrian rite."[49] The rigorous monotheism of the Jews, who were dispersed over the entire country, must also have acted as an active ferment of transformation.[50] But it was Babylon that retained the intellectual supremacy, even after its political ruin. The powerful sacerdotal caste ruling it did not fall with the independence of the country, and it survived the conquests of Alexander as it had previously lived through the Persian domination. The researches of Assyriologists have shown that its ancient worship persisted under the Seleucides, and at the time of Strabo the "Chaldeans" still discussed cosmology and first principles in the rival schools of Borsippa and Orchoë.[51] The ascendancy of that erudite clergy affected all surrounding regions; it was felt by Persia in the east, Cappadocia in the north, but more than anywhere else by the Syrians, who were connected with the Oriental Semites by bonds of language and blood. Even after the Parthians had wrested the valley of the Euphrates from the Seleucides, relations with the great temples of that region remained uninterrupted. The plains of Mesopotamia, inhabited by races of like origin, extended on both sides of an artificial border line; great commercial roads followed the course of the two rivers flowing into the Persian Gulf or cut across the desert, and the pilgrims came to Babylon, as Lucian tells us, to perform their devotions to the Lady of Bambyce.[52] {123} Ever since the Captivity, constant spiritual relations had existed between Judaism and the great religious metropolis. At the birth of Christianity they manifested themselves in the rise of gnostic sects in which the Semitic mythology formed strange combinations with Jewish and Greek ideas and furnished the foundation for extravagant superstructures.[53] Finally, during the decline of the empire, it was Babylon again from which emanated Manicheism, the last form of idolatry received in the Latin world. We can imagine how powerful the religious influence of that country on the Syrian paganism must have been. That influence manifested itself in various ways. First, it introduced new gods. In this way Bel passed from the Babylonian pantheon into that of Palmyra and was honored throughout northern Syria.[54] It also caused ancient divinities to be arranged in new groups. To the primitive couple of the Baal and the Baalat a third member was added in order to form one of those triads dears to Chaldean theology. This took place at Hierapolis as well as at Heliopolis, and the three gods of the latter city, Hadad, Atargatis and Simios, became Jupiter, Venus and Mercury in Latin inscriptions.[55] Finally, and most important, astrolatry wrought radical changes in the characters of the celestial powers, and, as a further consequence, in the entire Roman paganism. In the first place it gave them a second personality in addition to their own nature. The sidereal myths superimposed themselves upon the agrarian myths, and gradually obliterated them. Astrology, born on the banks of the Euphrates, imposed itself in Egypt upon the haughty and unapproachable clergy of the most conservative of all nations.[56] Syria {124} received it without reserve and surrendered unconditionally;[57] numismatics and archeology as well as literature prove this. King Antiochus of Commagene, for instance, who died 34 B. C., built himself a monumental tomb on a spur of the Taurus, in which he placed his horoscope, designed on a large bas-relief, beside the images of his ancestral divinities.[58] The importance which the introduction of the Syrian religions into the Occident has for us consists therefore in the fact that indirectly they brought certain theological doctrines of the Chaldeans with them, just as Isis and Serapis carried beliefs of old Egypt from Alexandria to the Occident. The Roman empire received successively the religious tribute of the two great nations that had formerly ruled the Oriental world. It is characteristic that the god Bel whom Aurelian brought from Asia to set up as the protector of his states, was in reality a Babylonian who had emigrated to Palmyra,[59] a cosmopolitan center apparently predestined by virtue of its location to become the intermediary between the civilizations of the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. The influence exercised by the speculations of the Chaldeans upon Greco-Roman thought can be asserted positively, but cannot as yet be strictly defined. It was at once philosophic and religious, literary and popular. The entire neo-Platonist school used the names of those venerable masters, but it cannot be determined how much it really owes to them. A selection of poems that has often been quoted since the third century, under the title of "Chaldaic Oracles" ([Greek: Logia Chaldaika]) combines the ancient Hellenic theories with a fantastic {125} mysticism that was certainly imported from the Orient. It is to Babylonia what the literature of Hermes Trismegistus is to Egypt, and it is equally difficult to determine the nature of the ingredients that the author put into his sacred compositions. But at an earlier date the Syrian religions had spread far and wide in the Occident ideas conceived on the distant banks of the Euphrates. I shall try to indicate briefly what their share in the pagan syncretism was. We have seen that the gods from Alexandria gained souls especially by the promise of blessed immortality. Those from Syria must also have satisfied doubts tormenting all the minds of that time. As a matter of fact the old Semitic ideas on man's fate in after-life were little comforting. We know how sad, dull and hopeless their conception of life after death was. The dead descended into a subterranean realm where they led a miserable existence, a weak reflection of the one they had lost; since they were subject to wants and suffering, they had to be supported by funeral offerings placed on their sepulchers by their descendants. Those ancient beliefs and customs were found also in primitive Greece and Italy. This rudimentary eschatology, however, gave way to quite a different conception, one that was closely related to the Chaldean astrology, and which spread over the Occident towards the end of the republic. According to this doctrine the soul returned to heaven after death, to live there among the divine stars. While it remained on earth it was subject to all the bitter necessities of a destiny determined by the revolutions of the stars; but when it ascended into the upper regions, it escaped that fate and even the limits of time; {126} it shared equally in the immortality of the sidereal gods that surrounded it.[60] In the opinion of some, the soul was attracted by the rays of the sun, and after passing through the moon, where it was purified, it lost itself in the shining star of day.[61] Another more purely astrological theory, that was undoubtedly a development of the former, taught that the soul descended to earth from the heights of heaven by passing through the spheres of the seven planets. During its passage it acquired the dispositions and qualities proper to each planet. After death it returned to its original abode by the same route. To get from one sphere to another, it had to pass a door guarded by a commandant ([Greek: archôn]).[62] Only the souls of initiates knew the password that made those incorruptible guardians yield, and under the conduct of a psychopompus[63] they ascended safely from zone to zone. As the soul rose it divested itself of the passions and qualities it had acquired on its descent to the earth as though they were garments, and, free from sensuality, it penetrated into the eighth heaven to enjoy everlasting happiness as a subtle essence. Perhaps this doctrine, undoubtedly of Babylonian origin, was not generally accepted by the Syrian religions, as it was by the mysteries of Mithra, but these religions, impregnated with astrology, certainly propagated the belief that the souls of those worshipers that had led pious lives were elevated to the heights of heaven, where an apotheosis made them the equals of the luminous gods.[64] Under the empire this doctrine slowly supplanted all others; the Elysian fields, which the votaries of Isis and Serapis still located in {127} the depths of the earth, were transferred into the ether bathing the fixed stars,[65] and the underworld was thereafter reserved for the wicked who had not been allowed to pass through the celestial gates. The sublime regions occupied by the purified souls were also the abode of the supreme god.[66] When it transformed the ideas on the destiny of man, astrology also modified those relating to the nature of the divinity. In this matter the Syrian religions were especially original; for even if the Alexandrian mysteries offered man just as comforting prospects of immortality as the eschatology of their rivals, they were backward in building up a commensurate theology. To the Semitic races belongs the honor of having reformed the ancient fetichism most thoroughly. Their base and narrow conceptions of early times to which we can trace their existence, broaden and rise until they form a kind of monotheism. As we have seen, the Syrian tribes worshiped a god of lightning,[67] like all primitive races. That god opened the reservoirs of the firmament to let the rain fall and split the giant trees of the woods with the double ax that always remained his emblem.[68] When the progress of astronomy removed the constellations to incommensurable distances, the "Baal of the Heavens" (_Ba'al [vs]amîn_) had to grow in majesty. Undoubtedly at the time of the Achemenides, he was connected with the Ahura-Mazda of the Persians, the ancient god of the vault of heaven, who had become the highest physical and moral power, and this connection helped to transform the old genius of thunder.[69] People continued to worship the material heaven in him; under the Romans he was still simply called {128} _Caelus_, as well as "Celestial Jupiter" (_Jupiter Caelestis_, [Greek: Zeus Ouranios]),[70] but it was a heaven studied by a sacred science that venerated its harmonious mechanism. The Seleucides represented him on their coins with a crescent over his forehead and carrying a sun with seven rays, to symbolize the fact that he presided over the course of the stars;[71] or else he was shown with the two Dioscuri at his side, heroes who enjoyed life and suffered death in turn, according to the Greek myth, and who had become the symbols of the two celestial hemispheres. Religious uranography placed the residence of the supreme divinity in the most elevated region of the world, fixing its abode in the zone most distant from the earth, above the planets and the fixed stars. This fact was intended to be expressed by the term Most-High ([Greek: Hupsistos]) applied to the Syrian Baals as well as to Jehovah.[72] According to this cosmic religion, the Most High resided in the immense orb that contained the spheres of all the stars and embraced the entire universe which was subject to his domination. The Latins translated the name of this "Hypsistos" by _Jupiter summus exsuperantissimus_[73] to indicate his preeminence over all divine beings. As a matter of fact, his power was infinite. The primary postulate of the Chaldean astrology was that all phenomena and events of this world were necessarily determined by sidereal influence. The changes of nature, as well as the dispositions of men, were controlled according to fate, by the divine energies that resided in the heavens. In other words, the gods were almighty; they were the masters of destiny that governed the universe absolutely. The notion of their {129} omnipotence resulted from the development of the ancient autocracy with which the Baals were credited. As we have stated, they were conceived after the image of an Asiatic monarch, and the religious terminology was evidently intended to display the humility of their priests toward them. In Syria we find nothing analogous to what existed in Egypt, where the priest thought he could compel the gods to act, and even dared to threaten them.[74] The distance separating the human and the divine always was much greater with the Semitic tribes, and all that astrology did was to emphasize the distance more strongly by giving it a doctrinal foundation and a scientific appearance. In the Latin world the Asiatic religions propagated the conception of the absolute and illimitable sovereignty of God over the earth. Apuleius calls the Syrian goddess _omnipotens et omniparens_, "mistress and mother of all things."[75] The observation of the starry skies, moreover, had led the Chaldeans to the notion of a divine eternity. The constancy of the sidereal revolutions inspired the conclusion as to their perpetuity. The stars follow their ever uncompleted courses unceasingly; as soon as the end of their journey is reached, they resume without stopping the road already covered, and the cycles of years in which their movements take place extend from the indefinite past into the indefinite future.[76] Thus a clergy of astronomers necessarily conceived Baal, "Lord of the heavens," as the "Master of eternity" or "He whose name is praised through all eternity"[77]--titles which constantly recur in Semitic inscriptions. The divine stars did not die, like Osiris or Attis; whenever they seemed to weaken, they were {130} born to a new life and always remained invincible (_invicti_). Together with the mysteries of the Syrian Baals, this theological notion penetrated into Occidental paganism.[78] Whenever an inscription to a _deus aeternus_ is found in the Latin provinces it refers to a Syrian sidereal god, and it is a remarkable fact that this epithet did not enter the ritual before the second century, at the time the worship of the god Heaven (_Caelus_)[79] was propagated. That the philosophers had long before placed the first cause beyond the limits of time was of no consequence, for their theories had not penetrated into the popular consciousness nor modified the traditional formulary of the liturgies. To the people the divinities were beings more beautiful, more vigorous, and more powerful than man, but born like him, and exempt only from old age and death, the immortals of old Homer. The Syrian priests diffused the idea of a god without beginning and without end through the Roman world, and thus contributed, along lines parallel with the Jewish proselytism, to lend the authority of dogma to what had previously been only a metaphysical theory. The Baals were universal as well as eternal, and their power became limitless in regard to space as it had been in regard to time. These two principles were correlative. The title of "_mar'olam_" which the Baals bore occasionally may be translated by "Lord of the universe," or by "Lord of eternity," and efforts certainly have been made to claim the twofold quality for them.[80] Peopled with divine constellations and traversed by planets assimilated to the inhabitants of Olympus, the heavens determined the destinies of the {131} entire human race by their movements, and the whole earth was subject to the changes produced by their revolutions.[81] Consequently the old _Ba'al [vs]amîn_ was necessarily transformed into a universal power. Of course, even under the Cæsars there existed in Syria traces of a period when the local god was the fetich of a clan and could be worshiped by the members of that clan only, a period when strangers were admitted to his altars only after a ceremony of initiation, as brothers, or at least as guests and clients.[82] But from the period when our knowledge of the history of the great divinities of Heliopolis or Hierapolis begins, these divinities were regarded as common to all Syrians, and crowds of pilgrims came from distant countries to obtain grace in the holy cities. As protectors of the entire human race the Baals gained proselytes in the Occident, and their temples witnessed gatherings of devotees of every race and nationality. In this respect the Baals were distinctly different from Jehovah. The essence of paganism implies that the nature of a divinity broadens as the number of its votaries increases. Everybody credits it with some new quality, and its character becomes more complex. As it gains in power it also has a tendency to dominate its companion gods and to concentrate their functions in itself. To escape this threatening absorption, these gods must be of a very sharply defined personality and of a very original character. The vague Semitic deities, however, were devoid of a well-defined individuality. We fail to find among them a well organized society of immortals, like that of the Greek Olympus where each divinity had its own features and its own particular {132} life full of adventures and experiences, and each followed its special calling to the exclusion of all the others. One was a physician, another a poet, a third a shepherd, hunter or blacksmith. The Greek inscriptions found in Syria are, in this regard, eloquently concise.[83] Usually they have the name of Zeus accompanied by some simple epithet: kurios ([Greek: kurios], Lord), _aniketos_ ([Greek: anikêtos], invincible), _megistos_ ([Greek: megistos], greatest). All these Baals seem to have been brothers. They were personalities of indeterminate outline and interchangeable powers and were readily confused. At the time the Romans came into contact with Syria, it had already passed through a period of syncretism similar to the one we can study with greater precision in the Latin world. The ancient exclusiveness and the national particularism had been overcome. The Baals of the great sanctuaries had enriched themselves with the virtues[84] of their neighbors; then, always following the same process, they had taken certain features from foreign divinities brought over by the Greek conquerors. In that manner their characters had become indefinable, they performed incompatible functions and possessed irreconcilable attributes. An inscription found in Britain[85] assimilates the Syrian goddess to Peace, Virtue, Ceres, Cybele, and even to the sign of the Virgin. In conformity with the law governing the development of paganism, the Semitic gods tended to become pantheistic because they comprehended all nature and were identified with it. The various deities were nothing but different aspects under which the supreme and infinite being manifested itself. Although Syria {133} remained deeply and even coarsely idolatrous in practice, in theory it approached monotheism or, better perhaps, henotheism. By an absurd but curious etymology the name Hadad has been explained as "one, one" (_'ad 'ad_).[86] Everywhere the narrow and divided polytheism showed a confused tendency to elevate itself into a superior synthesis, but in Syria astrology lent the firmness of intelligent conviction to notions that were vague elsewhere. The Chaldean cosmology, which deified all elements but ascribed a predominant influence to the stars, ruled the entire Syrian syncretism. It considered the world as a great organism which was kept intact by an intimate solidarity, and whose parts continually influenced each other. The ancient Semites believed therefore that the divinity could be regarded as embodied in the waters, in the fire of the lightning, in stones or plants. But the most powerful gods were the constellations and the planets that governed the course of time and of all things. The sun was supreme because it led the starry choir, because it was the king and guide of all the other luminaries and therefore the master of the whole world.[87] The astronomical doctrines of the "Chaldeans" taught that this incandescent globe alternately attracted and repelled the other sidereal bodies, and from this principle the Oriental theologians had concluded that it must determine the entire life of the universe, inasmuch as it regulated the movements of the heavens. As the "intelligent light" it was especially the creator of human reason, and just as it repelled and attracted the planets in turn, it was believed {134} to send out souls, at the time of birth, into the bodies they animated, and to cause them to return to its bosom after death by means of a series of emissions and absorptions. Later on, when the seat of the Most-High was placed beyond the limits of the universe, the radiant star that gives us light became the visible image of the supreme power, the source of all life and all intelligence, the intermediary between an inaccessible god and mankind, and the one object of special homage from the multitude.[88] Solar pantheism, which grew up among the Syrians of the Hellenistic period as a result of the influence of Chaldean astrolatry, imposed itself upon the whole Roman world under the empire. Our very rapid sketch of the constitution of that theological system shows incidentally the last form assumed by the pagan idea of God. In this matter Syria was Rome's teacher and predecessor. The last formula reached by the religion of the pagan Semites and in consequence by that of the Romans, was a divinity unique, almighty, eternal, universal and ineffable, that revealed itself throughout nature, but whose most splendid and most energetic manifestation was the sun. To arrive at the Christian monotheism[89] only one final tie had to be broken, that is to say, this supreme being residing in a distant heaven had to be removed beyond the world. So we see once more in this instance, how the propagation of the Oriental cults levelled the roads for Christianity and heralded its triumph. Although astrology was always fought by the church, it had nevertheless prepared the minds for the dogmas the church was to proclaim. * * * * * {135} PERSIA. The dominant historical fact in western Asia in ancient times was the opposition between the Greco-Roman and Persian civilizations, which was itself only an episode in the great struggle that was constantly in progress between the Orient and the Occident in those countries. In the first enthusiasm of their conquests, the Persians extended their dominion as far as the cities of Ionia and the islands of the Ægean Sea, but their power of expansion was broken at the foot of the Acropolis. One hundred and fifty years later, Alexander destroyed the empire of the Achemenides and carried Hellenic culture to the banks of the Indus. After two and a half centuries the Parthians under the Arsacid dynasty advanced to the borders of Syria, and Mithradates Eupator, an alleged descendant of Darius, penetrated to the heart of Greece at the head of his Persian nobility from Pontus. After the flood came the ebb. The reconstructed Roman empire of Augustus soon reduced Armenia, Cappadocia and even the kingdom of the Parthians to a kind of vassalage. But after the middle of the third century the Sassanid dynasty restored the power of Persia and revived its ancient pretensions. From that time until the triumph of Islam it was one long {136} duel between the two rival states, in which now one was victorious and now the other, while neither was ever decisively beaten. An ambassador of king Narses to Galerius called these two states "the two eyes of the human race."[1] The "invincible" star of the Persians might wane and vanish, but only to reappear in greater glory. The political and military strength displayed by this nation through the centuries was the result of its high intellectual and moral qualities. Its original culture was always hostile to such an assimilation as that experienced in different degrees by the Aryans of Phrygia, the Semites of Syria and the Hamites of Egypt. Hellenism and Iranism--if I may use that term--were two equally noble adversaries but differently educated, and they always remained separated by instinctive racial hostility as much as by hereditary opposition of interests. Nevertheless, when two civilizations are in contact for more than a thousand years, numerous exchanges are bound to occur. The influence exercised by Hellenism as far as the uplands of Central Asia has frequently been pointed out,[2] but the prestige retained by Persia throughout the ages and the extent of area influenced by its energy has not perhaps been shown with as much accuracy. For even if Mazdaism was the highest expression of Persian genius and its influence in consequence mainly religious, yet it was not exclusively so. After the fall of the Achemenides the memory of their empire long haunted Alexander's successors. Not only did the dynasties which claimed to be descended from Darius, and which ruled over Pontus, {137} Cappadocia and Commagene, cultivate political traditions that brought them nearer to their supposed ancestors, but those traditions were partly adopted even by the Seleucides and the Ptolemies, the legitimate heirs of the ancient masters of Asia. People were fond of recalling the ideals of past grandeur and sought to realize them in the present. In that manner several institutions were transmitted to the Roman emperors through the agency of the Asiatic monarchies. The institution of the _amici Augusti_, for instance, the appointed friends and intimate counselors of the rulers, adopted in Italy the forms in use at the court of the Diadochi, who had themselves imitated the ancient organization of the palace of the Great Kings.[3] The custom of carrying the sacred fire before the Cæsars as an emblem of the perpetuity of their power, dated back to Darius and with other Persian traditions passed on to the dynasties that divided the empire of Alexander. There is a striking similarity not only between the observance of the Cæsars and the practice of the Oriental monarchs, but also between the beliefs that they held. The continuity of the political and religious tradition cannot be doubted.[4] As the court ceremonial and the internal history of the Hellenistic kingdoms become better known we shall be able to outline with greater precision the manner in which the divided and diminished heritage of the Achemenides, after generations of rulers, was finally left to those Occidental sovereigns who called themselves the sacrosanct lords of the world as Artaxerxes had done.[5] It may not be generally known that the habit of welcoming friends with a kiss was a ceremony in the {138} Oriental formulary before it became a familiar custom in Europe.[6] It is very difficult to trace the hidden paths by which pure ideas travel from one people to another. But certain it is that at the beginning of our era certain Mazdean conceptions had already spread outside of Asia. The extent of the influence of Parseeism upon the beliefs of Israel under the Achemenides cannot be determined, but its existence is undeniable.[7] Some of its doctrines, as for instance those relating to angels and demons, the end of the world and the final resurrection, were propagated everywhere in the basin of the Mediterranean as a consequence of the diffusion of Jewish colonies. On the other hand, ever since the conquests of Cyrus and Darius, the active attention of the Greeks had been drawn toward the doctrines and religious practices of the new masters of the Orient.[8] A number of legends representing Pythagoras, Democritus and other philosophers as disciples of the magi prove the prestige of that powerful sacerdotal class. The Macedonian conquest, which placed the Greeks in direct relations with numerous votaries of Mazdaism, gave a new impetus to works treating that religion, and the great scientific movement inaugurated by Aristotle caused many scholars to look into the doctrines taught by the Persian subjects of the Seleucides. We know from a reliable source that the works catalogued under the name of Zoroaster in the library of Alexandria contained two million lines. This immense body of sacred literature was bound to attract the attention of scholars and to call forth the reflections of philosophers. The dim and dubious science that reached {139} even the lower classes under the name of "magic" was to a considerable extent of Persian origin, as its name indicates, and along with physician's recipes and thaumaturgic processes it imparted some theological doctrines in a confused fashion.[9] This explains why certain institutions and beliefs of the Persians had found imitators and adepts in the Greco-Oriental world long before the Romans had gained a foothold in Asia. Their influence was indirect, secret, frequently indiscernible, but it was certain. The most active agencies in the diffusion of Mazdaism as of Judaism seem to have been colonies of believers who had emigrated far from the mother country. There was a Persian dispersion similar to that of the Israelites. Communities of magi were established not only in eastern Asia Minor, but in Galatia, Phrygia, Lydia and even in Egypt. Everywhere they remained attached to their customs and beliefs with persistent tenacity.[10] When Rome extended her conquests into Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, the influence of Persia became much more direct. Superficial contact with the Mazdean populations began with the wars against Mithradates, but it did not become frequent and lasting until the first century of our era. During that century the empire gradually extended its limits to the upper Euphrates, and thereby absorbed all the uplands of Anatolia and Commagene south of the Taurus. The native dynasties which had fostered the secular isolation of those distant countries in spite of the state of vassalage to which they had been reduced disappeared one after another. The Flavians constructed through those hitherto almost inaccessible regions an immense network {140} of roads that were as important to Rome as the railways of Turkestan or of Siberia are to modern Russia. At the same time Roman legions camped on the banks of the Euphrates and in the mountains of Armenia. Thus all the little Mazdean centers scattered in Cappadocia and Pontus were forced into constant relation with the Latin world, and on the other hand the disappearance of the buffer states made the Roman and Parthian empires neighboring powers in Trajan's time (98-117 A. D.). From these conquests and annexations in Asia Minor and Syria dates the sudden propagation of the Persian mysteries of Mithra in the Occident. For even though a congregation of their votaries seems to have existed at Rome under Pompey as early as 67 B. C., the real diffusion of the mysteries began with the Flavians toward the end of the first century of our era. They became more and more prominent under the Antonines and the Severi, and remained the most important cult of paganism until the end of the fourth century. Through them as a medium the original doctrines of Mazdaism were widely propagated in every Latin province, and in order to appreciate the influence of Persia upon the Roman creeds, we must now give them our careful attention. However, it must be said that the growing influence of Persia did not manifest itself solely in the religious sphere. After the accession of the Sassanid dynasty (228 A. D.) the country once more became conscious of its originality, again resumed the cultivation of national traditions, reorganized the hierarchy of its official clergy and recovered the political cohesion which had been wanting under the Parthians. It felt {141} and showed its superiority over the neighboring empire that was then torn by factions, thrown upon the mercy of manifestoes, and ruined economically and morally. The studies now being made in the history of that period show more and more that debilitated Rome had become the imitator of Persia. In the opinion of contemporaries the court of Diocletian, prostrating itself before a master who was regarded as the equal of God, with its complicated hierarchy and crowd of eunuchs that disgraced it, was an imitation of the court of the Sassanides. Galerius declared in unmistakable terms that Persian absolutism must be introduced in his empire,[11] and the ancient Cæsarism founded on the will of the people seemed about to be transformed into a sort of caliphate. Recent discoveries also throw light upon a powerful artistic school that developed in the Parthian empire and later in that of the Sassanides and which grew up independently of the Greek centers of production. Even if it took certain models from the Hellenic sculpture or architecture, it combined them with Oriental motives into a decoration of exuberant richness. Its field of influence extended far beyond Mesopotamia into the south of Syria where it has left monuments of unequalled splendor. The radiance of that brilliant center undoubtedly illuminated Byzantium, the barbarians of the north, and even China.[12] The Persian Orient, then, exerted a dominant influence on the political institutions and artistic tastes of the Romans as well as on their ideas and beliefs. The propagation of the religion of Mithra, which always proudly proclaimed its Persian origin, was accompanied by a number of parallel influences of the {142} people from which it had issued. Never, not even during the Mohammedan invasions, had Europe a narrower escape from becoming Asiatic than when Diocletian officially recognized Mithra as the protector of the reconstructed empire.[13] The time when that god seemed to be establishing his authority over the entire civilized world was one of the critical phases in the moral history of antiquity. An irresistible invasion of Semitic and Mazdean conceptions nearly succeeded in permanently overwhelming the Occidental spirit. Even after Mithra had been vanquished and expelled from Christianized Rome, Persia did not disarm. The work of conversion in which Mithraism had failed was taken up by Manicheism, the heir to its cardinal doctrines, and until the Middle Ages Persian dualism continued to cause bloody struggles in the ancient Roman provinces. * * * * * Just as we cannot understand the character of the mysteries of Isis and Serapis without studying the circumstances accompanying their creation by the Ptolemies, so we cannot appreciate the causes of the power attained by the mysteries of Mithra, unless we go far back to their origin. Here the subject is unfortunately more obscure. The ancient authors tell us almost nothing about the origin of Mithra. One point on which they all agree is that he was a Persian god, but this we should know from the Avesta even if they had not mentioned it. But how did he get to Italy from the Persian uplands? Two scant lines of Plutarch are the most explicit document we have on the subject. He narrates incidentally that the pirates from Asia Minor vanquished {143} by Pompey in 67 performed strange sacrifices on Olympus, a volcano of Lycia, and practiced occult rites, among others those of Mithra which, he says, "exist to the present day and were first taught by them."[14] Lactantius Placidus, a commentator on Statius and a mediocre authority, also tells us that the cult passed from the Persians to the Phrygians and from the Phrygians to the Romans.[15] These two authors agree then in fixing in Asia Minor the origin of this Persian religion that later spread over the Occident, and in fact various indications direct us to that country. The frequency of the name Mithradates, for instance, in the dynasties of Pontus, Cappadocia, Armenia and Commagene, connected with the Achemenides by fictitious genealogies, shows the devotion of those kings to Mithra. As we see, the Mithraism that was revealed to the Romans at the time of Pompey had established itself in the Anatolian monarchies during the preceding period, which was an epoch of intense moral and religious unrest. Unfortunately we have no monuments of that period of its history. The absence of direct testimony on the development of Mazdean sects during the last three centuries before our era prevents us from gaining exact knowledge of the Parseeism of Asia Minor. None of the temples dedicated to Mithra in that religion have been examined.[16] The inscriptions mentioning his name are as yet few and insignificant, so that it is only by indirect means that we can arrive at conclusions about this primitive cult. The only way to explain its distinguishing features in the Occident is to study the environment in which it originated. During the domination of the Achemenides eastern {144} Asia Minor was colonized by the Persians. The uplands of Anatolia resembled those of Persia in climate and soil, and were especially adapted to the raising of horses.[17] In Cappadocia and even in Pontus the aristocracy who owned the soil belonged to the conquering nation. Under the various governments which followed after the death of Alexander, those landlords remained the real masters of the country, chieftains of clans governing the canton where they had their domains, and, on the outskirts of Armenia at least, they retained the hereditary title of satraps through all political vicissitudes until the time of Justinian, thus recalling their Persian origin.[18] This military and feudal aristocracy furnished Mithradates Eupator a considerable number of the officers who helped him in his long defiance of Rome, and later it defended the threatened independence of Armenia against the enterprises of the Cæsars. These warriors worshiped Mithra as the protecting genius of their arms, and this is the reason why Mithra always, even in the Latin world, remained the "invincible" god, the tutelary deity of armies, held in special honor by warriors. Besides the Persian nobility a Persian clergy had also become established in the peninsula. It officiated in famous temples, at Zela in Pontus and Hierocæsarea in Lydia. Magi, called _magousaioi_ or _pyrethes_ (firelighters) were scattered over the Levant. Like the Jews, they retained their national customs and traditional rites with such scrupulous loyalty that Bardesanes of Edessa cited them as an example in his attempt to refute the doctrines of astrology and to show that a nation can retain the same customs in different climates.[19] We know their religion sufficiently to be {145} certain that the Syrian author had good grounds for attributing that conservative spirit to them. The sacrifices of the _pyrethes_ which Strabo observed in Cappadocia recall all the peculiarities of the Avestan liturgy. The same prayers were recited before the altar of the fire while the priest held the sacred fasces (_bareçman_); the same offerings were made of milk, oil and honey; and the same precautions were taken to prevent the priest's breath from polluting the divine flame. Their gods were practically those of orthodox Mazdaism. They worshiped Ahura Mazda, who had to them remained a divinity of the sky as Zeus and Jupiter had been originally. Below him they venerated deified abstractions (such as Vohumano, "good mind," and Ameretat, "immortality") from which the religion of Zoroaster made its Amshaspends, the archangels surrounding the Most High.[20] Finally they sacrificed to the spirits of nature, the Yazatas: for instance, Anahita or Anaites the goddess of the waters--that made fertile the fields; Atar, the personification of fire; and especially Mithra, the pure genius of light. Thus the basis of the religion of the magi of Asia Minor was Mazdaism, somewhat changed from that of the Avesta, and in certain respects holding closer to the primitive nature worship of the Aryans, but nevertheless a clearly characterized and distinctive Mazdaism, which was to remain the most solid foundation for the greatness of the mysteries of Mithra in the Occident. Recent discoveries[21] of bilingual inscriptions have succeeded in establishing the fact that the language used, or at least written, by the Persian colonies of Asia Minor was not their ancient Aryan idiom, but {146} Aramaic, which was a Semitic dialect. Under the Achemenides this was the diplomatic and commercial language of all countries west of the Tigris. In Cappadocia and Armenia it remained the literary and probably also the liturgical language until it was slowly supplanted by Greek during the Hellenistic period. The very name _magousaioi_ ([Greek: magousaioi]) given to the magi in those countries is an exact transcription of a Semitic plural.[22] This phenomenon, surprising at first sight, is explained by the history of the _magousaioi_ who emigrated to Asia Minor. They did not come there directly from Persepolis or Susa, but from Mesopotamia. Their religion had been deeply influenced by the speculations of the powerful clergy officiating in the temples of Babylon. The learned theology of the Chaldeans imposed itself on the primitive Mazdaism, which was a collection of traditions and rites rather than a body of doctrines. The divinities of the two religions became identified, their legends connected, and the Semitic astrology, the result of long continued scientific observations, superimposed itself on the naturalistic myths of the Persians. Ahura Mazda was assimilated to Bel, Anahita to Ishtar, and Mithra to Shamash, the solar god. For that reason Mithra was commonly called _Sol invictus_ in the Roman mysteries, and an abstruse and a complicated astronomic symbolism was always part of the teachings revealed to candidates for initiation and manifested itself also in the artistic embellishments of the temple. In connection with a cult from Commagene we can observe rather closely how the fusion of Parseeism with Semitic and Anatolian creeds took place, because {147} in those regions the form of religious transformations was at all times syncretic. On a mountain top in the vicinity of a town named Doliche, a deity was worshiped who after a number of transformations became a Jupiter Protector of the Roman armies. Originally this god, who was believed to have discovered the use of iron, seems to have been brought to Commagene by a tribe of blacksmiths, the Chalybes, who had come from the north.[23] He was represented standing on a steer and holding in his hand a two-edged ax, an ancient symbol venerated in Crete during the Mycenean age and found also at Labranda in Caria and all over Asia Minor.[24] The ax symbolized the god's mastery over the lightning which splits asunder the trees of the forest amidst the din of storms. Once established on Syrian soil, this genius of thunder became identified with some local Baal and his cult took up all the Semitic features. After the conquests of Cyrus and the founding of the Persian domination, this "Lord of the heavens" was readily confounded with Ahura Mazda, who was likewise "the full circle of heaven," according to a definition of Herodotus,[25] and whom the Persians also worshiped on mountain tops. When a half Persian, half Hellenic dynasty succeeded Alexander in Commagene, this Baal became a _Zeus Oromasdes_ ([Greek: Zeus Ôromasdês], Ahura Mazda) residing in the sublime ethereal regions. A Greek inscription speaks of the celestial thrones "on which this supreme divinity receives the souls of its worshipers."[26] In the Latin countries "Jupiter Caelus" remained at the head of the Mazdean pantheon,[27] and in all the provinces the temples of {148} "Jupiter Dolichenus" were erected beside those of Mithra, and the two remained in the closest relations.[28] The same series of transformations took place elsewhere with a number of other gods.[29] The Mithra worship was thus formed, in the main, by a combination of Persian beliefs with Semitic theology, incidentally including certain elements from the native cults of Asia Minor. The Greeks later translated the names of the Persian divinities into their language and imposed certain forms of their mysteries on the Mazdean cult.[30] Hellenic art lent to the Yazatas that idealized form in which it liked to represent the immortals, and philosophy, especially that of the Stoics, endeavored to discover its own physical and metaphysical theories in the traditions of the magi. But in spite of all these accommodations, adaptations and interpretations, Mithraism always remained in substance a Mazdaism blended with Chaldeanism, that is to say, essentially a barbarian religion. It certainly was far less Hellenized than the Alexandrian cult of Isis and Serapis, or even that of the Great Mother of Pessinus. For that reason it always seemed unacceptable to the Greek world, from which it continued to be almost completely excluded. Even language furnishes a curious proof of that fact. Greek contains a number of theophorous ([Greek: theophoros], god-bearing) names formed from those of Egyptian or Phrygian gods, like Serapion, Metrodoros, Metrophilos--Isidore is in use at the present day--but all known derivations of Mithra are of barbarian formation. The Greeks never admitted the god of their hereditary enemies, and the great centers of Hellenic {149} civilization escaped his influence and he theirs.[31] Mithraism passed directly from Asia into the Latin world. There it spread with lightning rapidity from the time it was first introduced. When the progressive march of the Romans toward the Euphrates enabled them to investigate the sacred trust transmitted by Persia to the magi of Asia Minor, and when they became acquainted with the Mazdean beliefs which had matured in the seclusion of the Anatolian mountains, they adopted them with enthusiasm. The Persian cult was spread by the soldiers along the entire length of the frontiers towards the end of the first century and left numerous traces around the camps of the Danube and the Rhine, near the stations along the wall of Britain, and in the vicinity of the army posts scattered along the borders of the Sahara or in the valleys of the Asturias. At the same time the Asiatic merchants introduced it in the ports of the Mediterranean, along the great waterways and roads, and in all commercial cities. It also possessed missionaries in the Oriental slaves who were to be found everywhere, engaging in every pursuit, employed in the public service as well as in domestic work, in the cultivation of land as well as in financial and mining enterprises, and above all in the imperial service, where they filled the offices. Soon this foreign god gained the favor of high functionaries and of the sovereign himself. At the end of the second century Commodus was initiated into the mysteries, a conversion that had a tremendous effect. A hundred years later Mithra's power was such that at one time he seemed about to eclipse both Oriental and Occidental rivals and to dominate the {150} entire Roman world. In the year 307 Diocletian, Galerius and Licinius met in a solemn interview at Carnuntum on the Danube and dedicated a sanctuary there to Mithra, "the protector of their empire" (_fautori imperii sui_).[32] In previous works on the mysteries of Mithra we have endeavored to assign causes for the enthusiasm that attracted humble plebeians and great men of the world to the altars of this barbarian god. We shall not repeat here what any one who has the curiosity may read either in a large or a small book according to his preferences,[33] but we must consider the problem from a different point of view. Of all Oriental religions the Persian cult was the last to reach the Romans. We shall inquire what new principle it contained; to what inherent qualities it owed its superiority; and through what characteristics it remained distinct in the conflux of creeds of all kinds that were struggling for supremacy in the world at that time. The originality and value of the Persian religion lay not in its doctrines regarding the nature of the celestial gods. Without doubt Parseeism is of all pagan religions the one that comes closest to monotheism, for it elevates Ahura Mazda high above all other celestial spirits. But the doctrines of Mithraism are not those of Zoroaster. What it received from Persia was chiefly its mythology and ritual; its theology, which was thoroughly saturated with Chaldean erudition, probably did not differ noticeably from the Syrian. At the head of the divine hierarchy it placed as first cause an abstraction, deified Time, the Zervan Akarana of the Avesta. This divinity regulated the revolutions of the stars and in consequence was the absolute master of {151} all things. Ahura Mazda, whose throne was in the heavens, had become the equivalent of _Ba'al Samin_, and even before the magi the Semites had introduced into the Occident the worship of the sun, the source of all energy and light. Babylonian astrology and astrolatry inspired the theories of the mithreums as well as of the Semitic temples, a fact that explains the intimate connection of the two cults. This half religious, half scientific system which was not peculiarly Persian nor original to Mithraism was not the reason for the adoption of that worship by the Roman world. Neither did the Persian mysteries win the masses by their liturgy. Undoubtedly their secret ceremonies performed in mountain caves, or at any rate in the darkness of the underground crypts, were calculated to inspire awe. Participation in the liturgical meals gave rise to moral comfort and stimulation. By submitting to a sort of baptism the votaries hoped to expiate their sins and regain an untroubled conscience. But the sacred feasts and purifying ablutions connected with the same spiritual hopes are found in other Oriental cults, and the magnificent suggestive ritual of the Egyptian clergy certainly was more impressive than that of the magi. The mythic drama performed in the grottoes of the Persian god and culminating in the immolation of a steer who was considered as the creator and rejuvenator of the earth, must have seemed less important and affecting than the suffering and joy of Isis seeking and reviving the mutilated body of her husband, or than the moaning and jubilation of Cybele mourning over and reviving her lover Attis. But Persia introduced dualism as a fundamental principle in religion. It was this that distinguished {152} Mithraism from other sects and inspired its dogmatic theology and ethics, giving them a rigor and firmness unknown to Roman paganism. It considered the universe from an entirely new point of view and at the same time provided a new goal in life. Of course, if we understand by dualism the antithesis of mind and matter, of reason and intuition, it appeared at a considerably earlier period in Greek philosophy,[34] where it was one of the leading ideas of neo-Pythagoreanism and of Philo's system. But the distinguishing feature of the doctrine of the magi is the fact that it deified the evil principle, set it up as a rival to the supreme deity, and taught that both had to be worshiped. This system offered an apparently simple solution to the problem of evil, the stumbling block of theologies, and it attracted the cultured minds as well as the masses, to whom it afforded an explanation of their sufferings. Just as the mysteries of Mithra began to spread Plutarch wrote of them favorably and was inclined himself to adopt them.[35] From that time dates the appearance in literature of the anti-gods ([Greek: antitheoi]),[36] under the command of the powers of darkness[37] and arrayed against the celestial spirits, messengers or "angels"[38] of divinity. They were Ahriman's _devas_ struggling with the Yazatas of Ormuzd. A curious passage in Porphyry[39] shows that the earliest neo-Platonists had already admitted Persian demonology into their system. Below the incorporeal and indivisible supreme being, below the stars and the planets, there were countless spirits.[40] Some of them, the gods of cities and nations, received special names: {153} the others comprised a nameless multitude. They were divided into two groups. The first were the benevolent spirits that gave fecundity to plants and animals, serenity to nature, and knowledge to men. They acted as intermediaries between gods and men, bearing up to heaven the homage and prayers of the faithful, and down from heaven portents and warnings. The others were wicked spirits inhabiting regions close to the earth and there was no evil that they did not exert every effort to cause.[41] At the same time both violent and cunning, impetuous and crafty, they were the authors of all the calamities that befell the world, such as pestilence, famine, tempests and earthquakes. They kindled evil passions and illicit desires in the hearts of men and provoked war and sedition. They were clever deceivers rejoicing in lies and impostures. They encouraged the phantasmagoria and mystification of the sorcerers[42] and gloated over the bloody sacrifices which magicians offered to them all, but especially to their chief. Doctrines very similar to these were certainly taught in the mysteries of Mithra; homage was paid to Ahriman (Arimanius) lord of the somber underworld, and master of the infernal spirits.[43] This cult has continued in the Orient to the present day among the Yezidis, or devil worshipers. In his treatise against the magi, Theodore of Mopsuestia[44] speaks of Ahriman as Satan ([Greek: Satanas]). At first sight there really is a surprising resemblance between the two. Both are heads of a numerous army of demons; both are spirits of error and falsehood, princes of darkness, {154} tempters and corrupters. An almost identical picture of the pair could be drawn, and in fact they are practically the same figure under different names. It is generally admitted that Judaism took the notion of an adversary of God[45] from the Mazdeans along with portions of their dualism. It was therefore natural that Jewish doctrine, of which Christianity is heir, should have been closely allied to the mysteries of Mithra. A considerable part of the more or less orthodox beliefs and visions that gave the Middle Ages their nightmare of hell and the devil thus came from Persia by two channels: on the one hand Judeo-Christian literature, both canonical and apocryphal; and on the other, the remnants of the Mithra cult and the various sects of Manicheism that continued to preach the old Persian doctrines on the antagonism between the two world principles. But a theoretical adherence of the mind to dogmas that satisfy it, does not suffice to convert it to a new religion. There must be motives of conduct and a basis for hope besides grounds for belief. The Persian dualism was not only a powerful metaphysical conception; it was also the foundation of a very efficacious system of ethics, and this was the chief agent in the success of the mysteries of Mithra during the second and third centuries in the Roman world then animated by unrealized aspirations for more perfect justice and holiness. A sentence of the Emperor Julian,[46] unfortunately too brief, tells us that Mithra subjected his worshipers to "commandments" ([Greek: entolai]) and rewarded faithful observance both in this world and in the next. The {155} importance attached by the Persians to their peculiar ethics and the rigor with which they observed its precepts, are perhaps the most striking features of their national character as manifested in history. They were a race of conquerors subject to a severe discipline, like the Romans, and like them they realized the necessity of discipline in the administration of a vast empire. Certain affinities between the two imperial nations connected them directly without the mediation of the Greek world. Mazdaism brought long awaited satisfaction to the old-time Roman desire for a practical religion that would subject the individual to a rule of conduct and contribute to the welfare of the state.[47] Mithra infused a new vigor into the paganism of the Occident by introducing the imperative ethics of Persia. Unhappily the text of the Mithraic decalogue has not been preserved and its principal commandments can be restored only by implication. Mithra, the ancient spirit of light, became the god of truth and justice in the religion of Zoroaster and retained that character in the Occident. He was the Mazdean Apollo, but while Hellenism, with a finer appreciation of beauty, developed the esthetic qualities in Apollo, the Persians, caring more for matters of conscience, emphasized the moral character in Mithra.[48] The Greeks, themselves little scrupulous in that respect, were struck by the abhorrence in which their Oriental neighbors held a lie. The Persians conceived of Ahriman as the embodiment of deceit. Mithra was always the god invoked as the guarantor of faith and protector of the inviolability of contracts. Absolute fidelity to his oath had to be a cardinal virtue {156} in the religion of a soldier, whose first act upon enlistment was to pledge obedience and devotion to the sovereign. This religion exalted loyalty and fidelity and undoubtedly tried to inspire a feeling similar to our modern idea of honor. In addition to respect for authority it preached fraternity. All the initiates considered themselves as sons of the same father owing to one another a brother's affection. It is a question whether they extended the love of neighbor to that universal charity taught by philosophy and Christianity. Emperor Julian, a devoted mystic, liked to set up such an ideal, and it is probable that the Mithraists of later paganism rose to this conception of duty,[49] but they were not its authors. They seemed to have attached more importance to the virile qualities than to compassion and gentleness. The fraternal spirit of initiates calling themselves soldiers was doubtless more akin to the spirit of comradeship in a regiment that has _esprit de corps_, than to the love of one's neighbor that inspires works of mercy towards all. All primitive people imagine nature filled with unclean and wicked spirits that corrupt and torture those who disturb their repose; but dualism endowed this universal belief with marvelous power as well as with a dogmatic basis. Mazdaism is governed throughout by ideas of purity and impurity. "No religion on earth has ever been so completely dominated by an ideal of purification."[50] This kind of perfection was the goal of the aspiration and effort of believers. They were obliged to guard with infinite precaution against defiling the divine elements, for instance water or fire, or their own persons, and to wipe out all pollution by {157} repeated lustrations. But, as in the Syrian cults of the imperial period, these Mithraic rites did remain simply formal, mechanical and of the flesh, inspired by the old idea of _tabu_. Mithraic baptism wiped out moral faults; the purity aimed at had become spiritual. This perfect purity distinguishes the mysteries of Mithra from those of all other Oriental gods. Serapis is the brother and husband of Isis, Attis the lover of Cybele, every Syrian Baal is coupled with a spouse; but Mithra lives alone. Mithra is chaste, Mithra is holy (_sanctus_),[51] and for the worship of fecundity he substitutes a new reverence for continence. However, although resistance to sensuality is laudable and although the ideal of perfection of this Mazdean sect inclined towards the asceticism to which the Manichean conception of virtue led, yet good does not consist exclusively in abnegation and self-control, but also in action. It is not sufficient for a religion to classify moral values, but in order to be effective it must furnish motives for putting them into practice. Dualism was peculiarly favorable for the development of individual effort and human energy; here its influence was strongest. It taught that the world is the scene of a perpetual struggle between two powers that share the mastery; the goal to be reached is the disappearance of evil and the uncontested dominion, the exclusive reign, of the good. Animals and plants, as well as man, are drawn up in two rival camps perpetually hostile, and all nature participates in the eternal combat of the two opposing principles. The demons created by the infernal spirit emerge constantly from the abyss and roam about the earth; they penetrate everywhere carrying corruption, distress, {158} sickness and death. The celestial spirits and the supporters of piety are compelled constantly to baffle their ever renewed enterprises. The strife continues in the heart and conscience of man, the epitome of the universe, between the divine law of duty and the suggestions of the evil spirits. Life is a merciless war knowing no truce. The task of the true Mazdean consisted in constantly fighting the evil in order to bring about the gradual triumph of Ormuzd in the world. The believer was the assistant of the gods in their work of purification and improvement. The worshipers of Mithra did not lose themselves in a contemplative mysticism like other sects. Their morality particularly encouraged action, and during a period of laxness, anarchy and confusion, they found stimulation, comfort and support in its precepts. Resistance to the promptings of degrading instincts assumed the glamor and prestige of warlike exploits in their eyes and instilled an active principle of progress into their character. By supplying a new conception of the world, dualism also gave a new meaning to life. This same dualism determined the eschatological beliefs of the Mithraists. The antagonism between heaven and hell was extended into the life hereafter.[52] Mithra, the "invincible" god who assisted the faithful in their struggle against the malignity of the demons, was not only their strong companion in their human trials, but as an antagonist of the infernal powers he insured the welfare of his followers in the future life as well as on earth. When the genius of corruption seizes the corpse after death, the spirits of darkness and the celestial messengers struggle for the possession of the soul that has left its corporeal prison. It stands {159} trial before Mithra, and if its merits outweigh its shortcomings in the divine balance it is defended from Ahriman's agents that seek to drag it into the infernal abyss. Finally it is led into the ethereal regions where Jupiter-Ormuzd reigns in eternal light. The believers in Mithra did not agree with the votaries of Serapis who held that the souls of the just reside in the depths of the earth.[53] To them that somber kingdom was the domain of wrong-doers. The souls of the just live in the boundless light that extends above the stars, and by divesting themselves of all sensuality and all lust in passing through the planetary spheres[54] they become as pure as the gods whose company they enter. However, when the world came to an end the body also was to share in that happiness because it was believed as in Egypt that the whole person would enjoy eternal life. After time had run its course Mithra would raise all men from the dead, pouring out a marvelous beverage of immortality for the good, but all evil doers would be annihilated by fire together with Ahriman himself. * * * * * Of all the Oriental cults none was so severe as Mithraism, none attained an equal moral elevation, none could have had so strong a hold on mind and heart. In many respects it gave its definite religious formula to the pagan world and the influence of its ideas remained long after the religion itself had come to a violent end. Persian dualism introduced certain principles into Europe that have never ceased to exert an influence. Its whole history proves the thesis with which we began, the power of resistance and of {160} influence possessed by Persian culture and religion. These possessed an originality so independent that after having resisted in the Orient the power of absorption of Hellenism, and after having checked the Christian propaganda, they even withstood the destructive power of Islam. Firdusi (940-1020) glories in the ancient national traditions and the mythical heroes of Mazdaism, and while the idolatry of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor has long since died out or degenerated, there are votaries of Zoroaster at the present day who piously perform the sacred ceremonies of the Avesta and practise genuine fire worship. Another witness to the vitality of Mithraic Mazdaism is the fact that it escaped becoming a kind of state religion of the Roman empire during the third century. An oft-quoted sentence of Renan's says:[55] "If Christianity had been checked in its growth by some deadly disease, the world would have become Mithraic." In hazarding that statement he undoubtedly conjured up a picture of what would have been the condition of this poor world in that case. He must have imagined, one of his followers would have us believe,[56] that the morals of the human race would have been but little changed, a little more virile perhaps, a little less charitable, but only a shade different. The erudite theology taught by the mysteries would obviously have shown a laudable respect for science, but as its dogmas were based upon a false physics it would apparently have insured the persistence of an infinity of errors. Astronomy would not be lacking, but astrology would have been unassailable, while the heavens would still be revolving around the earth to accord with its doctrines. The greatest {161} danger, it appears to me, would have been that the Cæsars would have established a theocratic absolutism supported by the Oriental ideas of the divinity of kings. The union of throne and altar would have been inseparable, and Europe would never have known the invigorating struggle between church and state. But on the other hand the discipline of Mithraism, so productive of individual energy, and the democratic organization of its societies in which senators and slaves rubbed elbows, contain a germ of liberty. We might dwell at some length on these contrasting possibilities, but it is hard to find a mental pastime less profitable than the attempt to remake history and to conjecture on what might have been had events proved otherwise. If the torrent of actions and reactions that carries us along were turned out of its course what imagination could describe the unknown regions through which it would flow? * * * * * {162} ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. When we consider the absolute authority that astrology exercised under the Roman empire, we find it hard to escape a feeling of surprise. It is difficult to think that people could ever consider astrology as the most valuable of all arts and the queen of sciences,[1] and it is not easy for us to imagine the moral conditions that made such a phenomenon possible, because our state of mind to-day is very different. Little by little the conviction has gained ground that all that can be known about the future, at least the future of man and of human society, is conjecture. The progress of knowledge has taught man to acquiesce in his ignorance. In former ages it was different: forebodings and predictions found universal credence. The ancient forms of divination, however, had fallen somewhat into disrepute at the beginning of our era, like the rest of the Greco-Roman religion. It was no longer thought that the eagerness or reluctance with which the sacred hens ate their paste, or the direction of the flight of the birds indicated coming success or disaster. Abandoned, the Hellenic oracles were silent. Then appeared astrology, surrounded with all the prestige of an exact science, and based upon the experience of many centuries. It promised to ascertain the {163} occurrences of any one's life with as much precision as the date of an eclipse. The world was drawn towards it by an irresistible attraction. Astrology did away with, and gradually relegated to oblivion, all the ancient methods that had been devised to solve the enigmas of the future. Haruspicy and the augural art were abandoned, and not even the ancient fame of the oracles could save them from falling into irretrievable desuetude. This great chimera changed religion as well as divination, its spirit penetrated everything. And truly, if, as some scholars still hold, the main feature of science is the ability to predict,[2] no branch of learning could compare with this one, nor escape its influence. The success of astrology was connected with that of the Oriental religions, which lent it their support, as it in turn helped them. We have seen how it forced itself upon Semitic paganism, how it transformed Persian Mazdaism and even subdued the arrogance of the Egyptian sacerdotal caste.[3] Certain mystical treatises ascribed to the old Pharaoh Nechepso and his confidant, the priest Petosiris, nebulous and abstruse works that became, one might say, the Bible of the new belief in the power of the stars, were translated into Greek, undoubtedly in Alexandria, about the year 150 before our era.[4] About the same time the Chaldean genethlialogy began to spread in Italy, with regard to which Berosus, a priest of the god Baal, who came to Babylon from the island of Cos, had previously succeeded in arousing the curiosity of the Greeks. In 139 a prætor expelled the "Chaldaei" from Rome, together with the Jews. But all the adherents of the Syrian goddess, of whom there was quite a number in the Occident, were patrons and defenders of these Oriental {164} prophets, and police measures were no more successful in stopping the diffusion of their doctrines, than in the case of the Asiatic mysteries. In the time of Pompey, the senator Nigidius Figulus, who was an ardent occultist, expounded the barbarian uranography in Latin. But the scholar whose authority contributed most to the final acceptance of sidereal divination was a Syrian philosopher of encyclopedic knowledge, Posidonius of Apamea, the teacher of Cicero.[5] The works of that erudite and religious writer influenced the development of the entire Roman theology more than anything else. Under the empire, while the Semitic Baals and Mithra were triumphing, astrology manifested its power everywhere. During that period everybody bowed to it. The Cæsars became its fervent devotees, frequently at the expense of the ancient cults. Tiberius neglected the gods because he believed only in fatalism,[6] and Otho, blindly confiding in the Oriental seer, marched against Vitellius in spite of the baneful presages that affrighted his official clergy.[7] The most earnest scholars, Ptolemy under the Antonines for instance, expounded the principles of that pseudo-science, and the very best minds received them. In fact, scarcely anybody made a distinction between astronomy and its illegitimate sister. Literature took up this new and difficult subject, and, as early as the time of Augustus or Tiberius, Manilius, inspired by the sidereal fatalism, endeavored to make poetry of that dry "mathematics," as Lucretius, his forerunner, had done with the Epicurean atomism. Even art looked there for inspiration and depicted the stellar deities. At Rome and in the provinces architects erected sumptuous _septizonia_ in the likeness of {165} the seven spheres in which the planets that rule our destinies move.[8] This Asiatic divination was first aristocratic[9]--because the obtaining of an exact horoscope was a complicated matter, and consultations were expensive--but it promptly became popular, especially in the urban centers where Oriental slaves gathered in large numbers. The learned genethlialogers of the observatories had unlicensed colleagues, who told fortunes at street-crossings or in barnyards. Even common epitaphs, which Rossi styles "the scum of inscriptions," have retained traces of that belief. The custom arose of stating in epitaphs the exact length of a life to the very hour, for the moment of birth determined that of death: _Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet._[10] Soon neither important nor small matters were undertaken without consulting the astrologer. His previsions were sought not only in regard to great public events like the conduct of a war, the founding of a city, or the accession of a ruler, not only in case of a marriage, a journey, or a change of domicile; but the most trifling acts of every-day life were gravely submitted to his sagacity. People would no longer take a bath, go to the barber, change their clothes or manicure their fingernails, without first awaiting the propitious moment.[11] The collections of "initiatives" ([Greek: katarchai]) that have come to us contain questions that make us smile: Will a son who is about to be born have a big nose? Will a girl just coming into this world have gallant adventures?[12] And certain precepts sound almost like burlesques: he who gets his hair cut while {166} the moon is in her increase will become bald--evidently by analogy.[13] The entire existence of states and individuals, down to the slightest incidents, was thought to depend on the stars. The absolute control they were supposed to exercise over everybody's daily condition, even modified the language in every-day use and left traces in almost all idioms derived from the Latin. If we speak of a martial, or a jovial character, or a lunatic, we are unconsciously admitting the existence, in these heavenly bodies (Mars, Jupiter, Luna) of their ancient qualities. It must be acknowledged, however, that the Grecian spirit tried to combat the folly that was taking hold of the world, and from the time of its propagation astrology found opponents among the philosophers. The most subtle of these adversaries was the probabilist Carneades, in the second century before our era. The topical arguments which he advanced, were taken up, reproduced, and developed in a thousand ways by later polemicists. For instance, Were all the men that perish together in a battle, born at the same moment, because they had the same fate? Or, on the other hand, do we not observe that twins, born at the same time, have the most unlike characters and the most different fortunes? But dialectics are an accomplishment in which the Greeks ever excelled, and the defenders of astrology found a reply to every objection. They endeavored especially to establish firmly the truths of observation, upon which rested the entire learned structure of their art: the influence of the stars over the phenomena of nature and the characters of individuals. Can it be {167} denied, they said, that the sun causes vegetation to appear and to perish, and that it puts animals _en rut_ or plunges them into lethargic sleep? Does not the movement of the tide depend on the course of the moon? Is not the rising of certain constellations accompanied every year by storms? And are not the physical and moral qualities of the different races manifestly determined by the climate in which they live? The action of the sky on the earth is undeniable, and, the sidereal influences once admitted, all previsions based on them are legitimate. As soon as the first principle is admitted, all corollaries are logically derived from it. This way of reasoning was universally considered irrefutable. Before the advent of Christianity, which especially opposed it because of its idolatrous character, astrology had scarcely any adversaries except those who denied the possibility of science altogether, namely, the neo-Academicians, who held that man could not attain certainty, and such radical sceptics as Sextus Empiricus. Upheld by the Stoics, however, who with very few exceptions were in favor of astrology, it can be maintained that it emerged triumphant from the first assaults directed against it. The only result of the objections raised to it was to modify some of its theories. Later, the general weakening of the spirit of criticism assured astrology an almost uncontested domination. Its adversaries did not renew their polemics; they limited themselves to the repetition of arguments that had been opposed, if not refuted, a hundred times, and consequently seemed worn out. At the court of the Severi any one who should have denied the influence of the planets upon the events of this world {168} would have been considered more preposterous than he who would admit it to-day. But, you will say, if the theorists did not succeed in proving the doctrinal falsity of astrology, experience should have shown its worthlessness. Errors must have occurred frequently and must have been followed by cruel disillusionment. Having lost a child at the age of four for whom a brilliant future had been predicted, the parents stigmatized in the epitaph the "lying mathematician whose great renown deluded them."[14] Nobody thought of denying the possibility of such errors. Manuscripts have been preserved, wherein the makers of horoscopes themselves candidly and learnedly explain how they were mistaken in such and such a case, because they had not taken into account some one of the data of the problem.[15] Manilius, in spite of his unlimited confidence in the power of reason, hesitated at the complexity of an immense task that seemed to exceed the capacity of human intelligence,[16] and in the second century, Vettius Valens bitterly denounced the contemptible bunglers who claimed to be prophets, without having had the long training necessary, and who thereby cast odium and ridicule upon astrology, in the name of which they pretended to operate.[17] It must be remembered that astrology, like medicine, was not only a science ([Greek: epistêmê]), but also an art ([Greek: technê]). This comparison, which sounds irreverent to-day, was a flattering one in the eyes of the ancients.[18] To observe the sky was as delicate a task as to observe the human body; to cast the horoscope of a newly born child, just as perilous as to make a diagnosis, and to interpret the cosmic symptoms just as hard as to {169} interpret those of our organism. In both instances the elements were complex and the chances of error infinite. All the examples of patients dying in spite of the physician, or on account of him, will never keep a person who is tortured by physical pain from appealing to him for help; and similarly those whose souls were troubled with ambition or fear turned to the astrologer for some remedy for the moral fever tormenting them. The calculator, who claimed to determine the moment of death, and the medical practitioner who claimed to avert it received the anxious patronage of people worried by this formidable issue. Furthermore, just as marvelous cures were reported, striking predictions were called to mind or, if need were, invented. The diviner had, as a rule, only a restricted number of possibilities to deal with, and the calculus of probabilities shows that he must have succeeded sometimes. Mathematics, which he invoked, was in his favor after all, and chance frequently corrected mischance. Moreover, did not the man who had a well-frequented consulting-office, possess a thousand means, if he was clever, of placing all the chances on his side, in the hazardous profession he followed, and of reading in the stars anything he thought expedient? He observed the earth rather than the sky, and took care not to fall into a well. * * * * * However, what helped most to make astrology invulnerable to the blows of reason and of common sense, was the fact that in reality, the apparent rigor of its calculus and its theorems notwithstanding, it was not a science but a faith. We mean not only that {170} it implied belief in postulates that could not be proved--the same thing might be said of almost all of our poor human knowledge, and even our systems of physics and cosmology in the last analysis are based upon hypotheses--but that astrology was born and reared in the temples of Chaldea and Egypt.[19] Even in the Occident it never forgot its sacerdotal origin and never more than half freed itself from religion, whose offspring it was. Here lies the connection between astrology and the Oriental religions, and I wish to draw the reader's special attention to this point. The Greek works and treatises on astrology that have come down to us reveal this essential feature only very imperfectly. The Byzantines stripped this pseudo-science, always regarded suspiciously by the church, of everything that savored of paganism. Their process of purification can, in some instances, be traced from manuscript to manuscript.[20] If they retained the name of some god or hero of mythology, the only way they dared to write it was by cryptography. They have especially preserved purely didactic treatises, the most perfect type of which is Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos which has been constantly quoted and commented upon; and they have reproduced almost exclusively expurgated texts, in which the principles of various doctrines are drily summarized. During the classic age works of a different character were commonly read. Many "Chaldeans" interspersed their cosmological calculations and theories with moral considerations and mystical speculations. In the first part of a work that he names "Vision," ([Greek: Horasis]) Critodemus, in prophetic language, represents the truths he reveals {171} as a secure harbor of refuge from the storms of this world, and he promises his readers to raise them to the rank of immortals.[21] Vettius Valens, a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius, implored them in solemn terms, not to divulge to the ignorant and impious the arcana he was about to acquaint them with.[22] The astrologers liked to assume the appearance of incorruptible and holy priests and to consider their calling a sacerdotal one.[23] In fact, the two ministries sometimes combined: A dignitary of the Mithraic clergy called himself _studiosus astrologiae_[24] in his epitaph, and a member of a prominent family of Phrygian prelates celebrated in verse the science of divination which enabled him to issue a number of infallible predictions.[25] The sacred character of astrology revealed itself in some passages that escaped the orthodox censure and in the tone some of its followers assumed, but we must go further and show that astrology was religious in its principles as well as in its conclusions, the debt it owed to mathematics and observation notwithstanding. The fundamental dogma of astrology, as conceived by the Greeks, was that of universal solidarity. The world is a vast organism, all the parts of which are connected through an unceasing exchange of molecules of effluvia. The stars, inexhaustible generators of energy, constantly act upon the earth and man--upon man, the epitome of all nature, a "microcosm" whose every element corresponds to some part of the starry sky. This was, in a few words, the theory formulated by the Stoic disciples of the Chaldeans;[26] but if we divest it of all the philosophic garments with which it has been adorned, what do we find? The idea of {172} sympathy, a belief as old as human society! The savage peoples also established mysterious relations between all bodies and all the beings that inhabit the earth and the heavens, and which to them were animated with a life of their own endowed with latent power, but we shall speak of this later on, when taking up the subject of magic. Even before the propagation of the Oriental religions, popular superstition in Italy and Greece attributed a number of odd actions to the sun, the moon, and the constellations as well.[27] The Chaldaei, however, claimed a predominant power for the stars. In fact, they were regarded as gods _par excellence_ by the religion of the ancient Chaldeans in its beginnings. The sidereal religion of Babylon concentrated deity, one might say, in the luminous moving bodies at the expense of other natural objects, such as stones, plants, animals, which the primitive Semitic faith considered equally divine. The stars always retained this character, even at Rome. They were not, as to us, infinitely distant bodies moving in space according to the inflexible laws of mechanics, and whose chemical composition may be determined. To the Latins as to the Orientals, they were propitious or baleful deities, whose ever-changing relations determined the events of this world. The sky, whose unfathomable depth had not yet been perceived, was peopled with heroes and monsters of contrary passions, and the struggle above had an immediate echo upon earth. By what principle have such a quality and so great an influence been attributed to the stars? Is it for reasons derived from their apparent motion and known through observation or experience? Sometimes. Saturn made people {173} apathetic and irresolute, because it moved most slowly of all the planets.[28] But in most instances purely mythological reasons inspired the precepts of astrology. The seven planets were associated with certain deities, Mars, Venus, or Mercury, whose character and history are known to all. It is sufficient simply to pronounce their names to call to mind certain personalities that may be expected to act according to their natures, in every instance. It was natural for Venus to favor lovers, and for Mercury to assure the success of business transactions and dishonest deals. The same applies to the constellations, with which a number of legends are connected: "catasterism" or translation into the stars, became the natural conclusion of a great many tales. The heroes of mythology, or even those of human society, continued to live in the sky in the form of brilliant stars. There Perseus again met Andromeda, and the Centaur Chiron, who is none other than Sagittarius, was on terms of good fellowship with the Dioscuri. These constellations, then, assumed to a certain extent the good and the bad qualities of the mythical or historical beings that had been transferred upon them. For instance, the serpent, which shines near the northern pole, was the author of medical cures, because it was the animal sacred to Æsculapius.[29] The religious foundation of the rules of astrology, however, can not always be recognized. Sometimes it is entirely forgotten, and in such cases the rules assume the appearance of axioms, or of laws based upon long observation of celestial phenomena. Here we have a simple aspect of science. The process of {174} assimilation with the gods and catasterism were known in the Orient long before they were practiced in Greece. The traditional outlines that we reproduce on our celestial maps are the fossil remains of a luxuriant mythological vegetation, and besides our classic sphere the ancients knew another, the "barbarian" sphere, peopled with a world of fantastic persons and animals. These sidereal monsters, to whom powerful qualities were ascribed, were likewise the remnants of a multitude of forgotten beliefs. Zoolatry was abandoned in the temples, but people continued to regard as divine the lion, the bull, the bear, and the fishes, which the Oriental imagination had seen in the starry vault. Old totems of the Semitic tribes or of the Egyptian divisions lived again, transformed into constellations. Heterogeneous elements, taken from all the religions of the Orient, were combined in the uranography of the ancients, and in the power ascribed to the phantoms that it evoked, vibrates in the indistinct echo of ancient devotions that are often completely unknown to us.[30] Astrology, then, was religious in its origin and in its principles. It was religious also in its close relation to the Oriental religions, especially those of the Syrian Baals and of Mithra; finally, it was religious in the effects that it produced. I do not mean the effects expected from a constellation in any particular instance: as for example the power to evoke the gods that were subject to their domination.[31] But I have in mind the general influence those doctrines exercised upon Roman paganism. When the Olympian gods were incorporated among the stars, when Saturn and Jupiter became planets and {175} the celestial virgin a sign of the zodiac, they assumed a character very different from the one they had originally possessed. It has been shown[32] how, in Syria, the idea of an infinite repetition of cycles of years according to which the celestial revolutions took place, led to the conception of divine eternity, how the theory of a fatal domination of the stars over the earth brought about that of the omnipotence of the "lord of the heavens," and how the introduction of a universal religion was the necessary result of the belief that the stars exerted an influence upon the peoples of every climate. The logic of all these consequences of the principles of astrology was plain to the Latin as well as to the Semitic races, and caused a rapid transformation of the ancient idolatry. As in Syria, the sun, which the astrologers called the leader of the planetary choir, "who is established as king and leader of the whole world,"[33] necessarily became the highest power of the Roman pantheon. Astrology also modified theology, by introducing into this pantheon a great number of new gods, some of whom were singularly abstract. Thereafter man worshiped the constellations of the firmament, particularly the twelve signs of the zodiac, every one of which had its mythologic legend; the sky (_Caelus_) itself, because it was considered the first cause, and was sometimes confused with the supreme being; the four elements, the antithesis and perpetual transmutations of which produced all tangible phenomena, and which were often symbolized by a group of animals ready to devour each other;[34] finally, time and its subdivisions.[35] The calendars were religious before they were secular; their purpose was not, primarily, to record fleeting {176} time, but to observe the recurrence of propitious or inauspicious dates separated by periodic intervals. It is a matter of experience that the return of certain moments is associated with the appearance of certain phenomena; they have, therefore, a special efficacy, and are endowed with a sacred character. By determining periods with mathematical exactness, astrology continued to see in them "a divine power,"[36] to use Zeno's term. Time, that regulates the course of the stars and the transubstantiation of the elements, was conceived of as the master of the gods and the primordial principle, and was likened to destiny. Each part of its infinite duration brought with it some propitious or evil movement of the sky that was anxiously observed, and transformed the ever modified universe. The centuries, the years and the seasons, placed into relation with the four winds and the four cardinal points, the twelve months connected with the zodiac, the day and the night, the twelve hours, all were personified and deified, as the authors of every change in the universe. The allegorical figures contrived for these abstractions by astrological paganism did not even perish with it.[37] The symbolism it had disseminated outlived it, and until the Middle Ages these pictures of fallen gods were reproduced indefinitely in sculpture, mosaics, and in Christian miniatures.[38] Thus astrology entered into all religious ideas, and the doctrines of the destiny of the world and of man harmonized with its teachings. According to Berosus, who is the interpreter of ancient Chaldean theories, the existence of the universe consisted of a series of "big years," each having its summer and its winter. Their summer took place when all the planets were in {177} conjunction at the same point of Cancer, and brought with it a general conflagration. On the other hand, their winter came when all the planets were joined in Capricorn, and its result was a universal flood. Each of these cosmic cycles, the duration of which was fixed at 432,000 years according to the most probable estimate, was an exact reproduction of those that had preceded it. In fact, when the stars resumed exactly the same position, they were forced to act in identically the same manner as before. This Babylonian theory, an anticipation of that of the "eternal return of things," which Nietzsche boasts of having discovered, enjoyed lasting popularity during antiquity, and in various forms came down to the Renaissance.[39] The belief that the world would be destroyed by fire, a theory also spread abroad by the Stoics, found a new support in these cosmic speculations. Astrology, however, revealed the future not only of the universe, but also of man. According to a Chaldeo-Persian doctrine, accepted by the pagan mystics and previously pointed out by us,[40] a bitter necessity compelled the souls that dwell in great numbers on the celestial heights, to descend upon this earth and to animate certain bodies that are to hold them in captivity. In descending to the earth they travel through the spheres of the planets and receive some quality from each of these wandering stars, according to its positions. Contrariwise, when death releases them from their carnal prison, they return to their first habitation, providing they have led a pious life, and if as they pass through the doors of the superposed heavens they divest themselves of the passions and inclinations acquired during their first journey, {178} to ascend finally, as pure essence to the radiant abode of the gods. There they live forever among the eternal stars, freed from the tyranny of destiny and even from the limitations of time. This alliance of the theorems of astronomy with their old beliefs supplied the Chaldeans with answers to all the questions that men asked concerning the relation of heaven and earth, the nature of God, the existence of the world, and their own destiny. Astrology was really the first scientific theology. Hellenistic logic arranged the Oriental doctrines properly, combined them with the Stoic philosophy and built them up into a system of indisputable grandeur, an ideal reconstruction of the universe, the powerful assurance of which inspired Manilius to sublime language when he was not exhausted by his efforts to master an ill-adapted theme.[41] The vague and irrational notion of "sympathy" is transformed into a deep sense of the relationship between the human soul, an igneous substance, and the divine stars, and this feeling is strengthened by thought.[42] The contemplation of the sky has become a communion. During the splendor of night the mind of man became intoxicated with the light streaming from above; born on the wings of enthusiasm, he ascended into the sacred choir of the stars and took part in their harmonious movements. "He participates in their immortality, and, before his appointed hour, converses with the gods."[43] In spite of the subtle precision the Greeks always maintained in their speculations, the feeling that permeated astrology down to the end of paganism never belied its Oriental and religious origin. {179} The most essential principle of astrology was that of fatalism. As the poet says:[44] _"Fata regunt orbem, certa stant omnia lege."_ The Chaldeans were the first to conceive the idea of an inflexible necessity ruling the universe, instead of gods acting in the world according to their passions, like men in society. They noticed that an immutable law regulated the movements of the celestial bodies, and, in the first enthusiasm of their discovery they extended its effects to all moral and social phenomena. The postulates of astrology imply an absolute determinism. Tyche, or deified fortune, became the irresistible mistress of mortals and immortals alike, and was even worshiped exclusively by some under the empire. Our deliberate will never plays more than a very limited part in our happiness and success, but, among the pronunciamentos and in the anarchy of the third century, blind chance seemed to play with the life of every one according to its fancy, and it can easily be understood that the ephemeral rulers of that period, like the masses, saw in chance the sovereign disposer of their fates.[45] The power of this fatalist conception during antiquity may be measured by its long persistence, at least in the Orient, where it originated. Starting from Babylonia,[46] it spread over the entire Hellenic world, as early as the Alexandrian period, and towards the end of paganism a considerable part of the efforts of the Christian apologists was directed against it.[47] But it was destined to outlast all attacks, and to impose itself even on Islam.[48] In Latin Europe, in spite of the anathemas of the church, the belief remained confusedly {180} alive all through the Middle Ages that on this earth everything happens somewhat "Per ovra delle rote magne, Che drizzan ciascun seme ad alcun fine Secondo che le stella son campagne."[49] The weapons used by the ecclesiastic writers in contending against this sidereal fatalism were taken from the arsenal of the old Greek dialectics. In general, they were those that all defenders of free will had used for centuries: determinism destroys responsibility; rewards and punishments are absurd if man acts under a necessity that compels him, if he is born a hero or a criminal. We shall not dwell on these metaphysical discussions,[50] but there is one argument that is more closely connected with our subject, and therefore should be mentioned. If we live under an immutable fate, no supplication can change its decisions; religion is unavailing, it is useless to ask the oracles to reveal the secrets of a future which nothing can change, and prayers, to use one of Seneca's expressions, are nothing but "the solace of diseased minds."[51] And, doubtless, some adepts of astrology, like the Emperor Tiberius,[52] neglected the practice of religion, because they were convinced that fate governed all things. Following the example set by the Stoics, they made absolute submission to an almighty fate and joyful acceptance of the inevitable a moral duty, and were satisfied to worship the superior power that ruled the universe, without demanding anything in return. They considered themselves at the mercy of even the most capricious fate, and were like the intelligent slave who guesses the desires of his master to satisfy them, and {181} knows how to make the hardest servitude tolerable.[53] The masses, however, never reached that height of resignation. They looked at astrology far more from a religious than from a logical standpoint.[54] The planets and constellations were not only cosmic forces, whose favorable or inauspicious action grew weaker or stronger according to the turnings of a course established for eternity; they were deities who saw and heard, who were glad or sad, who had a voice and sex, who were prolific or sterile, gentle or savage, obsequious or arrogant.[55] Their anger could therefore be soothed and their favor obtained through rites and offerings; even the adverse stars were not unrelenting and could be persuaded through sacrifices and supplications. The narrow and pedantic Firmicus Maternus strongly asserts the omnipotence of fate, but at the same time he invokes the gods and asks for their aid against the influence of the stars. As late as the fourth century the pagans of Rome who were about to marry, or to make a purchase, or to solicit a public office, went to the diviner for his prognostics, at the same time praying to Fate for prosperity in their undertaking.[56] Thus a fundamental antinomy manifested itself all through the development of astrology, which pretended to be an exact science, but always remained a sacerdotal theology. Of course, the more the idea of fatalism imposed itself and spread, the more the weight of this hopeless theory oppressed the consciousness. Man felt himself dominated and crushed by blind forces that dragged him on as irresistibly as they kept the celestial spheres in motion. His soul tried to escape the oppression of this cosmic mechanism, and to leave the slavery of {182} Ananke. But he no longer had confidence in the ceremonies of his old religion. The new powers that had taken possession of heaven had to be propitiated by new means. The Oriental religions themselves offered a remedy against the evils they had created, and taught powerful and mysterious processes for conjuring fate.[57] And side by side with astrology we see magic, a more pernicious aberration, gaining ground.[58] * * * * * If, from the reading of Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, we pass on to read a magic papyrus, our first impression is that we have stepped from one end of the intellectual world to the other. Here we find no trace of the systematic order or severe method that distinguish the work of the scholar of Alexandria. Of course, the doctrines of astrology are just as chimerical as those of magic, but they are deduced with an amount of logic, entirely wanting in works of sorcery, that compels reasoning intellects to accept them. Recipes borrowed from medicine and popular superstition, primitive practices rejected or abandoned by the sacerdotal rituals, beliefs repudiated by a progressive moral religion, plagiarisms and forgeries of literary or liturgic texts, incantations in which the gods of all barbarous nations are invoked in unintelligible gibberish, odd and disconcerting ceremonies--all these form a chaos in which the imagination loses itself, a potpourri in which an arbitrary syncretism seems to have attempted to create an inextricable confusion. However, if we observe more closely how magic operates, we find that it starts out from the same principles and acts along the same line of reasoning {183} as astrology. Born during the same period in the primitive civilizations of the Orient, both were based on a number of common ideas.[59] Magic, like astrology, proceeded from the principle of universal sympathy, yet it did not consider the relation existing between the stars traversing the heavens, and physical or moral phenomena, but the relation between whatever bodies there are. It started out from the preconceived idea that an obscure but constant relation exists between certain things, certain words, certain persons. This connection was established without hesitation between dead material things and living beings, because the primitive races ascribed a soul and existence similar to those of man, to everything surrounding them. The distinction between the three kingdoms of nature was unknown to them; they were "animists." The life of a person might, therefore, be linked to that of a thing, a tree, or an animal, in such a manner that one died if the other did, and that any damage suffered by one was also sustained by its inseparable associate. Sometimes the relation was founded on clearly intelligible grounds, like a resemblance between the thing and the being, as where, to kill an enemy, one pierced a waxen figure supposed to represent him. Or a contact, even merely passing by, was believed to have created indestructible affinities, for instance where the garments of an absent person were operated upon. Often, also, these imaginary relations were founded on reasons that escape us: like the qualities attributed by astrology to the stars, they may have been derived from old beliefs the memory of which is lost. Like astrology, then, magic was a science in some respects. First, like the predictions of its sister, it {184} was partly based on observation--observation frequently rudimentary, superficial, hasty, and erroneous, but nevertheless important. It was an experimental discipline. Among the great number of facts noted by the curiosity of the magicians, there were many that received scientific indorsement later on. The attraction of the magnet for iron was utilized by the thaumaturgi before it was interpreted by the natural philosophers. In the vast compilations that circulated under the venerable names of Zoroaster or Hostanes, many fertile remarks were scattered among puerile ideas and absurd teachings, just as in the Greek treatises on alchemy that have come down to us. The idea that knowledge of the power of certain agents enables one to stimulate the hidden forces of the universe into action and to obtain extraordinary results, inspires the researches of physics to-day, just as it inspired the claims of magic. And if astrology was a perverted astronomy, magic was physics gone astray. Moreover, and again like astrology, magic was a science, because it started from the fundamental conception that order and law exist in nature, and that the same cause always produces the same effect. An occult ceremony, performed with the same care as an experiment in the chemical laboratory, will always have the expected result. To know the mysterious affinities that connect all things is sufficient to set the mechanism of the universe into motion. But the error of the magicians consisted in establishing a connection between phenomena that do not depend on each other at all. The act of exposing to the light for an instant a sensitive plate in a camera, then immersing it, according to given recipes, in appropriate liquids, and of making {185} the picture of a relative or friend appear thereon, is a magical operation, but based on real actions and reactions, instead of on arbitrarily assumed sympathies and antipathies. Magic, therefore, was a science groping in the dark, and later became "a bastard sister of science," as Frazer puts it. But, like astrology, magic was religious in origin, and always remained a bastard sister of religion. Both grew up together in the temples of the barbarian Orient. Their practices were, at first, part of the dubious knowledge of fetichists who claimed to have control over the spirits that peopled nature and animated everything, and who claimed that they communicated with these spirits by means of rites known to themselves alone. Magic has been cleverly defined as "the strategy of animism."[60] But, just as the growing power ascribed by the Chaldeans to the sidereal deities transformed the original astrology, so primitive sorcery assumed a different character when the world of the gods, conceived after the image of man, separated itself more and more from the realm of physical forces and became a realm of its own. This gave the mystic element which always entered the ceremonies, a new precision and development. By means of his charms, talismans, and exorcisms, the magician now communicated with the celestial or infernal "demons" and compelled them to obey him. But these spirits no longer opposed him with the blind resistance of matter animated by an uncertain kind of life; they were active and subtle beings having intelligence and will-power. Sometimes they took revenge for the slavery the magician attempted to impose on them and punished the audacious operator, who feared them, although {186} invoking their aid. Thus the incantation often assumed the shape of a prayer addressed to a power stronger than man, and magic became a religion. Its rites developed side by side with the canonical liturgies, and frequently encroached on them.[61] The only barrier between them was the vague and constantly shifting borderline that limits the neighboring domains of religion and superstition. * * * * * This half scientific, half religious magic, with its books and its professional adepts, is of Oriental origin. The old Grecian and Italian sorcery appears to have been rather mild. Conjurations to avert hail-storms, or formulas to draw rain, evil charms to render fields barren or to kill cattle, love philters and rejuvenating salves, old women's remedies, talismans against the evil eye,--all are based on popular superstition and kept in existence by folk-lore and charlatanism. Even the witches of Thessaly, whom people credited with the power of making the moon descend from the sky, were botanists more than anything else, acquainted with the marvelous virtues of medicinal plants. The terror that the necromancers inspired was due, to a considerable extent, to the use they made of the old belief in ghosts. They exploited the superstitious belief in ghost-power and slipped metal tablets covered with execrations into graves, to bring misfortune or death to some enemy. But neither in Greece nor in Italy is there any trace of a coherent system of doctrines, of an occult and learned discipline, nor of any sacerdotal instruction. Originally the adepts in this dubious art were {187} despised. As late as the period of Augustus they were generally equivocal beggar-women who plied their miserable trade in the lowest quarters of the slums. But with the invasion of the Oriental religions the magician began to receive more consideration, and his condition improved.[62] He was honored, and feared even more. During the second century scarcely anybody would have doubted his power to call up divine apparitions, converse with the superior spirits and even translate himself bodily into the heavens.[63] Here the victorious progress of the Oriental religions shows itself. The Egyptian ritual[64] originally was nothing but a collection of magical practices, properly speaking. The religious community imposed its will upon the gods by means of prayers or even threats. The gods were compelled to obey the officiating priest, if the liturgy was correctly performed, and if the incantations and the magic words were pronounced with the right intonation. The well-informed priest had an almost unlimited power over all supernatural beings on land, in the water, in the air, in heaven and in hell. Nowhere was the gulf between things human and things divine smaller, nowhere was the increasing differentiation that separated magic from religion less advanced. Until the end of paganism they remained so closely associated that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the texts of one from those of the other. The Chaldeans[65] also were past masters of sorcery, well versed in the knowledge of presages and experts in conjuring the evils which the presages foretold. In Mesopotamia, where they were confidential advisers of the kings, the magicians belonged to the official {188} clergy; they invoked the aid of the state gods in their incantations, and their sacred science was as highly esteemed as haruspicy in Etruria. The immense prestige that continued to surround it, assured its persistence after the fall of Nineveh and Babylon. Its tradition was still alive under the Cæsars, and a number of enchanters rightly or wrongly claimed to possess the ancient wisdom of Chaldea.[66] And the thaumaturgus, who was supposed to be the heir of the archaic priests, assumed a wholly sacerdotal appearance at Rome. Being an inspired sage who received confidential communications from heavenly spirits, he gave to his life and to his appearance a dignity almost equal to that of the philosopher. The common people soon confused the two,[67] and the Orientalizing philosophy of the last period of paganism actually accepted and justified all the superstitions of magic. Neo-Platonism, which concerned itself to a large extent with demonology, leaned more and more towards theurgy, and was finally completely absorbed by it. But the ancients expressly distinguished, "magic," which was always under suspicion and disapproved of, from the legitimate and honorable art for which the name "theurgy"[68] was invented. The term "magician," ([Greek: magos]) which applied to all performers of miracles, properly means the priests of Mazdaism, and a well attested tradition makes the Persians[69] the authors of the real magic, that called "black magic" by the Middle Ages. If they did not invent it--because it is as old as humanity--they were at least the first to place it upon a doctrinal foundation and to assign to it a place {189} in a clearly formulated theological system. The Mazdean dualism gave a new power to this pernicious knowledge by conferring upon it the character that will distinguish it henceforth. Under what influences did the Persian magic come into existence? When and how did it spread? These are questions that are not well elucidated yet. The intimate fusion of the religious doctrines of the Iranian conquerors with those of the native clergy, which took place at Babylon, occurred in this era of belief,[70] and the magicians that were established in Mesopotamia combined their secret traditions with the rites and formulas codified by the Chaldean sorcerers. The universal curiosity of the Greeks soon took note of this marvelous science. Naturalist philosophers like Democritus,[71] the great traveler, seem to have helped themselves more than once from the treasure of observations collected by the Oriental priests. Without a doubt they drew from these incongruous compilations, in which truth was mingled with the absurd and reality with the fantastical, the knowledge of some properties of plants and minerals, or of some experiments of physics. However, the limpid Hellenic genius always turned away from the misty speculations of magic, giving them but slight consideration. But towards the end of the Alexandrine period the books ascribed to the half-mythical masters of the Persian science, Zoroaster, Hostanes and Hystaspes, were translated into Greek, and until the end of paganism those names enjoyed a prodigious authority. At the same time the Jews, who were acquainted with the arcana of the Irano-Chaldean doctrines and proceedings, made some of the recipes known wherever the dispersion brought {190} them.[72] Later, a more immediate influence was exercised upon the Roman world by the Persian colonies of Asia Minor,[73] who retained an obstinate faith in their ancient national beliefs. The particular importance attributed to magic by the Mazdeans is a necessary consequence of their dualist system, which has been treated by us before.[74] Ormuzd, residing in the heavens of light, is opposed by his irreconcilable adversary, Ahriman, ruler of the underworld. The one stands for light, truth, and goodness, the other for darkness, falsehood, and perversity. The one commands the kind spirits which protect the pious believer, the other is master over demons whose malice causes all the evils that afflict humanity. These opposite principles fight for the domination of the earth, and each creates favorable or noxious animals and plants. Everything on earth is either heavenly or infernal. Ahriman and his demons, who surround man to tempt or hurt him,[75] are evil gods and entirely different from those of which Ormuzd's host consists. The magician sacrifices to them, either to avert evils they threaten, or to direct their ire against enemies of true belief, and the impure spirits rejoice in bloody immolations and delight in the fumes of flesh burning on the altars.[76] Terrible acts and words attended all immolations. Plutarch[77] mentions an example of the dark sacrifices of the Mazdeans. "In a mortar," he says, "they pound a certain herb called wild garlic, at the same time invoking Hades (Ahriman), and the powers of darkness, then stirring this herb in the blood of a slaughtered wolf, they take it away and drop it on a spot never reached by the rays of the sun." A necromantic performance indeed. {191} We can imagine the new strength which such a conception of the universe must have given to magic. It was no longer an incongruous collection of popular superstitions and scientific observations. It became a reversed religion: its nocturnal rites were the dreadful liturgy of the infernal powers. There was no miracle the experienced magician might not expect to perform with the aid of the demons, providing he know how to master them; he would invent any atrocity in his desire to gain the favor of the evil divinities whom crime gratified and suffering pleased. Hence the number of impious practices performed in the dark, practices the horror of which is equaled only by their absurdity: preparing beverages that disturbed the senses and impaired the intellect; mixing subtle poisons extracted from demoniac plants and corpses already in a state of putridity;[78] immolating children in order to read the future in their quivering entrails or to conjure up ghosts. All the satanic refinement that a perverted imagination in a state of insanity could conceive[79] pleased the malicious evil spirits; the more odious the monstrosity, the more assured was its efficacy. These abominable practices were sternly suppressed by the Roman government. Whereas, in the case of an astrologer who had committed an open transgression, the law was satisfied with expelling him from Rome--whither he generally soon returned,--the magician was put in the same class with murderers and poisoners, and was subjected to the very severest punishment. He was nailed to the cross or thrown to the wild beasts. Not only the practice of the profession, but even the simple fact of possessing works of sorcery made any one subject to prosecution.[80] {192} However, there are ways of reaching an agreement with the police, and in this case custom was stronger than law. The intermittent rigor of imperial edicts had no more power to destroy an inveterate superstition than the Christian polemics had to cure it. It was a recognition of its strength when state and church united to fight it. Neither reached the root of the evil, for they did not deny the reality of the power wielded by the sorcerers. As long as it was admitted that malicious spirits constantly interfered in human affairs, and that there were secret means enabling the operator to dominate those spirits or to share in their power, magic was indestructible. It appealed to too many human passions to remain unheard. If, on the one hand, the desire of penetrating the mysteries of the future, the fear of unknown misfortunes, and hope, always reviving, led the anxious masses to seek a chimerical certainty in astrology, on the other hand, in the case of magic, the blinding charm of the marvelous, the entreaties of love and ambition, the bitter desire for revenge, the fascination of crime, and the intoxication of bloodshed,--all the instincts that are not avowable and that are satisfied in the dark, took turns in practising their seductions. During the entire life of the Roman empire its existence continued, and the very mystery that it was compelled to hide in increased its prestige and almost gave it the authority of a revelation. A curious occurrence that took place towards the end of the fifth century at Beirut, in Syria, shows how deeply even the strongest intellects of that period believed in the most atrocious practices of magic. One night some students of the famous law-school of that {193} city attempted to kill a slave in the circus, to aid the master in obtaining the favor of a woman who scorned him. Being reported, they had to deliver up their hidden volumes, of which those of Zoroaster and of Hostanes were found, together with those written by the astrologer Manetho. The whole city was agitated, and searches proved that many young men preferred the study of the illicit science to that of Roman law. By order of the bishop a solemn auto-da-fé was made of all this literature, in the presence of the city officials and the clergy, and the most revolting passages were read in public, "in order to acquaint everybody with the conceited and vain promises of the demons," as the pious writer of the story says.[81] Thus the ancient traditions of magic continued to live in the Christian Orient after the fall of paganism. They even outlived the domination of the church. The rigorous principles of its monotheism notwithstanding, Islam became infected with those Persian superstitions. In the Occident the evil art resisted persecution and anathemas with the same obstinacy as in the Orient. It remained alive in Rome all through the fifth century,[82] and when scientific astrology in Europe went down with science itself, the old Mazdean dualism continued to manifest itself, during the entire Middle Ages in the ceremonies of the black mass and the worshiping of Satan, until the dawn of the modern era. * * * * * Twin sisters, born of the superstitions of the learned Orient, magic and astrology always remained the hybrid daughters of sacerdotal culture. Their existence {194} was governed by two contrary principles, reason and faith, and they never ceased to fluctuate between these two poles of thought. Both were inspired by a belief in universal sympathy, according to which occult and powerful relations exist between human beings and dead objects, all possessing a mysterious life. The doctrine of sidereal influences, combined with a knowledge of the immutability of the celestial revolutions, caused astrology to formulate the first theory of absolute fatalism, whose decrees might be known beforehand. But, besides this rigorous determinism, it retained its childhood faith in the divine stars, whose favor could be secured and malignity avoided through worship. In astrology the experimental method was reduced to the completing of prognostics based on the supposed character of the stellar gods. Magic also remained half empirical and half religious. Like our physics, it was based on observation, it proclaimed the constancy of the laws of nature, and sought to conquer the latent energies of the material world in order to bring them under the dominion of man's will. But at the same time it recognized, in the powers that it claimed to conquer, spirits or demons whose protection might be obtained, whose ill-will might be appeased, or whose savage hostility might be unchained by means of immolations and incantations. All their aberrations notwithstanding, astrology and magic were not entirely fruitless. Their counterfeit learning has been a genuine help to the progress of human knowledge. Because they awakened chimerical hopes and fallacious ambitions in the minds of their adepts, researches were undertaken which undoubtedly {195} would never have been started or persisted in for the sake of a disinterested love of truth. The observations, collected with untiring patience by the Oriental priests, caused the first physical and astronomical discoveries, and, as in the time of the scholastics, the occult sciences led to the exact ones. But when these understood the vanity of the astounding illusions on which astrology and magic had subsisted, they broke up the foundation of the arts to which they owed their birth. * * * * * {196} THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROMAN PAGANISM. About the time of the Severi the religion of Europe must have presented an aspect of surprising variety. Although dethroned, the old native Italian, Celtic and Iberian divinities were still alive. Though eclipsed by foreign rivals, they lived on in the devotion of the lower classes and in the traditions of the rural districts. For a long time the Roman gods had been established in every town and had received the homage of an official clergy according to pontifical rites. Beside them, however, were installed the representatives of all the Asiatic pantheons, and these received the most fervent adoration from the masses. New powers had arrived from Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria, and the dazzling Oriental sun outshone the stars of Italy's temperate sky. All forms of paganism were simultaneously received and retained while the exclusive monotheism of the Jews kept its adherents, and Christianity strengthened its churches and fortified its orthodoxy, at the same time giving birth to the baffling vagaries of gnosticism. A hundred different currents carried away hesitating and undecided minds, a hundred contrasting sermons made appeals to the conscience of the people. Let us suppose that in modern Europe the faithful {197} had deserted the Christian churches to worship Allah or Brahma, to follow the precepts of Confucius or Buddha, or to adopt the maxims of the Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits would be preaching fatalism and predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation--a confusion in which all those priests would erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which the future may perhaps realize, would offer a pretty accurate picture of the religious chaos in which the ancient world was struggling before the reign of Constantine. The Oriental religions that successively gained popularity exercised a decisive influence on the transformation of Latin paganism. Asia Minor was the first to have its gods accepted by Italy. Since the end of the Punic wars the black stone symbolizing the Great Mother of Pessinus had been established on the Palatine, but only since the reign of Claudius could the Phrygian cult freely develop in all its splendor and excesses. It introduced a sensual, highly-colored and fanatical worship into the grave and somber religion of the Romans. Officially recognized, it attracted and took under its protection other foreign divinities from Anatolia and assimilated them to Cybele and Attis, who thereafter bore the symbols of several deities together. Cappadocian, Jewish, Persian and even Christian influences modified the old rites of Pessinus and filled them with ideas of spiritual purification and {198} eternal redemption by the bloody baptism of the taurobolium. But the priests did not succeed in eliminating the basis of coarse naturism which ancient barbaric tradition had imposed upon them. Beginning with the second century before our era, the mysteries of Isis and Serapis spread over Italy with the Alexandrian culture whose religious expression they were, and in spite of all persecution established themselves at Rome where Caligula gave them the freedom of the city. They did not bring with them a very advanced theological system, because Egypt never produced anything but a chaotic aggregate of disparate doctrines, nor a very elevated ethics, because the level of its morality--that of the Alexandrian Greeks--rose but slowly from a low stage. But they made Italy, and later the other Latin provinces, familiar with an ancient ritual of incomparable charm that aroused widely different feelings with its splendid processions and liturgic dramas. They also gave their votaries positive assurance of a blissful immortality after death, when they would be united with Serapis and, participating body and soul in his divinity, would live in eternal contemplation of the gods. At a somewhat later period arrived the numerous and varied Baals of Syria. The great economic movement starting at the beginning of our era which produced the colonization of the Latin world by Syrian slaves and merchants, not only modified the material civilization of Europe, but also its conceptions and beliefs. The Semitic cults entered into successful competition with those of Asia Minor and Egypt. They may not have had so stirring a liturgy, nor have been so thoroughly absorbed in preoccupation with a future {199} life, although they taught an original eschatology, but they did have an infinitely higher idea of divinity. The Chaldean astrology, of which the Syrian priests were enthusiastic disciples, had furnished them with the elements of a scientific theology. It had led them to the notion of a God residing far from the earth above the zone of the stars, a God almighty, universal and eternal. Everything on earth was determined by the revolutions of the heavens according to infinite cycles of years. It had taught them at the same time the worship of the sun, the radiant source of earthly life and human intelligence. The learned doctrines of the Babylonians had also imposed themselves upon the Persian mysteries of Mithra which considered time identified with heaven as the supreme cause, and deified the stars; but they had superimposed themselves upon the ancient Mazdean creed without destroying it. Thus the essential principles of the religion of Iran, the secular and often successful rival of Greece, penetrated into the Occident under cover of Chaldean wisdom. The Mithra worship, the last and highest manifestation of ancient paganism, had Persian dualism for its fundamental dogma. The world is the scene and the stake of a contest between good and evil, Ormuzd and Ahriman, gods and demons, and from this primary conception of the universe flowed a strong and pure system of ethics. Life is a combat; soldiers under the command of Mithra, invincible heroes of the faith, must ceaselessly oppose the undertakings of the infernal powers which sow corruption broadcast. This imperative ethics was productive of energy and formed the characteristic {200} feature distinguishing Mithraism from all other Oriental cults. Thus every one of the Levantine countries--and that is what we meant to show in this brief recapitulation--had enriched Roman paganism with new beliefs that were frequently destined to outlive it. What was the result of this confusion of heterogeneous doctrines whose multiplicity was extreme and whose values were very different? How did the barbaric ideas refine themselves and combine with each other when thrown into the fiery crucible of imperial syncretism? In other words, what shape was assumed by ancient idolatry, so impregnated with exotic theories during the fourth century, when it was finally dethroned? It is this point that we should like to indicate briefly as the conclusion to these studies. However, can we speak of _one_ pagan religion? Did not the blending of the races result in multiplying the variety of disagreements? Had not the confused collision of creeds produced a division into fragments, a communication of churches? Had not a complacent syncretism engendered a multiplication of sects? The "Hellenes," as Themistius told the Emperor Valens, had three hundred ways of conceiving and honoring deity, who takes pleasure in such diversity of homage.[1] In paganism a cult does not die violently, but after long decay. A new doctrine does not necessarily displace an older one. They may co-exist for a long time as contrary possibilities suggested by the intellect or faith, and all opinions, all practices, seem respectable to paganism. It never has any radical or revolutionary transformations. Undoubtedly, the pagan beliefs of the fourth century or earlier did not {201} have the consistency of a metaphysical system nor the rigor of canons formulated by a council. There is always a considerable difference between the faith of the masses and that of cultured minds, and this difference was bound to be great in an aristocratic empire whose social classes were sharply separated. The devotion of the masses was as unchanging as the depths of the sea; it was not stirred up nor heated by the upper currents.[2] The peasants practised their pious rites over anointed stones, sacred springs and blossoming trees, as in the past, and continued celebrating their rustic holidays during seed-time and harvest. They adhered with invincible tenacity to their traditional usages. Degraded and lowered to the rank of superstitions, these were destined to persist for centuries under the Christian orthodoxy without exposing it to serious peril, and while they were no longer marked in the liturgic calendars they were still mentioned occasionally in the collections of folk-lore. At the other extreme of society the philosophers delighted in veiling religion with the frail and brilliant tissue of their speculations. Like the emperor Julian they improvised bold and incongruous interpretations of the myth of the Great Mother, and these interpretations were received and relished by a restricted circle of scholars. But during the fourth century these vagaries of the individual imagination were nothing but arbitrary applications of uncontested principles. During that century there was much less intellectual anarchy than when Lucian had exposed the sects "for sale at public auction"; a comparative harmony arose among the pagans after they joined the opposition. One single school, that of neo-Platonism, ruled all {202} minds. This school not only respected positive religion, as ancient stoicism had done, but venerated it, because it saw there the expression of an old revelation handed down by past generations. It considered the sacred books divinely inspired--the books of Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, the Chaldean oracles, Homer, and especially the esoteric doctrines of the mysteries--and subordinated its theories to their teachings. As there must be no contradiction between all the disparate traditions of different countries and different periods, because all have emanated from one divinity, philosophy, the _ancilla theologiae_, attempted to reconcile them by the aid of allegory. And thus, by means of compromises between old Oriental ideas and Greco-Latin thought, an _ensemble_ of beliefs slowly took form, the truth of which seemed to have been established by common consent. So when the atrophied parts of the Roman religion had been removed, foreign elements had combined to give it a new vigor and in it themselves became modified. This hidden work of internal decomposition and reconstruction had unconsciously produced a religion very different from the one Augustus had attempted to restore. However, we would be tempted to believe that there had been no change in the Roman faith, were we to read certain authors that fought idolatry in those days. Saint Augustine, for instance, in his _City of God_, pleasantly pokes fun at the multitude of Italian gods that presided over the paltriest acts of life.[3] But the useless, ridiculous deities of the old pontifical litanies no longer existed outside of the books of antiquaries. As a matter of fact, the Christian polemicist's authority in this instance was Varro. The defenders of the {203} church sought weapons against idolatry even in Xenophanes, the first philosopher to oppose Greek polytheism. It has frequently been shown that apologists find it difficult to follow the progress of the doctrines which they oppose, and often their blows fall upon dead men. Moreover, it is a fault common to all scholars, to all imbued with book learning, that they are better acquainted with the opinions of ancient authors than with the sentiments of their contemporaries, and that they prefer to live in the past rather than in the world surrounding them. It was easier to reproduce the objections of the Epicureans and the skeptics against abolished beliefs, than to study the defects of an active organism with a view to criticizing it. In those times the merely formal culture of the schools caused many of the best minds to lose their sense of reality. The Christian polemics therefore frequently give us an inadequate idea of paganism in its decline. When they complacently insisted upon the immorality of the sacred legends they ignored the fact that the gods and heroes of mythology had no longer any but a purely literary existence.[4] The writers of that period, like those of the Renaissance, regarded the fictions of mythology as details necessary to poetical composition. They were ornaments of style, rhetorical devices, but not the expression of a sincere faith. Those old myths had fallen to the lowest degree of disrepute in the theater. The actors of mimes ridiculing Jupiter's gallant adventures did not believe in their reality any more than the author of Faust believed in the compact with Mephistopheles. So we must not be deceived by the oratorical effects {204} of a rhetorician like Arnobius or by the Ciceronian periods of a Lactantius. In order to ascertain the real status of the beliefs we must refer to Christian authors who were men of letters less than they were men of action, who lived the life of the people and breathed the air of the streets, and who spoke from experience rather than from the treatises of mythmongers. They were high functionaries like Prudentius;[5] like the man to whom the name "Ambrosiaster"[6] has been given since the time of Erasmus; like the converted pagan Firmicus Maternus,[7] who had written a treatise on astrology before opposing "The Error of the Profane Religions"; like certain priests brought into contact with the last adherents of idolatry through their pastoral duties, as for instance the author of the homilies ascribed to St. Maximus of Turin;[8] finally like the writers of anonymous pamphlets, works prepared for the particular occasion and breathing the ardor of all the passions of the movement.[9] If this inquiry is based on the obscure indications in regard to their religious convictions left by members of the Roman aristocracy who remained true to the faith of their ancestors, like Macrobius or Symmachus; if it is particularly guided by the exceptionally numerous inscriptions that seem to be the public expression of the last will of expiring paganism, we shall be able to gain a sufficiently precise idea of the condition of the Roman religion at the time of its extinction. One fact becomes immediately clear from an examination of those documents. The old national religion of Rome was dead.[10] The great dignitaries still adorned themselves with the titles of augur and quindecimvir, or of consul and tribune, but those {205} archaic prelacies were as devoid of all real influence upon religion as the republican magistracies were powerless in the state. Their fall had been made complete on the day when Aurelian established the pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, the protector of his empire, beside and above the ancient high priests. The only cults still alive were those of the Orient, and against them were directed the efforts of the Christian polemics, who grew more and more bitter in speaking of them. The barbarian gods had taken the place of the defunct immortals in the devotion of the pagans. They alone still had empire over the soul. With all the other "profane religions," Firmicus Maternus fought those of the four Oriental nations. He connected them with the four elements. The Egyptians were the worshipers of water--the water of the Nile fertilizing their country; the Phrygians of the earth, which was to them the Great Mother of everything; the Syrians and Carthaginians of the air, which they adored under the name of celestial Juno;[11] the Persians of fire, to which they attributed preeminence over the other three principles. This system certainly was borrowed from the pagan theologians. In the common peril threatening them, those cults, formerly rivals, had become reconciled and regarded themselves as divisions and, so to speak, congregations, of the same church. Each one of them was especially consecrated to one of the elements which in combination form the universe. Their union constituted the pantheistic religion of the deified world. All the Oriental religions assumed the form of mysteries.[12] Their dignitaries were at the same time pontiffs of the Invincible Sun, fathers of Mithra, {206} celebrants of the taurobolium of the Great Mother, prophets of Isis; in short, they had all titles imaginable. In their initiation they received the revelation of an esoteric doctrine strengthened by their fervor.[13] What was the theology they learned? Here also a certain dogmatic homogeneity has established itself. All writers agree with Firmicus that the pagans worshiped the _elementa_.[14] Under this term were included not only the four simple substances which by their opposition and blending caused all phenomena of the visible world,[15] but also the stars and in general the elements of all celestial and earthly bodies.[16] We therefore may in a certain sense speak of the return of paganism to nature worship; but must this transformation be regarded as a retrogression toward a barbarous past, as a relapse to the level of primitive animism? If so, we should be deceived by appearances. Religions do not fall back into infancy as they grow old. The pagans of the fourth century no longer naively considered their gods as capricious genii, as the disordered powers of a confused natural philosophy; they conceived them as cosmic energies whose providential action was regulated in a harmonious system. Faith was no longer instinctive and impulsive, for erudition and reflection had reconstructed the entire theology. In a certain sense it might be said that theology had passed from the fictitious to the metaphysical state, according to the formula of Comte. It was intimately connected with the knowledge of the day, which was cherished by its last votaries with love and pride, as faithful heirs of the ancient wisdom of the Orient and Greece.[17] In many instances it was nothing but a religious form of the cosmology of the {207} period. This constituted both its strength and its weakness. The rigorous principles of astrology determined its conception of heaven and earth. The universe was an organism animated by a God, unique, eternal and almighty. Sometimes this God was identified with the destiny that ruled all things, with infinite time that regulated all visible phenomena, and he was worshiped in each subdivision of that endless duration, especially in the months and the seasons.[18] Sometimes, however, he was compared with a king; he was thought of as a sovereign governing an empire, and the various gods then were the princes and dignitaries interceding with the rulers on behalf of his subjects whom they led in some manner into his presence. This heavenly court had its messengers or "angels" conveying to men the will of the master and reporting again the vows and petitions of his subjects. It was an aristocratic monarchy in heaven as on earth.[19] A more philosophic conception made the divinity an infinite power impregnating all nature with its overflowing forces. "There is only one God, sole and supreme," wrote Maximus of Madaura about 390, "without beginning or parentage, whose energies, diffused through the world, we invoke under various names, because we are ignorant of his real name. By successively addressing our supplications to his different members we intend to honor him in his entirety. Through the mediation of the subordinate gods the common father both of themselves and of all men is honored in a thousand different ways by mortals who are thus in accord in spite of their discord."[20] However, this ineffable God, who comprehensively embraces everything, manifests himself especially in {208} the resplendent brightness of the ethereal sky.[21] He reveals his power in water and in fire, in the earth, the sea and the blowing of the winds; but his purest, most radiant and most active epiphany is in the stars whose revolutions determine every event and all our actions. Above all he manifests himself in the sun, the motive power of the celestial spheres, the inexhaustible seat of light and life, the creator of all intelligence on earth. Certain philosophers like the senator Praetextatus, one of the _dramatis personae_ of Macrobius, confounded all the ancient divinities of paganism with the sun in a thorough-going syncretism.[22] Just as a superficial observation might lead to the belief that the theology of the last pagans had reverted to its origin, so at first sight the transformation of the ritual might appear like a return to savagery. With the adoption of the Oriental mysteries barbarous, cruel and obscene practices were undoubtedly spread, as for instance the masquerading in the guise of animals in the Mithraic initiations, the bloody dances of the _galli_ of the Great Mother and the mutilations of the Syrian priests. Nature worship was originally as "amoral" as nature itself. But an ethereal spiritualism ideally transfigured the coarseness of those primitive customs. Just as the doctrine had become completely impregnated with philosophy and erudition, so the liturgy had become saturated with ethical ideas. The taurobolium, a disgusting shower-bath of lukewarm blood, had become a means of obtaining a new and eternal life; the ritualistic ablutions were no longer external and material acts, but were supposed to cleanse the soul of its impurities and to restore its original innocence; the sacred repasts {209} imparted an intimate virtue to the soul and furnished sustenance to the spiritual life. While efforts were made to maintain the continuity of tradition, its content had slowly been transformed. The most shocking and licentious fables were metamorphosed into edifying narratives by convenient and subtle interpretations which were a joy to the learned mythographers. Paganism had become a school of morality, the priest a doctor and director of the conscience.[23] The purity and holiness imparted by the practice of sacred ceremonies were the indispensable condition for obtaining eternal life.[24] The mysteries promised a blessed immortality to their initiates, and claimed to reveal to them infallible means of effecting their salvation. According to a generally accepted symbol, the spirit animating man was a spark, detached from the fires shining in the ether; it partook of their divinity and so, it was believed, had descended to the earth to undergo a trial. It could literally be said that "Man is a fallen god who still remembers heaven." After having left their corporeal prisons, the pious souls reascended towards the celestial regions of the divine stars, to live forever in endless brightness beyond the starry spheres.[25] But at the other extremity of the world, facing this luminous realm, extended the somber kingdom of evil spirits. They were irreconcilable adversaries of the gods and men of good will, and constantly left the infernal regions to roam about the earth and scatter evil. With the aid of the celestial spirits, the faithful had to struggle forever against their designs and seek to avert their anger by means of bloody sacrifices. {210} But, with the help of occult and terrible processes, the magician could subject them to his power and compel them to serve his purposes. This demonology, the monstrous offspring of Persian dualism, favored the rise of every superstition.[26] However, the reign of the evil powers was not to last forever. According to common opinion the universe would be destroyed by fire[27] after the times had been fulfilled. All the wicked would perish, but the just would be revived and establish the reign of universal happiness in the regenerated world.[28] The foregoing is a rapid sketch of the theology of paganism after three centuries of Oriental influence. From coarse fetichism and savage superstitions the learned priests of the Asiatic cults had gradually produced a complete system of metaphysics and eschatology, as the Brahmins built up the spiritualistic monism of the Vedanta beside the monstrous idolatry of Hinduism, or, to confine our comparisons to the Latin world, as the jurists drew from the traditional customs of primitive tribes the abstract principles of a legal system that governs the most cultivated societies. This religion was no longer like that of ancient Rome, a mere collection of propitiatory and expiatory rites performed by the citizen for the good of the state; it now pretended to offer to all men a world-conception which gave rise to a rule of conduct and placed the end of existence in the future life. It was more unlike the worship that Augustus had attempted to restore than the Christianity that fought it. The two opposed creeds moved in the same intellectual and moral sphere,[29] and one could actually pass from one to the other without shock or interruption. Sometimes when {211} reading the long works of the last Latin writers, like Ammianus Marcellinus or Boëthius, or the panegyrics of the official orators,[30] scholars could well ask whether their authors were pagan or Christian. In the time of Symmachus and Praetextatus, the members of the Roman aristocracy who had remained faithful to the gods of their ancestors did not have a mentality or morality very different from that of adherents of the new faith who sat with them in the senate. The religious and mystical spirit of the Orient had slowly overcome the whole social organism and had prepared all nations to unite in the bosom of a universal church. * * * * * {213} NOTES. PREFACE. 1 We are indebted for more than one useful suggestion to our colleagues Messrs. Charles Michel and Joseph Bidez, who were kind enough to read the proofs of the French edition. 2 An outline of the present state of the subject will be found in a recent volume by Gruppe, _Griechische Mythologie_, 1906, pp. 1606 ff., whose views are sharply opposed to the negative conclusions formulated, with certain reservations, by Harnack, _Ausbreitung des Christentums_, II, pp. 274 ff. Among the latest studies intended for the general reader that have appeared on this subject, may be mentioned in Germany those of Geffcken (_Aus der Werdezeit des Christentums_, Leipsic, 1904, pp. 114 ff.), and in England those of Cheyne (_Bible Problems_, 1904), who expresses his opinion in these terms: "The Christian religion is a synthesis, and only those who have dim eyes can assert that the intellectual empires of Babylonia and Persia have fallen."--Very useful is the new book of Clemen, _Religionsgeschichtliche Erklärung des Neuen Testaments_, Giessen, 1909. 3 _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 342, n. 4; see the new texts commented on by Usener, _Rhein. Museum_, LX, 1905, pp. 466 ff.; 489 ff., and my paper "Natalis Invicti," _C. R. Acad. des inscr._, 1911. 4 See page 70. Compare also _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 341. The imitation of the church is plain in the pagan reform attempted by the emperor Julian. 5 See Harnack, _Militia Christi_, 1905. 6 I have collected a number of texts on the religious "militias" in _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 317, n. 1. Others could certainly be discovered: Apuleius, _Metam._, XI, 14: _E cohorte {214} religionis unus_ (in connection with a mystic of Isis);--Vettius Valens (V, 2, p. 220, 27, Kroll ed.): [Greek: Stratiôtai tês heimarmenês]; (VII, 3, p. 271, 28) [Greek: Sustrateuesthai tois kairois gennaiôs]. See Minucius Felix, 36, § 7: _Quod patimur non est poena, militia est._--We might also mention the commonplace term _militia Veneris_, which was popular with the Augustan poets (Propertius, IV, 1, 137; see I, 6, 30; Horace, _Od._, III, 26, and especially the parallel developed by Ovid, _Amor._, I, 9, 1 ff., and _Ars amat._, III, 233 ff.)--Socrates, in Plato's _Apologia_ (p. 28 E), incidentally likens the philosophic mission imposed on him by the divinity to the campaigns he waged under the orders of the archons, but the comparison of God with a "strategus" was developed especially by the Stoics; see Capelle, "Schrift von der Welt," _Neue Jahrb. für das klass. Altert._, XV, 1905, p. 558, n. 6, and Seneca, _Epist._, 107, 9: _Optimum est Deum sine murmuratione comitari, malus miles est qui imperatorem gemens sequitur_.--See now also Reitzenstein, _Hellenistische Mysterienreligion_, 1910, p. 66. 7 See _Rev. des études grecques_, XIV, 1901, pp. 43 ff. 8 This has been clearly shown by Wendland in connection with the idea of the [Greek: sôtêria], _Zeitschrift für neutest. Wiss._, V, 1904, pp. 355 ff. More recently he has thrown light on the general influence of Hellenistic civilization on Christianity (_Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zum Judentum und Christentum_, Tübingen, 1908). A first attempt to determine the character of Hellenistic mysteries is to be found in Reitzenstein's _Hellenistische Mysterienreligion_, 1910. I. ROME AND THE ORIENT. 1 Renan, _L'Antéchrist_, p. 130. 2 M. Krumbacher (_Byzant. Zeitschr._, XVI, 1907, p. 710) notes, in connection with the idea that I am defending here: "In ähnlicher Weise war dieser Gedanke (der Ueberflügelung des Abendlandes durch die auf allen Kulturgebieten vordringende Regsamkeit der Orientalen) kurz vorher in meiner Skizze der byzantinischen Literatur (_Kultur der Gegenwart_, I, 8 [1907], pp. 246-253) auseinandergelegt worden; es ist ein erfreulicher und bei dem Wirrsal widerstreitender Doctrinen tröstlicher Beweis für den Fortschritt der Erkenntniss, dass {215} zwei von ganz verschiedenen Richtungen ausgehende Diener der Wissenschaft sich in so wichtigen allgemeinen Fragen so nahe kommen." 3. Cf. Kornemann, "Aegyptische Einflüsse im römischen Kaiserreich" (_Neue Jahrb. für das klass. Altertum_, II, 1898, p. 118 ff.) and Otto Hirschfeld, _Die kaiserl. Verwaltungsbeamten_, 2d. ed., p. 469. 4. See Cicero's statement regarding the ancient Roman dominion (_De off._, II, 8): "Illud patrocinium orbis terrae verius quam imperium poterat nominari." 5. O. Hirschfeld, _op. cit._, pp. 53, 91, 93, etc.; cf. Mitteis, _Reichsrecht und Volksrecht_, p. 9, n. 2, etc. Thus have various institutions been transmitted from the ancient Persians to the Romans; see Ch. VI, n. 5. 6. Rostovtzew, "Der Ursprung des Kolonats" (_Beiträge zur alten Gesch._, I, 1901, p. 295); Haussoullier, _Histoire de Milet et du Didymeion_, 1902, p. 106. 7. Mitteis, _Reichsrecht und Volksrecht in den östlichen Provinzen_, 1891, pp. 8 ff. 8. Mommsen, _Gesammelte Schriften_, II, 1905, p. 366: "Seit Diocletian übernimmt der östliche Reichsteil, die _partes Orientis_, auf allen Gebieten die Führung. Dieser späte Sieg des Hellenismus über die Lateiner ist vielleicht nirgends auffälliger als auf dem Gebiet der juristischen Schriftstellerei." 9. De Vogüe and Duthoit, _L'Architecture civile et religieuse de la Syrie centrale_, Paris, 1866-1877. 10. This result is especially due to the researches of M. Strzygowski, but we cannot enter here into the controversies aroused by his publications: _Orient oder Rom_, 1911; _Hellas in des Orients Umarmung_, Munich, 1902, and especially _Kleinasien, ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte_, Leipsic, 1903; [cf. the reports of Ch. Diehl, _Journal des Savants_, 1904, pp. 236 ff. = _Etudes byzantines_, 1905, pp. 336 ff.; Gabriel Millet, _Revue archéolog._, 1905, I, pp. 93 ff.; Marcel Laurent, _Revue de l'Instr. publ. en Belgique_, 1905, pp. 145 ff.]; _Mschatta_, 1904, [cf. _infra_, Ch. VI, n. 12].--M. Bréhier, "Orient ou Byzance?" (_Rev. archéol._, 1907, II, pp. 396 ff.), gives a substantial summary of the question.--In his last volume, _Amida_ (1910), M. {216} Strzygowski tries to find the source of medieval art in Mesopotamia. For this controversy see Diehl's _Manuel d'art byzantin_, 1910. 11. See also Pliny, _Epist. Traian._, 40: "Architecti tibi [in Bithynia] deesse non possunt ... cum ex Graecia etiam ad nos [at Rome] venire soliti sint."--Among the names of architects mentioned in Latin inscriptions there are a great many revealing Greek or Oriental origin (see Ruggiero, _Dizion. epigr._, s. v. "Architectus"), in spite of the consideration which their eminently useful profession always enjoyed at Rome. 12. The question of the artistic and industrial influences exercised by the Orient over Gaul during the Roman period, has been broached frequently--among others by Courajod (_Leçons du Louvre_, I, 1899, pp. 115, 327 ff.)--but it has never been seriously studied in its entirety. Michaëlis has recently devoted a suggestive article to this subject in connection with a statue from the museum of Metz executed in the style of the school of Pergamum (_Jahrb. der Gesellsch. für lothring. Geschichte_, XVII, 1905, pp. 203 ff.). By the influence of Marseilles in Gaul, and the ancient connection of that city with the towns of Hellenic Asia, he explains the great difference between the works of sculpture discovered along the upper Rhine, which had been civilized by the Italian legions, and those unearthed on the other side of the Vosges. This is a very important discovery, rich in results. We believe, however, that Michaëlis ascribes too much importance to the early Marseilles traders traveling along the old "tin road" towards Brittany and the "amber road" towards Germany. The Asiatic merchants and artisans did not set out from one point only. There were many emigrants all over the valley of the Rhone. Lyons was a half-Hellenized city, and the relations of Arles with Syria, of Nîmes with Egypt, etc., are well known. We shall speak of them in connection with the religions of those countries. 13. Even in the bosom of the church the Latin Occident of the fourth century was still subordinate to the Greek Orient, which imposed its doctrinal problems upon it (Harnack, _Mission und Ausbreitung_, II, p. 283, n. 1). 14. The sacred formulas have been collected by Alb. Dieterich, _Eine Mithrasliturgie_, pp. 212 ff. He adds [Greek: Doiê soi Osiris to psuchron hudôr], {217} _Archiv für Religionswiss_., VII, 1905, p. 504, n. 1. [Cf. _infra_, ch. IV, n. 90.] Among the hymns of greatest importance for the Oriental cults we must cite those in honor of Isis, discovered in the island of Andros (Kaibel, _Epigr._, 4028) and elsewhere (see ch. IV, n. 6). Fragments of hymns in honor of Attis have been preserved by Hippolytus (_Philosoph._, V, 9. pp. 168 ff.) The so-called orphic hymns (Abel, _Orphica_, 1883), which date back to a rather remote period, do not seem to contain many Oriental elements (see Maas, _Orpheus_, 1893, pp. 173 ff.), but this does not apply to the gnostic hymns of which we possess very instructive fragments.--Cf. _Mon. myst. de Mithra_, I, p. 313, n. 1. 15. Regarding the imitations of the stage, see Adami, _De poetis scen. Graecis hymnorum sacrorum imitatoribus_, 1901. Wünsch has shown the liturgic character of a prayer to Asklepios, inserted by Herondas into his mimiambi (_Archiv für Religionswiss._, VII, 1904, pp. 95 ff.) Dieterich believes he has found an extensive extract from the Mithraic liturgy in a magic papyrus of Paris (see _infra_, ch. VI, Bibliography). But all these discoveries amount to very little if we think of the enormous number of liturgic texts that have been lost, and even in the case of ancient Greece we know little regarding this sacred literature. See Ausfeld, _De Graecorum precationibus_, Leipsic, 1903; Ziegler, _De precationum apud Graecos formis quaestiones selectae_, Breslau, 1905; H. Schmidt, _Veteres philosophi quomodo iudicaverint de precibus_, Giessen, 1907. 16. For instance, the hymn "which the magi sung" about the steeds of the supreme god; its contents are given by Dion Chrysostom, Oral., XXXVI, 39 (see _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I. p. 298; II, p. 60). 17. I have in mind the hymns of Cleanthes (Von Arnim, _Stoic. fragm._, I, Nos. 527, 537), also Demetrius's act of renunciation in Seneca, _De Provid._, V, 5, which bears a surprising resemblance to one of the most famous Christian prayers, the _Suscipe_ of Saint Ignatius which concludes the book of Spiritual Exercises (Delehaye, _Les légendes hagiographiques_, 1905, p. 170, n. 1).--In this connection we ought to mention the prayer translated in the _Asclepius_, the Greek text {218} of which has recently been found on a papyrus (Reitzenstein, _Archiv für Religionswiss._, VII, 1904, p. 395). On pagan prayers introduced into the Christian liturgy see Reitzenstein and Wendland, _Nachrichten Ges. Wiss._, Göttingen, 1910, pp. 325 ff. 18. This point has been studied more in detail in our _Monuments relatifs aux mystères de Mithra_, from which we have taken parts of the following observations (I, pp. 21 ff.). 19. Lucian's authorship of the treatise [Greek: Peri tês Suriês theou] has been questioned but wrongly; see Maurice Croiset, _Essai sur Lucien_, 1882, pp. 63, 204. I am glad to be able to cite the high authority of Nöldeke in favor of its authenticity. Nöldeke writes me on this subject: "Ich habe jeden Zweifel daran schon lange aufgegeben.... Ich habe lange den Plan gehabt, einen Commentar zu diesem immerhin recht lehrreichen Stück zu schreiben and viel Material dazu gesammelt. Aus der Annahme der Echtheit dieser Schrift ergiebt sich mir, dass auch das [Greek: Peri astronomias] echt ist." 20. Cf. Frisch, _De compositione libri Plutarchei qui inscribitur_, [Greek: Peri Isidos], Leipsic, 1906, and the observations of Neustadt, _Berl. Philol. Wochenschr._, 1907, p. 1117.--One of Plutarch's sources is the [Greek: Ioudaika] by Apion.--See also Scott Moncrieft, _Journ. of Hell. Studies_, XIX, 1909, p. 81. 21. See ch. VII, pp. 202-203. 22. Cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 75, p. 219.--For Egypt see Georges Foucart, "L'art et la religion dans l'ancienne Egypte," _Revue des idées_, Nov. 15, 1908. 23. The narrative and symbolic sculpture of the Oriental cults was a preparation for that of the Middle Ages, and many remarks in Mâle's beautiful book _L'Art du XIII^e siècle en France_, can be applied to the art of dying paganism. II. WHY THE ORIENTAL RELIGIONS SPREAD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boissier, _La religion romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins_, especially Bk. II, ch. II.--Jean Réville, _La religion à Rome sous les Sévères_, Paris, 1886.--Wissowa, _Religion und Cultus der Römer_, Munich, 1902, pp. 71 ff., 289 ff.--Samuel Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, London, 1905.--Bigg, _The Church's Task Under the Roman Empire_, {219} Oxford, 1905.--Cf. also Gruppe, _Griech. Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte_, 1906, pp. 1519 ff.--Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zum Judentum und zum Christentum_, Tübingen, 1907, pp. 54 f.--The monographs will be cited in connection with the different cults which they treat. 1. _Mélanges Fredericq_, Brussels, 1904, pp. 63 ff. (_Pourquoi le latin fut la seule langue liturgique de l'Occident_); cf. the observations of Lejay, _Rev. d'hist. et litt. relig._, XI, 1906, p. 370. 2. Holl, _Volkssprache in Kleinasien_ (_Hermes_, 1908, pp. 250 ff.). 3. The volume of Hahn, _Rom und Romanismus im griechisch-römischen Osten bis auf die Zeit Hadrians_ (Leipsic, 1906) discusses a period for the most part prior to the one that interests us. On the period following we have nothing but a provisional sketch by the same author, _Romanismus und Hellenismus bis auf die Zeit Justinians_ (_Philologus_, Suppl. X), 1907. 4. Cf. Tacitus, Annales, XIV, 44: "_Nationes in familiis habemus quibus diversi ritus, externa sacra aut nulla sunt._" 5. S. Reinach, _Epona_ (Extr. _Rev. archéol._). 1895. 6. The theory of the degeneration of races has been set forth in particular by Stewart Chamberlain, _Die Grundlagen des XIX. Jahrhunderts_, 3d. ed., Munich, 1901, pp. 296 ff.--The idea of selection by retrogression, of the _Ausrottung der Besten_, has been defended, as is well known, by Seeck in his _Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt_, which outlines the religious consequence (II, p. 344). His system is developed in the third volume which appeared in 1909. 7. Apuleius, _Metam._, XI, 14 ff. See Preface. Manilius said of the divine stars (IV, 910; cf. II, 125), "_Ipse vocat nostros animos ad sidera mundus_." 8. Hepding, _Attis_, pp. 178 ff., 187. 9. The intimate connection between the juridical and religious ideas of the Romans has left numerous traces even in their language. One of the most curious is the double meaning of the term _supplicium_, which stands at the same time for a supplication addressed to the gods and a punishment {220} demanded by custom, and later by law. In regard to the development of this twofold meaning, see the recent note by Richard Heinze, _Archiv für lateinische Lexicographie_, XV, pp. 90 ff. Sematology is often synonymous with the study of customs. 10 Réville, _op. cit._, p. 144. 11 On ecstasy in the mysteries in general, cf. Rohde, _Psyche_, 2d ed., pp. 315-319; in the Oriental religions cf. De Jong, _De Apuleio Isiacorum mysteriorum teste_, 1900, p. 100; De Jong, _Das antike Mysterienwesen_, Leyden, 1909. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 323. 12 Firmicus Maternus mentioned this in _De errore prof. relig._, c. 8. 13 For Babylonia, cf. Strab., XVI, 1, § 6, and _infra_, ch. V, n. 51; for Egypt, _id._, XVII, 21, § 46. From the very interesting account Otto has written of the science of the Egyptian priests during the Hellenistic period (_Priester und Tempel_, II, pp. 211 ff.; 234), it appears that it remained quite worthy of consideration although progress had ceased. 14 Strabo, _loc. cit._: [Greek: Anatitheasi de tôi Hermêi pasan tên toiautên sophian]; Pliny, _Hist. nat._, VI, 26, § 121: "(Belus) _inventor fuit sideralis scientiae_"; cf. Solinus, 56, § 3; Achilles, _Isag._, 1 (Maass, _Comm. in Arat._, p. 27): [Greek: Bêlôi tên heuresin anathentes]. Let us remember that Hammurabi's code was represented as the work of Marduk.--In a general way, the gods are the authors of all inventions useful to humanity; cf. Reitzenstein, _Poimandres_, 1904, p. 123; Deissmann, _Licht von Osten_, 91 ff. Likewise in the Occident: _CIL_, VII, 759 = Bücheler, _Carm. epigr._, 24: "(Dea Syria) ex quis muneribus nosse contigit deos," etc., cf. Plut., _Crass._, 17.--"Religion im Sinne des Orients ist die Erklärung alles dessen was ist, also eine Weltauffassung" (Winckler, _Himmelsbild der Babylonier_, 1903, p. 9). 15 _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 312.--Manicheism likewise brought a complete cosmological system from Babylonia. Saint Augustine criticizes the book of that sect for containing long dissertations and absurd stories about matters that have nothing at all to do with salvation; see my _Recherches sur le manichéisme_, 1908, p. 53. 16 Cf. Porphyry, _Epist. Aneb._, 11; Jambl., _De myst._, II, 11. {221} 17 This upright character of the Roman religion has been thoroughly expounded by G. Boissier (_op. cit._, I, 30 ff, 373 ff). See also the remarks by Bailey, _Religion of Ancient Rome_, London, 1907, pp. 103 ff. 18 Varro in Augustine _De civ. Dei_, IV, 27; VI, 5; cf. Varro, _Antiq. rerum divin._, ed. Aghad, pp. 145 ff. The same distinction between the religion of the poets, of the legislators and of the philosophers has been made by Plutarch, _Amatorius_, 18, p. 763 C. The author of this division is Posidonius of Apamea. See Diels, _Doxographi Graeci_, p. 295, 10, and Wendland, _Archiv für Gesch. der Philos._, I, pp. 200 ff. 19 Luterbacher, _Der Prodigienglaube der Römer_, Burgdorf, 1904. 20 Juvenal, II, 149; cf. Diodorus, I, 93, § 3. Cf. Plutarch also in speaking of future punishment (_Non posse suaviter vivi_, c. 26, p. 1104 C-E: _Quo modo poetas aud._, c. 2, p. 17 C-E; _Consol. ad Apollon._, c. 10, p. 106 F), "nous laisse entendre que pour la plupart de ses contemporains ce sont là des contes de nourrice qui ne peuvent effrayer que des enfants" (Decharme, _Traditions religieuses chez les Grecs_, 1904, p. 442). 21 Aug., _Civ. Dei_, VI, 2; Varro, _Antiqu._, ed. Aghad, 141; "Se timere ne (dii) pereant non incursu hostili sed civium neglegentia." 22 I have developed this point in my _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 279 ff. 23 In Greece the Oriental cults expanded much less than in any other religion, because the Hellenic mysteries, especially those of Eleusis, taught similar doctrines and satisfied the religious needs. 24 The development of the "ritual of purification" has been broadly expounded in its entirety, by Farnell in _The Evolution of Religion_, 1905, pp. 88 ff. 25 We shall mention this subject again when speaking of the taurobolium in ch. III, pp. 67 ff. 26 We cannot dwell here upon the various forms assumed by that purifying rite of the Oriental mysteries. Often these forms remained quite primitive, and the idea that inspired them is still clear, as where Juvenal (VI, 521 f.) pictures the {222} worshiper of the _Magna Mater_ divesting himself of his beautiful garments and giving them to the _archigallus_ to wipe out all the misdeeds of the year (_ut totum semel expiet annum_). The idea of a mechanical transfer of the pollution by relinquishing the clothes is frequent among savages; see Farnell, _op. cit._, p. 117; also Frazer, _Golden Bough_, I^2, p. 60. 27 Dieterich, _Eine Mithrasliturgie_, pp. 157 ff.; Hepding, _Attis_, pp. 194 ff.--Cf. Frazer, _Golden Bough_, III^2 pp. 424 ff. 28 Cf. Augustine _Civit. Dei_, X, 28: "Confiteris tamen (sc. Porphyrius) etiam spiritalem animam sine theurgicis artibus et sine teletis quibus frustra discendis elaborasti, posse continentiae virtute purgari," cf. _ibid._, X, 23 and _infra_, ch. VIII, n. 24. 29 Here we can only touch upon a subject of very great interest. Porphyry's treatise _De abstinentia_ offers a fuller treatment than is often possible in this kind of studies.--See Farnell, _op. cit._, pp. 154 ff. 30 On [Greek: exomologêsis] in the religions of Asia Minor, cf. Ramsay, _Cities_, I, p. 134, p. 152, and Chapot, _La province romaine d'Asie_, 1904, pp. 509 ff. See also Crusius, "Paroemiographica," _Sitzungsb. Bayr. Akad._, 1910, p. 111. 31 Menander in Porphyry _De abstin._, II, 15; cf. Plutarch, _De Superstit._, 7, p. 168 D.; Tertullian, _De Paenit._, c. 9.--Regarding the sacred fishes of Atargatis, see _infra_, ch. V.--In Apuleius (Met. VIII, 28) the _gallus_ of the goddess loudly accuses himself of his crime and punishes himself by flagellation. See Gruppe, _Griech. Myth._, p. 1545; Farnell, _Evol. of Religion_, p. 55.--As a matter of fact, the confession of sin is an old religious tradition dating back to the Babylonians; cf. Lagrange, _Religions sémit._, p. 225 ff. Schrank, _Babylonische Sühnriten_, 1909, p. 46. 32 Juvenal, VI, 523 ff., 537 ff.; cf. Seneca, _Vit. beat._, XXVI, 8. 33 On liturgic feasts in the religion of Cybele: _infra_, ch. II; in the mysteries of Mithra: _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I. p. 320; in the Syrian cults: ch. V, n. 37. See in general, Hepding, _Attis_, pp. 185 ff. 34 We know according to Herbert Spencer that the {223} progressive differentiation of the ecclesiastic and lay functions is one of the characteristics of religious evolution. In this regard Rome was far behind the Orient. 35 An essential result of the researches of Otto (_op. cit._) is the proof of the opposition existing in Egypt since the Ptolemies between the hierarchic organization of the Egyptian clergy and the almost anarchical autonomy of the Greek priests. See our remarks on the clergy of Isis and the Galli. On the Mithraic hierarchy see our _Mysteries of Mithra_, Chicago, 1903, p. 165. 36 The development of the conceptions of "salvation" and "saviour" after the Hellenistic period has been studied by Wendland, [Greek: Sôtêr] (_Zeitschrift für neutestam. Wissensch._, V, 1904, pp. 335 ff.). See also Lietzmann, _Der Weltheiland_, Bonn, 1909. W. Otto, "Augustus [Greek: Sôtêr]," _Hermes_, XLV, 1910, pp. 448 ff. 37 Later on we shall expound the two principal doctrines, that of the Egyptian religions (identification with Osiris, god of the dead), and that of the Syrian and Persian religions (ascension into heaven). 38 At that time man's fate after death was the one great interest. An interesting example of the power of this idea is furnished by Arnobius. He became converted to Christianity because, according to his peculiar psychology, he feared that his soul might die, and believed that Christ alone could protect him against final annihilation (cf. Bardenhewer, _Gesch. der altkirchlichen Literatur_, II, 1903, p. 470.) 39 Lucretius had expressed this conviction (II, 1170 ff.). It spread to the end of the empire as disasters multiplied; cf. _Rev. de philologie_, 1897, p. 152. 40 Boissier, _Rel. rom._, I^3, p. 359; Friedländer, _Sittengesch._, I^6, pp. 500 ff. III. ASIA MINOR. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jean Réville, _La religion à Rome sous les Sévères_, pp. 62 ff.--Drexler in Roscher, _Lexikon der Mythol._, s. v. "_Meter_," II, 2932.--Wissowa, _Religion und Cultus der Römer_, pp. 263 ff., where the earlier bibliography will be found, {224} p. 271.--Showerman, "The Great Mother of the Gods" (_Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin_, No. 43), Madison, 1901.--Hepding, _Attis, seine Mythen und sein Kult_, Giessen, 1903.--Dill, _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, London, 1905, pp. 547 ff.--Gruppe, _Griech. Mythologie_, 1906, pp. 1521 ff. Eisele, "Die phrygischen Kulte," _Neue Jahrb. für das klass. Altertum_, XXIII, 1909, pp. 620 ff. For a number of years Henri Graillot has been collecting the monuments of the religion of Cybele with a view to publishing them in their entirety.--Numerous remarks on the Phrygian religion will be found in the works and articles of Ramsay, especially in _Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia_, 1895, and _Studies in the Eastern Roman Provinces_, 1906. 1. Arrien, fr. 30 (_FGH_, III, p. 592). Cf. our _Studio Pontica_, 1905, pp. 172 ff., and Statius, Achill., II, 345: "Phrygas lucos ... vetitasque solo, procumbere pinus"; Virg., _Aen., IX_, 85. 2. Lion; cf. S. Reinach, _Mythes, cultes_, I, p. 293. The lion, represented in Asia Minor at a very remote period as devouring a bull or other animals, might possibly represent the sacred animal of Lydia or Phrygia vanquishing the protecting _totem_ of the tribes of Cappadocia or the neighboring countries (I am using the term _totem_ in its broadest meaning). This at least is the interpretation given to similar groups in Egypt. Cf. Foucart, _La méthode comparat. et l'histoire des religions_, 1909, p. 49, p. 70. 3. [Greek: Potnia thêrôn]. On this title, cf. Radet, _Revue des études anciennes_, X, 1908, pp. 110 ff. The most ancient type of the goddess, a winged figure leading lions, is known from monuments dating back to the period of the Mermnadi (687-546 B. C.). 4. Cf. Ramsay, _Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia_, I, p. 7, p. 94. 5. Foucart, _Le culte de Dionysos en Attique_ (Extract from the _Mém. Acad. Inscr._, XXXVII), 1904, pp. 22 ff.--The Thracians also seem to have spread, in Asia Minor, the cult of the "riding god" which existed until the beginning of the Roman period; cf. Remy, _Le Musée belge_, XI, 1907, pp. 136 ff. 6. Catullus, LXIII. {225} 7. The development of these mysteries has been well expounded by Hepding, pp. 177 ff. (see Gruppe, _Gr. Myth._, p. 1544).--Ramsay has recently commented upon inscriptions of Phrygian mystics, united by the knowledge of certain secret signs ([Greek: tekmôr]); cf. _Studies in the Eastern Roman Provinces_, 1906, pp. 346 ff. 8. Dig., XLVIII, 8, 4, 2: "Nemo liberum servumve invitum sinentemve castrare debet." Cf. Mommsen, _Strafrecht_, p. 637. 9. Diodorus, XXXVI, 6; cf. Plutarch, _Marius_, 17. 10. Cf. Hepding, _op. cit._, p. 142. 11. Cf. chap. VI. 12. Wissowa, _op. cit._, p. 291. 13. Hepding, _op. cit._, pp. 145 ff. Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v. "Dendrophori," V, col. 216 and Suppl., col, 225, s. v. "Attis." 14. Cf. Tacitus, _Annales_, XI, 15. 15. This opinion has recently been defended by Showerman, _Classical Journal_, II, 1906, p. 29. 16. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, II^2, pp. 130 ff. 17. Hepding, pp. 160 ff. Cf. the texts of Ambrosiaster cited in _Rev. hist. et litt. relig._, VIII, 1903, p. 423, n. 1. 18. Hepding, p. 193. Cf. Gruppe, p. 1541. 19. On this diffusion, cf. Drexler in Roscher, _Lexikon_, s. v. "Meter," col. 918. 20. Gregory of Tours, _De glor. confess._, c. 76. Cf. _Passio S. Symphoriani_ in Ruinart, _Acta sinc._, ed. of 1859, p. 125. The _carpentum_ mentioned in these texts is found in Africa; cf. _CIL_, VIII, 8457, and Graillot, _Rev. archéol._, 1904, I, p. 353; Hepding, op. cit., p. 173, n. 7. 21. [Greek: Tharreite mustai tou theou sesôsmenou | hestai gar humin ek ponôn sôtêria]; cf. Hepding, op. cit., p. 167.--Attis has become a god through his death (see Reitzenstein, _Poimandres_, p. 93), and in the same way were his votaries to become the equals of the divinity through death. The Phrygian epitaphs frequently have the character of dedications, and it appears that the graves were grouped about the temple, see Ramsay, _Studies_, pp. 65 ff., 271 ff., _passim_. {226} 22. Perdrizet, _Bull. corr. hell._, XIX, 1905, p. 534 ff. 23. We know of those beliefs of the Sabaziasts from the frescoes in the catacombs of Praetextatus; the _Mercurius nuntius_, who leads the dead, is found beside Attis under the Greek name of Hermes (see Hepding, p. 263).--Maybe the inscription _CIL_, VI, 509 = _Inscr. graec._, XIV, 1018, should be completed: [Greek: Rheiêi [Hermêi] te genethlôi]; cf. _CIL_, VI, 499. Hermes appears beside the Mother of the gods on a bas-relief by Ouchak published by Michon, _Rev. des études anciennes_, 1906, p. 185, pl. II. See also Mendel, "Musée de Brousse," _Bull. corr. hell._, 1909, p. 255.--The Thracian Hermes is mentioned in Herodotus, see Maury, _Rel. de la Grèce_, III, p. 136. 24. Besides Bellona-Ma, subordinate to Cybele and Sabazius, who was as much Jewish as Phrygian, there was only one god of Asia Minor, the Zeus Bronton (the Thunderer) of Phrygia, prominently mentioned in Roman epigraphy. See Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v. and Suppl. I, col. 258. 25. Cf. _CIL_, VI, 499: "Attidi menotyranno invicto." "Invictus" is the characteristic epithet of the solar divinities. 26. P. Perdrizet, "Mèn" (_Bull. corr. hell._, XX), 1896; Drexler in Roscher, _Lexikon_, s. v., II, col. 2687. 27. _CIL_, VI, 50 = _Inscr. graec._, XIV, 1018. 28. Schürer, _Sitzungsb. Akad. Berlin_, XIII, 1897, p. 200 f. and our _Hypsistos_ (Suppl. _Revue instr. publ. en Belgique_), 1897. 29. The term is taken from the terminology of the mysteries: the inscription cited dates back to 370 A. D. In 364, in connection with Eleusis, Agorius Praetextatus spoke of [Greek: sunechonta to anthrôpeion genos hagiôtata mustêria] (Zozimus, IV, 3, 2). Earlier the "Chaldean oracles" applied to the intelligible god the term [Greek: mêtra sunechousa ta panta] (Kroll, _De orac. Chaldeïcis_, p. 19). 30. Henri Graillot, _Les dieux Tout-Puissants, Cybèle et Attis_ (_Revue archéol._, 1904, I), pp. 331 ff.--Graillot is rather inclined to admit a Christian influence, but _omnipotentes_ was used as a liturgic epithet in 288 A. D., and at about the same date Arnobius (VII, 32) made use of the periphrasis _omnipotentia numina_ to designate the Phrygian gods, and he {227} certainly was understood by all. This proves that the use of that periphrasis was general, and that it must have dated back to a much earlier period. As a matter of fact a dedication has been found at Delos, reading [Greek: Dii tôi pantôn kratounti kai Mêtri megalêi têi pantôn kratousêi] (_Bull. corr. hellén._, 1882, p. 502, No. 25), that reminds the reader of the [Greek: pantokratôr] of the Septuagint; and Graillot (loc. cit., p. 328, n. 7) justly observes, in this connection, that on certain bas-reliefs Cybele was united with the Theos Hypsistos, that is to say, the god of Israel; see Perdrizet, _Bull. corr. hell._, XXIII, 1899, p. 598. On the influence of Judaism on the cult of Men cf. Sam. Wide, _Archiv für Religionsw._, 1909, p. 227.--On the omnipotence of the Syrian gods, see ch. V, pp. 128 ff. 31. We are here giving the substance of a short essay on "Les mystères de Sabazius et le judaïsme," published in the _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, Febr. 9, 1906, pp. 63 ff. Cf. "A propos de Sabazius," _Musée belge_, XIV, 1910, pp. 56 ff. 32. Cf. _Monuments myst. de Mithra_, I, p. 333 f. The very early assimilation of Cybele and Anahita justifies to a certain extent the unwarranted practice of calling Cybele the Persian Artemis. See Radet, _Revue des études anciennes_, X, 1908, p. 157. The pagan theologians often considered Attis as the primeval man whose death brought about the creation, and so they likened him to the Mazdean Gayomart, see Bousset, _Hauptprobleme der Gnosis_, 1907, pp. 184 ff. 33. Prudentius, _Peristeph._, X, 1011 f. 34. Their meaning has been revealed through an inscription at Pergamum published by Schröder, _Athen. Mitt._, 1904, pp. 152 ff.; cf. _Revue archéologique_, 1905, I, pp. 29 ff.--The ideas on the development of that ceremony, which we are summarizing here, have been expounded by us more fully in the _Revue archéologique_, 1888, II, pp. 132 ff.; _Mon. myst. de Mithra_, I, pp. 334 ff.; _Revue d'histoire et de litt. relig._, VI, 1901, p. 97.--Although the conclusions of the last article have been contested by Hepding (op. cit., 70 f.), it cannot be doubted that the taurobolium was already practised in Asia Minor, in the cult of the Ma-Bellona. Moore (_American Journal of Archeology_, 1905, p. 71) justly refers to the text of Steph. Byz., in this connection: [Greek: Mastaura; ekaleito de kai hê Rhea Ma kai tauros autêi ethueto para Ludois]. {228} The relation between the cult of Ma and that of Mithra is shown in the epithet of [Greek: Aneikêtos], given to the goddess as well as to the god; see _Athen. Mitt._, XXIX, 1904, p. 169, and Keil und von Premerstein, "Reise in Lydien," _Denkschr. Akad. Wien_, 1908, p. 28 (inscription of the Hyrkanis plain). 35. Prudentius, Peristeph., 1027: "_Pectus sacrato dividunt venabulo._" The _harpé_ shown on the taurobolic altars, is perhaps in reality a boar-spear having a kind of hilt (_mora_; cf. Grattius, _Cyneg._, 110) to prevent the blade from entering too far. 36. Hepding, pp. 196 ff.; cf. _supra_, n. 21. 37. _CIL_, VI, 510, = Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 4152. Cf. Gruppe, _Griech. Myth._, p. 1541, n. 7. 38. Hepding, pp. 186 ff. 39. _CIL_, VI, 499: "Dii animae mentisque custodes." Cf. 512: "Diis magnis et tutatoribus suis," and _CIL_, XII, 1277, where Bel is called _mentis magister_. 40. Hippolytus, _Refut. haeres._, V, 9. 41. Julien, _Or._, V; cf. Paul Allard, _Julien l'Apostat_, II, pp. 246 ff.; Mau, _Die Religionsphilosophie Kaiser Julians_, 1908, pp. 90 ff. Proclus also devoted a philosophic commentary to the Cybele myth (Marinus, _Vita Procli_, 34). 42. Regarding all this see _Revue d'histoire et de littérat. relig._, VIII, 1903, pp. 423, ff.--Frazer (_Osiris, Attis, Adonis_, 1907, pp. 256 ff.) has recently defended the position that the commemoration of the death of Christ was placed by a great many churches upon March 25th to replace the celebration of Attis's death on the same date, just as Christmas has been substituted for the _Natalis Invicti_. The text of Ambrosiaster cited in our article (Pseudo Augustin, _Quaest. veter. Test_, LXXXIV, 3, p. 145, 13, Souter ed.) shows that this was asserted even in antiquity. IV. EGYPT. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lafaye, _Histoire du culte des divinités d'Alexandrie hors de l'Egypte_, Paris, 1884, and article "Isis" in Daremberg and Saglio, _Dictionn. des antiquités_, III, 1899, {229} where may be found (p. 586) an index of the earlier works.--Drexler, art. "Isis" in Roscher, _Lexikon der Mythol._, II, p. 373-548.--Réville, _op. cit._, pp. 54 ff.--Wissowa, _op. cit._, pp. 292 ff.--Dill, _op. cit._, pp. 560 ff.--Gruppe, _Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgesch._, pp. 1563-1581 (published after the revision of this chapter).--The study of the Roman cult of the Alexandrian gods is inseparable from that of the Egyptian religion. It would be impossible to furnish a bibliography of the latter here. We shall only refer the reader to the general works of Maspero, _Etudes de Mythologie_, 4 vols., Paris, 1893, and _Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient_, 1895 (_passim_).--Wiedemann, _Religion of the Ancient Egyptians_, London, 1897 [cf. Hastings, _Dictionary of the Bible_, "Religion of Egypt," V, pp. 177-197].--Erman, _Die ägyptische Religion_, Berlin, 1910.--Naville, _La religion des anciens Egyptiens_ (six lectures delivered at the Collège de France), 1906.--W. Otto, _Priester und Tempel im hellenistischen Aegypten_, 2 vols., 1905, 1908.--The publication of a _Bulletin critique des religions de l'Egypte_ by Jean Capart, begun in the _Rev. de l'hist. des religions_ (LI, 1905, pp. 192 ff.; LIII, 1906, pp. 307 ff.; 1909, pp. 162 ff.). 1. Cf. on this controversy Bouché-Leclercq, _Histoire des Lagides_, I, p. 102; S. Reinach, _Cultes, Mythes et Religions_, II, pp. 347 f.; Lehmann, _Beiträge zur alten Geschichte_, IV, 1904, pp. 396 ff.; Wilcken, _Archiv f. Papyrusforschung_, III, 1904, pp. 249 ff.; Otto, _Priester und Tempel_, I, 1905, pp. 11 ff.; Gruppe, loc. cit., pp. 1578 ff.; Petersen, _Die Serapislegende_, 1910, pp. 47 ff.; Schmidt, _Kultübertragungen_, 1910, pp. 47 ff. 2. Herodotus, II, 42, 171.--Cf. n. 4. 3. Ælius Aristides, VIII, 56 (I, p. 96, ed. Dindorf). Cf. Plut., _De Iside et Osiride_, ed. Parthey, p. 216. 4. Plut., _De Is. et Osir._, 28; cf. Otto, _Priester und Tempel_, II, pp. 215 ff.--This Timotheus is undoubtedly the same one that wrote about the Phrygian mysteries; see _infra_, n. 79.--The question, to what extent the Hellenistic cult had the form ascribed to it by Plutarch and Apuleius immediately after its creation, is still unsettled; see Otto, _Priester und Tempel_, II, p. 222. We do not appear to have any direct proof of the existence of "mysteries" of Isis and Serapis {230} prior to the Empire, but all probabilities are in favor of a more ancient origin, and the mysteries were undoubtedly connected with the ancient Egyptian esoterism.--See _infra_, n. 78. 5. Diogenes Laertius, V, 5, § 76: [Greek: Hothen kai tous paianas poiêsai tous mechri nun haidomenous]. The [Greek: mechri nun] Diogenes took undoubtedly from his source, Didymus. See Artemidorus, _Onirocr._, II, 44 (p. 143, 25 Hercher).--This information is explicitly confirmed by an inscription which mentions [Greek: hê hiera taxis tôn paianistôn] (_Inscr. Graec._, XIV, 1034). 6. Kaibel, _Epigr._ 1028 = Abel, _Orphica_, p. 295, etc.--See _supra_, ch. I, n. 14.--According to recent opinion, M. de Wilamowitz was good enough to write me, the date of the Andros hymn cannot have been later than the period of Cicero, and it is very probably contemporary with Sulla.--See _supra_, ch. I, n. 14.--On other similar texts, see Gruppe, _Griech. Mythol._, P. 1563. 7. Amelung, _Le Sérapis de Bryaxis_ (_Revue archéol_, 1903, II), p. 178. 8. P. Foucart, _Le culte de Dionysos en Attique_ (_Mém. Acad. des Inscr._, XXXVII), 1904. On the Isis cult in ancient Greece, we can now refer to Gruppe, _Griech. Myth._, pp. 1565 ff.; Ruhl, _De Sarapide et Iside in Graecia cultis_ (Diss. Berlin) 1906, has made careful use of the epigraphic texts dating back to the time before the Roman period. 9. The only exception is the Zeus Ammon, who was only half Egyptian and owed his very early adoption to the Greek colonies of Cyrene; see Gruppe, _Griech. Myth._, p. 1558. The addition of other goddesses, like Nephtis or Bubastis to Isis is exceptional. 10. Concerning the impression which Egypt made on travelers, see Friedländer, _Sittengesch._, II^6, 144 ff.; Otto, _Priester und Tempel_, II, p. 210. 11. Juvenal, XV, 10, and the notes of Friedländer on these passages.--The Athenian comic writers frequently made fun of the Egyptian zoolatry (Lafaye, _op. cit._, p. 32). Philo of Alexandria considered the Egyptians as the most idolatrous heathens and he attacked their animal worship, in particular {231} (_De Decal._, 16, II, p. 193 M., and _passim_). The pagan writers were no less scandalized (Cicero, _Nat. deor._, III, 15, etc.) except where they preferred to apply their ingenuity to justify it. See Dill, _loc. cit._, p. 571.--The features of this cult in ancient Egypt have been recently studied by George Foucart, _Revue des idées_, Nov. 15, 1908, and _La méthode comparative et l'histoire des religions_, 1909, pp. 43 ff. 12. Macrobius, _Sat._, I, 20, § 16. 13. Holm, _Gesch. Siziliens_, I, p. 81. 14. Libanius, Or., XI, 114 (I, p. 473 Förster). Cf. Drexler in Roscher, _op. cit._, col. 378. 15. Pausan., I, 18, 4: [Greek: Sarapidos hon para Ptolemaiou theon eisêgagonto]. Ruhl (op. cit., p. 4) attaches no historic value to this text, but, as he points out himself, we have proof that an official Isis cult existed at Athens under Ptolemy Soter, and that Serapis was worshiped in that city at the beginning of the third century. 16. Dittenberger, _Or. gr. inscr. sel._, No. 16. 17. Apul., _Metam._, XI, 17. 18. Thus it is found to be the case from the first half of the third century at Thera, a naval station of the Ptolemies (Hiller von Gärtringen, _Thera_, III, pp. 85 ff.; cf. Ruhl, _op. cit._, p. 59), and also at Rhodes (_Rev. archéol._, 1905, I, p. 341). Cult of Serapis at Delos, cf. _Comptes rendus Acad. inscr._, 1910, pp. 294 ff. 19. A number of proofs of its diffusion have been collected by Drexler, _loc. cit._, p. 379. See Lafaye, "Isis" (cf. _supra_), p. 577; and Ruhl, _De Sarapide et Iside in Graecia cultis_, 1906. 20. This interpretation has already been proposed by Ravaisson (_Gazette archéologique_, I, pp. 55 ff.), and I believe it to be correct, see _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1906, p. 75, n. 1. 21. The power of the Egyptian cult in the Oriental half of the empire has been clearly shown by von Domaszewski (_Röm. Mitt._, XVII, 1902, pp. 333 ff.), but perhaps with some exaggeration. All will endorse the restrictions formulated by Harnack, _Ausbreitung des Christentums_, II, p. 274. 22. The very early spread of Orphic doctrines in Magna Graecia, evidenced by the tablets of Sybaris and Petilia (Diels, {232} _Vorsokratiker_, II^2, p. 480) must have prepared the way for it. These tablets possess many points in common with the eschatological beliefs of Egypt, but, as their latest commentator justly remarks (Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, p. 624), these new ideas are fairly overwhelmed in the old mythology. The mysteries of Isis and Serapis seemed to offer a revelation that had been a presentiment for a long time, and the affirmation of a truth foreshadowed by early symbols. 23. _CIL_, X, 1781, I, 15-6. 24. Apul., _Metam._, XI, 30. 25. Wissowa, _op. cit._, p. 292-3; cf. Seeck, _Hermes_, XLIII, 1908, p. 642. 26. Manicheism was later persecuted on a similar pretext, see _Collat. Mos. et Rom. leg._, 15, 3, § 4: "De Persica adversaria nobis gente progressa." 27. A full list of the inscriptions and monuments discovered in the various cities is given by Drexler in Roscher, _Lexikon_, s. v. "Isis," II, col. 409 ff. 28. Hirschfeld, _CIL_, XII, p. 382, and _Wiener Studien_, V, 1883, pp. 319-322. 29. Cf. Wissowa, _op. cit._, pp. 294 ff. 30. Minuc. Fel., _Octav._ 22, 2: "Haec Ægyptia quondam nunc et sacra Romana sunt." 31. _Carmen contra paganos_ (_Anthol. lat._, ed. Riese, I, 20 ff.) v. 91, 95 ff.; cf. Ps. Aug., _Quaest. Vet. Test._, CXIV, 11 (p. 308, 10 Souter), and _Rev. hist. litt. relig._, VIII, 1903, p. 422, n. 1. 32. Rufin, II, 24: "_Caput ipsum idolatriae._" A miniature from an Alexandrian chronicle shows the patriarch Theophilus, crowned with a halo, stamping the Serapeum under foot, see Bauer and Strzygowski, _Eine alexandrinische Weltchronik_ (_Denkschr. Akad. Wien_, LI), 1905, to the year 391, pp. 70 ff., 122, and pl. VI. 33. Cf. Drexler in Roscher, s. v. "Isis," II, p. 425; Harnack, _Ausbreitung des Christentums_, II, pp. 147 ff.--Some curious details showing the persistence of the Isis cult among the professors and students of Alexandria during the last years of the {233} fifth century are given in the life of Severus of Antioch by Zachariah the Scholastic (_Patrol. orient._, I, ed. Kugener), pp. 17 ff., 27 ff. 34. Ps.-Apul., 34. Compare with a similar prophecy in the Sibylline oracles, V, 184 f. (p. 127, Geffcken ed.). 35. Iseum of Beneventum; cf. _Notizie debgli scavi di ant._, 1904, pp. 107 ff. Iseum of the Campus Martius: see Lanciani, _Bollet. communale di Roma_, 1883, pp. 33 ff.; Marucchi, _ibid._, 1890, pp. 307 f.--The _signa Memphitica_ (made of Memphian marble), are mentioned in an inscription (Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 4367-8).--The term used in connection with Caracalla: "Sacra Isidis Romam deportavit," which Spartianus (_Carac._, 9; cf. Aur. Vict., _Cæs._, 21, 4) no longer understood, also seems to refer to a transfer of sacred Egyptian monuments. At Delos a statue of a singer taken from some grave of the Saïs period had been placed in the temple. Everything Egyptian was looked upon as sacred. (Ruhl, _op. cit._, p. 53). 36. Gregorovius, _Gesch. des Kaisers Hadrian_, pp. 222 ff.; cf. Drexler, _loc. cit._, p. 410. 37. The term is Wiedemann's. 38. Naville, _op. cit._, pp. 89 ff. 39. On the [Greek: hierogammateus] Cheremon, see Otto, _Priester und Tempel_ II, p. 216; Schwartz in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, III, col. 2025 ff. 40. Doctrines of Plutarch: cf. Decharme, _Traditions religieuses chez les Grecs_, pp. 486 ff. and _supra_, ch. I, n. 20. 41. I did not mention Hermetism, made prominent by the researches of Reitzenstein, because I believe its influence in the Occident to have been purely literary. To my knowledge there is no trace in the Latin world of an Hermetic sect with a clergy and following. The _Heliognostae_ or _Deinvictiaci_ who, in Gaul, attempted to assimilate the native Mercury with the Egyptian Thoth, (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 49, n. 2; cf. 359), were Christian gnostics. I believe that Reitzenstein misunderstood the facts when he stated (_Wundererzählungen_, 1906, p. 128): "Die hermetische Literatur ist im zweiten und dritten Jahrhundert für alle religiös-interessierten der allgemeine Ausdruck der Frömmigkeit geworden." I believe that {234} Hermetism, which is used as a label for doctrines of very different origin, was influenced by "the universal spirit of devotion," and was not its creator. It was the result of a long continued effort to reconcile the Egyptian traditions first with Chaldean astrology, then with Greek philosophy, and it became transformed simultaneously with the philosophy. But this subject would demand extended development. It is admitted by Otto, the second volume of whose book has been published since the writing of these lines, that not even during the Hellenistic period was there enough theological activity of the Egyptian clergy to influence the religion of the times. (_Priester und Tempel_, II, pp. 218-220). 42. Plut, _De Isid._, 9. 43. Apul., _Metam._, XI, 5. 44. _CIL_ X, 3800 = Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 4362. 45. See the opening pages of this chapter. 46. Plut,. _De Iside et Osir._, 52; cf. Hermes Trismegistus, [Greek: Horoi Asklêpiou], c. 16; and Reitzenstein, _Poimandres_, p. 197. 47. Cf. Naville, _op. cit._, pp. 170 ff. 48. Juv., VI, 489: "Isiacae sacraria lenae"; cf. Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte_, I^6, p. 502. 49. In a recent book Farnell has brilliantly outlined the history of the ritual of purification and that of the conception of purity throughout antiquity (_Evolution of Religion_, London, 1905, pp. 88-192), but unfortunately he has not taken Egypt into account where the primitive forms have been maintained with perhaps the fewest alterations. 50. Juv., VI, 522 ff. 51. Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte_, I^6, p. 510.--On this transformation of the Isis cult, cf. Réville, _op. cit._, p. 56. 52. Plut., _De Iside_, c. 2; cf. Apul., _Met._, XI, 6, end. 53. Ælius Arist., _In Sarap._, 25 (II, p. 359, Keil ed.); see Diodorus, I, 93, and Apuleius, XI, 6, end.--On future rewards and punishments in Hermetism, see Ps.-Apul., _Asclepius_, c. 28; Lydus, _De mensib._, IV, 32 and 149, Wünsch ed. 54. Porph., _Epist. ad Aneb._, 29. The answer of the Ps.-Iamblichus (_de Myst._, VI, 5-7) is characteristic. He {235} maintained that these threats were addressed to demons; however, he was well aware that the Egyptians did not distinguish clearly between incantations and prayers (VI, 7, 5). 55. Cf. G. Hock, _Griechische Weihegebräuche_, 1905, pp. 65 ff. Ps.-Apul., _Asclep._, 23: "Homo fictor est deorum qui in templis sunt et non solum inluminatur, verum etiam inluminat"; c. 37: "Proavi invenerunt artem qua efficerent deos." Cf. George Foucart, _loc. cit._ [n. 61]: "La statuaire égyptienne a, avant tout autre, le caractère de créer des êtres vivants." 56. Maspero, _Sur la toute-puissance de la parole_ (_Recueil de travaux_, XXIV), 1902, pp. 163-175; cf. my _Récherches sur le manichéisme_, p. 24, n. 2.--The parallelism between the divine and the sacerdotal influence is established in Ps.-Apul., _Asclepius_, 23. 57. Iamblichus, _Myst._, VI, 6; cf. G. Foucart, _La méthode comparative et l'histoire des religions_, 1909, p. 131, 141, 149 ff. and infra, n. 66. The Egyptians prided themselves on having been the first "to know the sacred names and to use the sacred speech" (Luc., _De Dea Syr._, 1). 58. This has been proven by Otto, _Priester und Tempel_, I, pp. 114 ff. Cf. _supra_, chap. II, n. 35. Certain busts have recently inspired Mr. Dennison to give his attention to the tonsure of the votaries of Isis (_American Journ. of Archeology_, V, 1905, p. 341). The Pompeian frescoes representing priests and ceremonies of the Isis cult are particularly important for our knowledge of the liturgy (Guimet, _C. R. Acad. des Inscr._, 1896, pls. VII-IX. Cf. von Bissing, _Transact. congr. relig. Oxford_, 1908, I, pp. 225 ff.). 59. _CIL_, XII, 3061: "Ornatrix fani." 60. Cf. Kan, _De Iove Dolicheno_, 1901, p. 33. 61. Cf. Moret, _Le rituel du culte divin journalier en Egypte_, Paris, 1902. Just as the ritual of consecration brought the statue to life (_supra_, n. 55), the repeated sacrifices sustained life, and made it _longa durare per tempora_ (Ps.-Apul., _Asclep._, 38). The epithet of [Greek: aeizôos], given to several divinities (_CIG_, 4598; _Griech. Urkunden_ of Berlin, I, No. 124), expresses it exactly. All this is in conformity with the old ideas prevailing in the valley of the Nile (see George Foucart, _Revue des {236} idées_, Nov. 15, 1908).--When compared with the Egyptian ceremonial, the brief data scattered through the Greek and Latin authors become wonderfully clear and coherent. 62. Apul., XI, 22: "Rituque sollemni apertionis celebrato ministerio." Cf. XI, 20: "Matutinas apertiones templi." 63. Jusephus, _Ant. Jud._, XVIII, 3, 5, § 174. 64. Servius ad Verg., _Aen._, IV, 512: "In templo Isidis aqua sparsa de Nilo esse dicebatur"; cf. II, 116. When, by pouring water taken from the river, reality took the place of this fiction, the act was much more effective; see Juv. VII, 527. 65. This passage, together with a chapter from Apuleius (XI, 20), is the principal text we have in connection with the ritual of those Isis matins. (_De Abstin._, IV, 9): [Greek: Hôs pou eti kai nun en têi anoixei tou hagiou Sarapidos hê therapeia dia puros kai hudatos ginetai, leibontos tou humnôdou to hudôr kai to pur phainontos, hopênika hestôs epi tou oudou têi patriôi tôn Aiguptiôn phônêi egeirei ton theon]. Arnobius (VII, 32) alludes to the same belief of the votaries of Isis: "Quid sibi volunt excitationes illae quas canitis matutini conlatis ad tibiam vocibus? Obdormiscunt enim superi remeare ut ad vigilias debeant? Quid dormitiones illae quibus ut bene valeant auspicabili salutatione mandatis?" 66. On the power of "barbarian names" see my _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 313, n. 4; Dieterich, _Mithrasliturgie_, pp. III ff. Cf. Charles Michel, _Note sur un passage de Jamblique_ (Mélanges, Louis Havet), 1909, p. 279.--On the persistence of the same idea among the Christians, cf. Harnack, _Ausbreitung des Christ._, I, pp. 124 ff.; Heitmüller, _Im Namen Jesu_, Göttingen, 1903 (rich material). 67. Apul., _Met._, XI, 9. 68. _CIL_, II, 3386 = Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 442; cf. 4423. 69. Apul., XI, 24; cf. Lafaye, pp. 118 ff. Porphyry (_De Abstin._, IV, 6) dwells at length on this contemplative character of the Egyptian devotion: The priests [Greek: apedosan holon ton bion têi tôn theôn theôriai kai theasei]. 70. In the Pharaonic ritual the closing ceremony seems to have taken place during the morning, but in the Occident the sacred images were exposed for contemplation, and the {237} ancient Egyptian service must, therefore, have been divided into two ceremonies. 71. Herodotus, II, 37. 72. Cf. Maspero, _Rev. critique_, 1905, II, p. 361 ff. 73. Apul., _Metam._, XI, 7 ff.--This festival seems to have persisted at Catana in the worship of Saint Agatha; cf. _Analecta Bollandiana_, XXV, 1906, p. 509. 74. Similar masquerades are found in a number of pagan cults (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 315), and from very early times they were seen in Egypt; see von Bissing, _loc. cit._, n. 58, p. 228. 75. The _pausarii_ are mentioned in the inscriptions; cf. Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 4353, 4445. 76. Schäfer, _Die Mysterien des Osiris in Abydos unter Sesostris III_, Leipsic, 1904; cf. Capart, _Rev. hist, relig._, LI, 1905, p. 229, and Wiedemann, _Mélanges Nicole_, pp. 574 ff. Junker, "Die Stundenwachen in den Osirismysterien" (_Denkschrift Akad. Wien_, LIV) 1910. 77. In the Abydos mysteries, the god Thoth set out in a boat to seek the body of Osiris. Elsewhere it was Isis who sailed out in quest of it. We do not know whether this scene was played at Rome; but it certainly was played at Gallipoli where make-believe fishermen handled the nets in a make-believe Nile; cf. P. Foucart, _Rech. sur les myst. d'Eleusis_ (_Mém. Acad. Inscr._, XXXV), p. 37. 78. Cheremon in Porphyry, _Epist. ad Aneb._, 31: [Greek: Kai ta krupta tês Isidos epainei kai to en Abudôi aporrêton deixei]. Cf. Iamblichus, _De myster._, VI, 5-7.--On the "mysteries" of Isis in Egypt, cf. Foucart, _loc. cit._, p. 19 f.; De Jong, _De Apuleio Isiacorum mysteriorum teste_, Leyden, 1900, pp. 79 f., and _Das antike Mysterienwesen_, Leyden, 1909. 79. Cf. _supra_.--De Jong, op. cit., pp. 40 ff.; Gruppe, _Griech. Mythol._, p. 1574. 80. _La Cité antique_, I, ch. II, end. 81. Cf. Erman, _op. cit._, pp. 96-97. 82. Sufficient proof is contained in the bas-reliefs cited above (n. 20), where apotheosized death assumes the shape of {238} Serapis. Compare Kaibel, _Inscr. gr._, XIV, 2098: [Greek: Eupsuchi meta tou Oseiridos]. This material conception of immortality could be easily reconciled with the old Italian ideas, which had persisted in a dormant state in the minds of the people, see Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte_, III^6, p. 758. 83. Reitzenstein, _Archiv für Religionswiss._, VII, 1904, 406 ff. These are perhaps the most striking pages written on the meaning of the ceremony; it is an [Greek: apathanatismos]. Cf. also Reitzenstein, _Hellenistische Wundererzählungen_, p. 116. 84. Apul., _Metam._, 23.--De Jong, the latest commentator on this passage, seems inclined to take it as a mere ecstatic vision, but the vision was certainly caused by a dramatic scene in the course of which hell and heaven were shown in the dark.--The Egyptians represented them even on the stage; see Suetonius, _Calig._, 8: "Parabatur et in mortem spectaculum quo argumenta inferorum per Aegyptios et Aethiopas explicarentur." 85. Apul., _Met._, XI, 6 end. 86. _Ibid._, c. 24: "Inexplicabili voluptate < aspectu > divini simulacri perfruebar." 87. Plut., _De Isid._, 78, p. 383 A: [Greek: Hôs an exêrtêmenais (tais psuchais ap' autou (tou Osiridos kai theômenais aplêstôs kai pothousais to mê phaton mêde rhêton anthrôpois kallos]. 88. Cf., _supra_, n. 22. 89. We find similar wishes on the Egyptian monuments, frequently at least since the Middle Empire. "Donnez-moi de l'eau courante à boire.... Mettez-moi la face au vent du nord sur le bord de l'eau et que sa fraîcheur calme mon coeur" (Maspero, _Etudes égyptiennes_, I, 1881, p. 189). "Oh, si j'avais de l'eau courante à boire et si mon visage était tourné vers le vent du nord" (Naville,_op. cit._, p. 174). On a funerary stele in the Brussels museum (Capart, _Guide_, 1905, p. 71) is inscribed, "Que les dieux accordent de boire l'eau des sources, de respirer les doux vents du nord."--The very material origin of this wish appears in the funeral texts, where the soul is shown crossing the desert, threatened with hunger and thirst, and obtaining refreshment by the aid of the gods (Maspero, _Etudes de mythol. et d'archéol. égypt._, 1883, I, pp. {239} 366 ff.).--On a tablet at Petilia (see _supra_, n. 22), the soul of the deceased is required to drink the fresh water ([Greek: psuchron hudôr]) flowing from the lake of Memory in order to reign with the heroes. There is nothing to prevent our admitting with Foucart ("Myst. d'Eleusis," _Mém. Acad. des Inscr._, XXXV, 2, p. 67), that the Egyptian ideas may have permeated the Orphic worship of southern Italy after the fourth or third century, since they are found expressed a hundred years earlier at Carpentras (_infra_, n. 90). 90. [Greek: Doiê soi ho Osiris to psuchron hudôr], at Rome: Kaibel, _Inscr. gr._ XIV. 1488, 1705, 1782, 1842; cf. 658 and _CIL_, VI, 3, 20616.--[Greek: Soi de Oseiridos hagnon hudôr Eisis charisaito], _Rev. archéol._, 1887, p. 199, cf. 201.--[Greek: Psuchêi dipsôsêi psuchron hudôr metados], _CIG_, 6267 = Kaibel, 1890. It is particularly interesting to note that almost the same wish appears on the Aramaic stele of Carpentras (_C. I. Sem._, II, 141), which dates back to the fourth or fifth century B. C.: "Blessed be thou, take water from in front of Osiris."--A passage in the book of Enoch manifestly inspired by Egyptian conceptions, mentions the "spring of water," the "spring of life," in the realm of the dead (Enoch, xxii. 2, 9. Cf. Martin, _Le livre d'Hénoch_, 1906, p. 58, n. 1, and Bousset, _Relig. des Judentums_, 1903, p 271). From Judaism the expression has passed into Christianity. Cf. Rev. vii. 17; xxi. 6. 91. The Egyptian origin of the Christian expression has frequently been pointed out and cannot be doubted; see Lafaye, _op. cit._, p. 96, n. 1; Rohde, _Psyche_, II, p. 391; Kraus, _Realencycl. der christl. Alt._, s. v. "Refrigerium"; and especially Dieterich, _Nekyia_, pp. 95 ff. Cf. Perdrizet, _Rev. des études anc._, 1905, p. 32; Audollent, _Mélanges Louis Havet_, 1909, p. 575.--The _refrigerii sedes_, which the Catholic Church petitions for the deceased in the anniversary masses, appears in the oldest Latin liturgies, and the Greeks, who do not believe in purgatory, have always expressed themselves along the same lines. For instance, Nubian inscriptions which are in perfect agreement with the euchology of Constantinople hope the soul will rest [Greek: en topôi chloerôi, en topôi anapsuxeôs] (G. Lefebvre, _Inscr. gr. chrét. d'Eg._, No. 636, 664 ff., and introd., p. xxx; cf. Dumont, _Mélanges_, Homolle ed., pp. 585 ff.). The detail is not without significance because it furnishes a {240} valuable indication as to the Egyptian origin of prayer for the dead; this is unknown to Graeco-Roman paganism which prayed to the deified dead but never _for_ the dead as such. The Church took this custom from the Synagogue, but the Jews themselves seem to have taken it from the Egyptians during the Hellenistic period, undoubtedly in the course of the second century (S. Reinach, _Cultes, mythes_, I, p. 325), just as they were indebted to the Egyptians for the idea of the "spring of life" (_supra_, n. 90). The formula in the Christian inscriptions cited, [Greek: anapauson tên psuchên en kolpois Abraam kai Isaak kai Iakôb], appears to indicate a transposition of the doctrine of identification with Osiris. In this way we can explain the persistence in the Christian formulary of expressions, like _requies aeterna_, corresponding to the most primitive pagan conceptions of the life of the dead, who were not to be disturbed in their graves.--A name for the grave, which appears frequently in Latin epitaphs, viz., _domus aeterna_ (or _aeternalis_) is undoubtedly also of Egyptian importation. In Egypt, "la tombe est la maison du mort, sa maison d'étérnite, comme disent les textes" (Capart, _Guide du musée de Bruxelles_, 1905, p. 32). The Greeks were struck by this expression which appears in innumerable instances. Diodorus of Sicily (I, 51, § 2) was aware that the Egyptians [Greek: tous tôn teteleutêkotôn taphous aidious oikous prosagoreuousin, hôs en Haidou diatelountôn ton apeiron aiôna] (cf. I, 93, § 1, [Greek: eis tên aiônion oikêsin]).-- It is probable that this appellation of the tomb passed from Egypt into Palestine and Syria. It appears already in Ecclesiastes, xii. 7 (_beth 'olam_ = "house of eternity"), and it is found in Syrian epigraphy (for instance in inscriptions of the third century (_Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1906, p. 123), also in the epigraphy of Palmyra. (Chabot, _Journal asiatique_, 1900, p. 266, No. 47)).--Possibly the hope for consolation, [Greek: Eupsuchei, oudeis athanatos], frequently found engraved upon tombs even in Latin countries was also derived from the Egyptian religion, but this is more doubtful. [Greek: Eupsuchei] is found in the epitaphs of initiates in the Alexandrian mysteries. Kaibel, _Inscr. gr._, XIV, 1488, 1782 ([Greek: Eupsuchei kuria kai doiê soi ho Osiris to psuchron hudôr]), 2098 (cf. _supra_, n. 90). Possibly the twofold meaning of {241} [Greek: eupsuchos] which stands both for _animosus_ and _frigidus_ (see Dieterich, _Nekyia_, _loc. cit._) has been played upon. But on the other hand, the idea contained in the formula "Be cheerful, nobody is immortal," also inspired the "Song of the Harpist," a canonical hymn that was sung in Egypt on the day of the funeral. It invited the listener to "make his heart glad" before the sadness of inevitable death (Maspero, _Etudes égyptiennes_, I, 1881, pp. 171 ff.; cf. Naville, _op. cit._, p. 171). V. SYRIA. BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Syrian religions have been studied with especial attention to their relation with Judaism: Baudissin, _Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte_, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1876. The same author has published veritable monographs on certain divinities (Astarte, Baal, Sonne, etc.) in the _Realencyclopädie für prot. Theol._, of Herzog-Hauck, 3d ed.--Bäthgen, _Beiträge zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte_, Berlin, 1888.--W. Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_, 2d. ed., London, 1894.--Lagrange, _Etudes sur les religions sémitiques_, 2d ed., Paris, 1905. The results of the excavations in Palestine, which are important in regard to the funeral customs and the oldest idolatry, have been summarized by Father Hugues Vincent, _Canaan d'après l'exploration récente_, 1907.--On the propagation of the Syrian religions in the Occident, see Réville, _op. cit._, pp. 70 _et passim_; Wissowa, _Religion der Römer_, pp. 299 ff.; Gruppe, _Griech. Mythol._, pp. 1582 f.--Important observations will be found in Clermont-Ganneau, _Recueil d'archéologie orientale_, 8 vols., 1888, and in Dussaud, _Notes de mythologie syrienne_, Paris, 1903. We have published a series of articles on particular divinities in the _Realencyclopädie_ of Pauly-Wissowa (Baal, Balsamem, Dea Syria, Dolichenus, Gad, etc.). Other monographs are cited below. 1. Lucian, _Lucius_, 53 ff.; Apul., _Metam._, VIII, 24 ff. The description by these authors has recently been confirmed by the discovery of an inscription at Kefr-Hauar in Syria: a slave of the Syrian goddess "sent by her mistress ([Greek: kuria])," boasts of having brought back "seventy sacks" from each of her trips (Fossey, _Bull. corr. hell._, XXI, 1897, p. 60; on the {242} meaning of [Greek: pêra], "sack," see Deissmann, _Licht von Osten_, 1908, p. 73). 2. Cf. Riess in Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. _Astrologie_, col. 1816. 3. Cato, _De agric._, V, 4. 4. On dedication of Romans to Atargatis, see _Bull. corr. hell._, VI, 1882, p. 497, No. 15; p. 498, No. 17. 5. Since the year 187 we find the Syrian musicians (_sambucistriae_) mentioned also at Rome. Their number grew steadily (Livy, XXXIX, 6; see Friedländer, _Sittengesch._, III^6, p. 346.) 6. Florus, II, 7 (III, 9); cf. Diodorus Sic., fr. 34, 2, 5. 7. Plut., _Vit. Marii_, 17. 8. Juvenal, VI, 351; Martial, IV, 53, 10; IX, 2, 11, IX, 22, 9. 9. _CIL_, VI, 399; cf. Wissowa, _op. cit._, p. 201.--Suetonius, _Nero_, 56. 10. A temple of the Syrian gods at Rome, located at the foot of the Janiculum, has been excavated very recently. Cf. Gauckler, _Bolletino communale di Roma_, 1907, pp. 5 ff. (Cf. Hülsen, _Mitt. Inst. Rom_, XXII, 1907, pp. 225 ff.); _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1907, pp. 135 ff.; 1908, pp. 510 ff.; 1909, pp. 424 ff., pp. 617 ff.; Nicole and Darier, _Le sanctuaire des dieux orientaux au Janicule_, Rome, 1909 (Extr. des "Mél. Ecole franç. de Rome," XXIX). In it have been found dedications to Hadad of the Lebanon, to the Hadad [Greek: akroreitês], and to Maleciabrudus (in regard to the latter see Clermont-Ganneau, _Rec. d'archéol. or._, VIII, 1907, p. 52). Cf. my article "Syria Dea" in Daremberg-Saglio-Pottier, _Diction. des antiquités gr. et rom._, 1911. 11. I have said a few words on this colonization in my _Mon. rel. aux myst. de Mithra_, I, p. 262. Courajod has considered it in regard to artistic influences, _Leçons du Louvre_, I, 1899, pp. 115, 327 ff. For the Merovingian period see Bréhier, _Les colonies d'orientaux en Occident au commencement du moyen âge_ (_Byzant. Zeitschr._, XII), 1903, pp. 1 ff. 12. Kaibel, _Inscr. gr._, XIV, 2540. 13. _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1899, p. 353 = Waltzing, _Corporations professionelles_, II, No. 1961 = _CIL_, III S., {243} 14165^8.--Inscription of Thaïm of Canatha: Kaibel, _Inscr. gr._, XIV, 2532. 14. Gregory of Tours, _Hist. Fr._, VIII, 1.--On the diffusion of the Syrians in Gaul, see Bréhier, _loc. cit._, p. 16 ff. 15. Cf. Bréhier, _Les origines du crucifix dans l'art religieux_, Paris, 1904. 16. Adonis: Wissowa, p. 300, n. 1.--Balmarcodès: Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v.; Jalabert, _Mél. fac. orient. Beyrouth_, I, p. 182.--Marnas: The existence at Ostia of a "Marneum" can be deduced from the dedication _CIG_, 5892 (cf. Drexler in Roscher, _Lexikon_, s. v., col. 2382).--On Maleciabrudus, cf. _supra_, n. 10.--The Maiuma festival was probably introduced with the cult of the god of Gaza, Lydus, _De Mensib._, IV, 80 (p. 133, Wünsch ed.) = Suidas s. v. [Greek: Maioumas] and Drexler, _loc. cit._, col. 2287. Cf. Clermont-Ganneau, _Rec. d'archéol. orient._, IV, p. 339. 17. Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. "Damascenus, Dusares." 18. Malalas, XI, p. 280, 12 (Bonn).--The temple has recently been excavated by a German mission; cf. Puchstein, _Führer in Baalbek_, Berlin, 1905.--On the Hadad at Rome, cf. _supra_, n. 10. 19. _CIL_, X, 1634: "Cultores Iovis Heliopolitani Berytenses qui Puteolis consistunt"; cf. Wissowa, _loc. cit._, p. 504, n. 3; Ch. Dubois, _Pouzzoles antique_, Paris, 1906, p. 156. 20. A list of the known military societies has been made by Cichorius in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencycl._, s. v. "Ala" and "Cohors." 21. _CIL_, VII, 759 = Buecheler, _Carmina epigr._, 24. Two inscriptions dedicated to the Syrian Hercules (Melkarth) and to Astarte have been discovered at Corbridge, near Newcastle (_Inscr. gr._, XIV, 2553). It is possible that Tyrian archers were cantoned there. 22. Baltis: Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclop._, s. v. 23. Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v. "Aziz"; cf. Wissowa, _op. cit._, p. 303, n. 7. 24. On the etymology of Malakbel, see Dussaud, _Notes_, 24 ff. On the religion in the Occident see Edu. Meyer in Roscher, _Lexikon_, s. v. {244} 25. Kan, _De Iovis Dolicheni cultu_, Groningen, 1901; cf. Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencycl._, s. v. "Dolichenus." 26. Réville, _Relig. sous les Sévères_, pp. 237 ff.; Wissowa, _op. cit._, p. 305; cf. Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. "Elagabal."--In a recent article (_Die politische Bedeutung der Religion von Emesa_ [_Archiv für Religionsw._, XI], 1908, pp. 223 ff.) M. von Domaszewski justly lays stress on the religious value of the solar monotheism that arose in the temples of Syria, but he attributes too important a part in its formation to the clergy of Emesa (see _infra_, n. 88). The preponderant influence seems to have been exercised by Palmyra (see _infra_, n. 59). 27. Cf. _infra_, n. 59. 28. Cf. Curtiss, _Primitive Semitic Religion To-day_, Chicago, 1902; Jaussen, _Coutumes des Arabes du pays de Moab_, Paris, 1908, pp. 297 ff. 29. Cf. Robertson Smith, _passim_; Lagrange, pp. 158-216; Vincent, _op. cit._, pp. 102-123; 144 f.--The power of this Semitic litholatry equaled its persistence. Philo of Byblus defined the bethels as [Greek: lithoi empsuchoi] (2, § 20, FHG, III, p. 563): Hippolytus also tells us (V, 1, p. 145, Cruice), that in the Syrian mysteries ([Greek: Assuriôn teletai]) it was taught that the stones were animated ([Greek: hoi lithoi eisin empsuchoi; echousi gar to auxêtikon]), and the same doctrine perpetuated itself in Manicheism. (Titus of Bostra, II, 60, p. 60, 25, de Lagarde ed.: [Greek: Ouk aischunetai de kai tous lithous epsuchôsthai legôn kai ta panta empsucha eisêgoumenos]). During the last years of paganism the neo-Platonists developed a superstitious worship of the bethels; see Conybeare, _Transactions of the Congress of Hist. of Rel._, Oxford, 1908, p. 177. 30. Luc., _De dea Syria_, c. 41. Cf. the inscription of Narnaka with the note of Clermont-Ganneau, _Etudes d'arch. orient._, II, p. 163.--For bull worship in Syria cf. Ronzevalle, _Mélanges fac. orient. Beyrouth_, I, 1906, pp. 225, 238; Vincent, _op. cit._, p. 169. 31. Philo Alex., _De provid._, II, c. 107 (II, 646 M.); cf. Lucian, _De dea Syria_, 54. 32. For instance on Mount Eryx in Sicily (Ael., _Nat. Anim._, {245} IV, 2).--Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v. "Dea Syria," col. 2242. 33. Tibullus, I, 7, 17. 34. Lucian, _De dea Syria_, 14; 54. Cf. Diodorus, II, 4, 2; Ovid, _Met._, IV, 46; V, 331. 35. Pauly-Wissowa, _loc. cit._, col. 2241; W. Robertson Smith, p. 175. 36. The ancient authors frequently alluded to this superstition of the Syrians (the texts have been collected by Selden, _De dis Syris_, II, C. 3, pp. 268 ff., ed. of 1672). W. Robertson Smith (_loc. cit._, p. 449), is right in connecting it with certain ideas of savages. Like many primitive beliefs, this one has continued to the present day. It has been pointed out to me that at Sam-Keuï, a little west of Doliché, there is a pond fed by a spring and well stocked with fish, which one is forbidden to take. Near the mosque of Edessa is a large pond where catching fish is prohibited. They are considered sacred, and the people believe that any one who would eat them would die instantly. (Sachau, _Reise in Syrien_, 1883, pp. 196 ff. Cf. Lord Warkworth, _Diary in Asiatic Turkey_, London, 1898, p. 242). The same is the case at the mosque of Tripoli and elsewhere (Lammens, _Au pays des Nosaïris_ [_Revue de l'Orient chrétien_], 1908, p. 2). Even in Asia Minor this superstition is found. At Tavshanli, north of Aezani on the upper Rhyndacus, there is to-day a square cistern filled with sacred fish which no one is allowed to take (on the authority of Munro). Travelers in Turkey have frequently observed that the people do not eat fish, even when there is a scarcity of food (Sachau, _loc. cit._, p. 196) and the general belief that their flesh is unhealthful and can cause sickness is not entirely unfounded. Here is what Ramsay has to say on the subject (_Impressions of Turkey_, London, 1897, p. 288): "Fish are rarely found and when found are usually bad: the natives have a prejudice against fish, and my own experience has been unfavorable.... In the clear sparkling mountain stream that flows through the Taurus by Bozanti-Khan, a small kind of fish is caught; I had a most violent attack of sickness in 1891 after eating some of them, and so had all who partook." Captain Wilson, who spent a number of years in {246} Asia Minor, asserts (_Handbook of Asia-Minor_, p. 19), that "the natives do not eat fish to any extent." The "totemic" prohibition in this instance really seems to have a hygienic origin. People abstained from all kinds of fish because some species were dangerous, that is to say, inhabited by evil spirits, and the tumors sent by the Syrian goddess were merely the edemas caused by the poisoning. 37. On the [Greek: Ichthus] symbolism I will merely refer to Usener, _Sintflutsagen_, 1899, pp. 223 ff. Cf. S. Reinach, _Cultes, mythes_, III, 1908, pp. 43 ff. An exhaustive book on this subject has recently appeared: Dölger, [Greek: ICHTHYS], _das Fischsymbol in frühchristlicher Zeit_, I, Rome, 1910. On sacred repasts where fish was eaten see Mnaseas, fragment 32 (_Fragm. histor. graec._, III, 115); cf. Dittenberger, _Sylloge_, 584: [Greek: Ean de tis tôn ichthuôn apothanêi, karpousthô authêmeron epi tou bômou], and Diog. Laert., VIII, 34. There were also sacred repasts in the Occident in the various Syrian cults: _Cenatorium et triclinium_ in the temples of Jupiter Dolichenus (_CIL_, III, 4789; VI, 30931; XI, 696, cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, II, p. 501); _promulsidaria et mantelium_ offered to the Venus Caelestis (_CIL_, X, 1590); construction of a temple to Malachbel with a _culina_ (_CIL_, III, 7954). Mention is made of a [Greek: deipnokritês, deipnois kreinas polla met' euphrosunês], in the temple of the Janiculum (Gauckler, _C.R. Acad. Inscr._, 1907, p. 142; _Bolletino communale_, 1907, pp. 15 ff.). Cf. Lagrange, _Religions sémitiques_, II, p. 609, and Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v. "Gad." 38. W. Robertson Smith, pp. 292 ff. 39. An inscription discovered at Kefr-Hauar (Fossey, _Bull. corr. hell._, 1897, p. 60) is very characteristic in this respect. A "slave" of the Syrian goddess in that inscription offers his homage to his "mistress" ([Greek: kuria]). 40. Notably at Aphaca where they were not suppressed until the time of Constantine (Eusebius, _Vit. Const._, III, 55; cf. Sozom., II, 5). 41. Much has been written about the sacred prostitutions in paganism, and it is well known that Voltaire ridiculed the scholars who were credulous enough to believe in the tales of Herodotus. But this practice has been proven by {247} irrefutable testimony. Strabo, for instance, whose great-uncle was arch-priest of Comana, mentions it in connection with that city, (XII, 3, 36, p. 559 C), and he manifests no surprise. The history of religion teaches many stranger facts; this one, however, is disconcerting. The attempt has been made to see in it a relic of the primitive promiscuity or polyandry, or a persistence of "sexual hospitality," ("No custom is more widely spread than the providing for a guest a female companion, who is usually a wife or daughter of the host," says Wake, _Serpent Worship_, 1888, p. 158); or the substitution of union with a man for union with the god (Gruppe, _Griech. Mythol._, p. 915). But these hypotheses do not explain the peculiarities of the religious custom as it is described by more reliable authors. They insist upon the fact that the girls were dedicated to the temple service while _virgins_, and that after having had _strangers_ for lovers, they married in their own country. Thus Strabo (XI, 14, § 16, p. 532 C.) narrates in connection with the temple of Anaitïs in Acilisena, that [Greek: thugateras hoi epiphanestatoi tou ethnous anierousi parthenous, ais nomos esti kataporneutheisais polun chronon para têi theôi meta tauta didosthai pros gamon, ouk apaxiountos têi toiautêi sunoikein oudenos]. Herodotus (I, 93), who relates about the same thing of the Lydian women, adds that they acquired a dowry in that manner; an inscription at Tralles (_Bull. corr. hell._, VII, 1885, p. 276) actually mentions a descendant of a sacred prostitute ([Greek: ek progonôn pallakidôn]) who had temporarily filled the same office ([Greek: pallakeusasa kata chrêsmon Dii]). Even at Thebes in Egypt there existed a similar custom with striking local peculiarities in the time of Strabo (XVII, 1, § 46), and traces of it seem to have been found in Greece among the Locrians (Vurtheim, _De Aiacis origine_, Leyden, 1907). Every Algerian traveler knows how the girls of the Ouled-Naïl earn their dowry in the _ksours_ and the cities, before they go back to their tribes to marry, and Doutté (_Notes sur l'Islam maghrébien, les Marabouts_, Extr. _Rev. hist. des relig._, XL-XLI, Paris, 1900), has connected these usages with the old Semitic prostitution, but his thesis has been attacked and the historical circumstances of the arrival of the Ouled-Naïl in Algeria in the eleventh century render it very doubtful (Note by Basset).--It seems certain (I do not know whether this explanation has ever been offered) {248} that this strange practice is a modified utilitarian form of an ancient exogamy. Besides it had certain favorable results, since it protected the girl against the brutality of her kindred until she was of marriageable age, and this fact must have insured its persistence; but the idea that inspired it at first was different. "La première union sexuelle impliquant une effusion de sang, a été interdite, lorsque ce sang était celui d'une fille du clan versé par le fait d'un homme du clan" (Salomon Reinach, _Mythes, cultes_, I, 1905, p. 79. Cf. Lang, _The Secret of the Totem_, London, 1905.) Thence rose the obligation on virgins to yield to a stranger first. Only then were they permitted to marry a man of their own race. Furthermore, various means were resorted to in order to save the husband from the defilement which might result from that act (see for inst., Reinach, _Mythes, cultes_, I, p. 118).--The opinion expressed in this note was attacked, almost immediately after its publication, by Frazer (_Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, 1907, pp. 50 ff.) who preferred to see in the sacred prostitutions a relic of primitive communism. But at least one of the arguments which he uses against our views is incorrect. Not the women, but the men, received presents in Acilisena (Strabo, _loc. cit._) and the communistic theory does not seem to account for the details of the custom prevailing in the temple of Thebes. There the horror of blood clearly appears. On the discovery of a skull (having served at a rite of consecration) in the temple of the Janiculum, see the article cited above, "Dea Syria," in _Dict. des antiquités_. 42. Porphyry, _De Abstin._, II, 56; Tertull., _Apol._, 9. Cf. Lagrange, _op. cit._, p. 445. 43. Even in the regions where the cities developed, the Baal and the Baalat always remained the divinities [Greek: poliouchoi], the protectors of the city which they were supposed to have founded. 44. Le Bas-Waddington, 2196.--Suidas, s. v. [Greek: Phularchês] (II, 2, col. 1568, Bernhardy). Cf. Marquardt, _Staatsverwaltung_, I, p. 405, 409. 45. Hippolytus, Adv. Haeres., V, II, § 7: [Greek: Assuriôn teletai]; § 18: [Greek: Assuriôn mustêria] (pp. 145, 148, ed. by Cruice). Cf. Origen, _Contra Celsum_, I, 12. Pognon (_Inscrip. sémitiques_, {249} 1907, No. 48) has recently published a Syrian epitaph that is unfortunately mutilated, but which seems to be that of an adept of the pagan mysteries; see Nöldeke, _Zeitschrift für Assyr._, XXI, 1907, p. 155. 46. On the Semitic notion of purity, W. Robertson Smith has written admirably and convincingly (pp. 446 ff. and _passim_). The question has been taken up from a different point of view by Lagrange, pp. 141 ff.--The development of the notion of purity in the ancient religions has been recently expounded by Farnell, _The Evolution of Religion_, 1905, pp. 88 ff., especially pp. 124 ff. Cf. also _supra_, p. 91 f. An example of the prohibitions and purifications is found in the Occident in an inscription, unfortunately mutilated, discovered at Rome and dedicated to Beellefarus (_CIL_, VI, 30934, 31168; cf. Lafaye, _Rev. hist. relig._, XVII, 1888, pp. 218 ff.; Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 4343). If I have understood the text correctly it commands those who have eaten pork to purify themselves by means of honey.--On penances in the Syrian religions see ch. II, n. 31. 47. M. Clermont-Ganneau (_Etudes d'archéologie orientale_, II, 1896, p. 104) states that the epithet [Greek: hagios] is extremely rare in pagan Hellenism, and almost always betrays a Semitic influence. In such cases it corresponds to [Hebrew: QRSH], which to the Semites is the epithet _par excellence_ of the divinity. Thus Eshmon is [Hebrew: QRSH]; cf. Lidzbarski, _Ephemer. für semit. Epigraph._, II, p. 155; Clermont-Ganneau, _Recueil d'archéol. orient._, III, p. 330; V, p. 322.--In Greek Le Bas-Waddington, 2720, has: [Greek: Oi katochoi hagiou ouraniou Dios]. Dittenberger, _Orientis inscript._, 620, [Greek: Zeus hagios Beel bôsôros]. Some time ago I copied at a dealer's, a dedication engraved upon a lamp: [Greek: Theôi hagiôi Arelselôi], in Latin: J. Dolichenus _sanctus_, _CIL_, VI, 413, X, 7949.--J. Heliopolitanus _sanctissimus_, _CIL_, VIII, 2627.--"Caelestis _sancta_," VIII, 8433, etc.--The African Saturn (= Baal) is often called _sanctus_.--_Hera sancta_ beside Jupiter Dolichenus, VI, 413.--Malakbel is translated by _Sol sanctissimus_, in the bilingual inscription of the Capitol, VI, 710 = Dessau, 4337. Cf. _deus sanctus aeternus_, V, 1058, 3761, and _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1906, p. 69.--See in general Delehaye, _Analecta Bollandiana_, 1909, pp. 157 ff. {250} 48. As curious examples of Greco-Syrian syncretism we may mention the bas-relief of Ed-Douwaïr in the Louvre, which has been analyzed in detail by Dussaud (_Notes_, pp. 89 ff.), and especially that of Homs in the Brussels museum (_ibid._, 104 ff.). 49. Macrobius, I, 23, § 11: "Ritu Assyrio magis quam Aegyptio colitur"; cf. Lucian, _De dea Syria_, 5.--"Hermetic" theories penetrated even to the Sabians of Osrhoene (Reitzenstein, _Poimandres_, 166 ff.), although their influence seems to have been merely superficial (Bousset, _Göttingische gelehrt. Anzeigen_, 1905, 704 ff.)--The existence of [Greek: katochoi] at Baetocécé and elsewhere appears to be due to Egyptian influence (Jalabert, _Mélanges de la fac. orient. de Beyrouth_, II, 1907, pp. 308 ff.). The meaning of [Greek: katochos] which has been interpreted in different ways, is established, I think, by the passages collected by Kroll, _Cat. codd. astrol. graec._, V, pars 2, p. 146; cf. Otto, _Priester und Tempel_, I, p. 119; Bouché-Leclercq, _Hist. des Lagides_, IV, p. 335. It refers to the poor, the sick and even the "illumined" living within the temple enclosures and undoubtedly supported by the clergy, as were the refugees of the Christian period who availed themselves of the right of sanctuary in the churches (cf. _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1907, p. 454). 50. Cf. _infra_, n. 59. 51. Strabo, XVI, 1, 6. Cf. Pliny, _H. N._, VI, 6: "Durat adhuc ibi Iovis Beli templum." Cf. my _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 35 ff.; Chapot, _Mém. soc. antiq. de France_, 1902, pp. 239 ff.; Gruppe, _Griech. Mythol._, p. 1608, n. 1. 52. Lucian, _De dea Syria_, c. 10. 53. Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, I, pp. 233 ff. and _passim_. 54. On the worship of Bel in Syria cf. _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1907, pp. 447 ff.--Cf. _infra_, n. 59. 55. On the Heliopolitan triad and the addition of Mercury to the original couple see Perdrizet, _Rev. études anc._, III, 1901, p. 258; Dussaud, _Notes_, p. 24; Jalabert, _Mélanges fac. orient. de Bayrouth_, I, 1906, pp. 175 ff.--Triad of Hierapolis: Lucian, _De dea Syria_, c. 33. According to Dussaud, the three divinities came from Babylon together, _Notes_, p. 115.--The existence of a Phoenician triad (Baal, Astarte, Eshmoun or {251} Melkarth), and of a Palmyrian triad has been conjectured but without sufficient reason (_ibid._, 170, 172 ff.); the existence of Carthaginian triads is more probable (cf. Polybius, VII, 9, 11, and von Baudissin, _Iolaos_ [_Philothesia für Paul Kleinert_], 1907, pp. 5 ff.)--See in general Usener, _Dreiheit_ (Extr. _Rhein. Museum_, LVIII), 1903, p. 32. The triads continued in the theology of the "Chaldaic Oracles" (Kroll, _De orac. Chald._, 13 ff.) and a threefold division of the world and the soul was taught in the "Assyrian mysteries" (_Archiv für Religionswiss._, IX, 1906, p. 331, n. 1). 56. Boll, _Sphaera_, p. 372.--The introduction of astrology into Egypt seems to date back no further than the time of the Ptolemies. 57. The Seleucides, like the Roman emperors later, believed in Chaldean astrology (Appian., _Syr._, 28; Diodorus, II, 31, 2; cf. Riess in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v. "Astrologie," col. 1814), and the kings of Commagene, as well as of a great number of Syrian cities, had the signs of the zodiac as emblems on their coins. It is even certain that this pseudo-science penetrated into those regions long before the Hellenistic period. Traces of it are found in the Old Testament (Schiaparelli; translation by Lüdke, _Die Astron. im Alten Testament_, 1904, p. 46). It modified the entire Semitic paganism. The only cult which we know in any detail, that of the Sabians, assigned the highest importance to it; but in the myths and doctrines of the others its influence is no less apparent (Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencycl._, s. v. "Dea Syria," IV, col. 2241, and s. v. "Gad"; cf. Baudissin, _Realencycl. für prot. Theol._, s. v., "Sonne," pp. 510-520). To what extent, for instance, the clergy of Emesa had been subjected to its ascendency is shown by the novel of Heliodorus, written by a priest of that city (Rohde, _Griech. Roman_^2, p. 464 [436]), and by the horoscope that put Julia Domna upon the throne (_Vita Severi_, 3, 8; cf. A. von Domaszewski, _Archiv für Religionsw._, XI, 1908, p. 223). The irresistible influence extended even to the Arabian paganism (Nöldeke in Hastings, _Encyclop. of Religion_, s. v. "Arabs," I, p. 661; compare, _Orac. Sibyll._, XIII, 64 ff., on Bostra). The sidereal character which has been attributed to the Syrian gods, was borrowed, but none the less real. From very early times the Semites worshiped the sun, {252} the moon, and the stars (see Deut. iv. 19; Job xxxi. 25), especially the planet Venus, but this cult was of secondary importance only (see W. Robertson Smith, _op. cit._, p. 135, n. 1), although it grew in proportion as the Babylonian influence became stronger. The polemics of the Fathers of the Syrian Church show how considerable its prestige was in the Christian era (cf. Ephrem, _Opera Syriaca_, Rome, 1740, II, pp. 447 ff.; the "Assyrian" Tatian, c. 9 ff., etc.). 58. Humann and Puchstein, _Reise in Klein-Asien und Nord-Syrien_, 1890, pl. XL; _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 188, fig. 8; Bouché-Leclercq, _Astrol. gr._, p. 439. 59. Cf. Wissowa, _op. cit._, p. 306-7.--On the temple of Bel at Palmyra, cf. Sobernheim, _Palmyrenische Inschriften_ (_Mitt. der vorderasiat. Gesellsch._, X), 1905, pp. 319 ff.; Lidzbarski, _Ephemeris_, I, pp. 255 ff., II, p. 280.--Priests of Bel: Clermont-Ganneau, _Recueil d'arch. orient._, VII, p. 12, 24, 364. Cf. _supra_, n. 54. The power of Palmyra under Zenobia, who ruled from the Tigris to the Nile, must have had as a corollary the establishment of an official worship that was necessarily syncretic. Hence its special importance for the history of paganism. Although the Babylonian astrology was a powerful factor in this worship, Judaism seems to have had just as great an influence in its formation. There was at Palmyra a large Jewish colony, which the writers of the Talmud considered only tolerably orthodox (Chaps, _Gli Ebrei di Palmira_ [_Rivista Israelitica_, I], Florence, 1904, pp. 171 ff., 238 f. Cf. "Palmyra" in the _Jewish Encycl._; Jewish insc. of Palmyra; Euting, _Sitzb. Berl. Acad._, 1885, p. 669; Landauer, _ibid._, 1884, pp. 933 ff.). This colony seems to have made compromises with the idolaters. On the other hand we see Zenobia herself rebuilding a synagogue in Egypt (_Revue archéologique_, XXX, 1875, p. III; _Zeitschrift für Numismatik_, V, p. 229; Dittenberger, _Orientis inscript._, 729). This influence of Judaism seems to explain the development at Palmyra of the cult of [Greek: Zeus hupsitos kai epêkoos], "he whose name is blessed in eternity." The name of Hypsistos has been applied everywhere to Jehovah and to the pagan Zeus (_supra_, p. 62, 128) at the same time. The text of Zosimus (I, 61), according to which Aurelian brought from Palmyra to Rome the statues of [Greek: Hêliou te kai Bêlou] (this has been wrongly changed to read [Greek: tou kai Bêlou]), proves that the {253} astrological religion of the great desert city recognized a supreme god residing in the highest heavens, and a solar god, his visible image and agent, according to the Semitic theology of the last period of paganism (_supra_, p. 134). 60. I have spoken of this solar eschatology in the memorial cited _infra_, n. 88. 61. This opinion is that of Posidonius (see Wendland, _Philos Schrift über die Vorsehung_, Berlin, 1892, p. 68, n. 1; 70, n. 2). It is shared by the ancient astrologers. 62. This old pagan and gnostic idea has continued to the present day in Syria among the Nosaïris; cf. Dussaud, _Histoire et religion des Nosaïris_, 1900, p. 125. 63. The belief that pious souls are guided to heaven by a psychopompus, is found not only in the mysteries of Mithra (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 310), but also in the Syrian cults where that rôle was often assigned to the solar god, see Isid. Lévy, _Cultes syriens dans le Talmud_ (_Revue des études juives_, XLIII), 1901, p. 5, and Dussaud, _Notes_, p. 27; cf. the Le Bas-Waddington inscription, 2442: "[Greek: Basileu despota] (= the sun), [Greek: hilathi kai didou pasin hêmin hugiên katharan, prêxis agathas kai biou telos esthlon]."-- The same idea is found in inscriptions in the Occident; as for instance in the peculiar epitaph of a sailor who died at Marseilles (Kaibel, _Inscr. gr._, XIV, 2462 = _Epigr._, 650): "[Greek: En de [te] tethneioisin homêguri [es] ge pelousin] [Greek: doiai; tôn heterê men epichthoniê pephorêtai,] [Greek: hê d' heterê teiressi sun aitherioisi choreuei,] [Greek: ês stratiês eis eimi, lachôn theon hêgemonêa]." It is the same term that Julian used (_Césars_, p. 336 C) in speaking of Mithra, the guide of souls: [Greek: hêgemona theon]. Cf. also _infra_, n. 66 and ch. VIII, n. 24. 64. The Babylonian origin of the doctrine that the souls returned to heaven by crossing the seven planetary spheres, has been maintained by Anz (_Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnostizismus_, 1897; cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I. pp. 38 ff., p. 309; Bousset, _Die Himmelsreise der Seele_ [_Archiv für Religionsw._, IV], 1901, pp. 160 ff.) and "Gnosis" in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie_, col. 1520. It has since been denied by Reitzenstein (_Poimandres_, p. 79; cf. Kroll, _Berl. philol. Wochensch._, {254} 1906, p. 486). But although it may have been given its precise shape and been transformed by the Greeks and even by the Egyptians, I persist in believing that it is of Chaldean and religious origin. I heartily agree with the conclusions recently formulated by Bousset, (_Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen_, 1905, pp. 707 ff.). We can go farther: Whatever roots it may have had in the speculations of ancient Greece (Aristoph., _Pax_, 832, Plato, _Tim._, 42B, cf. Haussoullier, _Rev. de philol._, 1909, pp. 1 ff.), whatever traces of it may be found in other nations (Dieterich, _Mithrasliturgie_, pp. 182 ff.; _Nekyia_, p. 24, note; Rohde, _Psyche_, II, p. 131, n. 3), the idea itself of the soul rising to the divine stars after death certainly developed under the influence of the sidereal worship of the Semites to a point where it dominated all other eschatological theories. The belief in the eternity of souls is the corollary to the belief in the eternity of the celestial gods (p. 129). We cannot give the history of this conception here, and we shall limit ourselves to brief observations. The first account of this system ever given at Rome is found in "Scipio's Dream" (c. 3); it probably dates back to Posidonius of Apamea (cf. Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, p. 85, 166, n. 3, 168, n. 1), and is completely impregnated with mysticism and astrolatry. The same idea is found a little later in the astrologer Manilius (I, 758; IV, 404, etc.). The shape which it assumed in Josephus (_Bell. Judaic._, V, 1, 5, § 47) is also much more religious than philosophical and is strikingly similar to a dogma of Islam (happiness in store for those dying in battle; a Syrian [_ibid._, § 54] risks his life that his soul may go to heaven). This recalls the inscription of Antiochus of Commagene (Michel, _Recueil_, No. 735, l. 40): [Greek: Sôma pros ouranious Dios Ôromasdou thronous theophilê psuchên propempsan eis ton apeiron aiôna koimêsetai]. It must be said that this sidereal immortality was not originally common to all men; it was reserved "omnibus qui patriam conservaverint adiuverint, auxerint" (_Somn. Scip._ c. 3, c. 8; cf. _Manil._, I, 758; Lucan, _Phars._, IX, 1 ff.; Wendland, _op. cit._, p. 85 n. 2), and this also is in conformity with the oldest Oriental traditions. The rites first used to assure immortality to kings and to make them the equals of the gods were extended little by little as a kind of privilege, to the important {255} persons of the state, and only very much later were they applied to all who died. Regarding the diffusion of this belief from the beginning of the first century of our era, see Diels, _Elementum_, 1899, p. 73, cf. 78; Badstübner, _Beiträge zur Erklärung Senecas_, Hamburg, pp. 2 ff.--It is expressed in many inscriptions (Friedländer, _Sitteng._, III, pp. 749 ff.; Rohde, _Psyche_, p. 673, cf. 610; epitaph of Vezir-Keupru, _Studia Pontica_, No. 85; _CIL_. III (Salone), 6384; _supra_, n. 63, etc.) It gained access into Judaism and paganism simultaneously (cf. Bousset, _Die Religion des Judentums im neutest. Zeitalter_, 1903, p. 271, and, for Philo of Alexandria, Zeller, _Philos. der Griechen_, V, p. 397 and p. 297).--During the third century it was expounded by Cornelius Labeo, the source of Arnobius and Servius (Nieggetiet, _De Cornelio Labeone_ [Diss. Munster], 1908, pp. 77-86). It was generally accepted towards the end of the empire; see _infra_, n. 25.--I hope soon to have the opportunity of setting forth the development of this sidereal eschatology with greater precision in my lectures on "Astrology and Religion in Antiquity" which will appear in 1912 (chap. VI). 65. According to the doctrine of the Egyptian mysteries the Elysian Fields were in the under-world (Apul., _Metam._, XI, 6).--According to the astrological theory, the Elysian Fields were in the sphere of the fixed stars (Macrobius, _Comm. somn. Scip._, I, 11, § 8; cf. _infra_, chap. VIII, n. 25). Others placed them in the moon (Servius, _Ad Aen._, VI, 887; cf. Norden, _Vergils Buch_, VI, p. 23; Rohde, _Psyche_, pp. 609 ff.). Iamblichus placed them between the moon and the sun (Lydus, _De mens._, IV, 149, p. 167, 23, Wünsch). 66. The relation between the two ideas is apparent in the alleged account of the Pythagorean doctrine which Diogenes Laertius took from Alexander Polyhistor, and which is in reality an apocryphal composition of the first century of our era. It was said that Hermes guided the pure souls, after their separation from the body, [Greek: eis ton Hupsiston] (Diog. Laert., VIII, § 31; cf. Zeller, _Philos. der Griechen_, V, p. 106, n. 2).--On the meaning of Hypsistos, cf. _supra_, p. 128. It appears very plainly in the passage of Isaiah, xiv, 13, as rendered by the Septuagint: {256} [Greek: Eis ton ouranon anabêsomai, epanô tôn asterôn thêsô ton thronon mou ... esomai homoios tôi Hupsistôi.] 67. Originally he was the thunder-god, in Greek [Greek: Keraunos]. Under this name he appeared for instance on the bas-relief preserved in the museum of Brussels (Dussaud, _Notes_, p. 105). Later, by a familiar process, the influence of a particular god becomes the attribute of a greater divinity, and we speak of a [Greek: Zeus Keraunios] (cf. Usener, _Keraunos_, Rhein. Museum, N. F., LX, 1901).--This Zeus Keraunios appears in many inscriptions of Syria (_CIG_, 4501, 4520; Le Bas-Waddington, 2195, 2557 _a_, 2631, 2739; cf. Roscher, _Lexikon Myth._, s. v. "Keraunos"). He is the god to whom Seleucus sacrificed when founding Seleucia (Malalas, p. 199), and a dedication to the same god has been found recently in the temple of the Syrian divinities at Rome (_supra_, n. 10).--An equivalent of the Zeus Keraunios is the Zeus [Greek: Kataibatês]--"he who descends in the lightning"--worshiped at Cyrrhus (Wroth, _Greek Coins in the British Museum_: "Galatia, Syria," p. 52 and LII; Roscher, _Lexikon_, s. v.) 68. For instance the double ax was carried by Jupiter Dolichenus (cf. _supra_, p. 147). On its significance, cf. Usener, _loc. cit._, p. 20. 69. Cf. Lidzbarski, _Balsamem, Ephem. semit. Epigr._, I, p. 251.--Ba'al Samaïn is mentioned as early as the ninth century B. C. in the inscription of Ben Hadad (Pognon, _Inscr. sémit._, 1907, pp. 165 ff.; cf. Dussaud, _Rev. archéol._, 1908, I, p. 235). In Aramaic papyri preserved at Berlin, the Jews of Elephantine call Jehovah "the god of heaven" in an address to a Persian governor, and the same name was used in the alleged edicts of Cyrus and his successors, which were inserted in the book of Esdras (i. 1; vi. 9, etc.)--If there were the slightest doubt as to the identity of the god of thunder with Baalsamin, it would be dispelled by the inscription of Et-Tayibé, where this Semitic name is translated into Greek as [Greek: Zeus megistos keraunios]; cf. Lidzbarski, _Handbuch_, p. 477, and Lagrange, _op. cit._, p. 508. 70. On the worship of Baalsamin, confused with Ahura-Mazda and transformed into _Caelus_, see _Mon. myst. Mithra_, p. 87.--The texts attesting the existence of a real cult of {257} heaven among the Semites are very numerous. Besides the ones I have gathered (_loc. cit._, n. 5); see Conybeare, _Philo about the Contemplative Life_, p. 33, n. 16; Kayser, _Das Buch der Erkenntniss der Wahrheit_, 1893, p. 337, and _infra_, n. 75. Zeus [Greek: Ouranios]: Le Bas-Waddington, 2720 _a_ (Baal of Bétocécé); Renan, _Mission de Phénicie_, p. 103.--Cf. _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, IX, 1906, p. 333. 71. Coins of Antiochus VIII Grypus (125-96 B. C.); Babelon, _Rois de Syrie, d'Arménie_, 1890, p. CLIV, pp. 178 ff. 72. All these qualities ascribed to the Baals by astrological paganism ([Greek: hupsistos, pantokratôr], etc.), are also the attributes which, according to the doctrine of Alexandrian Judaism, characterized Jehovah (see _supra_, n. 66). If he was originally a god of thunder, as has been maintained, the evolution of the Jewish theology was parallel to that of the pagan conceptions (see _supra_, n. 69). 73. On this subject cf. _Jupiter summus exsuperantissimus_ (_Archiv f. Religionsw._, IX), 1906, pp. 326 ff. 74. Ps.-Iamblichus, _De mysteriis_, VI, 7 (cf. Porph., _Epist. Aneb._, c. 29), notes this difference between the two religions. 75. Apul., _Met._, VIII, 25. Cf. _CIL_, III, 1090; XII, 1227 (= Dessau, 2998, 4333); Macrobius, _Comm. somn. Scipionis_, I, 14, § 2: "Nihil aliud esse deum nisi caelum ipsum et caelestia ipsa quae cernimus, ideo ut summi omnipotentiam dei ostenderet posse vix intellegi."--[Greek: Hêlios pantokratôs]: Macrob., I, 23, 21. 76. Diodorus, II, 30: [Greek: Chaldaioi tên tou kosmou phusin aidion phasin einai k. t. l.]; cf. Cicero, _Nat. deor._, II, 20, § 52 ff.; Pliny, _H. N._, II, 8, § 30. The notion of eternity was correlative with that of [Greek: heimarmenê]; cf. Ps.-Apul., _Asclep._, 40; Apul., _De deo Socratis_, c. 2: "(The planets) quae in deflexo cursu ... meatus aeternos divinis vicibus efficiunt."--This subject will be more fully treated in my lectures on "Astrology and Religion" (chaps. IV-V). 77. At Palmyra: De Vogüé, _Inscr. sem._, pp. 53 ff., etc.--On the first title, see _infra_, n. 80. 78. Note especially _CIL_, VI, 406 = 30758, where Jupiter Dolichenus is called _Aeternus conservator totius poli_. The {258} relation to heaven here remained apparent. See _Somn. Scip._, III, 4; IV, 3. 79. Cf. _Rev. archéol._, 1888, I, pp. 184 ff.; Pauly-Wissowa, s. v. "Aeternus," and _Festschrift für Otto Benndorf_, 1898, p. 291.--The idea of the eternity of the gods also appeared very early in Egypt, but it does not seem that the mysteries of Isis--in which the death of Osiris was commemorated--made it prominent, and it certainly was spread in the Occident only by the sidereal cults. 80. The question has been raised whether the epithet [Hebrew: MR' `LM'] means "lord of the world" or "lord of eternity" (cf. Lidzbarski, _Ephemeris_, I, 258; II, 297; Lagrange, p. 508), but in our opinion the controversy is to no purpose, since in the spirit of the Syrian priests the two ideas are inseparable and one expression in itself embraces both, the world being conceived as eternal (_supra_, n. 76). See for Egypt, Horapoll., _Hieroglyph._, I (serpent as symbol of the [Greek: aiôn] and [Greek: kosmos]). At Palmyra, too, the title "lord of all" is found, [Hebrew: MR' KL] (Lidzbarski, _loc. cit._); cf. Julian, Or., IV, p. 203, 5 (Hertlein): [Greek: Ho basileus tôn holôn Hêlios], and infra, n. 81; n. 87. Already at Babylon the title "lord of the universe" was given to Shamash and Hadad; see Jastrow, _Religion Babyloniens_, I, p. 254, n. 10. Nöldeke has been good enough to write me as follows on this subject: "Daran kan kein Zweifel sein, dass [Hebrew: `LM] zunächst (lange Zeit) Ewigkeit heisst, und dass die Bedeutung 'Welt' secundär ist. Ich halte es daher für so gut wie gewiss dass das palmyrenische [Hebrew: MR' `LM'], wenn es ein alter Name ist, den 'ewigen' Herrn bedeutet, wie ohne Zweifel [Hebrew: 'L `WLM], Gen., xxi. 33. Das biblische Hebräisch kennt die Bedeutung 'Welt' noch nicht, abgesehen wohl von der späten Stelle, Eccl. iii. 11. Und, so viel ich sehe, ist im Palmyrenischen sonst [Hebrew: `LM'] immer 'Ewigkeit,' z.B. in der häufigen Redensart [Hebrew: LBRYK SHMCH L`LM']. Aber das daneben vorkommende palmyr. [Hebrew: MR' KL] führt allerdings darauf, dass die palmyrenische Inschrift auch in [Hebrew: MR' `LM'] den 'Herrn der Welt' sah. Ja der syrische Uebersetzer sieht auch in jenem hebräischen [Hebrew: 'L `WLM] 'den Gott der Welt.' Das Syrische hat nämlich einen formalen Unterschied festgestellt zwischen _'[=a]l[)a]m_, dem Status absolutus, 'Ewigkeit,' und _'[=a]lm[=a]_ [_[=a]l^em[=a]_] dem Status emphaticus 'Welt.'--Sollte übrigens die {259} Bedeutung Welt diesem Worte erst durch Einfluss griechischer Speculation zu Teil geworden sein? In der Zingirli-Inschrift bedeuted [Hebrew: BTSLM] noch bloss 'in seiner Zeit.'" 81. Cf. _CIL_, III, 1090 = Dessau, _Inscr._, 2998: "Divinarum humanarumque rerum rectori." Compare _ibid._, 2999 and Cagnet, _Année épigr._, 1905, No. 235: "I. O. M., id est universitatis principi." Cf. the article of the _Archiv_ cited, n. 73. The _Asclepius_ says (c. 39), using an astrological term: "Caelestes dii catholicorum dominantur, terreni incolunt singula." 82. Cf. W. Robertson Smith, 75 ff., _passim_. In the Syrian religions as in that of Mithra, the initiates regarded each other as members of the same family, and the phrase "dear brethren" as used by our preachers, was already in use among the votaries of Jupiter Dolichenus (_fratres carissimos_, _CIL_, VI, 406 = 30758). 83. Renan mentioned this fact in his _Apotres_, p. 297 = _Journal Asiatique_, 1859, p. 259. Cf. Jalabert, _Mél. faculté orient. Beyrout_, I, 1906, p. 146. 84. This is the term (_virtutes_) used by the pagans. See the inscription _Numini et virtutibus dei aeterni_ as reconstructed in _Revue de Philologie_, 1902, p. 9; _Archiv für Religionsw._, _loc. cit._, p. 335, n. 1 and _infra_, ch. VIII, n. 20. 85. _CIL_, VII, 759 = Bücheler, _Carm. epig._, 24.--Cf. Lucian, _De dea Syria_, 32. 86. Macrobius, _Sat._, I, 23, § 17: "Nominis (Adad) interpretatio significat unus unus." 87. Cicero, _Somnium Scip._, c. 4: "Sol dux et princeps et moderator luminum reliquorum, mens mundi et temperatio." Pliny, _H. N._, II, 6, § 12: "Sol ... siderum ipsorum caelique rector. Hunc esse mundi totius animam ac planius mentem, hunc principale naturae regimen ac numen credere decet," etc. Julian of Laodicea, _Cat. codd. astr._, I, p. 136, l. 1: [Greek: Hêlios basileus kai hêgemôn tou sumpantos kosmou kathestôs, pantôn kathêgoumenos kai pantôn ôn genesiarchês.] 88. We are here recapitulating some conclusions of a study on _La théologie solaire du paganisme romain_ published in _Mémoires des savants étrangers présentés à l'Acad. des Inscr._, XII, 2d part, pp. 447 ff., Paris, 1910. {260} 89. The hymns of Synesius (II, 10 ff., IV, 120 ff., etc.) contain peculiar examples of the combination of the old astrological ideas with Christian theology. VI. PERSIA. BIBLIOGRAPHY: We shall not attempt here to give a bibliography of the works devoted to Mazdaism. We shall merely refer the reader to that of Lehmann in Chantepie de la Saussaye, _Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte_, II, p. 150. We should mention, in the first place, Darmesteter, _Le Zend Avesta_, 1892 ff., with introductions and commentary.--In my _Textes et monuments relatifs aux mystères de Mithra_ (2 vols., 1894-1900), I, pp. xx ff., I have furnished a list of the earlier works on this subject; the conclusions of the book have been published separately without the notes, under the title: _Les Mystères de Mithra_, (2d ed., Paris and Brussels, 1902; English translation, Chicago, 1903). See also the article "Mithra" in the _Dictionnaire des antiquités_ of Daremberg and Saglio, 1904.--General outlines of certain phases of this religion have been since given by Grill, _Die persische Mysterienreligion und das Christentum_, 1903; Roeses, _Ueber Mithrasdienst_, Stralsund, 1905; G. Wolff, _Ueber Mithrasdienst und Mithreen_, Frankfort, 1909; Reinach, _La morale du mithraïsme_ in _Cultes, mythes_, II, 1906, pp. 220 ff.; Dill, _op. cit._, pp. 594-626; cf. also Bigg, _op. cit._ [p. 321], 1905, p. 46 ff.; Harnack, _Ausbreitung des Christent._, II, p. 270. Among the learned researches which we cannot enumerate here, the most important is that of Albrecht Dieterich, _Eine Mithrasliturgie_, 1903. He has endeavored with some ingenuity to show that a mystical passage inserted in a magic papyrus preserved at Paris is in reality a fragment of a Mithraic liturgy, but here I share the skepticism of Reitzenstein (_Neue Jahrb. f. das class. Altertum_, 1904, p. 192) and I have given my reasons in _Rev. de l'Instr. publ. en Belg._, XLVII, 1904, pp. 1 ff. Dieterich answered briefly in _Archiv f. Religionswis._, VIII, 1905, p. 502, but without convincing me. The author of the passage in question may have been more or less accurate in giving his god the external appearance of Mithra, but he certainly did not know the eschatology of the Persian mysteries. We know, for {261} instance, through positive testimony that they taught the dogma of the passage of the soul through the seven planetary spheres, and that Mithra acted as a guide to his votaries in their ascension to the realm of the blessed. Neither the former nor the latter doctrine, however, is found in the fantastic uranography of the magician. The name of Mithra, as elsewhere that of the magi Zoroaster and Hostanes, helped to circulate an Egyptian forgery., cf. Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, 1907, p. 168, n. 1. See on this controversy Wünsch's notes in the 2d ed. of the _Mithrasliturgie_, 1910, pp. 225 ff.--A considerable number of new monuments have been published of late years (the mithreum of Saalburg by Jacobi, etc.). The most important ones are those of the temple of Sidon preserved in the collection of Clercq (De Ridder, _Marbres de la collection de C._, 1906, pp. 52 ff.) and those of Stockstadt published by Drexel (_Der obergerm. Limes_, XXXIII, Heidelberg, 1910). In the following notes I shall only mention the works or texts which could not be utilized in my earlier researches. 1. Cf. Petr. Patricius, _Excerpta de leg._, 12 (II, p. 393, de Boor ed.). 2. Cf. Chapot, _Les destinées de l'hellénisme au delà l'Euphrate_ (_Mém. soc. antiq. de France_), 1902, pp. 207 ff. 3. Humbert in Daremberg and Saglio, _Dictionnaire_, s. v. "Amici," I, p. 228 (cf. 160). Cf. Friedländer, _Sittengesch._, I, pp. 202 ff. 4. Cf. _L'Eternité des empereurs romains_ (_Rev. d'hist. et de litt. relig._, I), 1896, p. 442. 5. Friedländer (_loc. cit._, p. 204) has pointed out several instances where Augustus borrowed from his distant predecessors the custom of keeping a journal of the palace, of educating the children of noble families at court, etc. Certain public institutions were undoubtedly modeled on them; for instance, the organization of the mails (Otto Hirschfeld, _Verwaltungsbeamten_, p. 190, n. 2; Rostovtzev, _Klio_, VI, p. 249 (on angariae)); cf. Preisigke, _Die Ptolemäische Staatspost_ (_Klio_, VII, p. 241), that of the secret police (Friedländer, I, p. 427).--On the Mazdean _Hvareno_ who became [Greek: Tuchê basileôs], then _Fortuna Augusti_, cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 284 ff.--Even Mommsen (_Röm. Gesch._, V, p. 343), although {262} predisposed to look for the continuity of the Roman tradition, adds, after setting forth the rules that obtained at the court of the Parthians: "Alle Ordnungen die mit wenigen Abminderungen bei den römischen Caesaren wiederkehren und vielleicht zum Teil von diesen der älteren Grossherrschaft entlehnt sind."--Cf. also _infra_, ch. VIII, n. 19. 6. Friedländer, _loc. cit._, p. 204; cf. p. 160. 7. Bousset, _Die Religion des Judentums im neutestam. Zeitalter_, 1903 (2d ed. 1906), pp. 453 ff., _passim_. 8. Cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 21 ff. 9. Cf. _infra_, ch. VII, pp. 188 ff. 10. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 9 ff., pp. 231 ff. 11. Lactantius, _De mort. persec._, 21, 2; cf. Seeck, _Gesch. des Untergangs der antiken Welt_, II, pp. 7 ff. 12. Cf. Strzygowski, _Mschatta_ (_Jahrb. preuss. Kunstsammlungen_, XXV), Berlin, 1904, pp. 324 ff., 371 ff.--From a communication made to the Congress of Orientalists at Copenhagen (1908) by Father Lammens, it would appear that the façade of Mschatta is the work of an Omaiyad kalif of Damascus, and Strzygowski's conclusions would, therefore, have to be modified considerably; but the influence of Sassanid art in Syria is nevertheless certain; see Dussaud, _Les Arabes en Syrie avant l'Islam_, 1907, pp. 33, 51 ff. 13. Cf. _infra_, n. 32. 14. Plutarch, _V. Pompei_, 24: [Greek: Xenas de thusias ethuon autoi tas en Olumpôi kai teletas tinas aporrêtous eteloun, ôn hê tou Mithrou kai mechri deuro diasôzetai katadeichtheisa prôton hup' ekeinôn]. 15. Lactantius Placidus ad Stat., _Theb._ IV, 717: "Quae sacra primum Persae habuerunt, a Persis Phryges, a Phrygibus Romani." 16. In the _Studio Pontica_, p. 368, I have described a grotto located near Trapezus and formerly dedicated to Mithra, but now transformed into a church. We know of no other Mithreum. A bilingual dedication to Mithra, in Greek and Aramaic, is engraved upon a rock in a wild pass near Farasha (Rhodandos) in Cappadocia. Recently it has been republished {263} with excellent notes by Henri Grégoire (_Comptes Rendus Acad. des Inscr._, 1908, pp. 434 ff.), but the commentator has mentioned no trace of a temple. The text says that a strategus from Ariaramneia [Greek: emageuse Mithrêi]. Perhaps these words must be translated according to a frequent meaning of the aorist, by "became a magus of Mithra" or "began to serve Mithra as a magus." This would lead to the conclusion that the inscription was made on the occasion of an initiation. The magus dignity was originally hereditary in the sacred caste; strangers could acquire it after the cult had assumed the form of mysteries. If the interpretation offered by us is correct the Cappadocian inscription would furnish interesting evidence of that transformation in the Orient. Moreover, we know that Tiridates of Armenia initiated Nero; see _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 239. 17. Strabo, XI, 14, § 9. On the studs of Cappadocia, cf. Grégoire, _Saints jumeaux et dieux cavaliers_, 1905, pp. 56 ff. 18. Cf. _C. R. Acad. des Inscr._, 1905, pp. 99 ff. (note on the bilingual inscription of Aghatcha-Kalé); cf. Daremberg-Saglio-Pottier, _Dict. Antiqu._, s. v. "Satrapa." 19. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 10, n. 1. The argument undoubtedly dates back to Carneades, see Boll, _Studien über Claudius Ptolemäus_, 1894, pp. 181 ff. 20. Louis H. Gray (_Archiv für Religionswiss._, VII, 1904, p. 345) has shown how these six Amshaspands passed from being divinities of the material world to the rank of moral abstractions. From an important text of Plutarch it appears that they already had this quality in Cappadocia; cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, II, p. 33, and Philo, _Quod omn. prob. lib._, 11 (II, 456 M).--On Persian gods worshiped in Cappadocia, see _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 132. 21. See _supra_, n. 16 and 18.--According to Grégoire, the bilingual inscription of Farasha dates back to the first century, before or after Christ (_loc. cit._, p. 445). 22. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 9, n. 5. 23. Comparison of the type of Jupiter Dolichenus with the bas-reliefs of Boghaz-Keui led Kan (_De Iovis Dolicheni cultu_, Groningen, 1901, pp. 3 ff.) to see an Anatolian god in him. {264} The comparison of the formula _ubi ferrum nascitur_ with the expression [Greek: hopou ho sidêros tiktetai], used in connection with the Chalybians, leads to the same conclusion, see _Revue de philologie_, XXVI, 1902, p. 281.--Still, the representations of Jupiter Dolichnus also possess a remarkable resemblance to those of the Babylonian god Ramman; cf. Jeremias in Roscher, _Lexikon der Myth._, s. v. "Ramman," IV, col. 50 ff. 24. _Rev. archéol._ 1905, I, p. 189. Cf. _supra_, p. 127, n. 68. 25. Herod., I, 131.--On the assimilation of Baalsamin to Ahura-Mazda, cf. _supra_, p. 127, and _infra_, n. 29. At Rome, Jupiter Dolichenus was _conservator totius poli et numen praestantissimum_ (_CIL_, VI, 406 = 30758). 26. Inscription of King Antiochus of Commagene (Michel, _Recueil_, No. 735), l. 43: [Greek: Pros ouranious Dios Ôromasdou thronous theophilê psuchên propempsan]; cf. l. 33: [Greek: Ouraniôn anchista thronôn]. 27. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 87. 28. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 333.--An inscription discovered in a mithreum at Dorstadt (Sacidava in Dacia, _CIL_, III, 7728, cf. 7729), furnishes, if I rightly understand, another proof of the relation existing between the Semitic cults and that of the Persian gods. It speaks of a "de[orum?] sacerdos creatus a Pal[myr]enis, do[mo] Macedonia, et adven[tor] huius templi." This rather obscure text becomes clear when compared with Apul., _Metam._, XI, 26. After the hero had been initiated into the mysteries of Isis in Greece, he was received at Rome in the great temple of the Campus Martius, "fani quidem advena, religionis autem indigena." It appears also that this Macedonian, who was made a priest of their national gods (Bel, Malakbel, etc.) by a colony of Palmyrenians, was received in Dacia by the mystics of Mithra as a member of their religion. 29. At Venasa in Cappadocia, for instance, the people, even during the Christian period, celebrated a panegyric on a mountain, where the celestial Zeus, representing Baalsamin and Ahura-Mazda, was formerly worshiped (Ramsay, _Church in the Roman Empire_, 1894, pp. 142, 457). The identification of Bel with Ahura-Mazda in Cappadocia results from the Aramaic inscription of Jarpuz (Clermont-Ganneau, _Recueil_, III, {265} p. 59; Lidzbarski, _Ephemeris für semit. Epigraphik_, I, pp. 59 ff.). The Zeus Stratios worshiped upon a high summit near Amasia was in reality Ahura-Mazda, who in turn probably supplanted some local god (_Studia Pontica_, pp. 173 ff.).--Similarly the equation Anahita = Ishtar = Ma or Cybele for the great female divinity is accepted everywhere (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 333), and Ma takes the epithet [Greek: anikêtos] like Mithra (_Athen. Mitt._, XVIII, 1893, p. 415, and XXIX, 1904, p. 169). A temple of this goddess was called [Greek: hieron Astartês] in a decree of Anisa (Michel, _Recueil_, No. 536, l. 32). 30. The Mithra "mysteries" are not of Hellenic origin (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 239), but their resemblance to those of Greece, which Gruppe insists upon (_Griech. Mythologie_, pp. 1596 ff.) was such that the two were bound to become confused in the Alexandrian period. 31. Harnack (_Ausbreitung des Christentums_, II, p. 271) sees in this exclusion of the Hellenic world a prime cause of the weakness of the Mithra worship in its struggle against Christianity. The mysteries of Mithra met the Greek culture with the culture of Persia, superior in some respects. But if it was capable of attracting the Roman mind by its moral qualities, it was too Asiatic, on the whole, to be accepted without repugnance by the Occidentals. The same was true of Manicheism. 32. _CIL_, III, 4413; cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 281. 33. Cf. the bibliography at the head of the notes for this chapter. 34. As Plato grew older he believed that he could not explain the evils of this world without admitting the existence of an "evil soul of the world" (Zeller, _Philos. der Griechen_, II, p. 973, p. 981, n. 1). But this late conception, opposed as it is to his entire system, is probably due to the influence of Oriental dualism. It is found in the Epinomis (Zeller, _ibid._, p. 1042, n. 4), where the influence of "Chaldean" theories is undeniable; cf. Bidez, _Revue de Philologie_, XXIX, 1905, p. 319. 35. Plutarch, _De Iside_, 46 ff.; cf. Zeller, _Philos. der Griechen_, V, p. 188; Eisele, _Zur Demonologie des Plutarch_ (_Archiv für Gesch. der Philos._, XVII), 1903, p. 283 f.--Cf. _infra_, n. 40. {266} 36. Arnobius, who was indebted to Cornelius Labeo for some exact information on the doctrines of the magi, says (IV, 12, p. 150, 12, Reifferscheid): "Magi suis in accitionibus memorant antitheos saepius obrepere pro accitis, esse autem hos quosdam materiis ex crassioribus spiritus qui deos se fingant, nesciosque mendaciis et simulationibus ludant." Lactantius, the pupil of Arnobius, used the same word in speaking of Satan that a Mazdean would have used in referring to Ahriman (_Inst. divin._, II, 9, 13, p. 144, 13, Brandt): "Nox quam pravo illi antitheo dicimus attributam"; he is the _aemulus Dei_.--Heliodorus who has made use in his _Aethiopica_ of data taken from the Mazdean beliefs (see _Monuments relatifs aux mystères de Mithra_, volume I, p. 336, n. 2) uses the Greek word in the same sense, (IV, 7, p. 105, 27, Bekker ed.): [Greek: Antitheos tis eoiken empodizein tên praxin].--The Ps.-Iamblichus, _De myster._, III, 31, § 15, likewise speaks of [Greek: daimones ponêrous hous dê kai kalousin antitheous]. Finally the magical papyri also knew of the existence of these deceiving spirits (Wessely, _Denksch. Akad. Wien_, XLII, p. 42, v. 702: [Greek: Pempson moi ton alêthinon Asklêpion dicha tinos antitheou planodaimonos]). 37. In a passage to which we shall return in note 39, Porphyry (_De Abstin._, II, 42), speaks of the demons in almost the same terms as Arnobius: [Greek: To gar pseudos toutois hoikeion; Boulontai gar einai theoi kai hê proestôsa autôn dunamis dokein theos einai ho megistos] (cf. c. 41: [Greek: Toutous kai ton proestôta autôn]); likewise Ps.-Iamblichus, _De myst._, III, 30, 6: [Greek: Ton megan hêgemona tôn daimonôn].--In the _De philos. ex orac. haur._ (pp. 147 ff. Wolff), an early work in which he followed other sources than those in _De Abstinentia_, Porphyry made Serapis (= Pluto) the chief of the malevolent demons. There was bound to be a connection between the Egyptian god of the underworld and the Ahriman of the Persians at an early date.--A veiled allusion to this chief of demons may be contained in Lucan, VI, 742 ff., and Plutarch who, in _De Iside_, 46, called Ahriman Hades (_supra_, p. 190; cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, II, p. 131, No. 3), says elsewhere (_De latenter viv._, 6, p. 1130): [Greek: Ton de tês enantias kurion moiras, eite theos eite daimôn estin, Aidên onomazousin]. Cf. Decharme, _Traditions religieuses chez les Grecs_, 1904, p. 431, n. 1. 38. The dedication _Diis angelis_ recently found at {267} Viminacium (_Jahresh. Instituts in Wien_, 1905, Beiblatt, p. 6), in a country where the Mithra worship had spread considerably seems to me to refer to this. See Minuc. Felix, _Octav._, 26: "Magorum et eloquio et negotio primus Hostanes angelos, id est ministros et nuntios Dei, eius venerationi novit assistere." St. Cypr., "Quod idola dii n. s.," c. 6 (p. 24, 2, Hartel): "Ostanes et formam Dei veri negat conspici posse et angelos veros sedi eius dicit adsistere." Cf. Tertullian, _Apol._, XXIII: "Magi habentes invitatorum angelorum et daemonum adsistentem sibi potestatem;" Arnobius, II, 35 (p. 76, 15, Reifferscheid); Aug., _Civ. Dei_, X, 9, and the texts collected by Wolff, _Porphyrii de philos. ex orac. haurienda_, 1856, pp. 223 ff.; Kroll, _De orac. Chaldaïcis_, 1894, pp. 53; Roscher, _Die Hebdomadenlehre der griech. Philosophen_, Leipsic, 1906, p. 145; Abt, _Apuleius und die Zauberei_, Giessen, 1909, p. 256. 39. Porphyry, _De Abstin._, II, 37-43, expounds a theory about the demons, which, he says, he took from "certain Platonists" ([Greek: Platônikoi tines], Numenius and Cronius?). That these authors, whoever they were, helped themselves freely to the doctrines of the magi, seems to appear immediately from the whole of Porphyry's exposition (one could almost give an endless commentary on it with the help of the Mazdean books) and in particular from the mention that is made of a power commanding the spirits of evil (see _supra_, n. 37). This conclusion is confirmed by a comparison with the passage of Arnobius cited above (n. 36), who attributes similar theories to the "magi," and with a chapter of the Ps.-Iamblichus (_De mysteriis_, III, 31) which develops analogous beliefs as being those of "Chaldean prophets."--Porphyry also cites a "Chaldean" theologian in connection with the influence of the demons, _De regressu animae_ (Aug., _Civ. Dei_, X, 9). I conjecture that the source of all this demonology is the book attributed to Hostanes which we find mentioned in the second century of our era by Minucius Felix, St. Cyprian (_supra_, n. 38), etc.; cf. Wolff, op. cit., p. 138; _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 33. As a matter of fact it would be false logic to try to explain the evolution of demonology, which is above everything else religious, by the development of the philosophic theories of the Greeks (see for instance the communications of Messrs. Stock and Glover: _Transactions of the Congress of {268} History of Rel._, Oxford, 1908, II, pp. 164 ff.). The influence of the popular Hellenic or foreign ideas has always been preponderant here; and the Epinomis, which contains one of the oldest accounts of the theory of demons, as proved _supra_, n. 34, was influenced by the Semitic notions about genii, the ancestors of the _djinns_ and the _wélys_ of Islam. If, as we believe, the text of Porphyry really sets forth the theology of the magi, slightly modified by Platonic ideas based on popular beliefs of the Greeks and perhaps of the barbarians, we shall be able to draw interesting conclusions in regard to the mysteries of Mithra. For instance, one of the principles developed is that the gods must not be honored by the sacrifice of animated beings ([Greek: empsucha]), and that immolation of victims should be reserved for the demons. The same idea is found in Cornelius Labeo, (Aug., _Civ. Dei_, VIII, 13; see Arnobius, VII, 24), and possibly it was the practice of the Mithra cult. Porphyry (II, 36) speaks in this connection of rites and mysteries, but without divulging them, and it is known that in the course of its history Mazdaism passed from the bloody to the bloodless sacrifice (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 6). 40. Cf. Plutarch, _De defectu orac._, 10, p. 415 A: [Greek: Emoi de dokousi pleionas lusai aporias hoi to tôn daimonôn genos en mesôi thentes theôn kai anthrôpôn kai tropon tina tên koinônian hêmôn sunagon eis tauto kai sunapton exeurontes; eite magôn tôn peri Zôroastrên ho logos outos esti, eite Thraikios].... 41. Cf. Minucius Felix, 26, § 11: "Hostanes daemonas prodidit terrenos vagos humanitatis inimicos." The pagan idea, that the air was peopled with evil spirits against whom man had to struggle perpetually, persisted among the Christians; cf. Ephes., ii. 2, vi. 12, see also Prudentius, _Hamartigenia_, 514 ff. 42. Cf. Minucius Felix, _loc. cit._: "Magi non solum sciunt daemonas, sed quidquid miraculi ludunt, per daemonas faciunt," etc. Cf. Aug., _Civ. Dei_, X, 9 and _infra_, ch. VII, n. 76. 43. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 139 ff. 44. Theod. Mopsuest. ap. Photius, _Bibl._ 81. Cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 8. {269} 45. Cf. Bousset, _Die Religion des Judentums im neutest. Zeitalter_, 1903, pp. 483 ff. 46. Julian, _Caesares_, p. 336 C. The term [Greek: entolai] is the one also used in the Greek Church for the commandments of the Lord. 47. Cf. _supra_, p. 36. 48. The remark is from Darmesteter, _Zend-Avesta_, II, p. 441. 49. Cf. Reinach, _op. cit._, [260], pp. 230 ff. 50. Farnell, _Evolution of Religion_, p. 127. 51. Mithra is _sanctus_ (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, II, p. 533), like the Syrian gods; cf. _supra_, ch. V, n. 47. 52. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 309 ff. The eschatology of orthodox Mazdaism has been expounded recently by Söderblom, _La vie future d'après le mazdéisme_, Paris, 1901. 53. Cf. _supra_, ch. IV, p. 100, ch. V, p. 126. 54. We have explained this theory above, p. 125. It was foreign to the religion of Zoroaster and was introduced into the mysteries of Mithra with the Chaldean astrology. Moreover, ancient mythological ideas were always mixed with this learned theology. For instance, it was an old Oriental belief that souls, being regarded as material, wore clothing (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 15, n. 5; Bousset, _Archiv für Religionswiss._, IV, 1901, p. 233, n. 2; _Rev. hist. des relig._, 1899, p. 243, and especially Böklen, _Die Verwandtschaft der jüdisch-christlichen und der parsischen Eschatologie_, Göttingen, 1902, pp. 61 ff.) Thence arose the notion prevalent to the end of paganism, that the soul in passing through the planetary spheres, took on the qualities of the stars "like successive tunics." Porphyry, _De abstin._, I, 31: [Greek: Apoduteon ara tous pollous hêmin chitônas k. t. l.]; Macrobius, _Somnium Sc._, I, 11, § 12: "In singulis sphaeris aetherea obvolutione vestitur"; I, 12, § 13: "Luminosi corporis amicitur accessu"; Proclus, _In Tim._, I, 113, 8, Diehl ed.: [Greek: Periballesthai chitônas], Procl., _Opera_, Cousin ed., p. 222: "Exuendum autem nobis et tunicas quas descendentes induti sumus"; Kroll, _De orac. Chaldaïcis_, p. 51, n. 2: [Greek: Psuchê hessamenê noun]; Julian, Or., II, p. 123, 22, (Hertlein). Cf. Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, p. 168 n. 1. Compare what {270} Hippolytus, _Philos._, V, I, says of Isis (Ishtar?) in connection with the Naasenians. She is [Greek: heptastolos], because nature also is covered with seven ethereal garments, the seven heavens of the planets; see Ps.-Apul., _Asclepius_, 34 (p. 75, 2 Thomas): "Mundum sensibilem et, quae in eo sunt, omnia a superiore illo mundo quasi ex vestimento esse contecta." I have insisted upon the persistence of this idea, because it may help us to grasp the significance attributed to a detail of the Mithra ritual in connection with which Porphyry relates nothing but contradictory interpretations. The persons initiated into the seven degrees were obliged to put on different costumes. The seven degrees of initiation successively conferred upon the mystic were symbols of the seven planetary spheres, through which the soul ascended after death (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 316), the garments assumed by the initiates were probably considered as emblems of those "tunics" which the soul put on when descending into the lower realms and discarded on returning to heaven. 55. Renan, _Marc-Aurèle_, p. 579. 56. Anatole France, _Le mannequin d'osier_, p. 318. Cf. Reinach, _op. cit._ [p. 260], p. 232. VII. ASTROLOGY AND MAGIC. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bouché-Leclercq's book _L'astrologie grecque_ (Paris, 1899) makes it unnecessary to refer to the earlier works of Saumaise (_De annis climactericis_, 1648), of Seiffarth (_Beiträge sur Lit. des alten Aegypten_, II, 1883), etc. Most of the facts cited by us are taken from that monumental treatise, unless otherwise stated.--A large number of new texts has been published in the _Catalogus codicum astrologorum Graecorum_ (9 vols. ready, Brussels, 1898).--Franz Boll, _Sphaera_ (Leipsic, 1903) is important for the history of the Greek and barbarian constellations (see _Rev. archéol._, 1903, I, p. 437).--De la Ville de Mirmont has furnished notes on _L'astrologie en Gaule au V^e siècle_ (_Rev. des Etudes anciennes_, 1902, pp. 115 ff.; 1903, pp. 255 ff.; 1906, p. 128). Also in book form, Bordeaux, 1904. The principal results of the latest researches have been outlined to perfection by Boll, _Die Erforschung der {271} antiken Astrologie_ (_Neue Jahrb. für das klass. Altert._, XI), 1908, pp. 104 ff.--For the bibliography of magic, cf. _infra_, notes, 58 ff. 1. Stephan. Byzant. (_Cat. codd. astr._, II, p. 235), I, 12: [Greek: Exochôtatê kai pasês epistêmês despoina]. Theophil. Edess., _ibid._, V, 1, p. 184: [Greek: Hoti pasôn timiôtera technôn]. Vettius Valens, VI, proem. (_ibid._, V, 2, p. 34, 7 = p. 241, 19, Kroll ed.): [Greek: Tis gar ouk an krinai tautên tên theôrian pasôn prouchein kai makariôtatên tunchanein]. 2. Cf. Louis Havet, _Revue bleue_, Nov., 1905, p. 644. 3. Cf. _supra_, p. 146, p. 123. 4. Kroll, _Aus der Gesch. der Astrol._ (_Neue Jahrb. für das klass. Altertum_, VII), 1901, pp. 598 ff. Cf. Boll, _Cat. codd. astr._, VII, p. 130. 5. The argumentation of Posidonius, placed at the beginning of the Tetrabiblos, inspired the defense of astrology, and it has been drawn upon considerably by authors of widely different spirit and tendencies, see Boll, _Studien über Claudius Ptolemäus_, 1894, pp. 133 ff. 6. Suetonius, Tib., 69. 7. Suetonius, _Othon_, 8; cf. _Bouché-Leclercq_, p. 556, n. 4. 8. On these edifices, cf. Maass, _Tagesgötter_, 1902. The form "Septizonia" is preferable to "Septizodia"; cf. Schürer, _Siebentägige Woche_ (Extr. _Zeitschr. neutestam. Wissensch._, VI), 1904, pp. 31, 63. 9. Friedländer, _Sittengesch._, I, p. 364. It appears that astrology never obtained a hold on the lower classes of the rural population. It has a very insignificant place in the folklore and healing arts of the peasantry. 10. Manilius, IV, 16.--For instance _CIL_, VI, 13782, the epitaph of a Syrian freedman: "L. Caecilius L. l(ibertus) Syrus, natus mense Maio hora noctis VI, die Mercuri, vixit ann. VI dies XXXIII, mortuus est IIII Kal. Iulias hora X, elatus est h(ora) III frequentia maxima." Cf. Bucheler, _Carm. epigr._, 1536: "Voluit hoc astrum meum." 11. Chapter [Greek: Peri deipnou]: _Cat. codd. astr._, IV, p. 94. The precept: "Ungues Mercurio, barbam Iove, Cypride crinem," {272} ridiculed by Ausonius, (VII, 29, p. 108, Piper) is well known. There are many chapters [Greek: Peri onuchôn, Peri himatiôn], etc. 12. _Cat. codd. astr._, V, 1 (Rom.) p. 11, cod. 2, f. 34: [Greek: Peri tou ei echei megan rhina ho gennêtheis. Poteron pornê genêtai hê gennêtheisa.] 13. Varro, _De re rustica_, I, 37, 2; cf. Pliny, _Hist. nat._, XVI, 75, § 194. Olympiod, _Comm. in Alcibiad Plat._, p. 18 (ed. Creuzer, 1821): [Greek: Tous hieratikôs zôntas estin idein mê apokeiromenous auxousês tês selênês]. This applies to popular superstition rather than to astrology. 14. _CIL_, VI, 27140 = Bücheler, _Carmina epigraph._, 1163: "Decepit utrosque | Maxima mendacis fama mathematici." 15. Palchos in the _Cat. codd. astr._, I, pp. 106-107. 16. Manilius, IV, 386 ff., 866 ff. _passim_. 17. Vettius Valens, V, 12 (_Cat. codd. astr._, V, 2, p. 32 = p. 239, 8, Kroll ed.); cf. V, 9 (_Cat._, V, 2, p. 31, 20 = p. 222, 11 Kroll ed.). 18. Cf. Steph. Byz., _Cat. codd. astr._, II, p. 186. He calls both [Greek: stochasmos entechnos]. The expression is taken up again by Manuel Comnenus (_Cat._, V, 1, p. 123, 4), and by the Arab Abou-Mashar [Apomasar] (_Cat._, V, 2, p. 153). 19. The sacerdotal origin of astrology was well known to the ancients; see Manilius, I, 40 ff. 20. Thus in the chapter on the fixed stars which passed down to Theophilus of Edessa and a Byzantine of the ninth century, from a pagan author who wrote at Rome in 379; cf. _Cat. codd. astrol._, V, 1, pp. 212, 218.--The same observation has been made in the manuscripts of the Cyranides, cf. F. de Mély and Ruelle, _Lapidaires grecs_, II, p. xi. n. 3.--See also _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 31 ff.; Boll, _Die Erforsch. der antiken Astrologie_, pp. 110 ff. 21. In Vettius Valens, III, 12 (p. 150, 12 Kroll ed.) and IX, prooem. (p. 329, 20); cf. VI, prooem. (p. 241, 16); Riess, _Petosiridis et Necheps. fragm._, fr. 1. 22. Vettius Valens, IV, 11 (_Cat. codd, astr._, V, 2, p. 86 = p. 172, 31 ff., Kroll ed.), cf. V, 12, (_Cat._, _ibid._, p. 32 = p. 238, 18 ff.), VII prooem. (_Cat._, p. 41 = p. 263, l. 4, Kroll ed. and the note). {273} 23. Firmicus Maternus, II, 30, VIII, prooem. and 5. Cf. Theophilus of Edessa, _Cat._, V, 1, p. 238, 25; Julian of Laod., _Cat._, IV, p. 104, 4. 24. _CIL_, V, 5893.--Chaeremon, an Egyptian priest, was also an astrologer. 25. Souter, _Classical Review_, 1897, p. 136; Ramsay, _Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia_, II, p. 566, 790. 26. On the Stoic theory of sympathy see Bouché-Leclercq, pp. 28 ff., _passim_. A brilliant account will be found in Proclus, _In remp. Plat._, II, 258 f., Kroll ed. Cf. also Clem. Alex., _Strom._, VI, 16, p. 143 (p. 504, 21, Stähelin ed.)--Philo attributed it to the Chaldeans (_De migrat. Abrahami_, 32, II, p. 303, 5, Wendland): [Greek: Chaldaioi tôn allôn anthrôpôn ekpeponêkenai kai diapherontôs dokousin astronomian kai genethlialogikên, ta epigeia tois meteôrois kai ta ourania tois epi gês harmozomenoi kai hôsper dia mousikês logôn tên emmelestatên sumphônian tou pantos epideiknumenoi têi tôn merôn pros allêla koinôniai kai sumpatheiai, topois men diezeugmenôn, sungeneiai de ou diôikismenôn.] 27. Riess in Pauly-Wissowa, _Realenc._, s. v. "Aberglaube," I, col. 38 f. 28. (_No note with this number in original book--Transcriber._). 29. _Cat._, V, 1, p. 210, where a number of other examples will be found. 30. See Boll, _Sphaera_ (_passim_), and his note on the lists of animals assigned to the planets, in Roscher, _Lexikon Myth._, s. v. "Planeten," III, col. 2534; cf. _Die Erforsch. der Astrologie_, p. 110, n. 3. 31. _Cat._, V, 1, pp. 210 ff. 32. Cf. _supra_, ch. V. pp. 128 ff. 33. Cf. _supra_, ch. V, n. 87. 34. On worship of the sky, of the signs of the zodiac, and of the elements, cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 85 ff., 98 ff., 108 ff. 35. The magico-religious notion of sanctity, of _mana_, appeared in the idea and notation of time. This has been shown by Hubert in his profound analysis of _La représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie_ (_Progr. éc. des Hautes-Etudes_), 1905 = _Mélanges hist. des rel._, Paris, 1909, p. 190. 36. On the worship of Time see _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 20, {274} 74 ff.; of the seasons: _ibid._, pp. 92 ff. There is no doubt that the veneration of time and its subdivisions (seasons, months, days, etc.) spread through the influence of astrology. Zeno had deified them; see Cicero, _Nat. D._, II, 63 (= von Arnim, fr. 165): "Astris hod idem (i. e. vim divinam) tribuit, tum annis, mensibus, annorumque mutationibus." In conformity with the materialism of the Stoics these subdivisions of time were conceived by him as bodies (von Arnim, _loc. cit._, II, fr. 665; cf. Zeller, _Ph. Gr._, IV, p. 316, p. 221). The later texts have been collected by Drexler in Roscher, _Lexikon_, s. v. "Mên," II, col. 2689. See also Ambrosiaster, _Comm. in epist. Galat._, IV, 10 (Migne, col. 381 B). Egypt had worshiped the hours, the months, and the propitious and adverse years as gods long before the Occident; see Wiedemann, _loc. cit._ (_infra_, n. 64) pp. 7 ff. 37. They adorn many astronomical manuscripts, particularly the _Vaticanus gr._ 1291, the archetype of which dates back to the third century of our era; cf. Boll, _Sitzungsb. Akad. München_, 1899, pp. 125 ff., 136 ff. 38. Piper, _Mythologie der christl. Kunst_, 1851, II, pp. 313 f. Cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 220. 39. Bidez, _Bérose et la grande année_ in the _Mélanges Paul Fredericq_, Brussels, 1904, pp. 9 ff. 40. Cf. _supra_, pp. 126, 158 f. 41. When Goethe had made the ascent of the Brocken, in 1784, during splendid weather, he expressed his admiration by writing the following verses from memory, (II, 115): "Quis caelum possit, nisi caeli munere, nosse | Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars ipse deorum est?"; cf. _Brief an Frau von Stein_, No. 518, (Schöll) 1885, quoted by Ellis in _Noctes Manilianae_, p. viii. 42. This idea in the verse of Manilius (n. 41, cf. IV, 910), and which may be found earlier in _Somnium Scipionis_ (III, 4; see Macrobius, _Comment._ I, 14, § 16; "Animi societatem cum caelo et sideribus habere communem"; Pseudo-Apul., _Asclepius_, c. 6, c. 9. Firmicus Maternus, _Astrol._, I, 5, § 10). dates back to Posidonius who made the contemplation of the sky one of the sources of the belief in God (Capelle, _Jahrb._ {275} _für das klass. Altertum_, VIII, 1905, p. 534, n. 4), and it is even older than that, for Hipparchus had already admitted a "cognationem cum homine siderum, animasque, nostras partem esse caeli" (Pliny, _Hist. nat._, II, 26, § 95). 43. Vettius Valens, IX, 8 (_Cat. codd. astr._, V, 2, p. 123 = p. 346, 20, Kroll ed.), VI, prooem. (_Cat._, ibid. p. 34, p. 35, 14 = p. 242, 16, 29, Kroll ed.); cf. the passages of Philo collected by Cohn, _De opificio mundi_, c. 23, p. 24, and Capelle, _loc. cit._ 44. Manilius, IV, 14. 45. Cf. my article on _L'éternité des empereurs_ (_Rev. hist. litt. relig._, I), 1898, pp. 445 ff. 46. Reitzenstein, to whom belongs the credit of having shown the strength of this astrological fatalism (see _infra_, n. 57), believes that it developed in Egypt, but surely he is wrong. In this connection see the observations of Bousset, _Götting. gel. Anzeigen_, 1905, p. 704. 47. The most important work is unfortunately lost: it was the [Greek: Peri heimarmenês] by Diodorus of Tarsus. Photius has left us a summary (_cod._ 223). We possess a treatise on the same subject by Gregory of Nyssa (_P. G._, XLV, p. 145). They were supported by the Platonist Hierocles (Photius, _cod._ 214, p. 172 b.).--Many attacks on astrology are found in St. Ephraim, _Opera syriaca_, II, pp. 437 ff.; St. Basil (_Hexaem._, VI, 5), St. Gregory of Nazianzen, St. Methodus (_Symp., P. G._, XVII, p. 1173); later in St. John Chrysostom, Procopus of Gaza, etc. A curious extract from Julian of Halicarnassus has been published by Usener, _Rheinisches Mus._, LV, 1900, p. 321.--We have spoken briefly of the Latin polemics in the _Revue d'hist. et de litt. relig._, VIII, 1903, pp. 423 f. A work entitled De Fato (Bardenhewer, _Gesch. altchr. Lit._, I, p. 315) has been attributed to Minucius Felix; Nicetas of Remesiana (about 400) wrote a book _Adversus genethlialogiam_ (Gennadius, _Vir. inl._, c. 22), but the principal adversary of the _mathematici_ was St. Augustine (_Civ. Dei_, c. 1 ff.; _Epist._, 246, ad Lampadium, etc.). See also Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-römische Kultur_, p. 172, n. 2. 48. The influence of the astrological ideas was felt by the Arabian paganism before Mohammed; see _supra_, ch. V, n. 57. {276} 49. Dante, _Purg._, XXX, 109 ff.--In the _Convivio_, II, ch. XIV, Dante expressly professes the doctrine of the influence of the stars over human affairs.--The church succeeded in extirpating the learned astrology of the Latin world almost completely at the beginning of the Middle Ages. We do not know of one astrological treatise, or of one manuscript of the Carlovingian period, but the ancient faith in the power of the stars continued in secret and gained new strength when Europe came in contact with Arabian science. 50. Bouché-Leclercq devotes a chapter to them (pp. 609 ff.). 51. Seneca, _Quaest. Nat._, II, 35: "Expiationes et procurationes nihil aliud esse quam aegrae mentis solatia. Fata inrevocabiliter ius suum peragunt nec ulla commoventur prece." Cf. Schmidt, _Veteres philosophi quomodo iudicaverint de precibus_, Giessen, 1907, p. 34.--Vettius Valens, V, 9, (_Catal. codd. astr._, V, 2 p. 30, 11 = p. 220, 28, Kroll ed.), professes that [Greek: Adunaton tina euchais ê thusiais epinikêsai tên ex archês katabolên k. t. l.], but he seems to contradict himself, IX, 8 (p. 347, 1 ff.). 52. Suetonius, _Tib._, 69: "Circa deos ac religiones neglegentior, quippe addictus mathematicae, plenusque persuasionis cuncta fato agi." Cf. Manilius, IV. 53. Vettius Valens, IX, 11 (_Cat. codd. astr._, V, 2, p. 51, 8 ff. = p. 355, 15. Kroll ed.), cf. VI, prooem. (_Cat._, p. 33 = p. 240, Kroll). 54. "Si tribuunt fata genesis, cur deos oratis?" reads a verse of Commodianus (I, 16, 5). The antinomy between the belief in fatalism and this practice did not prevent the two from existing side by side, cf. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 120, 311; _Revue d'hist. et de litt. relig._, VIII, 1903, p. 431.--The peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias who fought fatalism in his [Greek: Peri heimarmenês], at the beginning of the third century, and who violently attacked the charlatanism and cupidity of the astrologers in another book (_De anima mantissa_, p. 180, 14, Bruns), formulated the contradiction in the popular beliefs of his time (_ibid._, p. 182, 18): [Greek: Pote men anthrôpoi to tês heimarmenês humnousin hôs anankaion, pote de ou pantêi tên sunecheian autês pisteuousi sôzein; kai gar hoi dia tôn logôn huper autês hôs ousês anankaias diateinomenoi sphodra kai panta anatithentes autêi, en tais kata ton bion praxesin ouk eoikasin autêi pepisteukenai;] {277} [Greek: Tuchên goun pollakis epiboôntai, allên homologountes einai tautên aitian tês heimarmenês; alla kai tois theois ou dialeipousin euchomenoi, hôs dunamenon tinos hup' autôn dia tas euchas genesthai kai para tên heimarmenên; ... kai manteiais ouk oknousi chrêsthai, hôs enon autois, ei promathoien, phulaxasthai ti tôn heimarmenôn ... apithanôtatai goun eisin autôn hai pros tên toutôn sumphônian heurêsilogiai.] Cf. also _De Fato_, c. 2 (p. 165, 26 ff. Bruns). 55. Manilius, II, 466: "Quin etiam propriis inter se legibus astra | Conveniunt, ut certa gerant commercia rerum, | Inque vicem praestant visus atque auribus haerent, | Aut odium, foedusque gerunt," etc.--Signs [Greek: bleponta] and [Greek: akouonta]: cf. Bouché-Leclercq, pp. 139 ff.--The planets rejoice ([Greek: chairein]) in their mansions, etc.--Signs [Greek: phônêenta], etc.: cf. _Cat._, I, pp. 164 ff.; Bouché-Leclercq, pp. 77 ff. The terminology of the driest didactic texts is saturated with mythology. 56. Saint Leo, _In Nativ._, VII, 3 (Migne, _P. L._, LIV, col. 218); Firmicus, I, 6, 7; Ambrosiaster, in the _Revue d'hist. et litt. relig._, VIII, 1903, p. 16. 57. Cf. Reitzenstein, _Poimandres_, pp. 77 ff., cf. p. 103, where a text of Zosimus attributes this theory to Zoroaster. Wendland, _Die hellenistisch-röm. Kultur_, 1907, p. 81. This is the meaning of the verse of the _Orac. Chaldaïca_: [Greek: Ou gar huph' heimartên agelên piptousi theourgoi] (p. 59 Kroll). According to Arnobius (II, 62, Cornelius Labeo) the magi claimed "deo esse se gnatos nec fati obnoxios legibus." 58. _Bibliography._ We have no complete book on Greek and Roman magic. Maury, _La magie et l'astrologie dans l'antiquité et au moyen âge_, 1864, is a mere sketch. The most complete account is Hubert's art. "Magia" in the _Dict. des antiquités_ of Daremberg, Saglio, Pottier. It contains an index of the sources and the earlier bibliography. More recent studies are: Fahz, _De poet. Roman. doctrina magica_, Giessen, 1903; Audollent, _Defixionum tabulae_, Paris, 1904; Wünsch, _Antikes Zaubergerät aus Pergamon_, Berlin, 1905 (important objects found dating back to the third century, A. D.); Abt, _Die Apologie des Apuleius und die Zauberei_, Giessen, 1908.--The superstition that is not magic, but borders upon it, is the subject of a very important article by Riess, "Aberglaube," in the _Realenc._ of Pauly-Wissowa. An essay by Kroll, _Antiker Aberglaube_, Hamburg, 1897, deserves mention.--Cf. Ch. Michel {278} in the _Revue d'hist. et litt. rel._, VII, 1902, p. 184. See also _infra_, nn. 64, 65, 72. 59. The question of the principles of magic has recently been the subject of discussions started by the theories of Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, 2d ed., 1900 (cf. Goblet d'Alviella, _Revue de l'univ. de Bruxelles_, Oct. 1903). See Andrew Lang, _Magic and Religion_, London, 1901; Hubert and Mauss, _Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie_ (_Année sociologique_, VII), 1904, p. 56; cf. _Mélanges hist. des relig._, Paris, 1909, pp. xvii ff.; Jevons, _Magic_, in the _Transactions of the Congress for the History of Religions_, Oxford, 1908, I, p. 71. Loisy, "Magie science et religion," in _A propos d'hist. des religions_, 1911, p. 166. 60. S. Reinach, _Mythes, cultes et relig._, II, Intr., p. xv. 61. The infiltration of magic into the liturgy under the Roman empire is shown especially in connection with the ritual of consecration of the idols, by Hock, _Griechische Weihegebräuche_, Würzburg, 1905, p. 66.--Cf. also Kroll, _Archiv für Religionsw._, VIII, 1905, Beiheft, pp. 27 ff. 62. Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte_, I, pp. 509 f. 63. Arnobius, II, 62, cf. II, 13; Ps.-Iamblichus, _De Myst._, VIII, 4. 64. Magic in Egypt: Budge, _Egyptian Magic_, London, 1901; Wiedemann, _Magie und Zauberei im alten Aegypten_, Leipsic, 1905 [cf. Maspero, _Rev. critique_, 1905, II, p. 166]; Otto, _Priester und Tempel_, II, p. 224; Griffith, _The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden_, 1904 (a remarkable collection dating back to the third century of our era), and the writings analyzed by Capart, _Rev. hist. des relig._, 1905 (Bulletin of 1904, p. 17), 1906 (Bull. of 1905, p. 92). 65. Fossey, _La magie assyrienne_, Paris, 1902. The earlier bibliography will be found p. 7. See also Hubert in Daremberg, Saglio, Pottier, _Dict. des antiq._, s. v. "Magia," p. 1505, n. 5. Campbell Thomson, _Semitic Magic, Its Origin and Development_, London, 1908. Traces of magical conceptions have survived even in the prayers of the orthodox Mohammedans; see the curious {279} observations of Goldziher, _Studien, Theodor Nöldeke gewidmet_, 1906, I, pp. 302 ff. The Assyrio-Chaldean magic may be compared profitably with Hindu magic (Victor Henry, _La Magie dans l'Inde antique_, Paris, 1904). 66. There are many indications that the Chaldean magic spread over the Roman empire, probably as a consequence of the conquests of Trajan and Verus (Apul., _De Magia_, c. 38; Lucian, _Philopseudes_, c. 11; _Necyom._, c. 6, etc. Cf. Hubert, loc. cit.) Those most influential in reviving these studies seem to have been two rather enigmatical personages, Julian the Chaldean, and his son Julian the Theurge, who lived under Marcus Aurelius. The latter was Considered the author of the [Greek: Logia Chaldaika], which in a measure became the Bible of the last neo-Platonists. 67. Apul., _De Magia_, c. 27. The name [Greek: philosophos], _philosophus_, was finally applied to all adepts in the occult sciences. 68. The term seems to have been first used by Julian, called the Theurge, and thence to have passed to Porphyry (_Epist. Aneb._, c. 46; Augustine, _Civ. Dei_, X, 9-10) and to the neo-Platonists. 69. Hubert, article cited, pp. 1494, n. 1; 1499 f.; 1504. Ever since magical papyri were discovered in Egypt, there has been a tendency to exaggerate the influence exercised by that country on the development of magic. It made magic prominent as we have said, but a study of these same papyri proves that elements of very different origin had combined with the native sorcery, which seems to have laid special stress upon the importance of the "barbarian names," because to the Egyptians the name had a reality quite independent of the object denoted by it, and possessed an effective force of its own (_supra_, pp. 93, 95). But that is, after all, only an incidental theory, and it is significant that in speaking of the origin of magic, Pliny (XXX, 7) names the Persians in the first place, and does not even mention the Egyptians. 70. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, pp. 230 ff.--Consequently Zoroaster, the undisputed master of the magi, is frequently considered a disciple of the Chaldeans or as himself coming from Babylon. The blending of Persian and Chaldean beliefs appears clearly in Lucian, _Necyom._, 6 ff. {280} 71. The majority of the magical formulas attributed to Democritus are the work of forgers like Bolos of Mendes (cf. Diels, _Fragmente der Vorsokratiker_, I^2, pp. 440 f.), but the authorship of this literature could not have been attributed to him, had not these tendencies been so favorable. 72. On Jewish magic see: Blau, _Das altjüdische Zauberwesen_, 1898; cf. Hubert, _loc. cit._, p. 1505. 73. Pliny, _H. N._, XXX, 1, § 6; Juvenal, VI, 548 ff. In Pliny's opinion these magicians were especially acquainted with _veneficas artes_. The toxicology of Mithridates goes back to that source (Pliny, XXV, 2, 7). Cf. Horace, _Epod._, V, 21; Virgil, _Buc._ VIII, 95, etc. 74. Cf. _supra_, pp. 151 ff. 75. Minucius Felix, _Octavius_, 26; cf. _supra_, ch. VI, p. 152. 76. In a passage outlining the Persian demonology (see _supra_, n. 39), Porphyry tells us (_De Abst._, II, 41): [Greek: Toutous] (sc. [Greek: tous daimonas]) [Greek: malista kai ton proestôta autôn] (c. 42, [Greek: hê proestôsa autôn dunamis] = Ahriman) [Greek: ektimôsin hoi ta kaka dia tôn goêteiôn prattomenoi k. t. l.] Cf. Lactantius, _Divin. Inst._, II, 14 (I, p. 164, 10, Brandt ed.); Clem. of Alexandria, _Stromat._, III, p. 46 C, and _supra_, n. 37. The idea that the demons subsisted on the offerings and particularly on the smoke of the sacrifices agrees entirely with the old Persian and Babylonian ideas. See Yasht V, XXI, 94: What "becomes of the libations which the wicked bring to you after sunset?" "The devas receive them," etc.--In the cuneiform tablet of the deluge (see 160 ff.), the gods "smell the good odor and gather above the officiating priest like flies." (Dhorme, _Textes religieux assyro-babyloniens_, 1907, p. 115; cf. Maspero, _Hist. anc. des peuples de l'Orient_, I, p. 681.). 77. Plut., _De Iside_, c. 46. 78. The _druj Nasu_ of the Mazdeans; cf. Darmesteter, _Zend-Avesta_, II, p. xi and 146 ff. 79. Cf. Lucan, _Phars._, VI, 520 ff. 80. Mommsen, _Strafrecht_, pp. 639 ff. There is no doubt that the legislation of Augustus was directed against magic, cf. Dion, LII, 34, 3.--Manilius (II, 108) opposes to astrology the {281} _artes quorum haud permissa facultas_. Cf. also Suet., _Aug._, 31. 81. Zachariah the Scholastic, _Vie de Sévère d'Antioche_, Kugener ed. (_Patrol. orientalis_, II), 1903, pp. 57 ff. 82. Magic at Rome in the fifth century: Wünsch, _Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom_, Leipsic, 1898 (magical leads dated from 390 to 420); _Revue hist. litt. relig._, VIII, 1903, p. 435, and Burchardt, _Die Zeit Constantin's_, 2d ed., 1880, pp. 236 ff. VIII. THE TRANSFORMATION OF PAGANISM. BIBLIOGRAPHY: The history of the destruction of paganism is a subject that has tempted many historians. Beugnot (1835), Lasaulx (1854), Schulze (Jena, 1887-1892) have tried it with varying success (see Wissowa, _Religion der Römer_, pp. 84 ff.). But hardly any one has been interested in the reconstruction of the theology of the last pagans, although material is not lacking. The meritorious studies of Gaston Boissier (_La fin du Paganisme_, Paris, 1891) treat especially the literary and moral aspects of that great transformation. Allard (_Julien l'Apostat_, I, 1900, p. 39 ff.) has furnished a summary of the religious evolution during the fourth century. 1. Socrates, _Hist. Eccl._, IV, 32. 2. It is a notable fact that astrology scarcely penetrated at all into the rural districts (_supra_, ch. VII, n. 9), where the ancient devotions maintained themselves; see the _Vita S. Eligii_, Migne, _P. L._, XL, col. 1172 f.--In the same way the cult of the menhirs in Gaul persisted in the Middle Ages; see d'Arbois de Jubainville, _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscr._, 1906, pp. 146 ff.; S. Reinach, _Mythes, cultes_, III, 1908, pp. 365 ff. 3. Aug., _Civ. Dei_, IV, 21 _et passim_. Arnobius and Lactantius had previously developed this theme. 4. On the use made of mythology during the fourth century, cf. Burckhardt, _Zeit Contantins_, 2d ed., 1880, pp. 145-147; Boissier, _La fin du paganisme_, II, pp. 276 ff. and _passim_. {282} 5. It is well known that the poems of Prudentius (348-410), especially the Peristephanon, contain numerous attacks on paganism and the pagans. 6. Cf. _La polémique de l'Ambrosiaster contre les païens_ (_Rev. hist. et litt. relig._, VIII, 1903, pp. 418 ff.). On the personality of the author (probably the converted Jew Isaac), cf. Souter, _A Study of Ambrosiaster_, Cambridge, 1905 (_Texts and Studies_, VII) and his edition of the _Quaestiones_, (Vienna, 1908), intr. p. xxiv. 7. The identity of Firmicus Maternus, the author of _De errore profanarum religionum_, and that of the writer of the eight books _Matheseos_ appears to have been definitely established. 8. Maximus was Bishop of Turin about 458-465 A. D. We possess as yet only a very defective edition of the treatises _Contra Paganos_ and _Contra Judaeos_ (Migne, _Patr. lat._, LVII, col. 781 ff.). 9. Particularly the _Carmen adversus paganos_ written after Eugene's attempt at restoration in 394 A. D. (Riese, _Anthol. lat._, I, 20) and the _Carmen ad senatorem ad idolorum servitutem conversum_, attributed to St. Cyprian (Hartel. ed., III, p. 302), which is probably contemporaneous with the former. 10. On this point see the judicious reflections of Paul Allard, _Julien l'Apostat_, I, 1900, p. 35. 11. Hera was the goddess of the air after the time of the Stoics ([Greek: Hêra] = [Greek: aêr]). 12. Cf. _supra_, pp. 51, 75, 99, 120, 148. Besides the Oriental gods the only ones to retain their authority were those of the Grecian mysteries, Bacchus and Hecate, and even these were transformed by their neighbors. 13. The wife of Praetextatus, after praising his career and talents in his epitaph, adds: "Sed ista parva: tu pius mystes sacris | teletis reperta mentis arcano premis, | divumque numen multiplex doctus colis" (_CIL_, 1779 = Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 1259). 14. Pseudo-August. [Ambrosiaster], _Quaest. Vet. et Nov. Test._, (p. 139, 9-11, Souter ed.): "Paganos elementis esse {283} subiectos nulli dubium est.... Paganos elementa colere omnibus cognitum est"; cf. 103 (p. 304, 4 Souter ed.): "Solent (pagani) ad elementa confugere dicentes haec se colere quibus gubernaculis regitur vita humana" (cf. _Rev. hist. lit. rel._, VIII, 1903, p. 426, n. 3).--Maximus of Turin (Migne, _P. L._, LVII, 783): "Dicunt pagani: nos solem, lunam et stellas et universa elementa colimus et veneramur." Cf. _Mon myst. Mithra_, I, p. 103, n. 4, p. 108. 15. Firmicus Maternus, _Mathes._, VII prooem: "(Deus) qui ad fabricationem omnium elementorum diversitate composita ex contrariis et repugnantibus cuncta perfecit." 16. _Elementum_ is the translation of [Greek: stoicheion], which has had the same meaning in Greek at least ever since the first century (see Diels, _Elementum_, 1899, pp. 44 ff., and the Septuagint, Sap. Sal., 7, 18; 19, 17.) Pfister, "_Die [Greek: stoicheia tou kosmou] in den Briefen des Paulus_," _Philologus_, LXIX, 1910, p. 410.--In the fourth century this meaning was generally accepted: Macrobius, _Somn. Scipionis_, I, 12, § 16: "Caeli dico et siderum, aliorumque elementorum"; cf. I, 11, § 7 ff. Martianus Capella, II, 209; Ambrosiaster, _loc. cit._; Maximus of Turin, _loc. cit._; Lactantius, II, 13, 2: "Elementa mundi, caelum, solem, terram, mare."--Cf. Diels, _op. cit._, pp. 78 ff. 17. Cf. _Rev. hist. litt. rel._, VIII, 1903, pp. 429 ff.--Until the end of the fifth century higher education in the Orient remained in the hands of the pagans. The life of Severus of Antioch, by Zachariah the Scholastic, preserved in a Syrian translation [_supra_, ch. VII, n. 81], is particularly instructive in this regard. The Christians, who were opposed to paganism and astrology, consequently manifested an aversion to the profane sciences in general, and in that way they became responsible to a serious extent for the gradual extinction of the knowledge of the past (cf. _Rev. hist. litt. rel._, _ibid._, p. 431; Royer, _L'enseignement d'Ausone à Alcuin_, 1906, p. 130 ff.). But it must be said in their behalf that before them Greek philosophy had taught the vanity of every science that did not have the moral culture of the ego for its purpose, see Geffcken, _Aus der Werdezeit des Christentums_, p. 7, p. 111. 18. _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 294. Cf. _supra_, pp. 175 f. {284} 19. Ambrosiaster, _Comm. in Epist. Pauli_, p. 58 B: "Dicentes per istos posse ire ad Deum sicut per comites pervenire ad regem" (cf. _Rev. his. lit. rel._, VIII, 1903, p. 427).--The same idea was set forth by Maximus of Turin (_Adv. pag._, col. 791) and by Lactantius (_Inst. div._, II, 16, § 5 ff., p. 168 Brandt); on the celestial court, see also Arnobius, II, 36; Tertullian, _Apol._, 24.--Zeus bore the name of king, but the Hellenic Olympus was in reality a turbulent republic. The conception of a supreme god, the sovereign of a hierarchical court, seems to have been of Persian origin, and to have been propagated by the magi and the mysteries of Mithra. The inscription of the Nemroud Dagh speaks of [Greek: Dios Ôromasdou thronous] (_supra_, ch. VI, n. 26), and, in fact, a bas-relief shows Zeus-Oramasdes sitting on a throne, scepter in hand. The Mithra bas-reliefs likewise represent Jupiter Ormuzd on a throne, with the other gods standing around him (_Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 129; II, p. 188, fig. 11); and Hostanes pictured the angels sitting around the throne of God (_supra_, ch. VI, n. 38; see Rev. iv). Moreover, the celestial god was frequently compared, not to a king in general, but to the Great King, and people spoke of his satraps; cf. Pseudo-Arist., [Greek: Peri kosmou], c. 6, p. 398 _a_, 10 ff. = Apul., _De mundo_, c. 26; Philo, _De opif. mundi_, c. 23, 27 (p. 24, 17; 32, 24, Cohn); Maximus of Turin, X, 9; and Capelle, _Die Schrift von der Welt_ (_Neue Jahrb. für das klass. Altert._, VIII), 1905, p. 556, n. 6. Particularly important is a passage of Celsus (Origen, _Contra Cels._, VIII, 35) where the relation of this doctrine to the Persian demonology is shown. But the Mazdean conception must have combined, at an early date, with the old Semitic idea that Baal was the lord and master of his votaries (_supra_, p. 94 ff.). In his _Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte_, (2d. ed., 1906, p. 364 ff.), Holtzmann insists on the fact that the people derived their conception of the kingdom of God from the pattern of the Persian monarchy. See also _supra_, p. 111. A comparison similar to this one, which is also found among the pagans of the fourth century, is the comparison of heaven with a city (Nectarius in St. Aug., _Epist._, 103 [Migne, _P. L._, XXXIII, col. 386]): "Civitatem quam magnus Deus et bene meritae de eo animae habitant," etc. Compare the City of God of St. Augustine and the celestial Jerusalem of the Jews {285} (Bousset, _Religion des Judentums_, 1903, p. 272).--Cf. also Manilius, V, 735 ff. 20. August., _Epist._ 16 [48] (Migne, _Pat. Lat._, XXXIII, col. 82): "Equidem unum esse Deum summum sine initio, sine prole naturae, seu patrem magnum atque magnificum, quis tam demens, tam mente captus neget esse certissimum? Huius nos virtutes per mundanum opus diffusas multis vocabulis invocamus, quoniam nomen eius cuncti proprium videlicet ignoramus. Nam Deus omnibus religionibus commune nomen est. Ita fit ut, dum eius quasi quaedam membra carptim variis supplicationibus prosequimur, totum colere profecto videamur." And at the end: "Dii te servent, per quos et eorum atque cunctorum mortalium communem patrem, universi mortales, quos terra sustinet, mille modis concordi discordia, veneramur et colimus." Cf. Lactantius Placidus, _Comm. in Stat. Theb._, IV, 516.--Another pagan (_Epist._, 234 [21], Migne, _P. L._, XXXIII, col. 1031) speaks "deorum comitatu vallatus, Dei utique potestatibus emeritus, id est eius unius et universi et incomprehensibilis et ineffabilis infatigabilisque Creatoris impletus virtutibus, quos (_read_ quas) ut verum est angelos dicitis vel quid alterum post Deum vel cum Deo aut a Deo aut in Deum." 21. The two ideas are contrasted in the _Paneg. ad Constantin. Aug._, 313 A. D., c. 26 (p. 212, Bährens ed.): "Summe rerum sator, cuius tot nomina sunt quot gentium linguas esse voluisti (quem enim te ipse dici velis, scire non possumus), sive tute quaedam vis mensque divina es, quae toto infusa mundo omnibus miscearis elementis et sine ullo extrinsecus accedente vigoris impulsu per te ipsa movearis, sive alique supra omne caelum potestas es quae hoc opus tuum ex altiore naturae arce despicias."--Compare with what we have said of _Jupiter exsuperantissimus_ (p. 128). 22. Macrobius, _Sat._, I, 17 ff.; cf. Firm. Mat., _Err. prof. rel._, c. 8; _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, 338 ff. Some have supposed that the source of Macrobius's exposition was Iamblichus. 23. Julian had intended to make all the temples centers of moral instruction (Allard, _Julien l'Apostat_, II, 186 ff.), and this great idea of his reign was partially realized after his death. His homilies were little appreciated by the bantering {286} and frivolous Greeks of Antioch or Alexandria, but they appealed much more to Roman gravity. At Rome the rigorous mysteries of Mithra had paved the way for reform. St. Augustine, _Epist._, 91 [202] (Migne, _P. L._, XXXIII, col. 315), c. 408 A. D., relates that moral interpretations of the old myths were told among the pagans during his time: "Illa omnia quae antiquitus de vita deorum moribusque conscripta sunt, longe aliter sunt intelligenda atque interpretanda sapientibus. Ita vero in templis populis congregatis recitari huiuscemodi salubres interpretationes heri et nudiustertius audivimus." See also _Civ. Dei_, II, 6: "Nec nobis nescio quos susurros paucissimorum auribus anhelatos et arcana velut religione traditos iactent (pagani), quibus vitae probitas sanctitasque discatur." Compare the epitaph of Praetextatus (_CIL_, VI, 1779 = Dessau, _Inscr. sel._, 1259): "Paulina veri et castitatis conscia | dicata templis," etc.--Firmicus Maternus (_Mathes_, II, 30) demands of the astrologer the practice of all virtues, "antistes enim deorum separatus et alienus esse debet a pravis illecebris voluptatum.... Itaque purus, castus esto, etc." 24. This is clearly asserted by the verses of the epitaph cited (v. 22 ff): "Tu me, marite, disciplinarum bono | puram ac pudicam SORTE MORTIS EXIMENS, | in templa ducis ac famulam divis dicas: | Te teste cunctis imbuor mysteriis." Cf. Aug., _Epist._, 234 (Migne, _P. L._, XXXIII, col. 1031, letter of a pagan to the bishop,): "Via est in Deum melior, qua vir bonus, piis, puris iustis, castis, veris dictisque factisque probatus et deorum comitatu vallatus ... ire festinat; via est, inquam, qua purgati antiquorum sacrorum piis praeceptis expiationibusque purissimis et abstemiis observationibus decocti anima et corpore constantes deproperant."--St. Augustine (_Civ. Dei_, VI, 1 and VI, 12) opposes the pagans who assert "deos non propter praesentem vitam coli sed propter aeternam." 25. The variations of this doctrine are set forth in detail by Macrobius, _In Somn. Scip._, I, 11, § 5 ff. According to some, the soul lived above the sphere of the moon, where the immutable realm of eternity began; according to others, in the spheres of the fixed stars where they placed the Elysian Fields (_supra_, ch. V, n. 65; see Martian, _Capella_, II, 209). The Milky Way in particular was assigned to them as their residence {287} (Macr., _ib._, c. 12; cf. Favon. Eulog., _Disput. de somn. Scipionis_, p. 1, 20 [Holder ed.]: "Bene meritis ... lactei circuli lucida ac candens habitatio deberetur"; St. Jerome, _Ep._, 23, § 3 [Migne, _P. L._, XXII, col. 426), in conformity with an old Pythagorean doctrine (Gundel, _De stellarum appellatione et relig. Romana_, 1907, p. 153 [245]), as well as an Egyptian doctrine (Maspero, _Hist. des peuples de l'Orient_, I, p. 181).--According to others, finally, the soul was freed from all connection with the body and lived in the highest region of heaven, descending first through the gates of Cancer and Capricorn, at the intersection of the zodiac and the Milky Way, then through the spheres of the planets. This theory, which was that of the mysteries (_supra_, pp. 126, 152) obtained the approbation of Macrobius ("quorum sectae amicior est ratio") who explains it in detail (I, 12, § 13 ff.). Arnobius, who got his inspiration from Cornelius Labeo (_supra_, ch. V, n. 64), opposed it, as a widespread error (II, 16): "Dum ad corpora labimur et properamus humana ex mundanis circulis, sequuntur causae quibus mali simus et pessimi." Cf. also, II, 33: "Vos, cum primum soluti membrorum abieretis e nodis, alas vobis adfuturas putatis quibus ad caelum pergere atque ad sidera volare possitis," etc.). It had become so popular that the comedy by Querolus, written in Gaul during the first years of the fifth century, alluded to it in a mocking way, in connection with the planets (V, 38): "Mortales vero addere animas sive inferis nullus labor sive superis." It was still taught, at least in part, by the Priscillianists (Aug., _De haeres._, 70; Priscillianus, éd. Schepss., p. 153, 15; cf. Herzog-Hauck, _Realencycl._, 3d ed., s. v. "Priscillian," p. 63.--We have mentioned (_supra_, ch. VI, n. 54) the origin of the belief and of its diffusion under the empire. 26. Cf. _supra_, p. 152, and pp. 189 ff.; _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 296. 27. This idea was spread by the Stoics ([Greek: ekpurôsis]) and by astrology (_supra_, p. 177); also by the Oriental religions, see Lactantius, _Inst._, VII, 18, and _Mon. myst. Mithra_, I, p. 310. 28. Gruppe (_Griech. Mythol._, pp. 1488 ff.) has tried to indicate the different elements that entered into this doctrine. 29. Cf. supra, pp. 134 f., p. 160 and _passim_. The similarity {288} of the pagan theology to Christianity was strongly brought out by Arnobius, II, 13-14.--Likewise in regard to the Orient, de Wilamowitz has recently pointed out the close affinity uniting the theology of Synesius with that of Proclus (_Sitzungsb. Akad. Berlin_, XIV, 1907, pp. 280 ff.) he has also indicated how philosophy then led to Christianity. 30. M. Pichon (_Les derniers écrivains profanes_, Paris, 1906) has recently shown how the eloquence of the panegyrists unconsciously changed from paganism to monotheism. See also Maurice, _Comptes Rendus Acad. Inscriptions_, 1909, p. 165.--The vague deism of Constantine strove to reconcile the opposition of heliolatry and Christianity (Burckhardt, _Die Zeit Constantins_, pp. 353 ff.) and the emperor's letters addressed to Arius and the community of Nicomedia (Migne, _P. G._, LXXXV, col. 1343 ff.) are, as shown by Loeschke (_Das Syntagma des Gelasius_ [Rhein. Mus., LXI], 1906, p. 44), "ein merkwürdiges Produkt theologischen Dilettantismus, aufgebaut auf im wesentlichen pantheistischer Grundlage mit Hilfe weniger christlicher Termini und fast noch weniger christlicher Gedanken." I shall cite a passage in which the influence of the astrological religion is particularly noticeable (col. 1552 D): [Greek: Idou gar ho kosmos morphê eitoun schêma tunchanei hôn; kai hoi asteres ge charaktêras probeblêntai; kai holôs to pneuma tou sphairoeidous toutou kuklou, eidos tôn ontôn tunchanei hon, kai hôsper morphôma; kai homôs ho Theos pantachou paresti.] * * * * * {289} INDEX. Ablutions, Ritualistic, 208. Absolutism, 38, 141, 161. Abstinence, 40. Abydos, 89, 98, 99, 237 n. 78; Isis in, 99; Liturgy of, 97; Mysteries of, 237 n. 77; Phallophories of, 78. Achemenides, 127, 135, 143. Adonis, 110; and Attis, 69. Æsculapius and Eshmoun, 21; Serpent sacred to, 173. _Aeterna domus_, 240 n. 91. _Aeternus, Deus_, 130. Africa, Isis in, 83. Agatha, St., 237 n. 73. Agathocles, 79, 80. Agrippa forbids worship of Isis, 82. Ahriman, 152, 190, 199; and Satan, 153, 266 n. 36. Ahura-Mazda, 127, 145; and Bel, 146. Alexander, 135; of Aphrodisias, 276 n. 54; Polyhistor, 255 n. 66. Alexandria, 84; Greek influence in, 75f.; Isis in, 90, 232 n. 33. Alexandrian calendar, 84; mysteries, 99, 240 n. 91. Amasis, 86. Amber road, 216 n. 12. Ambrosiaster, 204. Ameretat, 145. _Amici Augusti_, 137. Ammianus Marcellinus, 211. Ammon, 230 n. 9. Amshaspends, 145, 263 n. 20. Anahita, 54, 65, 145; and Ishtar, 146; Cybele and, 227 n. 32. Ananke, 182. Anatolia, 47, 139, 143. Andros, 76. Angels, 138, 152, 207, 267 n. 38. Animals, 116; sacred in Egypt, 78, 230f. n. 11; sacred in Phrygia, 48; sacred in Syria, 115f. Animism, 183. Anti-gods, 152. Antinous, 86. Antiochus, the Great, 105; of Commagene, 124, 264 n. 26. Antonines, 140. Antoninus Pius, 111. Antony, 82. Anubis, 77. _Apertio_, 95. Aphaca, 246 n. 40. Aphrodite and Isis, 89. Apion, 218 n. 20. Apollo and Mithra, 155. Apollodorus of Damascus, 8. Apuleius, 20, 79, 97, 104, 129. Aquileia, Isis in, 83. Aquitania, 108. Arabia, Astrology in, 275 n. 48. Aramaic, 146. Archeology as source, 16. Architecture, 8, 216 n. 11. Archon, 126. Aristotle, 138. Arius, 288 n. 30. Arles, 216 n. 12. Armenia, 144. Army. See "Soldiers" and "Militia." Arnobius, 204, 223 n. 38, 226 n. 30, 236 n. 65, 277 n. 57, 287 n. 25. Arsacides, 135. {290} Arsinoë, Serapeum in, 79. Art, Astrology in, 164, 168; Egyptian, 86; in Persia, 141; Influence of Oriental, 7; of Oriental religions, 33; of paganism, 17, 218 n. 23. Artaxerxes, 137. Artemis and Cybele, 227 n. 32. Aryans, Nature worship of, 145. Ascalon, 117. Asceticism, 40f., 51, 157. Asia Minor, 46ff., 197; Isis in, 80; Mazdaism in, 145; Mithraism in, 143. Astarte, 120, 243 n. 21; Immorality of, 118. Astrology, 207; and magic, 32, 162ff.; Babylonian, 151; Chaldean, 199; Christian theology and, 260 n. 89; in Syria, 123, 133; Origin of, 170, 272 n. 19; religious, 169. Atar, 145. Atargatis, 103ff.; and Venus, 123; Fish sacred to, 117. Athens, Serapis in, 79. Atonement, 40. Attalus, 47, 51. Attica, Attis and Cybele in, 62. Attis, x, 22, 48, 53, 69, 197, 225 n. 21; and Cybele, 62f.; Death of, 59; Hymns to, 217 n. 14; in Greece, 57; _Menotyrannus_, 61. Augustine, St., 71, 202, 220 n. 15, 275 n. 47. Augustus, 39, 111, 135, 187, 261 n. 5, 280 n. 80; and Diocletian, 3; and the Egyptian religion, 82; Reforms of, 38. Aurelian, 114f., 124, 205, 252 n. 59. Aust, Emil, xii. Autun, 57. Avesta, 142. Aziz, 113. Baal, x, 22, 84, 114, 118, 123, 130, 248 n. 43; and Saturn, 21; different from Jehovah, 131; Mystics of, 41. _Ba'al samîn_, 127, 131, 151, 256 nn. 69, 70; 264 nn. 25, 29. Baalat, 118, 123, 248 n. 43. Babylon, Astrology of, 151; Confession of sin in, 222 n. 31; Cosmology of, 220 n. 15; Influence of in Persia, 146; Influence of in Syria, 122; Judaism and, 123. See also "Chaldeans." Bacchus, 282 n. 12; and Attis, 69. Balmarcodes, 110. Baltis, 113. Bambyce, Lady of, 122. Baptism, Mithraic, 157; Taurobolium compared to, 70. Bardesanes of Edessa, 144. Beirut, 110f., 192. Bel, 32, 115, 123f.; Ahura Mazda and, 146. Bellona, 54. Beneventum, Iseum of, 233 n. 35. Berosus, 31, 163, 176. Bethels, 116. See also "Litholatry." Bidez, Joseph, 213 n. 1. Boethius, 211. Book of the Dead, 90. Borsippa, 122. _Bronton, Zeus_, 226 n. 24. Brotherhoods, 58. See also "Fraternity." Bryaxis, 76. Bubastis, 230 n. 9. Byzantium, 141; Astrology in, 170. Cadiz, Isis of, 96. _Caelestis, Jupiter_, 128. _Caelus_, 128, 130, 175; Jupiter, 147. See also "Sky" and "Zeus Ouranios." Calendars, 173; Alexandrian, 84. Caligula, 55, 84, 198. Campus Martius, Iseum of, 233 n. 35. _Cannophori_, 56. Cappadocia, 112f. Caracalla, 84. Carneades, 166. Carnuntum, 150. {291} _Carpentum_ of Cybele, 225 n. 20. Catacombs, 65, 226 n. 23. Catasterism, 173. Cato, 105. Catullus, 49. Chaeremon, 273 n. 24. Chaldean astrology, 199; cosmology, 133; oracles, 124, 202, 226 n. 29, 251 n. 55. Chaldeans, 105, 122, 124, 170, 187, 267 n. 39. Chalybes, 147. Chastity, 40. Cheremon, 87. China, 141. Chiron, 173. _Christi, Militia_, xxff. Christian liturgy, Pagan prayer in, 218 n. 17; monotheism, 134; theology and astrology, 260 n. 89. Christianity, and heliolatry, 288 n. 30; and paganism, xviff., 202ff., 288 n. 29; Hellenistic influence on, 214 n. 8; opposed to astrology, 167; opposed to science, 283 n. 17; Resemblance to, xxiii; Triumph of, xi, 19, 85. See also "Church." Christmas, xvii. Church, Fathers of the, xviii, 14; militant, xix. Cicero, 164. Claudius, 55. Cleanthes, Hymns of, 217 n. 17. Clothing of souls, 269 n. 54. Commagene, 112f., 139, 146f. Commodus, 39, 149. Common origin of ideas, xviii. Communions in Phrygia, 69. Communities of initiates, Rise of, 27. Community and family, 69. Comte, 206. Confession of sin, 40; in Babylonia, 222 n. 31. Conscience, Influence of Oriental religions on, 28, 35ff., 43. Constantine, 246 n. 40, 288 n. 30. Continence, 157. Cosmology, Babylonian, 220 n. 15; Chaldean, 133. Coulanges, Fustel de, 99. Crete, 147. Critodemus, 170. Crucifix, Devotion to, 109. Cybele, 22, 47ff., 197; and Anahita, 227 n. 32; and Mithra cults combined, 65; Mystics of, 41. Cyprian, St., 282 n. 9. Dacia, 112, 113. _Dadophori_, 97. Dagon, 117. _Damascenus, Jupiter_, 111. Dante, 180, 276 n. 49. _Dea Syria_, 14, 104. Death, Life after, 99, 223 n. 38; Spirit released by, 43. See also "Immortality." Decalogue, Mithraic, 155. _Deinvictiaci_, 233 n. 41. Delos, Atargatis in, 105, 107; Attis in, 61; Isis in, 80. Demeter and Isis, 76, 89. Demetrius of Phalerum, 75. Democritus, 189. Demonology, 210, 267 n. 39; Persian, 152ff., 284 n. 19. Demons, 138, 266 n. 37, 280 n. 76. _Dendrophori_, 56f. Deterioration of races, 25, 219 n. 6. _Devotio_, 27. _Dies sanguinis_, 56, 70. Diffusion, Agents of, 24. _Diis angelis_, 266 n. 38. Diocletian, 142, 150; and Augustus, 3; Court of, 141. Diodochi, 137. Diodorus of Sicily, 52, 240 n. 91; of Tarsus, 275 n. 47. Diogenes Laertius, 255 n. 66. Dionysus and Osiris, 76; and Sabazius, 48. See also "Sabazius." Dioscuri, 128, 173. Discipline, Persian, 155. Dispersion of the Jews, 138, 189. Distinctions abolished, 28. {292} Doliché, 113, 147. Dolichenus, Jupiter, 25, 113, 116, 148, 249 n. 47. Domitian, 38, 84, 85. _Domus aeterna_, 240 n. 91. See also "Heaven" and "Souls." Druidism, 20. Dualism, Persian, xxi, 142, 151, 159, 199, 210. Dusares, 111. Easter, xviii, 70. Egypt, 73ff., 112f.; Astrology in, 251 n. 56; Magi in, 139; Magic in, 279 n. 69. Egyptian mysteries, Ethics of, 90. Elagabal, 114, 116. _Elementa_, 206. Elephantine, 256 n. 69. Elysian Fields, 126. See also "Souls." Emesa, 112; Baal of, 114. Emotion in Oriental religions, 30, 34. Emperors, Worship of, 22. End of the world, 138, 209. See also "Eschatology." England, Inscription in, 112, 132. Epicureans, 203. Epicurus, 90. Epona, 25. Erasmus, 204. Eros, Harpocrates and, 90. Eryx, Mount, 118. Eschatology, 199. See also "Immortality." Eshmoun, Æsculapius and, 21. Ethics of Egyptian mysteries, 90; of Mithraism, 199; Persian, 154. See also "Morality." Eugene, 282 n. 9. Evil principle deified, 152. _Expiatio_, 40. Faith, Reason and, 169, 194; Union of science and, 32, 34. Farnell, xiii. Fatalism, 179ff., 276 n. 54; of Tiberius, 164. _Fautori imperii sui_, 150. Feasts, 44, 48; Liturgic, 64; Sacred, 59, 68, 151, 208; Fish at sacred, 246 n. 37. Fetichism, 51, 127, 131, 210. Firdusi, 160. Fire, Sacred, 137; Universe to be destroyed by, 177, 210. Firmicus Maternus, 15, 181, 204, 205, 282 n. 7, 286 n. 23. Fish, 117, 245 n. 36, 246 n. 37; Sacred, 40. Flagellations, 40, 56, 104, 222 n. 31. Flavians, 140. Formulas as sources, 11, 216 n. 14. Foucart, 48, 76. Fraternity, 156. See "Brotherhoods." Frazer, xiii. Future life, Notions of, 37, 39, 43; retribution in Egypt, 92. See also "Death" and "Immortality." Galatia, Magi in, 139. Galerius, 136, 141, 150. Galli, 50, 52, 70, 106, 208, 222 n. 31. Gallipoli, 237 n. 77. Gaul, Cybele in, 57; Influence of Orient in, 9, 216 n. 12; Syrians in, 108f. Gayomart, 227 n. 32. Germany, 112. Gnosis, 33. Gnostic hymns, 217 n. 14; sects, 233 n. 41. Gnosticism, 196. God, Pagan conceptions of, 207, 284 n. 19. Goethe on the Brocken, 274 n. 41. Gontrand, 108. Good Friday, 71, 228 n. 42. Great Mother, ix, x, xviii, 30, 46ff., 148, 197, 201, 205f. Greece, Cybele in, 57; Isis in, 77, 80, 230 n. 8. Greek influence in Alexandria, 75f.; philosophy, Dualism in, 152; religion, 30, 31, 33. {293} Gregory of Tours, 108. Gruppe, xiii. Hadad, 107, 111, 121, 242 n. 10; and Jupiter, 123; Etymology of, 133. Hadrian, 86, 119. Hammurabi and Marduk, 220 n. 14. Hannibal, 46. _Hagioi_, 121, 249 n. 47. Harpist, Song of the, 241 n. 91. Harpocrates, 77; and Eros, 90. Hauran, 8. Heaven a city, 284 n. 19; a court, 207. See also "Elysian Fields." Hecate, 282 n. 12. Heliogabalus, 114, 120. Heliognostae, 233 n. 41. Heliolatry and Christianity, 288 n. 30. Heliopolis, 123. _Heliopolitanus, Jupiter_, 111, 249 n. 47. Hellenistic influence on Christianity, 214 n. 8. Henotheism in Syria, 133. Hera, 282 n. 11; and Isis, 89; _sancta_, 249 n. 47. Hermes, 226 n. 23; Psychopompos, 59. Hermes Trismegistus, 32, 85, 202, 234 n. 46. Hermetism, 88, 234 n. 53, 250 n. 49; Influence of, 233 n. 41. Herodotus, 96, 147. Hierapolis, 123. High places, Worship of, 116. _Hilaria_, 57. Hinduism, 210. Hipparchus, 275 n. 42. Homer, 202. Honor, 156. Horus, 98. Hostanes, 184, 189, 193, 267 n. 39, 284 n. 19. Hymn to Isis, 76, 230 n. 6; as sources, 11, 217 n. 14; of Synesius, 260 n. 89. _Hymnodes_, 97. Hypsistos, xxi, 62, 128, 227 n. 30, 252 n. 59, 255 n. 66. See also "Most High." Hystaspes, 189. Iamblichus, 87. Iao, 63. _Iasura_, 104. _Ichthus_ symbolism, 117. Idolatry, Death of, 85; in Syria, 133; of Hinduism, 210. Idols, Consecration of, 278 n. 61, Toilet of, 96. Ignatius, St., 217 n. 17. Immorality of Astarte, 118; of legends, 203. Immortality, 39, 42f., 59, 68, 145, 209, 238 n. 82; in Egypt, 99; in Persia, 159; Semitic ideas on, 125. Industry, Influence of Oriental, 9. Initiates, Rise of communities of, 27; Syrian, 120. Initiation, 100. Intelligence, Influence of Oriental religions on, 28, 31ff., 43. Intelligent light (sun), 133. _Inventio_ of Osiris, 98. _Invicti_, 130. Io and Isis, 89. Ishtar and Anahita, 146. Isis, x, xvii, 22, 55, 73ff., 206; and Io, 89; and Venus, 90; Hymns to, 217 n. 14; Influence of, 86; Mysteries of, 87, 198; Mystics of, xx; Worshipers of, 41. Italy, Syrians in, 106f. Ituraea, 112. Jehovah, x, 257 n. 72; Baal different from, 131. Jerome, 108. Jewish colonies in Phrygia, 62. Jews, 189, 196; in Asia Minor, 64; Monotheism of, 122. Judaism, 252 n. 59; and Babylon, 123; Influence of, 63; Influence of Parseeism on, 138. {294} Julia Domna, 113, 251 n. 57; Maesa, 113; Mammea, 113. Julian, 70, 154, 156, 201, 213 n. 4, 285 n. 23; the Chaldean, 279 n. 66; the Theurge, 279 n. 66, n. 68. Juno, 205. Jupiter _Caelestis_, 128; _Caelus_, 147; _Damascenus_, 111; _Dolichenus_, 25, 113, 116, 148; Hadad and, 123; _Heliopolitanus_, 111; Protector, 147. See also "Zeus." Juvenal, 13, 23, 37, 41, 78, 90, 92. Kiss of welcome, 137. Kizil-Bash peasants, 47. Labeo, Cornelius, 6, 255 n. 64. Labranda, 147. Lactantius Placidus, 143, 204. Lagides, 75, 79; Financial system of the, 4. Lammens, 262 n. 12. Lang, xiii. Law in Rome and the Orient, 5. Lebanon, 122. Licinius, 150. Life after death, 99, 223 n. 38. See also "Immortality." Lightning, God of, 127. Lion, 224 n. 2. Literature as source, 13; Astrology in, 164; in Persia, 138; Influence of Roman, 20; Influence of Oriental, 7. Litholatry, 116, 119, 244 n. 29. Liturgic repasts, 64. Liturgy, 130, 198; Magic in, 278 n. 61; Mithraic, 217 n. 15; of Abydos, 97; Pagan prayer in Christian, 218 n. 17; Persian, 151; Roman, 29. Lucian, 13, 14, 34, 104, 115, 119, 122, 201. Lucian's _De dea Syria_, Authenticity of, 218 n. 19. Lucius of Patras, 105. Lucretius, 223 n. 39. Lustrations, 39. Lydia, Magi in, 139. Lydus, Johannes, 55. Lyons, 216 n. 12. Mâ, 48, 53, 228 n. 34. McCormack, Thomas J., v. Macrobius, 204, 208, 287 n. 25. Magi, 138; Theology of the, 268 n. 39. Magic, Astrology and, 32, 182ff.; Bibliography of, 277 n. 58; in Persia, 139; Religion and, 93; religious, 185. _Magna Mater_, 46ff. See also "Great Mother." _Magousaioi_, 144, 146. Maiuma, 110. Malaga, Syrians in, 108. Malakbel, 113, 249 n. 47. Maleciabrudus, 242 n. 10. Manetho, 32, 75, 193. Manicheism, 123, 142, 220 n. 15, 232 n. 26, 244 n. 29. Manilius, 168, 178. Marduk, Hammurabi and, 220 n. 14. Marius, 106. Marna, 110. _Mar'olam_, 130. Mars, 173. Matter, Spirit imprisoned in, 43. Mauretania, 112. Maximus of Madaura, 207. Maximus of Turin, 204, 282 n. 8, 283 n. 14, 284 n. 19. Mazdaism, 136; in Asia Minor, 145. _Megalenses, Ludi_, 47, 52. Melkarth, 243 n. 21. Memory, Lake of, 239 n. 89. Mèn, 62. _Menotyrannus_, Attis, 61. Merchants, Influence of, on diffusion, 24, 79, 105. Mercury, 173; Simios and, 123. Merovingians, 108. _Métragyrtes_, 51. Michel, Charles, xxv, 213 n. 1. _Militia Christi_, xxff. Militia, Sacred, xx, 27. Militias, Religious, 213 n. 6. {295} Minucius Felix, 84. Mithra, x, 22, 84, 142ff.; and Apollo, 155; and Attis, 69; and Cybele cults combined, 65; and Shamash, 146; Mysteries of, 33, 126, 140, 269 n. 54; Mystics of, 41; Purity of, 157. Mithradates Eupator, 135, 144; Toxicology of, 280 n. 73. Mithraism, Advantages of, 159; Ethics of, 199; not Zoroastrianism, 150. Mithreum near Trapezus, 262 n. 16. Mohammedans, Magic of the, 278 n. 65. Monotheism, 288 n. 30; Christian, 134; in Syria, 133; Parseeism closest to, 150. Morality, in the Oriental mysteries, xxii, 44; in Egyptian religion, 81; in Roman religion, 35; Laxity of, 42; of paganism, 209; unrewarded, 37. See also "Ethics." Mosaic Law, xxi. Most-High, 134, 145. See also "Hypsistos." Mutilations, 40. Mysteries, Alexandrian, 88, 99, 240 n. 91; Charm of, 29; Egyptian, 237 n. 77; Egyptian, Theology of, 90; Hellenic, 214 n. 8, 221 n. 23; in Syria, 120; of all the Oriental religions, 205; of Isis, 87, 142, 258 n. 79, of Mithra, 33, 126, 140, 142, 199, 269 n. 54, 286 n. 23; Oriental, xxii, 44; Phrygian, 51. Mystic rites, 39f., 51. Mythology, Roman, 35. _Nama Sebesio_, 16. Names, Barbarian, 279 n. 69; Theophorous, 148. Naples, Syrians in, 108. Narses, 136. _Natalis Invicti_, xvii, 228 n. 42. Nature worship, 206. _Navigium Isidis_, 97. Nechepso, 163. Nectanebos, 86. Neo-Platonism, ix, xxiv, 34, 45, 70, 124, 152, 188, 201, 244 n. 29, 279 n. 66. Neo-Pythagoreanism, 152. Nephtis, 230 n. 9. Nero, 87, 106; initiated by Tiridates, 263 n. 16. Nicocreon, 79. Nietzsche, 177. Nigidius Figulus, 164. Nile, 205. Nimes, 216 n. 12; Isis in, 83. Nöldeke, 258 n. 80; on authenticity of _De dea Syria_, 218 n. 19. Numidia, 113. Olympus a republic, 284 n. 19; Sacrifices on, 143. _Omnipotens et omniparens_, 129. _Omnipotentes_, 63, 226 n. 30. Orchoë, 122. Organism, Universe an, 207. Orient, Law in the, 5f. Menace of, 2ff.; Triumph of, 26. Ormuzd, 152, 190, 199. _Ornatrices_, 94, 96. Orpheus, 101, 202. Orphic hymns, 217 n. 14. Osiris, 237 n. 77; and Attis, 69; Deceased identified with, 99; the judge, 90f.; _Inventio_ of, 98; Serapis and, 74ff. Ostia, Syrians in, 108. Otho and Vitellius, 164. Pagan theology and Christianity, 288 n. 29. Paganism, Chaotic condition of, vii; Education in, 283 n. 17; Essence of, 131; Latin, 197; Morality of, 209; Semitic, 116; Syrian, 121. Palmyra, 112f., 115, 123f., 252 n. 59. Pan and Attis, 69. Pannonia, 112; Syrians in, 108. Pantheism, 33; Solar, 134. {296} _Pantheos_, 70. Papas. See "Attis." Paphos, Conical stone at, 116. Parseeism closest to monotheism, 150; Influence of, on Judaism, 138. _Pastophori_, 94. Penance, 40f.; in Syria, 249 n. 46. Pergamum, 47ff. Perseus and Andromeda, 173. Persia, 135ff.; Magic of, 189. Pessinus, 47ff.; 148, 197. Petilia, 239 n. 89. Petosiris the priest, 163. Phallophories of Abydos, 78. Philo of Alexandria, 230 n. 11. Philo of Biblos, 115, 122. Philosophers, 201. Philosophy, 33. Phoenicia, 122. Phrygia, 46ff.; Magi in, 139; Penance in, 40. Pigeon, 117. Pilgrimages, 46. Pine, Sacred, 56f. Piraeus, Attis in, 61. Plagiarism, 11. Plants, Sacred, in Egypt, 78. Plato, 265 n. 34. Platonists, 14. Pliny, 279 n. 69. Plutarch, 14, 75, 87, 90, 142, 152, 190. Pluto, chief of demons, 266 n. 37. Polemicists as source, 15. Pompeii, Frescoes of, 235 n. 58; Iseum at, 81. Pompey, 143. Porphyry, 93, 95, 152. Posidonius of Apamea, 164. Pozzuoli, 111; Serapeum of, 81; Syrians in, 108. Praetextatus, 208, 211; Catacombs of, 65, 226 n. 23; Epitaph of, 286 n. 23; Wife of, 282 n. 13. Priesthood, 41; in Egypt, 94; Oriental 32. Proclus, 228 n. 41. _Prophetes_, 94. Prudentius, 66, 204, 282 n. 5. Psychological crisis, 27. Ptolemy, 164, 170, 182. Ptolemy Euergetes, 79. Ptolemy Soter, 74, 79. Purification, 64; in Mazdaism, 156. Purity, 209; Conception of, 234 n. 49, 249 n. 46; in Egyptian ritual, 91; in Syria, 121; of Mithra, 157. _Pyrethes_, 144. Pythoness, 106. Querolus, 287 n. 25. Rameses II, 86. Ramsay, 225 n. 7. Rationalism of Greece, 31. Reason and faith, 169, 194. _Refrigerium_, 102. Reinach, xiii. Religion, and magic, 93; Roman, 28. Religions, Invasion of the barbarian, 10, 19, 22; Parliament of, xiii. Renan, x, 1, 160. Repasts. See "Feasts." Responsibility, Collective, 36. Resurrection, 138. Reward and punishment, 37, 92, 154. Rhodes, Attis in, 61. Rites, Mystic, 39f., 51. Ritual, Egyptian, 93; Pharaonic, 236 n. 70. Ritualistic ablutions, 208. Roman liturgy, 29; mythology, 35; religion, 28. Rome, Isis in, 83; Private law of, 5. Rufinus, 85. Sabaoth, 63. Sabaziasts, xxi, 226 n. 23. Sabazius, 22, 59, 64f. Dionysus and, 48. See also "Dionysus." Sabbatists, xxi. Sabians, 250 n. 49. Sacerdotal character of Oriental civilizations, 31. {297} Sacrifice, Human, 119. Sagittarius, 173. Salvation, xxiii, 33, 40, 43. Sanctuary, Right of, 250 n. 49. _Sanctus_, (Mithra), 157. Sassanides, 135, 140; Court of the, 141. Satan, Ahriman and, 153, 266 n. 36. Saturn, 172; Baal and, 21. Saviour, 223 n. 36. Scaevola, 6, 35. Science, 43; and faith, 32, 34; and the priesthood, 32; Christians opposed to, 283 n. 17; Magic a, 183f. Sciences, Astrology queen of, 162. Scipio Nasica, 47. Scopas, 76. Seleucides, 62, 121, 128, 138. Seleucus, 256 n. 67; Callinicus, 79. Semele and Isis, 89. Semitic paganism, 116; religions, Diffusion of the, 111ff. Seneca, 217 n. 17. Senses, Influence of Oriental religions on, 28ff., 43. _Septizonia_, 164. Serapis, x, 22, 73ff., 126; chief of demons, 266 n. 37. Serpent sacred to Æsculapius, 173. Set, 98. Severi, 140, 167, 196. Severus of Antioch, 233 n. 33. Sextus Empiricus, 167. Shamash and Mithra, 146. Showerman, xiv, 225 n. 15. Sibylline oracles, 233 n. 34. Sibyls, 46. Sicily, Slave revolution in, 105. Sidereal immortality, 254 n. 64, worship, 133, 251 n. 57, 254 n. 64. See also "Stars." _Signa Memphitica_, 233 n. 35. Simios and Mercury, 123. Sky, 208. See "Caelus." Slave revolution in Sicily, 105. _Sol invictus_, 114, 146, 205; _sanctissimus_, 249 n. 47. Soldiers of fate, xx; Faith of Syrian, 112; Persian cult spread by, 149. Souls, Abode of, in the stars, 125, 159, 269 n. 54, 287 n. 25; Abode of, in the earth, 159; Clothing of, 269 n. 54. Sources, 11ff. Spear, Sacred, 67. Species, Variation of, 25. Spencer, Herbert, 222 n. 34. Spirit imprisoned in matter, 43. Spring of water, 239 n. 90. Stars, 129; Deified, 199; Soul in the, 125, 159, 269 n. 54, 287 n. 25. Steer, the author of creation, 68. Stoics, 14, 148, 167, 171, 177, 180, 214 n. 6; Philosophy of, xx. _Stolistes_, 94, 96, 97. Stones, Worship of, 116. See also "Litholatry." Strabo, 32, 122, 145, 247 n. 41. Strategus, God a, 214 n. 6. Sulla, 54, 81. Sun, Supreme, 133. See also "_Sol invictus_." Superstition, 36, 277 n. 58. _Supplicium_, The term, 219 n. 9. Symmachus, xxiv, 204, 211. Sympathy, 171, 194. Synesius, Hymns of, 260 n. 89. Syria, Isis in, 79. Syrian goddess, 14, 104. Syrians in Italy, 106f. Tabu, 120, 157. Taurobolium, xviii, 66, 198, 206, 208; compared to baptism, 70. Tetrabiblos, 170, 182, 271 n. 5. Thasos, Attis in, 61. Thaumaturgus, 188. Thebes, Sepulchers of, 99. Themistius, 200. Theodore of Mopsuestia, 153. Theology, 33; and astrology, 175, 260 n. 89; of the Egyptian mysteries, 90; of the magi, 268 n. 39. {298} Theophilus, 85; Miniature of, 232 n. 32. Theophorous names, 148. Thessaly, Witches of, 186. Thoth, 32, 94, 237 n. 77. Thunder-god, 256 n. 67. Tiberius, 39, 180; Fatalism of, 164; persecutes priests of Isis, 83. Time, 35; Deified, 150, 273 n. 36. Timotheus the Eumolpid, 51, 75, 99, 229 n. 4. Tin road, 216 n. 12. Tiridates, Nero initiated by, 263 n. 16. Toilet of the idol, 96. Tonsure, 235 n. 58. Totem, 48. Trapezus, Mithreum near, 262 n. 16. Trees, Sacred, 48, 56, 78, 116. Triads, 250 n. 55. Trinity, Egyptian, 77; Syrian, 123. Tyche, 179; and Isis, 89. Tylor, xiii. _Tyrannos_, 61. Universal church, 211. Universe, 207. Valens, 200; Vettius, 168, 171. Varro, 38, 202. Vedanta, 210. Venus, 173; Atargatis and, 123; Isis and, 90. Viminacium, 267 n. 38. Vincentius, Grave of, 65. Vitellius, Otho and, 164. Vogüé, de, 8. Vohumano, 145. Water, Spring of, 239 n. 90; Worship of, 116. Wissowa, xiii. Xenophanes, 203. Yahveh Zebaoth, 64. See also "Jehovah." Yazatas, 145, 148, 152. Zachariah the Scholastic, 283 n. 17, 233 n. 33, 281 n. 81. Zeno, 176. Zenobia, 252 n. 59. Zervan Akarana, 150. Zeus Ammon, 230 n. 9; Bronton, 226 n. 24; Keraunios, 256 n. 67; Oromasdes, 147; Ouranios, 128; Stratios, 265 n. 29. See also "Jupiter." Zoolatry, 119. See also "Animals." Zoroaster, 138, 145, 184, 189, 193, 269 n. 54, 277 n. 57, 279 n. 70; Votaries of, 160. Zoroastrianism, Mithraism not, 150. Zosimus, 277 n. 57. * * * * * Corrections made to printed original. p. 40. "regenerate the initiated person": 'initated' in original. p. 138. "and the Hamites of Egypt": 'Hanites' in original. p. 148. "But in spite of all these accommodations": 'accomodations' in original. p. 175. "particularly the twelve signs of the zodiac": 'particutarly' in original. p. 176. "twelve months connected with the zodiac": 'tweleve' in original. p. 178. "a system of indisputable grandeur": 'indiputable' in original. p. 182. "a more pernicious aberration, gaining ground": 'gronud' in original. p. 227. n. 30. "the [Greek: pantokratôr] of the Septuagint": 'Septugint' in original. p. 236. n. 65. "the principal text we have": 'mave' in original. p. 251. n. 34. "differentiation of the ecclesiastic and lay functions": 'ecclestiastic' in original. p. 253. n. 62. "among the Nosaïris": 'Hosaïris' in original. p. 264. n. 24. "Cf. supra, p. 127, n. 68.": 'p. 373' in original (which does not exist). p. 268. n. 41. "man had to struggle perpetually": 'strugle' in original. p. 273. n. 26. "[Greek: astronomian]": '[Greek: astrouomian]' in original. p. 275. n. 48. "see supra, ch. V, n. 57.": 'ch. VIII' in original; there is no such note, ch. V appears to be meant. p. 285. n. 21. "Jupiter exsuperantissimus (p. 128).": 'p. 190' in original; p. 128 appears to be the only relevant passage. p. 287. n. 25. "We have mentioned (supra, ch. VI, n. 54)": 'ch. V' in original, but ch. VI appears to be the relevant note. p. 287. n. 27. "by astrology (supra, p. 177)": 'p. 262' in original; p. 262 is in the notes, p. 177 appears to be the relevant passage. Index: Arnobius "277 n. 57": 'n. 58' wrongly in original. Carneades. 'Carbeades' wrongly in original. Julian the Theurge, "n. 68": 'n. 67' wrongly in original. Sidereal. 'Siderial' wrongly in original. Supplicium, "219 n. 9.": 'n. 6' wrongly in original. Triads, "250 n. 55.": 'n. 50' wrongly in original. 
29893	----	HISTORY OF RELIGION A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems by ALLAN MENZIES, D.D. Professor of Biblical Criticism in the University of St. Andrews Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world.--ACTS xv. 18. New York Charles Scribner's Sons 597-599 Fifth Avenue 1917 FIRST EDITION . . . _April_ 1895 SECOND EDITION . . _September_ 1895 _Reprinted_ . . . . _March_ 1897 _Reprinted_ . . . . _June_ 1900 _Reprinted_ . . . . _January_ 1902 _Reprinted_ . . . . _March_ 1903 _Reprinted_ . . . . _October_ 1905 THIRD EDITION . . . _January_ 1908 FOURTH EDITION . . _September_ 1911 _Reprinted_ . . . . _June_ 1914 _Reprinted_ . . . . _October_ 1918 PREFACE This book makes no pretence to be a guide to all the mythologies, or to all the religious practices which have prevailed in the world. It is intended to aid the student who desires to obtain a general idea of comparative religion, by exhibiting the subject as a connected and organic whole, and by indicating the leading points of view from which each of the great systems may best be understood. A certain amount of discussion is employed in order to bring clearly before the reader the great motives and ideas by which the various religions are inspired, and the movements of thought which they present. And the attempt is made to exhibit the great manifestations of human piety in their genealogical connection. The writer has ventured to deal with the religions of the Bible, each in its proper historical place, and trusts that he has not by doing so rendered any disservice either to Christian faith or to the science of religion. It is obvious that in a work claiming to be scientific, and appealing to men of every faith, all religions must be treated impartially, and that the same method must be applied to each of them. In a field of study, every part of which is being illuminated almost every year by fresh discoveries, such a sketch as the present can be merely tentative, and must soon, in many of its parts, grow antiquated and be superseded. And where so much depends on the selection of some facts out of many which might have been employed, it will no doubt appear to readers who have some acquaintance with the subject, that here and there a better choice might have been made. The writer hopes that the great difficulty will not be overlooked with which he has had to contend, of compressing a vast subject into a compendious statement without allowing its life and interest to evaporate in the process. For a fuller bibliography than is given in this volume the reader may consult the works of Dr. C. P. Tiele, and of Dr. Chantepie de la Saussaye. It will readily be believed that the writer of this volume has been indebted to many an author whom he has not named. ST. ANDREWS, 1895. PREFACE TO THE THIRD (REVISED) EDITION Since this book first appeared twelve years ago it has been several times reprinted without change. Advantage has now been taken, however, of a call for a fresh issue, to introduce into it some alterations and additions, such as its stereotyped form allows. Some mistakes have been corrected, the names of recent books have been added to the bibliographies, and in some chapters, especially those dealing with the Semitic religions, considerable changes have been made. In going over the book for this purpose, I have seen very clearly that if it had been called for and written at this time instead of twelve years ago, some things which are in it need not have appeared, and additions might have been made which are not now possible. The last twelve years have made a great change in the study of religions; the prejudices with which it was regarded have almost passed away, powerful forces have been enlisted in its service, and admirable works have appeared dealing with various parts of the vast field. Yet I am glad to think that the attempt made in this book to furnish a simple introduction to a deeply important study, and especially to promote the understanding of the religions of the Bible by placing them in their connection with the religion of mankind at large, may still prove useful. ST. ANDREWS, _June_ 1907. PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION This book is now being reprinted in a somewhat larger type, and an opportunity is given, less restricted than the last, for making changes in it. It is impossible for me at present to re-write it; it appears substantially as it was. Some alterations and additions have been made in the earlier chapters, and the bibliographies have been brought more nearly up to date. I would take this opportunity of directing the attention of readers of this book to the published Proceedings of the Oxford Congress of the History of Religion, held in September 1908. They will there see how large this field of study has now grown, and what varied life and movement every part of it contains. I have given references only to the addresses of the Presidents of the Sections of the Congress, in which a fresh review will be found of recent progress in the study of each of the great religions. ST. ANDREWS, _July_ 1910. CONTENTS PART I THE RELIGION OF THE EARLY WORLD CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION PAGE Position of the science--Unity of all religion--The growth of religion continuous--Preliminary definition of religion-- Criticism of other definitions--Fuller definition--Religion and civilisation advance together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1-18 CHAPTER II THE BEGINNING OF RELIGION Origin of civilisation--It was from the savage state that civilisation was by degrees produced--The religion of savages--All savages have religion--It is a psychological necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19-28 CHAPTER III THE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP Nature-worship--Ancestor-worship--Fetish-worship--A supreme being--Which gods were first worshipped?--Fetish-gods came first--Spirits, human or quasi-human, came first--Theories of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Tylor--Animism--The minor nature-worship came first--Theories of Mr. M. Müller and of Ed. von Hartmann--The great nature-powers came first--Both nature-worship and the worship of spirits are sources of early religion--Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29-50 CHAPTER IV EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--BELIEF Growth of the great gods--Polytheism--Kathenotheism--The minor nature-worship--The worship of animals--Trees, wells, stones--The state after death--Growth of the great religions out of these beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51-65 CHAPTER V EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--PRACTICES Sacrifice--Prayer--Sacred places, objects, persons--Magic-- Character of early religion--Early religion and morality . . 66-78 CHAPTER VI NATIONAL RELIGION Classifications of religions--Rise of national religion--It affords a new social bond--And a better God--Example--The Inca religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79-90 PART II ISOLATED NATIONAL RELIGIONS CHAPTER VII BABYLON AND ASSYRIA People and literature--Worship of spirits--Worship of animals--The great Gods--Mythology--The state religion . . . 91-105 CHAPTER VIII CHINA History of China--The literature of the religion--The state religion of ancient China--Heaven--The spirits--Ancestors-- Confucius--His life--His doctrine--Taoism--Buddhism in China 106-125 CHAPTER IX THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT History and literature--1. Animal worship--Theories accounting for it--2. The great Gods--They also are local-- Mythology--Dynasties of gods--Ra--Osiris--Ptah--Was the earliest religion monotheistic?--Syncretism--Pantheism-- Worship--3. The doctrine of the other life--Treatment of the dead--The spirit in the under-world--_The Book of the Dead_-- Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126-157 PART III THE SEMITIC GROUP CHAPTER X THE SEMITIC RELIGION Home of the Semites--Character of the race--Their early religious ideas--Difference between Semitic and Aryan religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159-169 CHAPTER XI CANAANITES AND PHENICIANS The Religion of the Canaanites--The Phenicians--Their gods-- Astral deities of Phenicia--Influence of Phenician art . . . 170-178 CHAPTER XII ISRAEL The sacred literature--The people--Jehovah--The early ritual was simple--Contact with Canaanite religion--Danger of fusion--Religious conflict--The monarchy--Religion not centralised--The Prophets--The old religion national-- Criticism of the old religion by the prophets--Appearance of Universalism--Ethical monotheism--Individualism of the prophetic teaching--The reforms--Deuteronomy--Earlier codes-- The exile--The return; the reform of Ezra--Character of the later religion--Heathenish elements of Judaism--Spiritual elements--The Psalms--The Synagogue--The national hopes--The state after death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179-216 CHAPTER XIII ISLAM Arabia before Mahomet--The old religion--Confusion of worship--Allah--Judaism and Christianity in Arabia--Mahomet, early life--His religious impressions--The revelations--His preaching--Persecution--Trials; decides to leave Mecca-- Mahomet at Medina--New religious union--Breach with Judaism and Christianity--Domestic--Conquest of Mecca--Mecca made the capital of Islam--Spread of Islam--The duties of the Moslem-- The Koran--Islam a universal religion . . . . . . . . . . . . 217-242 PART IV THE ARYAN GROUP CHAPTER XIV THE ARYAN RELIGION The Aryans, their early home--Their civilisation described-- Little known of their gods--Their worship was domestic . . . 243-255 CHAPTER XV THE TEUTONS The Aryans in Europe--The ancient Germans--The early German gods--The working religion--Later German religion--Iceland-- The Eddas--The gods of the Eddas--The twilight of the gods . 256-273 CHAPTER XVI GREECE People and land--Earliest religion; functional deities-- Growth of Greek gods--Stones, animals, trees--Greek religion is local--Artistic tendency--Early Eastern influences-- Homer--The Homeric gods--Worship in Homer--Omens--The state after death--Hesiod--The poets and the working religion--Rise of religious art--Festivals and games--Zeus and Apollo-- Change of the Greek spirit in sixth century B.C.--New religious feeling; the mysteries--Religion and philosophy . . 274-304 CHAPTER XVII THE RELIGION OF ROME Roman religion was different from Greek--The earliest gods of Rome are functional beings--The worship of these beings--The great gods--Sacred persons--Roman religion legal rather than priestly--Changes introduced from without--Etruria--Greek gods in Rome--The Graeco-Roman religion--Decay and confusion 305-323 CHAPTER XVIII THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA I. _The Vedic Religion_ Relation of Indian to Aryan religion--The Rigveda--The Vedic gods--Hymns to the gods--To what stage does this religion belong?--It is primitive--It is advanced--In spite of many gods, a tendency to Monotheism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324-337 CHAPTER XIX INDIA II. _Brahmanism_ The caste system: the Brahmans--The growth of the sacred literature--Sacrifice--Practical life--Philosophy-- Transmigration--Later developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338-352 CHAPTER XX INDIA III. _Buddhism_ The literature--Was there a personal founder?--The story of the founder--Is Buddhism a revolt against Brahmanism?--The Buddha--The doctrine--Buddhist morality--Nirvana--No gods-- The order--Buddhism made popular--Conclusion--Buddhism is not a complete religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353-380 CHAPTER XXI PERSIA Sources--The contents of the Zend-Avesta are composite-- Zoroaster--Primitive religion of Iran--The call of Zarathustra--The doctrine--Its inconsistencies--Man is called to judge between the gods--This religion is essentially intolerant--Growth of Mazdeism--Organisation of the heavenly beings--The attributes of Ahura--Ancient testimonies to the Persian religion--The Vendidad: laws of purity--How this doctrine entered Mazdeism--Influence of Mazdeism on Judaism and in other directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381-408 PART V UNIVERSAL RELIGION CHAPTER XXII CHRISTIANITY State of Jewish religion at the Christian era--The teaching of Jesus--His person and work--Universalism of Christianity-- The Apostle Paul--What Christianity received from Judaism-- And from the Greek world--The different religions of Christian nations and the common Christianity . . . . . . . . 409-425 CHAPTER XXIII CONCLUSION Tribal, national, and individual religion--This the central development--Has to be studied in nations--Periods of general advance in religion--Conditions of religious progress . . . . 426-434 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435-440 PART I THE RELIGION OF THE EARLY WORLD CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The science to which this little volume is devoted is a comparatively new one. It is scarcely half a century since the attention of Western Europe began to fix itself seriously on the great religions of the East, and the study of these ancient systems aroused reflection on the great facts that the world possesses not one religion only, but several, nay, many religions, and that these exhibit both great differences and great resemblances. The agitation of mind then awakened by the thought that other faiths might be compared with Christianity, has to a large extent passed away; and on the other hand fresh fields of knowledge have been opened to the student of the worships of mankind. By new methods of research the religions of Greece and Rome have come to be known as they never were before; and all the other religions of which we formerly knew anything have been led to tell their stories in a new way. A new study--that of the earliest human life on the earth--has brought to light many primitive beliefs and practices, which seem to explain early religious ideas; and the accounts of missionaries and others about savage tribes now existing in different parts of the world, are seen to be full of a significance which was not noticed formerly. We are thus in a very different position from our fathers for studying the religion of the world as a whole. To them their own religion was the true one and all the others were false. Calvin speaks of the "immense welter of errors" in which the whole world outside of Christianity is immersed; it is unnecessary for him to deal with these errors, he can at once proceed to set forth the true doctrine. The belief of the early fathers of the Church, that all worships but those of Judaism and Christianity were directed to demons, and that the demons bore sway in them, practically prevailed till our own day; and it could not but do so, since no other religions than these were really known. That ignorance has ceased, and we are responsible for forming a view of the subject according to the light that has been given us. The science of religion, though of such recent origin, has already passed beyond its earliest stage, as a reference even to its earlier and its later names will show. "Comparative Religion" was the title given at first to the combined study of various religions. What had to be done, it was thought, was to compare them. The facts about them had to be collected, the systems arranged according to the best information procurable, and then laid side by side, that it might be seen what features they had in common and what each had to distinguish it from the others. Work of this kind is still abundantly necessary. The collection of materials and the specifying of the similarities and dissimilarities of the various faiths will long occupy many workers. Unity of all Religion.--But recent works on the religions of the world regarded as a whole have been called "histories." We have the well-known _History of Religion_ of M. Chantepie de la Saussaye, now in its third edition, and the _Comparative History of the Religions of Antiquity_ of M. Tiele. A history of religion may be either of two things. The word history may be used as in the term Natural History, to denote a reasoned account of this department of human life, without attempting any chronological sequence; or it may be used as when we speak of the History of the Romans, an attempt being made to tell the story of religion in the world in the order of time. In either case the use of the term "history" indicates that the study now aims at something more than the accumulation of materials and the pointing out of resemblances and analogies, namely, at arranging the materials at its command so as to show them in an organic connection. This, it cannot be doubted, is the task which the science of religion is now called to attempt. What every one with any interest in the subject is striving after, is a knowledge of the religions of the world not as isolated systems which, though having many points of resemblance, may yet, for all we know, be of separate and independent growth, but as connected with each other and as forming parts of one whole. Our science, in fact, is seeking to grasp the religions of the world as manifestations of the religion of the world.[1] [Footnote 1: The above statement is criticised by Mr. L. H. Jordan in his excellent work, _Comparative Religion_, p. 485, but is in the main a true account of what has taken place. Mr. Jordan strongly holds that Comparative Religion is a science by itself, and ought to be distinguished from the History of Religion, though the latter is, of course, its necessary foundation.] In rising to this conception of its task, the science of religion is only obeying the impulse which dominates every department of study in modern times. What every science is doing is to seek to show the unity of law amid the multiplicity of the phenomena with which it has to deal, to gather up the many into one, or rather to show how the one has given rise to the many. In the study of religion, if it be really a science, this impulse of all science must surely be felt. Here also we must cherish the conviction that an order does exist amid the apparent disorder, if we could but find it. We must believe that the religious beliefs and practices of mankind are not a mere chaos, not a mere incessant outburst of unreason, consistent only in that it has appeared in every age and every country of the world, but that they form a cosmos, and may be known, if we take the right way, as a part of human life from which reason has never been absent, and in which a growing purpose has fulfilled and still fulfils itself. Some theories, it is true, from which the world formerly hoped much, are not now relied on, and the present tendency is to abstain from any general doctrine of the subject, and to be content with careful collection and arrangement of the facts in special parts of the field. Caution is no doubt most needful in the attempt to form a view of this great study as a whole. Yet something of this kind is possible, and is beyond all doubt much called for. It is the aim of this little work not only to describe the leading features of the great religions, but also to set forth some of the results which appear to have been reached regarding the relation in which these systems stand to each other. The Growth of Religion Continuous.--We shall not pretend to set out on this enterprise without any assumptions. The first and principal assumption we make is that in religion as in other departments of human life there has been a development from the beginning, even till now, and that the growth of religion has gone on according to the ordinary laws of human progress. This is a position which, begin the study at whatever point he may, the student of this subject will find himself compelled to take up, if he is not to renounce altogether the idea of understanding it as a whole. To understand anything means, to the thought of the present day, to know how it has come to be what it is; of any historical phenomenon at least it is certain that it cannot be understood except by tracing its history up to the root. We assume, therefore, until it be disproved, that in this as in other departments of human activity, growth has been continuous from the first. In every other branch of historical study, this assumption is made. The history of institutions is traced back in a continuous line to an age before there was any family or any such thing as property. The methods by which men have earned their subsistence on the earth are known equally far back; and there is no break in the development from the hooked stick to the steam plough. And should it not be the same in religion? Here also shall we not assume, until we find it proved to be incorrect, that there has been no break in the growth of ideas and practices from the earliest days till now, and that the highest religion of the present day is organically connected with that religion which man had at first? It is, indeed, in many ways far removed from the earliest religion, but what was most essential in the earliest belief still lives in it, and what was fittest to survive of its earliest motives, still prompts its worship. Should we adopt this view, we shall find many of the difficulties disappear which have frequently stood in the way of this study. When, according to the new tendency that seems to govern all modern thought, institutions and beliefs are regarded not as fixed things, but as things growing from something that was there before, and tending towards something that is coming, they cease to arouse contempt, or jealousy, or hatred. If we can regard religions as stages in the evolution of religion, then we have no motive either to depreciate or unduly to extol any of them. The earlier stages of the development will have a peculiar interest for us, just as we look with affection on the home of our ancestors even though we should not choose to dwell there. We shall not divide religions into the true one, Christianity, and the false ones, all the rest; no religion will be to us a mere superstition, nor shall we regard any as unguided by God. Feeling that we cannot understand our own religion aright without understanding those out of which it has been built up, we shall value these others for the part they have played in the great movement, and our own most of all, without which they could not be made perfect. In the light of this principle of growth we shall find good in the lowest, and shall see that the good and true rather than the evil and false, furnish the ultimate meaning of even the poorest systems. We start then with the assumption that religion is a thing which has developed from the first, as law has, or as art has; and the best method we can follow, if it should prove practicable, will be to follow its movement from the beginning. We must not presume to hope that everything will be made clear, or that we shall meet with no religious phenomena to which we cannot assign their place in the development. We must remember that ground is often lost as well as won in human history, and that in religions as in nations degeneration frequently occurs as well as progress. We must not be too sure that we shall be able to find any plain path leading through the immeasurable forests of man's religious sentiments and practices. Yet we may at least expect to find evidence of the direction which on the whole the growth of religion has followed. Preliminary Definition of Religion.--But, before we can set out on this inquiry, we are met by the question, What is it that we suppose to have been thus developed? In order to trace any process of evolution it is necessary to define that which is evolved; for it belongs to the very idea of evolution that the identity of the subject of it is not changed on the way up, but that the germ and the finished product are the same entity, only differing from each other in that the one has still to grow while the other is grown. Futile were it indeed to sketch a history of religion with the savage at one end of it and the Christian thinker at the other, if it could be said that in no point did the religion of the savage and that of the Christian coincide, but that the product was a thing of entirely different nature from the germ. It seems necessary, therefore, in the first place, to say what that is, of which we are to attempt the history; or in other words, to say what we mean by religion. It must not be forgotten that an adequate definition of a thing which is growing can only be reached when the growth is complete. During its growth it is showing what it is, and its higher as well as its lower manifestations are part of its nature. The world has not yet found out completely, but is still in the course of finding out, what religion is. Any definition propounded at this stage must, therefore, be of an elementary and provisional character. I propose then as a working definition of religion in the meantime, that it is "The worship of higher powers." This appears at first sight a very meagre account of the matter; but if we consider what it implies, we shall find it is not so meagre. In the first place it involves an element of belief. No one will worship higher powers unless he believes that such powers exist. This is the intellectual factor. Not that the intellectual is distinguished in early forms of religion from the other factors, any more than grammar is distinguished by early man as an element of language. But something intellectual, some creed, is present implicitly even in the earliest worships. Should there be no belief in higher powers, true worship cannot continue. If it be continued in outward act, it has lost reality to the mind of the worshipper, and the result is an apparent or a sham religion, a worship devoid of one of the essential conditions of religion. This is true at every stage. But in the second place, these powers which are worshipped are "higher." Religion has respect, not to beings men regard as on a level with themselves or even beneath themselves, but to beings in some way above and beyond themselves, and whom they are disposed to approach with reverence. When objects appear to be worshipped for which the worshipper feels contempt, and which a moment afterwards he will maltreat or throw away, there also one of the essential conditions is absent, and such worship must be judged to fall short of religion. There may no doubt be some religion in it; the object he worships may appear to the savage, in whose mind there is little continuity, at one moment to be higher than himself and the next moment to be lower; but the result of the whole is something less than religion. And in the third place these higher powers are worshipped. That is to say, religion is not only belief in the higher powers but it is a cultivating of relations with them, it is a practical activity continuously directed to these beings. It is not only a thinking but also a doing; this also is essential to it. When worship is discontinued, religion ceases; a principle indeed not to be applied too narrowly, since the apparent cessation of worship may be merely its transition to another, possibly a higher form; but religion is not present unless there be not only a belief in higher powers but an effort of one kind or another to keep on good terms with them. Criticism of other Definitions.--What has now been said will enable us to judge of several of the definitions of religion which have been put before the world in recent years. Without going back to the definitions offered by philosophers who wrote before the scientific study of our subject had begun, and limiting ourselves to those which have been propounded in the interests of our science, we notice that several make religion consist in an intellectual activity.[2] Thus Mr. Max Müller[3] says that "Religion is a mental faculty or disposition which independent of, nay, in spite of, sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names, and under varying disguises. Without that faculty ... no religion would be possible." To this definition there are various strong objections. It implies that there is only one way in which men come to believe in higher beings; they arrive at that belief by finding something which transcends them and which they cannot understand; _i.e._ by an intellectual process. It may be doubted whether the sense of disappointment with the finite is the only road, or even a common road, to belief in gods. Mr. Müller's omission, moreover, from his definition, of the practical side of religion, of the element of worship, is a fatal objection to it. Belief and worship are inseparable sides of religion, which does not come fully into existence till both are present. In a later work[4] Mr. Müller admits the force of this objection, urged by several scholars, to his definition, and modifies it as follows: "Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man." In this form the definition recognises that worship, the practical activity in which man's moral character shows itself in fear, gratitude, love, contrition, is an essential part of religion, and that perceptions of the infinite apart from this are only one side of it. His original definition, however, has played too large a part in the history of our subject to be left without careful notice. The same objection applies to Mr. Herbert Spencer's account of the matter. Mr. Spencer finds the basis of all religion in the inscrutableness of the Power which the universe manifests to us. The belief common to all religions, he holds, is the presence of something which passes comprehension. The idea of the absolute and unconditioned he regards as accompanying all our consciousness of things conditioned and limited, and as being not a negative notion, not merely the denial of limits, but a positive one. The unconditioned is that of which all our thoughts and ideas are manifestations, but which we never can know, with regard to which we cannot affirm anything but that it exists. This definition like that last noticed traces religion to the defects in man's knowledge, and rather to a negative than a positive element in his experience. It also comes under the objection that it traces religion rather to an intellectual than a practical motive, and omits the element of worship. [Footnote 2: Though Mr. Tylor defines religion as the "belief in spiritual beings," he is not to be charged with making it too much a matter of the intellect. He uses the word belief in a wide sense as including the practices it involves. In the word "spiritual," however, Mr. Tylor brings into the definition his theory of Animism, and thus makes it unserviceable for those who do not adopt that theory.] [Footnote 3: _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, 1882, p. 13. The definition was put forward in the year 1873, and in his lectures on the Origin of Religion, 1882, Mr. Müller adhered to it as being in the main sound (p. 23).] [Footnote 4: _Natural Religion_, 1888, pp. 188, 193.] Other scholars have explained religion as the action of the curiosity of the human mind, of that impulse which prompts man to investigate the causes of things, and specially to seek for the first cause of all things. Here we touch what is certainly to be recognised as an invariable feature of religion; it always professes to explain the world, and to bring unity to man's mind by clearing up the problems which perplex him, and affording him a commanding point of view, from which he may see all the parts of the world and of life fall into their places. This, however, does not tell us what religion itself is. This curiosity, this impulse to know, are not specifically religious; they belong rather to philosophy. Other motives than those connected with knowledge entered from the first into man's worship. Curiosity impelled him to seek the first cause of things; in religion he saw something that promised to explain the world to him, and to explain him to himself. But it was something more than curiosity that made him regard that cause, when found, as a god, and pay it reverence and sacrifice. What is the motive of worship? Wonder, no doubt, is always present in it, but what is there in it beyond wonder? No definition of religion can be regarded as complete in which the motive of worship is left undetermined. That is of the essence of the matter. There must be a moral as well as an intellectual quality which is characteristic of religion. What is religion morally? Acts of worship may be specified in which every conceivable moral quality seeks to express itself. The most contradictory motives, pride and anger and revenge, as well as fear or hunger or contrition, enter into such acts. But if religion is a matter of sentiment as well as of outward posture, these acts of worship cannot all be equally entitled to the name, and something is wanted to complete our definition. Fuller Definition.--Let us add what seems to be wanting; and say that religion is the "worship of higher powers from a sense of need"! This will remind the reader of Schleiermacher's definition--"a sense of infinite dependence." It was always objected to that definition, that it made religion no more than a sentiment, a mood, but that besides this, it is both belief and action. But the truth Schleiermacher urged was one of essential importance to the matter. Belief in gods and acts of worship paid to them do not constitute religion unless the sentiment, the sense of need, be also there. These three together, feeling, belief, and will expressing itself in action, constitute religion both in the lowest and in the highest levels of civilisation. A belief must exist, to take a step farther, that the being worshipped is capable of supplying what the worshipper requires. Men do not pray nor bring offerings to beings they suppose to be incapable of attending to them, or powerless to do them any good or evil. It is implied in every act of worship that the being addressed is a power who is able to do for the worshipper what he cannot do for himself. It is his inability to help himself or to supply his own needs that sends the worshipper to his god, who has a power he himself has not. If he could help himself he would not need religion, if his life were either perfectly prosperous and even, so that there was nothing left to wish for, or perfectly miserable and unsuccessful, so that there was no room for hope, he would not resort to higher powers; but neither of these two being the case, his life on the contrary being a mixed lot of good and evil, in which there are blessings his own forces cannot secure, and dangers from which no efforts of his own can save him, and the belief having arisen within him, in what way we need not now inquire, that higher powers exist who can, if they will, defend and prosper him, in this way he has religion, he keeps up intercourse with higher powers. And thus religion is not necessarily, even in its most primitive form, a manifestation of mere selfishness. Though gifts are offered which are expected to please the higher beings, and though benefits are asked of which the worshipper is urgently in need, such transactions are not necessarily sordid any more than similar applications between human beings, between two friends, or between a parent and a child. Even the savage living in entire isolation, at war with every one and conscious of no needs but those of food and shelter, will not seek benefits from his god without some feeling of attachment, nor without some sense of strengthened friendship should the benefit be granted him. When once this sense of friendship has arisen, religion is present, the man has come to be in living relation with a higher power, whom he conceives, no doubt, after his own likeness, but nevertheless as greater than he is. This then is what we conceive to be the essence of religion--the worship of higher powers, from a sense of need; and it is of this that we are to trace the history though only in the barest outlines. The definition itself suggests in what way the development may be expected to work itself out. According as the needs change their character, of which men are conscious, so will their religion also change. The gradual elevation and refinement of human needs, in the growth of civilisation, is the motive force of the development of religion. The deities themselves, their past history and their present character, the sacrifices offered to them, and the benefits aimed at in intercourse with them, all must grow up as man himself grows, from rudeness to refinement and from caprice to order. At its lowest, religion is perhaps an individual affair between the savage and his god, and has to do with material individual needs. At a higher stage (not always nor even commonly later in time) it is the affair of a family, of a tribe, or of a combination of tribes, and with each of these extensions the requests grow broader and less personal which have to be presented to the deity; the religion becomes a common worship for public ends. The needs of the nomad are other than those of the settled agriculturist, and those of the countryman differ from those of the citizen, and those of the Laplander from those of the Negro, and these differences will be reflected in the aspect of the deities and in the observances celebrated in their honour. When art begins to stir within a nation, the gods have to adapt themselves to the new taste. As society grows more humane, cruel and sanguinary religious observances, though they may long keep a hold of the ignorant and excitable, lose their support in the public conscience and are sentenced to change or to extinction. And when a new consciousness of personal human dignity springs up, and men come to feel the infinite value and the infinite responsibility of personal life, the old public religion is felt to be cold and distant, and religious services of a more personal and more intimate kind are sought for. Thus religion and civilisation advance together; according as the civilisation is in any people, so is its religion. It is vain, broadly speaking, to look for the combination of primitive manners and customs with a lofty spiritual faith. The converse it is true may often seem to take place. Religion, or rather religious creeds and practices, often seem to lag behind civilisation and to maintain themselves long after the reason and the conscience of a people has condemned them. That is because religion is what man values most in his life, and he is loath to change observances in which his affections are powerfully engaged. But religion must reflect the ideals of the society in which it exists; the needs which the society feels at the time must be the burden of its prayers; its sacrifices must be such as the general sentiment allows; its gods, to retain the allegiance of the community, must alter with time and prove themselves alive and in touch with their people. And if it be the case that civilisation has on the whole advanced upwards from the first; if, as Mr. Tylor assures us,[5] man began with his lowest and has, in spite of occasional declines, on the whole been improving ever since, then of religion also the same will be true. It also will be found to begin with its rudest forms and gradually to grow better. Religion in fact is the inner side of civilisation, and expresses the essential spirit of human life in various ages and nations. The religion of a race is the truest expression of its character, and reflects most faithfully its attitude and aims and policy. The religion of an age shows what at that time constituted the object of man's aspiration and endeavour, as older hopes grew pale and new hopes rose on his sight. Thus the study of the religions of the world is the study of the very soul of its history; it is the study of the desires and aspirations which throughout the course of history men have not been ashamed, nay, which they have been proud and determined to confess. No more fascinating study could possibly engage us. It is true that the requirements for the adequate treatment of the subject are such as few indeed can hope to possess. He who would treat the history of religion aright ought to know thoroughly the whole of the history of civilisation; he should have explored the vast domain of savage life and thought that has recently been opened up to us, and he should be at home in every century of every nation from the beginning of history. At a time like this, when new light is being poured every year on every part of our subject, no statement of it can be more than tentative and partial. The student will be directed at each step to sources of fuller information. [Footnote 5: _Primitive Culture_, chap. ii.] BOOKS RECOMMENDED (GENERAL) _Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the Universal Religions_. By Dr. C. P. Tiele. Translation. In Trübner's Oriental Series. Very condensed and in somewhat technical language; but the work of one of the greatest masters of the subject. A full Bibliography is appended to the various chapters. _Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte_, von P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye. Freiburg, 1887. The English translation has an altered title, viz. _Manual of the Science of Religion_, Longmans, 1891. The Third Edition (1905) is practically a different book, and consists of studies, each by an expert, of the various religions. _Religious Systems of the World_ (Sonnenschein, 1892) is a full collection of descriptions of the various religions, by persons specially acquainted with them; of very unequal merit. Mr. Max Müller's works cited above, also his more recent volumes of Gifford Lectures, contain a number of general discussions. See also the Gifford Lectures of the late Mr. Ed. Caird, and the late Prof. Tiele. Pfleiderer's _Philosophy of Religion_, 4 vols. Pünjer, _Geschichte der christl. Religionsphilosophie_, 2 vols. 1880-83. Rauwenhoff, _Wijsbegeerde van den Godsdienst_, 2 vols. 1887 (also in German). M. Jastrow, _The Study of Religion_, 1901. L. H. Jordan, _Comparative Religion, its Origin and Growth_, 1905. _Revue de l'histoire des religions_, edited by M. J. Réville. _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, edited by Alb. Dieterich. Reinach, Orpheus, _Histoire Générale des Religions_, 1909. Hastings, _Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics_, vol. i. A-Art, 1908. _The New Schaff-Heizog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge_ has excellent articles on the various religions. Louis H. Jordan, _Comparative Religion_, 1905. An account of the progress of our study, with extensive bibliography. Galloway, _The Principles of Religious Development_, a psychological and philosophical study, 1909. _Proceedings of the Oxford International Congress of the History of Religions_, 1908. 2 vols. The addresses of the Presidents of the Sections give a record of the most recent progress in every part of our study. Of these see, for this chapter, Count Goblet d'Alviella, vol. ii. pp. 365 _sqq_. on the Method and Scope of the History of Religion. CHAPTER II THE BEGINNING OF RELIGION Origin of Civilisation.--Every inhabited country, we are assured by ethnologists, was once peopled by savages; the stone age everywhere came before the age of metals. Antecedent to every civilisation that has sprung up on the earth is this dim period, the period of the cave dwellers and afterwards of the lake dwellers. There can be no chronology nor any exact knowledge of these early men who lived by hunting, with stone weapons, animals which are now extinct. How from his earliest and most helpless state man came in various ways to help himself; how he discovered fire, how he improved his weapons and invented tools, how he learned to tame certain of the animals on which he had formerly made war, and instead of wandering about the world came to settle in one place and till the soil, and how family life came to be instituted, and the father as well as the mother to act as guardian to the children; all that is a vast history, which must be read in its own place. Immense, indeed, were the labours early man had to undergo, in wrestling his way up from a life like that of the brutes to a life in which his own distinctive nature could begin to display itself. It was from the savage state that civilisation was by degrees produced. The theory that man was originally civilised and humane, and that it was by a fall, by a degeneration from that earliest condition, that the state of savagery made its appearance, is now generally abandoned. There may be instances of such degeneration having taken place; but on the whole, the conviction now obtains that civilisation is the result of progressive development, and was the result man conquered for himself by his age-long struggles with his environment. That development did not take place in all lands alike. In some it proceeded faster than in others, and its advances were due oftener to propagation from without, than to unaided growth from within; as one race came in contact with another new ideas were aroused of the possibilities of life in various directions. In some lands the development has scarcely taken place at all. There remain to this day races who are judged to be still in the primitive condition. Not all savage tribes are thought to be in that condition. The bushmen of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, and others,[1] are found to be in such a state in point of habits and acquirements that they must be considered as races which have fallen from a higher position, and present instances of degeneration. But a multitude of savage tribes remain in all quarters of the globe who do not appear to have been thus enfeebled, and who are held to be still in that state in which the dwellers in all parts of the earth were before what we now call civilisation began. They are races among whom civilisation did not spring up, as it did in China or in Peru. From these races we may learn in a general way, though in this great caution is required, what the ancestors of all the civilised nations were. It confirms this conclusion that we find in every civilised nation a number of phenomena, practices, beliefs, stories, which the mental condition of the nation as we know it does not account for, which manifestly are not outgrowths of the civilisation, but relics of an older state of life, which civilisation has not entirely obliterated; and that these practices, beliefs, and stories can be exactly matched by those of the savage races. The inference is drawn that civilisation has sprung from savage life, that, as Mr. Tylor says, "the savage state represents the early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed by causes still in operation." To trace the history of civilisation, therefore, it is necessary to go back to the earliest knowledge we have of human life upon the earth, and to ask what germs and rudiments can be discovered among savages of law, of institutions, of arts and sciences. Such works as Maine's _Ancient Law_, Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, Lubbock's _Origin of Civilisation_, show how fruitful this method is, and what floods of light it pours on the history of society. [Footnote 1: Instances in Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, chap. ii., where the theory of degeneration is fully discussed.] Now what is true of civilisation generally will be true also of religion, which is one of its principal elements. If every country was once inhabited by savages, then the original religion of every country must have been a religion of savages; and in the later religion there will be features which have been carried on from the earlier one. This, indeed, we must in any case expect to find. No new religion can enter on its career on a soil quite unprepared, on which no gods have been worshipped before. (That would imply that there had been races in the world without religion, on which we shall speak presently.) A new faith has always to begin by adjusting itself to that which it found in possession of the soil, and it always adopts what it can of the old system. We should expect then that the great religions of the world should exhibit features which do not belong to their own structure, but which they inherited, with or against their will, from their uncivilised predecessors. And that is the case, as we shall see afterwards, with all the great religions. They are all full of survivals of the savage state. The old religious associations cling to the face of a land and refuse to be uprooted, whatever changes take place among the gods above. Superstitious practices continue among a race long after a truth has been preached there with which they are entirely inconsistent. Stories are long told about the gods, quite out of keeping with their character in the theology of the new faith, pointing to a time when not so much was expected of a god. In Mr. Lang's _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, the reader will find an admirable collection of material showing how the popular elements of an old religion survive in a new one in which they are quite out of place. There is none of the great religions to which this does not apply. Now, if it be the case that each of the great religions has been built upon a primitive religion formerly occupying the same ground, it might appear that we must, in order to understand any of the great religions, study first, in each case, the savage system which it superseded. It would be a serious prospect for the student if he had to make a separate study of a set of savage beliefs as an approach to each of the ten or twelve great religions. But this, as we shall see afterwards, is not the case. There is a great family likeness in the religions of savages, and we may even allow ourselves to speak not of the religions but of the religion of early races. In the next chapter an attempt will be made to describe that religion; but we may say here that there are some features which are generally, though by no means always found in it, and that these features may be regarded for practical purposes as the religion of the primitive world, which everywhere was the forerunner of the great systems. This is the jungle, as it were, overspreading all the early world, out of which like giant trees the great religions arose, and from which they derived and still derive a nourishment they cannot disown. Indeed, we may go much farther. In some of their leading doctrines, the great religions show the most striking affinity with one another. China and Egypt have some doctrines in common which are also found in the religion of the Incas; the Aryan and the Semitic religions know them too. Should these doctrines be found in the religion of savages, it will at least be a question whether the great religions all alike borrowed and developed them from that source, or whether any other explanation of the case can be found. Evidently we cannot make any progress with our subject till we have taken a general view of this religion of savages and come to some conclusions regarding it. A few words must be said, by way of preface to this subject, on the mental habits of early races. We cannot hope to understand the thoughts of those people without knowing how they came to have such thoughts, how they were accustomed to think. Now of the savage we may say that he is just like a child who has not yet learned to think correctly, or to know things truly. He is making all kinds of experiments in thought, and being led into all sorts of errors and confusion; and if the child takes years, the savage may take millenniums, to get free from these. He does not know the difference between one thing and another, between himself and the lower animals, or between an animal and a water-spout. He does not know how far things are away from him, nor what makes them move and act as they do; why, for example, the sun and moon go round the sky, or why the wind blows. He cannot tell why things have this or that peculiar appearance; why, for example, the rabbit has no tail, why the sky is red in the morning, why some stones are like men. And he wants to know all these things, and is for ever asking questions. But almost any answer will do for him, the first explanation that turns up is accepted; and while a child finds out pretty soon if he has been told wrong, the savage is so ignorant that he cannot see the absurdest explanation to be false, but sticks to it seriously and goes on using it. There is no consistency in the contents of his mind, and inconsistency does not distress him. He has no classes and orders of things, but considers each thing by itself as it occurs, without putting it in its place with reference to other things. He has no idea of what is possible and what is impossible; these words in fact would have no meaning for him, since he is not aware of any laws by which events are governed. His imagination, accordingly, is not under any restraint; he hits upon all kinds of grotesque theories, and, having no critical faculty to test them, he repeats them and seriously believes them. The stories of the nursery, in which there are no impossibilities, in which a man may visit the sun and the winds in their homes and find them at their broth, in which the beasts can speak, in which the witch or the fairy knows at any distance what is going on and can turn up just at the nick of time, in which ghosts walk, in which anything can be changed into anything, a hero going through half a dozen transformations to escape from so many dangers,--these are to the savage not incredible nor foolish tales, to him they are very real, and very serious matters. He lives, in fact, we are told by the authorities on the subject, in the myth-making period of the world; in the period when such incidents as occur in the tales of fairyland and in the stories of mythology are matter of common belief, and even, it is thought, of common experience, so that when the story is put in a good form, it lives and is believed as a true record of what has actually taken place. On one feature of the savage imagination in particular we must fix our attention. The savage regards all things as animated,--as animated with a life like his own. Of his own life he has no very exalted idea; he has no notion how different he really is from anything around him; as he is himself, so he supposes other beings to be also, not only the animals but the trees and all that moves and even what does not move, even rocks and stones. He is living himself; he regards all these as living too. He imagines them like himself, and supposes them to have feelings and passions like his own, to reason as he does, and even if he is told they speak as he does, that is not incredible to him. Thus he lives in a world of infinite confusion, in which there are no laws, no classes of beings, no means of knowing what may happen, or of verifying any statement, where every effort of fancy may be believed. The mental world of savages has been compared to the ravings of a whole world turned lunatic. We survey it, however, without horror, because we know that reason is not unseated there, but striving towards her kingdom. That is the experience that had to be gone through, these are part of the experiments, such as every child has still to make, by which the knowledge of the world is gradually arrived at. Amid this apparent universal confusion a certain consistency of view is to be observed. It might be expected that the savage habit of thought, acting independently in different parts of the world, would lead to an infinite number of divergent and inconsistent views of the nature of things and of man's place in the world. But this is not found to be the case. Mr. Lang accounts as follows for the diffusion of the same stories all over the world: "An ancient identity of mental status, and the working of similar mental forces at the attempt to explain the same phenomena, will account without any theory of borrowing, or of transmission of myth, or of original unity of race, for the world-wide diffusion of many mythical conceptions." Mr. Tylor says that the same imaginative processes regularly recur, that world-wide myths show the regularity and the consistency of the human imagination. M. Réville, in his _Religions des peuples non-civilisés_, remarks that the character of savage religions is everywhere the same; that only the forms vary. Now of the things that all savages possess, certainly religion is one. It is practically agreed that religion, the belief in and worship of gods, is universal at the savage stage; and the accounts which some travellers have given of tribes without religion are either set down to misunderstanding, or are thought to be insufficient to invalidate the assertion that religion is a universal feature of savage life. How did it get there? How comes it that men so near the lowest human state, so devoid of all that has been since acquired, should yet be found to have this mode of thought universally diffused among them? It has been ascribed to a primitive revelation. At the beginning, it is said, God, with the other gifts He gave to man, gave him religion; that is to say, gave him not only a disposition for reverence and piety, but a certain amount of religious knowledge, so that he set out with a stock of religious ideas which were not elaborated by his own efforts, but bestowed on him ready made. It is impossible, however, to conceive how this could be done. If the religion given at first was a lofty and pure one,--and no other need be thought of in such a connection,--then it implies a condition of human life far above the struggles and uncertainties of savage existence; and both the civilisation and the religion must have been lost afterwards. But how could all mankind forget a pure religion? Mankind in that case cannot have been fit for the possession of it; it was given prematurely. No. The history of early civilisation is the history of a struggle in which man has everything to conquer, and in which he is not remembering something he had lost, but advancing by new routes to a land he never reached before. And if civilisation was won for the first time, so was religion. We may also put aside the theory that man had religion from the first as an innate idea, that he found information all ready and prepared in his mind of what it was proper to do in this direction, and how it was to be done. There was indeed a suggestion from within; but it was due not to any special faculty lying outside the essential structure of human nature, but to the constitution of the human mind itself. We cannot go into the philosophical question of the basis of religion in the human mind.[2] It would seem to be a psychological necessity. At all stages of his existence the world of which man is aware outside him, and the world of feelings and desires within him are in conflict. But the conviction lives within him that in some way they can be brought into harmony, and that a power exists which rules in both of these discordant realms and in which, if he can identify himself with it, he also will escape from their discord. If this be so, then this necessity to seek after a higher power must have begun to operate as soon as human consciousness appeared. The savage certainly was never unacquainted with the discrepancy between what he wanted and what the world would give him, between the inner man so full of desires and plans, and that outward nature which denied him his desires and thwarted his plans, and before which he felt so feeble and insecure. He also could not but be driven, if his life was to go on at all on any tolerable basis, to believe in something that had to do both with the world outside him and with the world of his heart, in a being which both had sympathy with his desires and power to give effect to them outwardly. [Footnote 2: See on this subject Prof. Edward Caird's Gifford Lectures, _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893. Galloway, _The Principles of Religious Development_.] The whole of the early world did entertain such a belief. This is the first and the most important instance of uniformity of thought at a stage through which every nation once passed; all men at that stage believe in gods. We will not refuse the name of religion to this side of savage life, even should the needs be low and material which send the savage to his god, though his god be a being who in us would excite the very opposite of reverence, and though his treatment of his god be far from what to us seems worthy, or even though he strove to appease a multitude of spirits which he conceived as flitting about him, before he came to form a settled relation of confidence with one being whom he took for his own god. Where the sense of need has sent a human being to hold intercourse with a higher power, there we hold religion is making its appearance. And if this is universally the case among men at the savage stage, then religion is universal among the ancestors of all nations; it did not need to be invented when kings and priests appeared and wanted it as an instrument for their own purposes; it was there before there were any kings or priests, and is an inheritance which has come down to all mankind from the time when human intelligence first turned to the effort to understand the world. BOOKS RECOMMENDED _For this and the three following chapters_ J. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_, Third Edition, 1891. J. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Fourth Edition, 1903. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, Third Edition, 1900. A new edition is now appearing in parts. A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, new edition, 1899. Th. Achelis, in De la Saussaye. Waitz und Gerland, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, 1859-72. Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, 1897. The reports of travellers and missionaries are, of course, important. CHAPTER III THE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP We must now make some attempt to set forth the principal features of the religion of savages. It is an attempt of some difficulty; for savage religion is an immense and bewildering jungle of all manner of extraordinary growths. It is described in detail in large books and if we try to sum it up in a short statement, we may be told that essential features have been omitted. No one set of savages has anything that can be called a system, and different sets of savages are not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to include under the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale of human advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions, in hot climates and in cold, both rude savages and those who are nobler; and these will, of course, have a variety of ideas and needs, and in so far, different religions. After reading such a book as Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_, or turning over the pages of Waitz and Gerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, one is inclined to regard it as a hopeless task to reduce savage religion to any compact statement. Mr. Tylor's orderly collections, in his great book _Primitive Culture_, of materials bearing on different features of early religion are a help for which the student cannot be sufficiently thankful. After all, it is not the whole of savage religion that we are responsible for here, but only those parts of it that grew and survived in higher faiths. Remembering what has been said as to the uniformity of savage thought amid its great variety of forms, and looking for those parts of it which have proved to have life in them, rather than for what is merely curious and grotesque, we may venture on our task not without hope. In the present chapter we shall inquire what beings savages worship as gods. Of these we shall find that there are several classes; and it will be necessary to notice the great discussions which have arisen on the question which of these classes of deities was first worshipped by man. The objects worshipped by men in low stages of civilisation may be arranged in four classes, viz.-- 1. Parts of nature (_a_) great, (_b_) small. 2. Spirits of ancestors and other spirits. 3. Objects supposed to be haunted by spirits (fetish-worship). 4. A Supreme Being. 1. Nature-worship.--It is not difficult to realise why early man turned to the great elements of nature as beings who could help him, and whom he ought, therefore, to cultivate. The farther we go back in civilisation, the less protection has man against the weather, the more do his subsistence and his comfort depend on the action of the sun, the winds, the rain. If, according to the habits of early thought, he conceived these beings as living like himself and as guided by feelings and motives similar to his own, he could not fail to wish to open up communication with them. That simple view, that they were living beings with feelings like his own, was enough to go upon. In his anxieties for food or warmth he could not fail to think of the beings who, he had observed, had power to supply him with these comforts, of the rain which he had noticed was able to make food grow, of the sun whose warmth he knew. The thunderstorm was a being who had power to put an end to a long drought; the winds could break the trees, could dry up the wet earth, or could bring rain. Heaven was over all, and the Earth was the supporter and fertile producer of all; from her all life came. The moon as well as the sun was a friendly power, nay, in some climates, more friendly. Fire was a living being certainly, on whom much depended; and so was the great lake or the ocean. This is what M. Réville calls the great Nature-worship, in comparison with the minor Nature-worship to be noticed presently. We do not now enter on the subject of mythology; that is to say, of the names men very early began to give to the great natural objects of worship, the characters they ascribed to them, the stories they told about them. That process of myth-making began very early, and is to be found at work in every part of the world. But at first it was simply the natural being itself, conceived as living, that was worshipped, not a spirit or a person thought to dwell in it. Of this, abundant evidence has survived in the great religions. Jupiter is just the sky, the Greek god Helios is just the sun, and the goddess Selene the moon. In China heaven itself is worshipped to this day. The Babylonians worshipped the stars. The Vedic gods are primarily the elements. From savage life examples of this earliest state of matters can also be quoted, though mythology has nearly everywhere greatly confused it. The Mincopies adore the sun as a beneficent deity, the moon as an inferior god. To the Natchez the sun is the supreme god; with some tribes of North America the chief god is heaven blowing, the sky with a wind in it, what Longfellow calls the "Great Spirit" or blowing. The Incas invoked together the Creator and the Sun and Thunder. Thunder was one of the great gods of the Germans. The Samoyede bows to the Sun every morning and every evening and says. "When thou arisest I also arise; when thou settest I also betake myself to rest." To the Ojibways Fire is a divine being, to be well entertained, with whom no liberties must be taken. In every land men are to be found who worship the Earth as a great deity, calling her by her own name and serving her with suitable rites. In the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus the hero addresses his appeal as follows to the beings he regards as gods of old race who will sympathise with him against the upstart Zeus:-- Ether of Heaven and Winds untired of wing, Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea, Laughing in waves innumerable! O Earth, All-mother!--Yea and on the Sun I call, Whose orb scans all things; look on me and see How I, a god, am wronged by gods. _Lewis Campbell_, line 85 _sq_. The minor Nature-worship has to do with rivers and springs, with trees and groves, with crops and fruits, with rocks and stones, and with the lower animals. Here also we must bear in mind the habit of mind of early man, who regarded all things as animated and as like himself. It was not necessary for one who thought in this way to suppose that the spring was haunted by a nymph or the oak inhabited by a dryad, before he felt that the spring or the oak had a claim on him, and brought offerings to secure their friendship. The Nile and the Ganges did not become sacred by having a mythical being added to them as their spirit; they were themselves sacred beings. Every country is studded with names which reveal to the scholar the primeval sanctity of the spots they belong to; the mountain, the grove, and the individual tree, the rocky gorge, the rock, the grassy knoll, each was once an object of reverence. Britain is full of sacred wells, which once received prayers and offerings. There is no animal that has not once been worshipped. A marked feature of primitive life also is the worship of nature not in its particular objects but in its living processes. In a multitude of curious rites, some of which still survive in local usages, and have only recently been explained, primitive man brought himself into relations with nature in its growth, decay, and resurrection. He sympathised with it and imitated it, and he thus sought to make himself sure of the benefits which he saw bestowed by some power which he apprehended in its processes and believed able to further him. 2. Ancestor-worship.--A set of beings of a very different kind comes next. If man found in the world which he beheld outside him a number of objects he could make gods, his domestic experience forced him to consider certain beings of a different kind, of whom the outward world could tell him nothing. The worship of the dead, of ancestors, is diffused throughout nearly the whole of antiquity, it is practised by most savages. Man at an early stage does not fully realise the meaning of death. He interprets death after the analogy of dreams, in which he judges that the spirit leaves the body and traverses distant regions, coming back to the body again when the journey is ended. A vision is to him an instance of the same thing. He sees a friend, who, he afterwards learns, was far from him at the time, and he judges that it was the spirit of his friend which visited him. Thus there arises in his mind the conception of a human spirit which is able to leave the body and dwell at a distance from it. It is called by various names,--the shade, the image, the heart, as perhaps when Elisha says his heart went with Gehazi when he went to meet Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings v. 26), the breath, the soul. When the breath or spirit goes away and stays away (in spite of efforts made to bring it back) the man dies. But the spirit is not dead. It has gone away and is staying somewhere else. The spirit resembles the body in shape, but it is of a thin and light consistence, and is able to move about and to pass through the smallest openings, to make unpleasant noises, and to cause its presence to be felt in a variety of ways. In the very earliest times, the savage regards the spirit which has left the house as an enemy, and uses a variety of precautions to keep it from coming back to trouble him (vampires, ghosts, _lemures_). Whether from such fear or from more liberal motives, much is done to please the spirits of the departed and to increase their comfort in the abodes to which they have gone. At their burial or cremation all they may be supposed to want where they are going, _i.e._ the things they used on earth, are made to accompany them; food and weapons are placed beside them; servants are killed whose spirits are to wait on them, even a wife, voluntarily or without being asked, gives up her earthly life to accompany her husband. Offerings of food and drink are made to them afterwards, prayers are addressed to them, memorials of them, of various kinds, are preserved in the houses they occupied. It was the universal belief of the early world that the person continued to exist after the death of the body; and this furnished the materials for a religion which was more widely prevalent in antiquity than the worship of any god. In some forms of it, indeed, the spirit appears to have been treated as an enemy, and this worship might be judged to fall short of religion, which is the cultivation, not the avoidance, of intercourse with higher powers. The savage has no hope from the spirit, and does not seek his intercourse. But in most forms of the belief in the continued life of the departed, other sentiments than fear prevail; natural affection is felt for the lost relative; the ancestor represents the family, to which the individual is called to subordinate and to some extent even to sacrifice himself; the spirit of the dead is the upholder of a family tradition which the living must hold sacred. Even in those cases in which nothing but fear is apparent, these latter sentiments may also be to some extent operative. 3. Fetish-worship.--The early world has still another kind of deity. In the case of all those we have considered, the god stands in some respect above the worshipper; man reverences the sun, spirit, or animal, for some quality in them that is admirable or that gives them a hold over him; they are in some ways beyond him. Among certain sets of savages, however, notably in South Africa, this feature of religion partially disappears, and objects are reverenced not for any intrinsic quality in them that makes them worthy of regard, but because of a spirit which is supposed to be connected with them. Stones, trees, twigs, pieces of bark, roots, corn, claws of birds, teeth, skin, feathers, articles of human manufacture, any conceivable object, will be held in reverence by the savage and regarded as embodying a spirit. Anything that strikes his fancy as being out of the common he will take up and add to his museum of objects, each of which has in it a hidden power. That power, be it repeated, is not connected with the natural quality of the object, but is due to a spirit which has come to reside in it, and which may very possibly leave it again. Having chosen this deity and set it up for worship, the man can use it as he thinks fit. He addresses prayers to it and extols its virtues; but should his enterprise not prosper, he will cast his deity aside as useless, and cease to worship it; he will address it with torrents of abuse, and will even beat it, to make it serve him better. It is a deity at his disposal, to serve in the accomplishment of his desires; the individual keeps gods of his own to help him in his undertakings. The name "fetishism," by which this kind of worship is known, is of Portuguese origin; it is derived from _feitiço_, "made," "artificial" (compare the old English _fetys_, used by Chaucer); and this term, used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion of the period, was applied by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenth century to the deities they saw worshipped by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant of last century, brought the word fetishism into use as a term for the type of religion of the lowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having been applied by Comte and other writers to the worship of the heavenly bodies and of the great features of nature. It is best to limit it, as has been done above, to the worship of such natural objects as are reverenced not for their own power or excellence but because they are supposed to be occupied each by a spirit. Can this be called religion? In the full sense of the term it cannot. We should remember that it is not the casual object, but the spirit connected with it that the savage worships; but even then we shall be obliged to hold that the fetish worshipper is rather seeking after religion than actually in possession of it. 4. A Supreme Being.--Is it necessary to add another class of deity to these three, and to say that besides nature-gods and spirits early man also worshipped a Supreme Being above all these? In most savage religions there is a principal deity to whom the others are subordinate. But if we carefully examine one by one the supreme gods of these religions, we shall find reason to doubt whether they really have a common character so as to form a class by themselves. Many of them are nature gods who have outgrown the other deities of that class and come to occupy an isolated position. The North American Indians, as we saw, worship the Great Spirit, the heaven with its breath, to whom sun and moon and other ordinances of nature act as ministers. In many cases heaven is the highest god. In others again the sun is supreme. Ukko the great god of the Finns is a heaven- and rain-god. Perkunas the god of the Lithuanians is connected with thunder. On the other hand there are instances in which the supreme god appears to be a different being from the nature-god. The Samoyedes worship the sun and moon and the spirits of other parts of nature; but they also believe in a good spirit who is above all. The Supreme Being of the islands of the Pacific bears in New Zealand the name of Tangaroa, and is spoken of in quite metaphysical terms as the uncreated and eternal Creator. Here we may suspect Christian influence. With the Zulus Unkulunkulu the Old-old one might be supposed to be a kind of first cause. But on looking nearer we find he is distinctly a man, the first man, the common ancestor; beyond which idea speculation does not seem to go. Among many North American tribes it is usual to find an animal the chief deity, the hare or the musk-rat or the coyote. It is very common to find in savage beliefs a vague far-off god who is at the back of all the others, takes little part in the management of things, and receives little worship. But it is impossible to judge what that being was at an earlier time; he may have been a nature-god or a spirit who has by degrees grown faint and come to occupy this position. We cannot judge from the supreme beings of savages, such as they are, that the belief in a supreme being was generally diffused in the world[1] in the earliest times, and is not to be derived from any of the processes from which the other gods arose. We shall see afterwards how natural the tendency is which, where there are several gods, brings one of them to the front while the others lose importance. For a theory of primitive monotheism the supreme gods of savages certainly do not furnish sufficient evidence; they do not appear to have sprung all from the same source, but to have advanced from very different quarters to the supreme position, in obedience to that native instinct of man's mind which causes him, even when he believes in many gods, to make one of them supreme. [Footnote 1: _Cf._ A. Lang, _The Making of Religion_ (1898); Galloway, _Studies in the Philosophy of Religion_ (1904), p. 123, _sqq._] Which Gods were First Worshipped?--If then early man formed his gods from parts of nature and from spirits of departed ancestors or heroes, and even, should the more backward races now existing represent a stage of human life belonging to the early world, from spirits residing in outward objects, which of these is the original root of all the religions of the world? The claim has been made for each of these kinds of religion, that it came first. 1. Fetish-gods came First.--Till recently the view prevailed that all the religion of the world has sprung out of fetishism. First the savage took for his god some casual object, as we have described, then he chose higher objects, trees and mountains, rivers and lakes, and even the sun and stars. The heavens at last became his supreme fetish, and at a higher level, when he had learned about spirits, he would make a spirit his fetish, and so at last come to Monotheism. This view is attractive because it places the beginning of religion in the lowest known form of it and thus makes for the belief that the course of the world's faith has been upward from the first. But it presents the gravest difficulties; for why should the savage make a god of a stick or a stone, and attribute to it supernatural powers? Who told him about a god, that he should call a stick god, or about supernatural powers, that he should suppose a stick to work wonders? There is nothing in the stick to suggest such notions; that he should make gods in this way, that the belief in wonderful powers should originate in this way, is surely quite incredible. Much more likely is it, surely, that he got the notion of God from some other quarter and applied it in his own grotesque and degraded way; than that the notion of God was taken first from such poor forms and applied afterwards to objects better suited to it. Religion and civilisation go hand in hand, and if civilisation can decay (and leading anthropologists declare that the debased tribes of Australia and West Africa show signs of a higher civilisation they have lost) then religion also may decay. A lower race may borrow religious ideas from a higher and adapt them to their own position, _i.e._ degrade them. And the progress of religion may still have been upwards on the whole, although retrograde movements have taken place in certain races. On these and other grounds it is now held with growing certainty that fetishism cannot be the original form of religion, and that the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. The races among whom fetishism is found exhibit a well-known feature of the decadence of religion, namely that the great god or gods have grown weak and faint, and smaller gods and spirits have crowded in to fill up the blank thus caused. Worship is transferred from the great beings who are the original gods of the tribe and whom it still professes in a vague way to believe, to numerous smaller beings, and from the good gods to the bad. 2. Spirits, Human or Quasi-human, came First.--Is the worship of spirits then the original form of religions. This has been powerfully maintained in this country by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor. According to Mr. Spencer "the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors." Men concluded, as soon as they were capable of such reasoning, that the life they witnessed in plants and animals, in sun and moon and other parts of nature, was due to their being inhabited by the spirits of departed men. With all respect for the splendid exposition given by Mr. Spencer[2] of the early beliefs of mankind regarding spirits, it is impossible to think that he has made out his case when he treats the gods of early India and of Greece as deified ancestors. If the natural incredulity we feel at being told that Jupiter, Indra, the sun, the sacred mountain, and the stars all alike came to be worshipped because each of them represented some departed human hero, is not at once decisive, we have only to wait a little to see whether some other theory cannot account for these gods in a simpler way. [Footnote 2: _Sociology_, vol. i. Also _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, p. 675; "ghost-propitiation is the origin of all religions."] Mr. Tylor also derives all religion from the worship of spirits, but in a different way. His is the most comprehensive system of Animism, using that term in the narrower sense of soul-worship. Starting from the doctrine of souls, reached by early man in the way described above (p. 33, _sqq._), he argues that when once this notion was reached it would be applied to other beings as well as man. Not having learned to distinguish himself clearly from other beings, man would judge that they had souls like his own; and so every part of nature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in the universe was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in this way, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animation of nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by other spirits." At this point the soul is an unsubstantial essence inhabiting a body, it has its life and activity only in connection with the body; but the step was easily taken to the further belief in spirits like the souls, but not attached to any body. The spirits moved about freely, like the genii, demons, fairies, and beings of all kinds, with whom to the mind of antiquity the world was so crowded. Three classes of spirits we have up to this point: those of ancestors, those attached to the various parts of the life of nature, and those existing independently. Can the higher nature-deities be accounted for by this theory as well as the minor spirits of the parts of nature? Mr. Tylor considers that they can; he declares that the "higher deities of polytheism have their place in the general animistic system of mankind." He acknowledges that, with few exceptions, great gods have a place as well as smaller gods in every non-civilised system of religion. But in origin and essence he holds they are the same. "The difference is rather of rank than of nature." As chiefs and kings are among men so are the great gods among the lesser spirits. The sun, the heavens, the stars, are living beings, because they have spirits as man has a soul, or as a spring has a spirit that haunts it. Thus in the doctrine of souls is found the origin of the whole of early religion. Mr. Tylor confesses, however, that it is impossible to trace the process by which the doctrine of souls gave rise to the belief in the great gods. The weakness of this view is that it involves a denial that the great powers of nature could be worshipped before the process of reasoning had been completed which led to the belief that they had souls or spirits. But how did early man regard these great powers before this? Did they not appear to him adorable by the very impressions they made upon his various senses? Did he really need to argue out the belief that they had souls, before he felt drawn to wonder at them, and to seek to enter into relations with them? Animism.--The word Animism, it should here be noticed, is used in the study of religions in a wider sense than that of Mr. Tylor. Many of the great religions are known to have arisen out of a primitive worship of spirits and to have advanced from that stage to a worship of gods. The god differs from the spirit in having a marked personal character, while the spirits form a vague and somewhat undistinguishable crowd; in having a regular _clientèle_ of worshippers, whereas the spirit is only served by those who need to communicate with him; in having therefore a regular worship, while the spirit is only worshipped when the occasion arises; and in being served from feelings of attachment and trust, and not like the spirits from fear. When gods appear, some writers hold, then and not till then does religion begin; before that point is reached magic and exorcism are the forms used for addressing the unseen beings, but when it is reached we have worship; intercourse is deliberately sought with beings who hold regular relations with man. The word Animism is best employed to denote the worship of spirits as distinguished from that of gods. Whether or not early man derived his belief in the multitude of spirits by which he believed himself to be surrounded, from his belief in the separable human soul, there is no doubt that he did consider himself to be so surrounded. Animism in this sense is undoubtedly the beginning of some at least of the great religions. 3. The Minor Nature-worship came First.--M. Réville holds[3] that the tree and the river and other such beings were the first gods, and that the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards as an extension of the same principle. Mr. Max Müller seems to share this view when he says that man was led from the worship of semi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to that of intangible objects, which gave him deities proper. The Germans, as a rule, hold the view that the great nature-worship came first, and that the sanctity of the tree and the river came to them from above, these objects being regarded as lesser living beings deserving to be worshipped as well as the greater ones. The English school let the sanctity of these objects come to them as it were from below; when man has come to believe in spirits, he concludes that they have spirits too, and worships the spirits he supposes to dwell in them. It does not seem that these theories are entirely exclusive of each other. French writers suppose that the minor nature-worship first sprang up of itself, half-animal man respecting the animals as rivals, the trees as fruit-bearers for his hunger, and so on, and that spirits were added to these beings when the great animistic movement of thought in which these writers believe took place, of course at a very early period.[4] [Footnote 3: Réville, _Histoire des religions des peuples non-civilisés_, ii. 225.] [Footnote 4: This view is the basis of M. André Lefèvre's _La Religion_. Paris, 1892.] 4. The Great Nature-powers came First.--We come in the last place to that class of deities which we spoke of first--the powers of nature. By several great writers it is held that the worship of these is the original form of all religion. We shall give two of the leading theories on the subject, that of Mr. Max Müller and that of Ed. von Hartmann. Mr. Max Müller has written very strongly against the view that fetishism is a primary form of religion, and holds that the worship of casual objects is not a stage of religion once universally prevalent, but is, on the contrary, a parasitical development and of accidental origin. He does not tell us what the original religion of mankind was. The work in which he deals most directly with this question[5] is concerned chiefly with the Indian faith, the early stages of which he regards as the most typical instance of the growth of religion generally. He does not, however, tell us definitely out of what earlier kind of religion that of the Aryans grew, which India best teaches us to know, or what religion they had before they developed that of the Vedic hymns. We may infer, however, what his view on this point is from the very interesting sketch he draws of the psychological advance man could make, in selecting objects of reverence, from one class of things to another (p. 179, _sqq._). First, there are tangible objects, which, however, Mr. Max Müller denies that mankind as a whole ever did worship; such things as stones, shells, and bones. Then second, semi-tangible objects; such as trees, mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, which supply the material for what may be called _semi-deities_. And third, intangible objects, such as the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the moon; in these are to be seen the germs of _deities_. At each of these stages man is seeking not for something finite but for the infinite; from the first he has a presentiment of something far beyond; he grasps successive objects of worship not for themselves but for what they seem to tell of, though it is not there, and this sense of the infinite, even in poor and inadequate beliefs, is the germ of religion in him. When he rises after his long journey to fix his regards on the great powers of nature, he apprehends in them something great and transcendent. He applies to them great titles; he calls them _devas_, shining ones; _asuras_, living ones; and, at length, _amartas_, immortal ones. At first these were no more than descriptive titles, applied to the great visible phenomena of nature as a class. They expressed the admiration and wonder the young mind of man felt itself compelled to pay to these magnificent beings. But by giving them these names he was led instinctively to regard them as persons; he ascribed to them human attributes and dramatic actions, so that they became definite, transcendent, living personalities. In these, more than in any former objects of his adoration, his craving for the infinite was satisfied. Thus the ancient Aryan advanced, "from the visible to the invisible, from the bright beings that could be touched, like the river that could be seen, like the thunder that could be heard, like the sun, to the devas that could no longer be touched or heard or seen.... The way was traced out by nature herself." [Footnote 5: _Lectures on the Origin of Religion_, 1882.] This famous theory is, when we come to examine it, rather puzzling. It does not account for the first beginnings of religion except by inference, and it does so in two contradictory ways; for, on the one hand, Mr. Max Müller enumerates tangible objects first as those from which men rose to higher objects, and on the other he denies that fetishism is a primitive formation. He suggests that there were earlier gods than the devas, but he tells us nothing about them, except that they were not fully deities; they were only semi-deities, or not deities at all. The worship of spirits he leaves entirely out of consideration; religion did not, in his view, begin with Animism. When he does tell us of the beginnings of religion, what is his view? The religion of the Aryans began, and it is a type--the other religions presumably began in the same way, _e.g._ those of China and of Egypt--by the impression made on man from without by great natural objects co-operating with his inner presentiment of the infinite, which they met to a greater degree than any objects he had tried before. Religion was due accordingly to æsthetic impressions from without, answering an æsthetic and intellectual inner need. Those needs, then, which led men to make gods of the great powers of earth and heaven were not of an animal or material nature, but belonged to the intellectual part of his constitution. Those who framed such a religion for themselves must have been raised above the pressing necessities and cares of savage life; they were not absorbed in the task of making their living, but had leisure to stand and admire the heavenly bodies, and to analyse the impressions made on them by the waters and the thunder. Nay, they had sufficient power of abstraction to form a class of such great beings, to bestow on them a common title, not only one but several progressive common titles, each expressing a deeper reflection than the last. Thus did they reflect on the nature of the cosmic powers, taken as a class. This, evidently, is not the beginning of religion. It is the religion of a comparatively lofty civilisation; lower stages of civilisation, and of religion also, must have preceded this one. Even the heavenly bodies, it appears to many scholars, must have been worshipped by men who regarded them not with æsthetic admiration and intellectual satisfaction only, but in the light of more pressing and practical interests. We take Edward von Hartmann as the representative of those who, like Mr. Max Müller, trace the origin of religion to the worship of the heavenly powers, but who carry back that worship to the earliest stage. Writers who disagree with his philosophy take grave exception to his treatment of religion, for he regards religion, as he considers consciousness itself, not as an original and inseparable element of human nature, but as a thing acquired by man on his way upwards; and he finds the original motive of religion to have lain in egoistic eudæmonism, in the selfish desire of happiness, which at that stage of man's life determined all his actions. The account, however, given by Von Hartmann of the beginning of religion in the adoration of the powers of nature is of singular freshness and power, and we can deduct from it, after stating it, the peculiarities arising out of his philosophical system. The first religion that existed in the world had for its objects the heavenly powers. The objects worshipped are known, indeed, before religion begins; the illusions of early thought have settled on the heavenly powers before they are worshipped; on the outward object the mind has conferred the character of a living and acting being, which it is henceforth to wear. This transformation, poetic fancy, not mere logic and not merely utilitarian considerations, has brought about. But religion only begins when man sets himself to worship these beings, and to this he is driven by his material needs. Religion begins in a being as yet without religion and without morality. The need for food is the motive that brings about the change, for that pure egoist early man has seen that the powers of nature are able to help or hinder him in his search for a living; the sun can set his plants growing or can burn them up, and the thunderstorm can revive them. His happiness depends on these powers, and he seeks to set up relations with them. He seeks to gain as an ally the heavenly power who is so able to further or to thwart his aims; he makes known to it his wishes by calling upon it, and he offers presents to it. He worships the heavenly powers, and religion has begun. Worship lends to these powers, though they were known before, a fixity and reality they did not formerly possess. Von Hartmann is inclined to trace all the various worships of these powers, which have prevailed in the most different parts of the earth, to the same original centre, while at the same time he maintains that even if all the instances of this worship cannot be referred to any common origin, it must have arisen in this way, wherever men of the same nature dwelt; the psychological necessity of this development accounts for the appearance of this same religion in different lands and among dissimilar races. The worship of the heavenly powers, accordingly, is with this writer the original religion. While admitting that the worship of domestic spirits grew up in the way described by the English anthropologists, he denies that Animism is ever a religion by itself without being combined with higher beliefs. He denies also that fetishism could ever be an original religious product, or that men could ever pass from having no religion to the religion of fetishism. Wherever it appears, it is a religion of decay. All the religion in the world has come from the worship of nature, which, whether arising at one centre or at several, spread over the world, and is to be recognised, clearly or dimly, in the religions of all lands. This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by Otto Pfleiderer,[6] and other German writers. It was from the impressions made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at bribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenly powers surely arose from other needs than that for food alone. The intellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world he lived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as far as that could be attained; the æsthetic need, the desire to have to do with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, the desire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himself under some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, though in the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clear consciousness, entered into the earliest worship of the heavenly powers. This view has the great advantage over that of Von Hartmann, that it makes the development of religion continuous from the first, instead of representing it as being originally a purely selfish thing, into which the character of affection and devotion only entered at some subsequent stage. If man's nature is essentially religious, then all that constitutes religion must have been with him from the first, in however unconscious and undeveloped form. [Footnote 6: _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. iii. chap. i.] Conclusion.--We have enumerated the different kinds of gods worshipped by early man--fetishes, spirits, the powers of nature. We have found a general agreement that fetishism is not an original form of religion, but a product of the decay of higher forms in unfavourable conditions. As to the other two kinds of deities, it is impossible to deny that gods have been formed from the very first in each of these two ways. The domestic worship of the early world cannot be derived from nature-worship, but grew out of the belief awakened in early man, by the familiar experiences mentioned above. That the greater nature-worship, on the other hand, can be derived from the belief in spirits is an assertion which can never be proved, or even made probable; that it arose from the impressions produced on early man by the great objects and forces of nature, is a thing we can understand and believe. The minor nature-worship is also a very intelligible thing, even without Mr. Tylor's theory of souls to explain it. What more natural than that the savage should worship the great oak or the waterfall, or should think himself surrounded by invisible beings, even if he did not frame the latter on the model of the human soul? We arrive therefore at the conclusion that with the exception of the doctrines about death and the abode of spirits, we must regard the worship of nature as the root of the world's religion. We must beware, however, of imputing to the thoughts of early men about their gods, any such qualities as consistency or regularity. The power of holding at one and the same time religious beliefs which are inconsistent with each other, is one which even in the most developed religions is by no means wanting; and how much more was this the case among men who lived before there was any exact thought! The savage could have a variety of gods of very different natures, who formed in his mind quite a happy family. When he found a new god, that did not oblige him to part with any old one; it was one god he was seeking, but he could not settle on one god as yet, when there were so many beings with a good claim to the position. He made his gods not out of nothing, but out of a great variety of experiences and impressions, and they acted and reacted on each other in an endless variety of ways. One god came to the front here and another there; an object was deified here from one reason and there from another; new gods in time turned old and were less thought of while forgotten gods of former days came back to memory and were worshipped once more. Endless change, endless recurrences of growth and of decay filled up those great spaces and periods, measureless and trackless almost as the expanses of the ocean, that were covered by the prehistoric life of mankind. BOOKS RECOMMENDED Jevons, _Introduction to the History of Religion_, 1896. E. S. Hartland, in _Proceedings of Oxford Congress of the History of Religion_, p. 21, _sqq._ Of the large class of books reporting the manners and beliefs of special savage races we may specify-- D. G. Brinton, _The Myths of the New World_, 1896. W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, 1876. Kingsley, Miss, _West African Studies_, 1899. Callaway, _The Religious System of the Amazulu_, 1863-72. Duff Macdonald, _Africana, the Heart of Heathen Africa_, 1882. G. Grey, _Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-Western and Western Australia_, 1841. Spencer and Gilpen. _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, 1899. CHAPTER IV EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--BELIEF We have seen from what materials early man made his gods. As the gods differed in their origin, they differed also from the very first in the mode of their development. The great nature-gods gave rise to one kind of religion, and the minor nature-gods to another, the thought of the departed members of the household to a third. But these various religions could not develop side by side without influencing each other. These different worships began in the very earliest times to get mixed up together; there is none of the great religions which we do not find to be a combination of them. It will be well to consider them in the first place separately. 1. Growth of the Great Gods.--Taking them in the order we have already followed, we come first to the great nature-worship, of which heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars, dawn and sunset, and then the phenomena of the weather, rain, storm, and thunder and lightning, are the objects. It cannot be too clearly borne in mind that what was worshipped was originally the natural object itself, regarded, after the earliest habit of thought, as living. To heaven itself, to the sun as he rose or set, to the storm itself, men addressed prayers and made offerings; and in many quarters, both among savages and in the great religions, the same thing occurs to this day. But it was impossible for man to stop here, his imagination would not allow him to do so. In some races, imagination was more active than in others, but nowhere was it quite inoperative; and so it happened that man was led, here to a greater there to a less extent, beyond the direct and simple adoration of the powers of nature. When he began to give them names, a first and a great step was taken in advance of the original simplicity. A name is a power; if it is anything more than a mere title or label, and all primitive names are more than this, it brings with it associations of its own, and thus men are led to ascribe to the object indicated by the name, a new character and new powers. They proceed to argue about the name and draw conclusions from it as to the nature of the being they worship, and so come to think of their deity in quite a different manner. Even to classify objects together and give them a common title, "the bright ones," or "the living ones," as the early Aryans did, gives them an independent position of their own, and tempts the imagination to go further in describing them. Striving to find names for those beings he worships and thinks about so much, early man gives them the names of living creatures with whom he is familiar, and in this way he brings them much nearer to himself, and at the same time appears to himself to know a great deal more about them. The moon, for example, has horns, the moon is a cow. Heaven is over all, heaven is a father. And as he knows all about a cow, and all about a father, he at once has these deities made much more real to him, they have an independent existence to him. But, on the other hand, he has got something more in his deity than there is in the natural object. It is no longer the mere naked heaven or the mere moon he worships; but these beings with additions made to them by his own imagination. As time goes on the additions grow more and more. Having got living persons for his deities, early man readily goes on to weave their histories and their relations. If the moon is a cow, the sun is a bull chasing her round the sky. This is an instance of a principle which obtains in many at least of the early religions and which it is important to remember, viz. that the powers of nature were first identified with animals. The zoomorphic stage of the nature-gods comes before the anthropomorphic (_cf._ the signs of the zodiac), and in many savage tribes it still survives. But it is when the gods begin to be thought of after the likeness of human beings that the decisive step is made in their development. If heaven is a father, it is easy to go on from that. Earth will be the corresponding mother (an idea found all over the world); and all men will be their children. If the sun is invested with a name of masculine gender (but the sun is frequently feminine), he must do feats becoming such a character. If the storm is a male god, he will be a warrior or a huntsman. Thus the god acquires a personal character and an independent movement; what is told about him has reference, of course, to the natural object he sprang from, or the season with which he is connected; but the deity is becoming more and more separate from the natural object, and acquiring a character and history of his own. The stories connected with the god vary according to the habits and the imaginations of different peoples; in some cases the gods remain pure and exalted beings, in others savage and indecent myths are accumulated around them, and these primitive myths adhere to their persons long after they themselves have felt an upward tendency and acquired a civilised character with the moral elevation of their peoples. We shall see in many instances how the nature-gods were personified, made into beasts, made into men, and surrounded with myths and legends. That is the natural history of the nature-gods; the process through which they must pass if they grow at all. Polytheism.--Another general feature of the worship of the great natural objects has to be mentioned. Each god has a history of his own; he has grown up separately as men concentrated their attention upon him. But as one god grows up after another, or as the gods who grow up in two countries are afterwards brought together, it comes to pass that there are many of them, and none of them is necessarily supreme. What is the worshipper to do? The least reflection will convince us that in any act of worship man fixes his attention on one object only. That belongs to the very nature of religion; as a child could not treat several men at once as its father, nor a servant be equally faithful to several masters, so man naturally tends to have one god. He turns to the highest he knows, who is most likely to be able to help him, and there cannot be two highests, but only one. But man's position in the early world does not allow him to be true to this religious instinct. As he sees one aspect of the world to-day, and another to-morrow, he cannot, when his god is a power of nature, always see the same god before him. But can he not worship another god when the first one is out of sight and out of mind? Though he worshipped heaven yesterday, can he not worship the sun to-day, or the storm, or the great sea? And though the former generation worshipped one of these beings in the foremost place, may not the existing generation devote itself principally to another? That power does not cease to be a deity which is not immediately before his mind. It is still a deity, and in a while he will turn to it again, and make it first. Thus it comes about by inevitable logic that when man gets his gods from nature, he has a number of them. When he gets a new god he does not deny the god he had before; he is not yet in a position to conclude that there can only be one god. When he is worshipping he feels as if there were only one; but this feeling applies at different times to a number of different beings, and from such inconsistency he lacks the power to free himself. The other is a god too; all the gods he has ever worshipped he may on occasion worship again. Nor can he refuse to recognise the gods of others; to them no doubt they are gods, if not to him; they are beings of the same class with his god. And thus early man is a polytheist. Polytheism is a complex product; it is the addition to each other of a number of cults which have grown up separately. In Polytheism, however, very different religious positions are possible. Men may feel that the whole set of the gods in whose existence they believe have claims on them, and may regard themselves as worshippers of them all, resorting, as feeling and old association moves them, now to one and now to another, or defining the places or occasions at which each of them is to be sought, or in some other way adjusting their various claims; or, on the other hand, while believing in the existence of many gods, they may confine their worship to one. A man knows that there are many gods, but says that he has only to do with one of them. This is a religious position very frequently met with in antiquity. A circle of gods is believed in, but one of them comes into prominence at a time and is worshipped as supreme. This is called Kathenotheism: the worship of one god at a time. The title was invented by Mr. Max Müller, who also gives the title of Henotheism to that position in which many gods are believed in as existing, but worship is given to only one. The following are examples of the various positions:-- The language of Polytheism is--"Father Zeus that rulest from Ida, most glorious, most great, and thou sun that seest all things, and ye rivers and thou earth, and ye that in the underworld punish whosoever sweareth falsely--be ye witnesses."--_Iliad_, iii. 280. The Jews at the time of Josiah were accomplished polytheists, as we may see from the catalogue of the worships suppressed at Jerusalem by that monarch, 2 Kings xxiii. The gods of each of the surrounding tribes appear to have been worshipped there, and the old gods of the separate tribes and families of Israel appear to have been kept up. Kathenotheism.--The Vedic poets, as we shall see, speak of the god they are immediately addressing as supreme, and heap upon him all the highest attributes, while not thinking of denying the divinity of other gods. The language of Henotheism is--"Thou, O Jehovah, art far above all the earth; thou art exalted far above all gods" (Ps. xcvii. 9). "There is none like unto Thee among the gods, O Lord!... Thou art great, and doest wondrous things: Thou art God alone" (Ps. lxxxvi. 8, 10). Here the other gods are recognised as existing, but only one is worshipped. Compare also St Paul: "There are gods many, and lords many, but to us there is one God" (1 Cor. viii. 5, 6). The language of Monotheism is--"All the gods of the peoples are idols: but Jehovah made the heavens" (Ps. xcvi. 5), and "Thou shalt have no other god before Me." A further religious position to be noticed here is that of Dualism. Not all dualism comes from nature-worship, but in a land where a beneficent and a harmful natural force are in striking antagonism to each other, this may take place. Man, when he interprets the kindly influences of nature as the blessings of the good god, naturally interprets the agencies which blight or ruin as being also the manifestation of a living power, but of an evil one. Thanks to the good god alternate, in this case, with efforts to counteract or to appease the bad one; if the two appear to be nearly balanced, then neither is supreme, and both overawe the mind and receive worship. But in general we may remark that the greater nature-worship is of an elevating tendency. It brings man into relations with powers which are truly great, and places him even physically in the position of looking up, not down. Where the nature-power is a harsh one, a scorching sun, a tempestuous sea, the self-command and self-sacrifice called out by the worship of them may be, if not carried to extremes, a bracing discipline; but with some exceptions the nature-gods are good, and have to do with light and with kindness. 2. The Minor Nature-worship.--The worship of the great powers of nature has a universal character; it can be carried on anywhere; wandering tribes carry it with them; heaven and the sun and the winds can be addressed in every land. The minor nature-worship differs from it in this respect: an animal is only worshipped in the country where it occurs, and the worship of the tree, the well, the stone, is altogether local. With this local nature-worship the world was, in early times, thickly overspread; and manifold survivals of it are still to be found even in lands where the primitive religion has been longest superseded. This is the religion of local observance and local legend, which clings to the face of a country in spite of public changes of creed, and, when the old religion has departed, is found to have secured a shelter for itself in the new one. In this minor nature-worship which spreads its network over all the early world, the character of primitive society is clearly represented; the small communities have their small local worships--each clan, almost each kraal, has its shrine, its god, and limits itself to its own sacred things. Religion is a bond connecting together the members of small groups of men, but separating them from the members of other groups. The following are some of the more important developments of this. (_a_) The Worship of Animals.--Primitive man had to hold his own against the animals by force of strength and cunning; and he was well acquainted with them. He respected them for the qualities in which they excelled him, the hare for his swiftness, the beaver for his skill, the fox for his craftiness. What he worshipped, however, was not the individuals of a species, but the species as a whole, typified perhaps in a great hare or a great fox, the mythical first parent of the species, and possessing its qualities in a supreme degree. It happened apparently over the whole world, with the exception of most branches of the Aryan family, that men at a very early stage regarded themselves as related by the tie of descent, some to one species of animals or of plants and some to another. From this belief tribes took their names, each member tattooing the figure of his animal ancestor on his person. The Bechuanas, for example, are divided into crocodile-men, fish-, ape-, buffalo-, elephant-, and lion-men, and so on. The hairy or scaly ancestor is the "totem" of the tribe, and they consider that animal sacred, and will not eat the flesh of it. All who bear the same totem regard each other as of kindred blood, as descended from the same ancestor. The totem may also be a vegetable, in which case no member of the stock will gather or eat it. Totemism is to be seen in operation at the present day in various parts of the world. North America is, perhaps, its classic land in modern times. It is, however, a stage of society through which all races have at one time or another passed. According to the latest investigations totemism is not to be regarded as itself a religion; the totem being regarded not as a superior but as an equal. Its influence on the early growth of religion, however, was great, and widely ramified.[1] From this two important consequences follow which will meet us again and again in our study of the great religions. The first is animal-worship, a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and of perplexing import. Mr. McLennan has shown that much at least of the widespread worship of animals is to be traced to an early totem-stage of society,[2] when animals were held sacred as the ancestors of men. In the second place, totemism explains the view taken in the early world of the nature of religious fellowship. In modern times people regard each other as brothers in religion when they believe the same doctrines. It is belief, an intellectual or spiritual agreement, that binds them together. The ancient religious union was of a quite different nature. People then regarded each other as brothers because they were of the same blood, descended from the same ancestor. In the Bible the Hebrews are all descended from Abraham, the Edomites from Esau, etc. That is the necessary condition of brotherhood in early times; only those could join in a religious rite who were of the same blood. For men of another blood there was another worship, another god. It is an earlier stage of this view, when men are of the same worship because they are descended from the same animal, and when they worship that animal. [Footnote 1: J. G. Frazer, "Totemism," in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. xxiii., and now his _Totemism and Exogamy_. It was formerly held that the Semites were an exception, having never passed through the totemistic stage. Mr. Robertson Smith, in his _Religion of the Semites_, maintains that, though they are past that stage when we first know them, the traces of it are apparent in their institutions, and that their sacrifices especially are based on ideas belonging to it. Wellhausen does not agree with him in this.] [Footnote 2: _Fortnightly Review_, 1869-70. See also Mr. Lang's _Myth, Ritual and Religion_ in many passages.] (_b_) Trees, Wells, Stones.--The worship of each of these three is in itself a great subject, and we can do no more than mention the leading views which appear to have entered into them. Mannhardt in his _Feld- und Waldkulte_ and Frazer in _The Golden Bough_ have studied the survivals of tree-worship in the local customs of the peasantry of Europe. Early man appears to have worshipped trees as wonderful living beings; but his thought soon advanced to the conception of a tree-spirit, of which the tree itself was either the body or the dwelling, and which possessed various powers, such as that of commanding rain, or that of causing fertility in plants or in animals. From the tree-spirit, again, the tree-god was further formed, a being who was able to quit the sacred tree or who presided over many trees. Of these beliefs the fast-decaying usages of the Maypole and the Harvest May still remind us. The well, in a similar manner, may first have been worshipped in and for itself, and then a nymph may have been added to it. The worship of wells consisted in throwing precious articles into them, or hanging such offerings on the surrounding trees, and asking some boon from the deity.[3] Rivers and lakes were also held sacred. The worship of stones, that is of stones not treated by art, but regarded as sacred in the form in which they were found, was widely diffused among early races; but this is a subject on which light is still called for. The Caaba of Mecca and the stone of the temple of Diana at Ephesus are famous isolated instances of it; but it has been suggested that the standing stones or menhirs which are found in every part of Europe, and in the south and west of Asia, were objects of this worship. In Palestine these stones are not found, though they occur in the neighbouring lands; and this is attributed by Major Conder[4] to the zeal of the orthodox kings, who, we know from the Bible, destroyed all the monuments of idolatry in their territory. [Footnote 3: In Mr. G. A. Gomme's _Ethnology in Folklore_ many sacred wells are mentioned which are still, or were lately, frequented in England. St. Wallach's well and bath, in the parish of Glass, Morayshire, was much resorted to within living memory.] [Footnote 4: _Scottish Review_, 1894, vol. xvii. p. 33, "Rude Stone Monuments in Syria."] What is common to these cults, and cannot be disregarded, is their local nature. This gives its colour to all the religion of early man. The god of the sacred tree cannot be worshipped anywhere else than where the tree stands, and he who would have his wishes granted by the well must come to it. The deity of this kind of religion has his abode at a certain spot, and he is a fixed, not a movable deity. There is a story, or a set of stories, connected with his shrine, and there are observances of one kind or another to be done there; and this goes on from age to age. Now a deity who is fixed to one spot will be worshipped by the people who dwell around that spot. The god will have his own people and dwell among them, and they alone will be his worshippers. And thus the surface of the earth comes to be parcelled out among a number of deities, each seated, like a little prince, at his own court among his own people. In passing from his own home to a distant spot, a man will leave the territory of his own god and enter on that of another, and as the god can only be worshipped at his own shrine, the man will leave his religion when he leaves his home, and either be compelled to serve the gods of strangers, or to perform no religious duties at all.[5] Thus the ideas connected with totemism meet and harmonise in many old countries with those connected with local shrines.[6] Those dwelling around the shrine form a kindred of one blood, of which the local god is both the progenitor and the living head. Religion is thus both strictly tribal and strictly local. It is for his brethren of the tribe, for those in whose veins the blood of the same divine ancestor runs, that a man's enthusiasm is kindled in acts of worship; it is his duty to his clan that he then realises, the prosperity of his clan that he desires. To those of other stems no religious bond unites him, they are men of another blood, of another worship. His religious duty is to love his neighbour, or fellow-tribesman, to hate his enemy, the man of another tribe. And on the other hand, as religion consists in approaches to a particular spot and the performance of certain rites, it is left behind when these rites are accomplished, and the man is away from his god. The sanctuary is regarded with extreme veneration, often with shrinking and terror, but distance makes a change, the religion alters with travel, and is left behind. This religion was on the whole a more exciting and intense thing than that of the great nature powers; and was far more interwoven with social life; but it also presented the greatest obstacles to progress, limiting men's affections to their own kin and their own land, and confining them in an inveterate conservatism. [Footnote 5: As illustrating this circle of ideas, compare the following passages in the Bible: Genesis xxviii.; Ruth i. 16; 1 Sam. xxvi. 19; 2 Kings v. 17; and of a later period, Psalm xlii.] [Footnote 6: See on this whole subject Mr. Robertson Smith's _Religion of the Semites_.] 3. The State after Death.--The belief that the human spirit was not extinguished at the death of the body, but entered on an existence without the body somewhere else, opened the door to a wide range of speculation; and the ideas arrived at by early man as to the place of spirits and the life beyond, are a principal part of that antique religion of which the great systems are the heirs. The funeral practices of prehistoric times, when various articles were placed in the tomb along with the body of the departed hero or father, and various sacrifices made to him at his burial or cremation and at anniversary festivals afterwards, show that the spirits of the dead were conceived as carrying on the same kind of existence as they had led here, though an existence unsubstantial and of little power; "strengthless heads" Homer calls them. Food and drink were of use to them; for the finer part of it was supposed to reach them. The taste of blood revived them; and various pleasures were possible to them.[7] This belief, it will be seen, differs from all the modern doctrines of a continued existence. It is not the resurrection of the body that the savage believes in. He knows well enough that the body does not rise; but he also knows that the spirit can exist and move and do a number of things that were done in life, without the body. Nor can he be said to believe in the immortality of the soul. That term describes a free and unfettered existence after death, but to the savage the spirit after death has but a troubled and frail existence; it is tethered to certain spots on the earth, known to it formerly; it cannot do much, it lives under many limitations and constraints. Nor, again, can it be said that retribution after death is a true designation of the early belief. That may be found here and there in early times, but generally the other life is less under a divine government than this one; death takes a man away from his god as well as from his family, and the dead are left to themselves. [Footnote 7: On this subject compare Mr. Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, twelfth and thirteenth chapters.] While, however, this is the general background of primitive belief about the other life, imagination is at work on the subject very early, and various features of that life are touched with more vivid colours, here in one way and there in another. The place where the departed stay, their occupations, their delights, are variously described; the land where they dwell is modelled on a land that is known, with the addition of ideal features; they do very much what they did on earth, hunt or feast, make music or carry on discussions. In some cases there is a judgment-seat before which the soul appears for its trial, and here of course the spirit-world must be divided into two parts or more, for the reception of those who are approved and of those who are condemned. The detailed description of the abodes of the blest and of the damned, by no means peculiar to Christianity, are later developments in the early world. Hell, Mr. Tylor says, is unknown to savage thought. The doctrine of transmigration, however, whether into plants or into lower animals, is of early growth. Growth of the Great Religions out of these Beliefs.--These various developments of thought about the gods did, as a matter of fact, take place in primitive times, and that is almost all that can be said. In the religion of savages the various elements we have so briefly indicated cross and recross each other, in endless combinations; none of them is to be found entirely by itself. There is no fetish worship which is not accompanied by traces of an early belief in great gods; there is no belief in great gods which is not accompanied by a belief in lower spirits. With regard to every savage religion the student has to ask what the constituent elements of it are, in what way the various beliefs of the early world, beliefs arising from such different sources, meet in it and combine with one another. In each of the higher religions, too, the same questions have to be asked. The beliefs which we have sketched are the materials out of which they also arose. They did not _originate_ the belief in high gods with power over nature, nor the belief in the lesser spirits which busy themselves with man's affairs. They did not originate the belief in a life after death, nor was it left to them to appoint sacred seasons in the year, or to consecrate the spots to which worship has always clung. All these beliefs are prehistoric, and what remained for the great religions was not to bring them forward for the first time, but to surround them with a new kind of authority, and to establish as a matter of positive ordinance or revelation what had formerly grown up without any ordinance by the unconscious work of custom. It was not left for any of the great founders to plant religion in the world as a new thing, but only to add to the old religion new forms and new sanctions. It may be said that if these are the elements of which religion as a whole is made, then religion arose at first out of illusions. That is no doubt true, in a sense. It was an illusion on the part of early man to suppose that the powers of heaven were animated beings who could be his allies and answer his appeals; it was an illusion to think that the tree or the stone contained a spirit, and an illusion to think that men's spirits can go and wander about the earth by themselves, leaving their bodies untenanted. But these illusions were after all only the outward and inadequate expression in which the spirit of religion then clothed itself. Religion must always express itself in terms of the knowledge which exists in the world at a particular time; and if the knowledge is defective to which the world has attained, religious beliefs must share in its defects. But, on the other hand, religion is something more than knowledge; it is also faith and communion, and these can be deep and true, even when the knowledge which provides their forms of expression is greatly mistaken. And when the forms of knowledge in which religion has clothed itself are found to be mistaken, religion has power to leave them behind and to adopt other forms, as the tree is clothed with fresh leaves in place of those which are withered. Yet it would be wrong to admit that even in its character as knowledge early religion was illusion and no more. The poetic faculty, the faculty which prompts us to find outside us what we feel to be within us and to assert its reality, led man right and not wrong. What he worshipped was not the bare object which met the eye and ear, but the thing as he conceived it. He conceived that there was without him that of which his inner consciousness bore witness, an ideal, a being not grasped by the senses, which could help him, with which he could hold intercourse, which had the power he himself had not. This, not the faulty outward expressions in which the sentiment clothed itself, was the living and growing element of his religion. In addition to the books cited in this chapter, we may mention-- C. Bötticher, _Der Baumkultus der Hellenen_, 1856. J. Ferguson, _Tree and Serpent Worship_, 1868. J. Ferguson, _Rude Stone Monuments in all Countries_, 1872. J. G. Fraser, _Totemism and Exogamy_, 4 vols. 1910. An immense collection of material on the subject of totemism, with fresh conclusions as to the origin and meaning of the system. CHAPTER V EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--PRACTICES In early religion it is important to remember that belief counted for much less than it now does; a man's religion consisted in the religious acts he did, and not in the beliefs or thoughts he cherished about his god. Worship, moreover, is that element of religion which in all ages and lands is apt to advance most slowly. Even in times of ferment of ideas and change of belief, we often see that the worship of a former time, be it simple or stately, goes on in its old forms, as if it were a thing that could not change. Men alter their beliefs more readily than their habits, especially the habits connected with their faith. If this is the case generally, it was much more the case in the early world than it is now. The religion of a shrine in old times consisted of a certain story about the god, and certain acts done before or near the object which represented him. There was no compulsion, however, to believe the story if a man did the acts or took part in them. As to his private beliefs no one inquired; if he took part in the proper acts of worship he counted as a religious man, unless he went so far as openly to flout the current opinions of his time. Nor were the acts which went to make up religion of an elaborate or difficult nature. No minute ritual regulated in early times the approaches to the deity; they were a matter of common knowledge, and were fixed not by law, which did not yet exist in any form, but by public custom and public opinion. The manner in which a god is to be served is known of course to his own people who dwell around him; others do not know it. The immigrants from Assyria had to send for a Hebrew to teach them the ritual of the God of Palestine, as they were on his ground and did not know the right way to worship Him (2 Kings xvii. 24 _sqq._). It is later that the rite becomes a mystery, known only to the professional guardian of the shrine or to the initiated few. Sacrifice is an invariable feature of early religion. Wherever gods are worshipped, gifts and offerings are made to them of one kind or another. It is in this way that, in antiquity at least, the relation with the deity was renewed, if it had been slackened or broken, or strengthened and made sure. Sacrifice and worship are in the ancient world identical terms. The nature of the offering and the mode of presenting it are infinitely various, but there is always sacrifice in one form or another. Different deities of course receive different gifts; the tree has its roots watered, or trophies of battle or of the chase are hung upon its branches; horses are thrown into the sea. But of primitive sacrifice generally we may affirm that it consists of such food and drink as men themselves partake of. Whether it be the fruit of the field or the firstling of the flock that is offered at the sacred stone, whether the offering is burnt before the god or set down and left near him, or whether he is summoned to come down from the sky or to travel from the far country to which he may have gone, it is of the materials of a meal that the sacrifice consists. In some cases it appears to be thought that the god consumes the offering, as when Fire is worshipped with offerings which he burns up, or when a fissure in the earth closes upon a victim; but in most cases it is only the spirit or finer essence of the sacrifice that the god enjoys; the rest he leaves to men. And thus sacrifice is generally accompanied by a meal. The offering is presented to the god whole, but the worshippers help to eat it. The god gets the savour of it which rises into the air towards him, while the more material part is devoured below. Every sacrifice is also a festival.[1] If this be the case it is unnecessary to spend much time in considering a number of theories formerly regarded with favour as to the original meaning and intention of sacrifice. The view that it is originally simply a bribe to the deity to induce him to afford some needed help, receives a good deal of countenance from primitive expressions. "_Do ut des_," "I give to thee that thou mayest give to me." "Here is butter, give us cows!" "By gifts are the gods persuaded, by gifts great kings." Was early sacrifice then simply a business transaction, in which man bringing a prayer to the deity brought a gift too, as he was accustomed to do to the great ones of the earth, in order that the deity might be well disposed towards him and grant his petition? Even if this was the case, if sacrifice were offered with the direct and almost the avowed intention of getting good value for it, yet if it takes the form of a meal, it is lifted above the most sordid form of bribery. There is a difference between slipping money into a man's hand and asking him to dinner, even if the object aimed at be in both cases the same; and when the invitations are numerous and formal, there must be a moral, not an immoral, relation between the two parties. Where the sacrifice is a meal, intercourse is sought for; a certain sympathy exists between worshipper and worshipped; they stand to each other not only in the relation of briber and bribed, buyer and seller, but in that of patron and client, or of father and son. [Footnote 1: Mr. Tylor (_Prim. Cult._ vol. ii. p. 397) states that "sacrifices to deities, from the lowest to the highest levels of culture, consist, to the extent of nine-tenths or more, of gifts of food and sacred banquets."] But granting that early sacrifice was for the most part a meal, an observance, with a social element in it, between the god and the worshipper, what was the object of this meal, what was the motive for holding it? In some cases it looks as if the intention had been to strengthen the god, and to make him more vigorous, so that he might be able to do what was wanted of him. In the Vedic hymns this motive undeniably is to be met with. The notion is by no means unknown in early thought, that not only does man need God, but that God is also dependent on man, and capable of being aided and encouraged. In rites which are not strictly sacrifices, we notice men seeking to sympathise with their gods in what the gods are doing, and to take a share in it by doing similar things themselves. The Christmas and Easter fires in pagan times connected with the worship of the sun, are examples of this, and many other instances might be cited. This, however, is not the principal motive of early sacrifice. All the incidents of it suggest that it is not merely a thing offered to the deity, but a thing in which man takes part; if it is a meal, it is one of which the god and the worshippers partake in common. In China the ancestors are invited to the family feast; their place is set for them; their share in the feast is placed before them. In the _Iliad_,[2] we have an account of a solemn religious act: after prayers the victims were slaughtered, choice slices were cut from them and cooked at the fire by the worshippers, who then ate and drank their fill; after this "all day long they worshipped the god with music, singing the beautiful pæan to Apollo, and his heart was glad to hear." In the Bible we know that the blood is poured out for the Deity, and in various sacrifices the parts He is to have are specified, while the rest is to be eaten by the priests. In the earlier sacrifices of the Hebrews there are no priests; those who present the sacrifice consume it after the act of presentation, and the occasion is one of mirth and jollity, as at a banquet (1 Sam. ix. 12, 13, and the following description; see also Exod. xxxii. 5, 6). In fact it is a banquet. This is specially plain in the sacrifices of the Semites, as Mr. Robertson Smith has shown. Early Semitic usage exhibits clearly how sacrifice was an act of communion, in which the god and his human family proclaimed and renewed their unity with each other. The details may differ in other races, but in general it may be said that early sacrifice was an act done not by an individual, though plenty of individual sacrifices are also to be met with, but by a tribe, in which all the partakers of the blood of the tribe took part before the god who was their common ancestor, and who, as it were, presided over and shared in their feast. In some cases of totem-clans the totem animal is sacrificed, and all the members of the clan eat their animal ancestor (only on such a solemn occasion could the totem be eaten), and so renew their bond of membership and brotherhood. A covenant is made by sacrifice, to which the deity and all the members of his people are parties. [Footnote 2: I. 457 _sqq._] To these primitive conceptions others no doubt should be added. The mood was not always the same which prevailed when the tribe renewed its union with its god; that depended on circumstances. In general the sacrifice of early days is a joyous thing, but to a fierce god cruel rites belonged. When cannibalism was practised it also was such a primitive sacrifice, and the most powerful means, no doubt, of cementing the union of the god with the members of the tribe. When the god was noted for suffering, a tragic tone prevailed, and the sacrifice might have a dramatic character and represent the leading incident in the history of the god. If we trace the history of sacrifice in any particular people we find two opposite tendencies at work in connection with it. On the one hand there is a disposition to smooth matters, to drop the harsher practices, to let an animal victim suffice where a man used to be sacrificed, to let the man off with some slight mutilation, such as circumcision; or to allow poor people to offer a less costly victim than the former custom claimed--the rite, in fact, becomes civilised, and adapts itself to the feelings of a humaner period. On the other hand there is a tendency to add to the value of the offerings, and to reckon the efficacy of sacrifice by its cost and painfulness. In periods of outward distress sacrifice attains a deeper earnestness, nothing is to be left undone, and no cost to be spared to bring the deity back to his people; darker customs which had become obsolete are revived again,[3] the ceremonial is made more elaborate, new kinds of sacrifice are introduced. The old social aspect of sacrifice grows faint; it becomes a propitiation or a trespass-offering; the notion is entertained that sacrifice is the more efficacious the more it has cost, or the more magnificent and awful its mode of presentation. [Footnote 3: An instance of human sacrifice has just taken place in a remote part of Russia.] Prayer is the ordinary concomitant of sacrifice; the worshipper explains the reason of the gift, and urges the deity to accept it, and to grant the help that is needed. The prayers of the earliest stage are offered on emergencies, and often appear to be intended to attract the attention of the god who may be engaged in another direction. The requests they contain are of the most primary sort. Food is asked for, success in hunting or fishing, strength of arm, rain, a good harvest, children, etc. The prayers have a ring of urgency; they state the claims the worshipper has on the god, and mention his former offerings as well as the present one; they praise the power and the past acts of the deity, and adjure him by his whole relationship to his people (and also to their enemies) to grant their requests. As life grows more secure, the note of immediate urgency fades out of prayer; being a feature not of an occasional worship arising from some pressing need, but of a worship statedly offered at set times, it tends to run into forms, and to become fixed and to have the nature of a liturgy. Then it comes about that the words themselves are regarded as sacred, and that the efficacy of the sacrifice is supposed to be partly dependent on them. They are incantations which the deity cannot resist,--charms which in themselves have virtue to secure the desired result. Sacred Places, Objects, Persons.--The early world had no temples, nor idols, nor priests. The worship of nature does not suggest the enclosing of a space for religious acts. The natural object itself being the sacred thing, worship is brought to it where it stands; the gift is carried to the tree or to the well, and if the deities are conceived as being above the earth, then the tops of hills are the spots where man can be nearest to them. High places are sacred in all lands. Groves and remote spots are also sacred. When man was carrying on his struggle with the wild beasts he would regard with terror the places where they had their lairs and strongholds; it was in this form that the feeling of mystery with which moderns regard places where they are cut off from all human intercourse, first appealed to man. After this earliest stage had passed, and the grove had come to be regarded as the dwelling of a deity, it became a place man did not dare to approach except with the necessary precautions. We may here explain a notion which plays a great part in early religion, but is not specially connected with any one institution of it, the notion, namely, of taboo. Taboo is a Polynesian term, and indicates that which man must not use or touch, because it belongs to a deity. The god's land must not be trodden, the animal dedicated to the god must not be eaten, the chief who represents the god must not be lightly treated or spoken of. These are examples of taboo where the inviolable object or person belongs to a good god, and where the taboo corresponds exactly with the rule of holiness.[4] But instances are still more numerous among savages of taboo attaching to an object because it is connected with a malignant power. The savage is surrounded on every side by such prohibitions; there is danger at every step that he may touch on what is forbidden to him, and draw down on himself unforeseen penalties. The nature of the early deities also excludes idolatry in connection with them; there is no need for a representation of a being who is visibly present, and can be extolled and worshipped in his own person. It was at a later stage, when the god came to be personified and separated in thought from his natural basis, that the need arose to make representations of him to aid the imagination. The stones of early religion are not idols. They are natural, not artificial stones; they are not images of the god, but the god himself, or at least that in which the divine spirit dwells,[5] or with which it associates itself for the purpose of worship. And, further, the earliest time knows no priests; there is no special class to whom alone the celebration of sacrifice is entrusted. It would be quite inconsistent with the whole view of sacrifice which then prevailed, to suppose that it could be done by proxy. It was a man's own act, by which he identified himself with his god and with his tribe, and that could only be done by a personal service. We often find kings and chiefs sacrificing. Agamemnon does so, Abraham and Saul do so, though the sacrifice of the latter is disapproved of by the priestly writer. David does so without being rebuked for it. The king or chief does this as the natural head of his clan; some one must take the leading part in the transaction. As religion is the principal part of politics, and the first business of the state is to keep itself right with the gods, the head of the state is its most natural representative on such an occasion. The head of a household also sacrifices for his house, not only to the spirits of the house, but in cases like that of Job, where there is no question of ancestor-worship. Early custom did not fix in any uniform manner by whose hands a sacrifice was to be made. [Footnote 4: _Religion of the Semites_, by W. R. Smith, p. 142, _sqq._] [Footnote 5: _Religion of the Semites_, by W. R. Smith, p. 192.] Magic.--In another direction, however, we see in the earliest times the growth of a class of persons with religious functions and attributes. While the ordinary worship of the gods does not require the services of any special class, there is everywhere found the man of special knowledge and gifts, to whom men resort for needs lying outside the scope of that worship. Every savage religion contains a certain amount of magic, of practices, that is to say, by which it is thought possible to influence or to foretell outward events. Early man is not limited in his views of what may happen by any accurate knowledge of natural laws, or of the sequence of cause and effect, and he imagines it possible to influence nature in various ways. He imitates what he supposes to be the causes of things, judging that the effect will also follow; or he uses such powers as he may have over spirits, to induce or compel them to accomplish his wishes; or he manipulates objects he believes to have a hidden virtue, in a way he believes calculated to bring about the desired result. Magic is thus related both to the cult of spirits and to that of casual objects, both to animism and to fetishism. There is generally a special person in a tribe who knows these things, and is able to work them. It may be the chief or king,--there are many instances in which the chief is believed to have power to bring rain,--or it may be a separate functionary, medicine-man, sorcerer, diviner, seer, or whatever name be given him. He has more power over spirits than other men have, and is able to make them do what he likes. He can heal sickness, he can foretell the future, he can change a thing into something else, or a man into a lower animal or a tree, or anything; he can also assume such transformations himself at will. He uses means to bring about such results; he knows about herbs, he has stones or other objects endowed with special virtues, he also has recourse to rubbing, to making images of affected parts of the body, and to various other arts. Very frequently he is regarded as inspired. It is the spirit dwelling in him which brings about the wonderful results; without the spirit he could not do anything. While the details of course vary infinitely in different tribes, the figure of the worker of magic is an essential feature of any general sketch of early religion. He is often a person of great political importance; being supposed to be in closer alliance than any one else with spiritual beings, he has a power which is much dreaded, and which even the chief cannot disregard. Of Sacred Seasons there can be but few in the earliest human life, when there is no fixed measure of time, nor any notion of regularity, but all depends on the occurrence of need and of danger. As soon as agriculture was engaged in, however, attention must have been fixed on the recurrence of the seasons, and the measures of time afforded by the moon must, at least, have been observed. The summer and the winter solstice, the equinoxes, the new moons, these were to the early cultivator epochs to be observed; and certain annual feasts are found to have come into use in very early times, epochs of man's simplest and earliest calendar, and occasions for tribal gatherings and for such fixed religious observances as we have described. A private religious emergency arising in the interval between two feasts is dealt with by means of a vow; the help of the deity, that is to say, is claimed at once, but the payment of the due consideration for it on man's part is deferred till the time of sacrifice comes round.[6] [Footnote 6: Genesis xxviii. 20; Judges xi. 30; 2 Sam. xv. 8.] Character of Early Religion.--We have now passed in review the principal observances and usages of primitive religion; but before concluding this chapter some remarks have to be made as to the position religion held in the life of ancient times, and as to the spirit and temper which it exhibited. In the first place, as we remarked above, religion was in these times the most important branch of the public service. Every uncommon occurrence had to be laid before the god, and no important step could be taken without consulting him; and it was a principal duty of the head of the state to keep the god on good terms with the tribe, and to apply to him for all the aid and protection the tribe required from him. In attending to this, however, the chief was acting for his tribesmen; where there was no chief these matters were not neglected, but were looked after by common spontaneous action by the members of the tribe. The god was their lord, their father, and they must always take him along with them. This identification of the god with the interests of his subjects is so close that the latter are troubled with no doubts as to whether or not their god is with them. If they observe the customary rules for cultivating his friendship, he must be with them; they never imagine that he can be estranged from them. It is the habitual attitude of early religion to take it for granted that the god goes with his people (he generally has no other people to go with) and helps them against their adversaries. To doubt this and to resort to sacrifices of atonement to bring him back from his estrangement is a later stage of religion. But if religion is in this way a public matter, a matter of the tribe and its concerns, what place is there in it for the individual? Individual cares and needs may form the subject of prayers and vows, but religion on the whole has to do with the tribe, not with the individual, or with the individual only as a member of the tribe. It is the duty of every one to take his part in the public approaches to the god; he must either do so or be cut off from his tribe. For his own griefs there is little comfort in the tribal worship; indeed, personal sorrows and perplexities meet with but little consideration in early religion. As the tribe is in no doubt of the goodwill of its god, and regards him as a firm ally not easily turned away, old religion has a confident and joyous air, strongly contrasting with the doubts and the contrition of modern faith. The acts of worship are feasts at which the members of the tribe rejoice and make merry before their god. To the delights of feasting those of dance and song are added ("The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play"), and frequently the merrymaking goes to the pitch of frenzy; the worshippers dance themselves into an ecstasy; they feel the god taking possession of them, and are hurried along by the sacred inspiration to behaviour they would not dream of at any other time. Early Religion and Morality.--How did this early religion bear upon morality? In how far was it a power for righteousness? There are two sides to this question. In the first place, the religion of the infant world was a strong influence for the restraint of individual excess. The god being the parent of the tribe, its customs had his sanction, he had no higher interest than its welfare, he was identified with all its enterprises, its battles were his battles also. The worship of the god therefore made strongly for loyalty to the tribe, and for the observance of its customs; it caused a man to forget his own interest where that of the tribe was concerned, and unhesitatingly to sacrifice himself for the public cause. But, on the other hand, primitive religion was an intensely conservative force; it subjected the whole life to the customs of the tribe, and discouraged spontaneity and independence in moral action. The duties it prescribed were of a conventional order; a man had no duties to those beyond his tribe, and to his fellow-tribesmen religion bade him rather walk by rule than consult his own feelings. Of the morality which consists in discipline and subordination to the community, early religion was an efficient school; to the higher morality, the law of which is found written in the heart, and which aims at rendering higher services than those of custom, it did not attain. The worship of the higher nature-powers, the heavenly powers of light and kindness, tending as it did to transcend the limits of place and of nationality, was destined powerfully to foster a more generous morality than that of the tribal worship, and this tendency was no doubt dimly felt by early man long before it was possible for him to follow it. CHAPTER VI NATIONAL RELIGION We now leave behind us the beliefs and practices of savage and barbarous tribes, and turn to those of mighty empires. The gulf which lies between these two parts of our subject is obviously a wide one; and in many instances there is no bridge by which the student can pass from one to the other. Often it is a matter of inference rather than of direct proof that the great systems are built out of the materials accumulated, as we have seen, in the prehistoric period. But the inference is sufficiently strong to rest upon; in some cases we are able to see quite clearly how the religion of the empire arose by an uninterrupted growth out of that of the tribe; and in the cases where this cannot be so fully made out, we yet judge that the result came about in a similar way. We pause therefore at this point to ask what is the nature of the transition at which we have arrived, or, in other words, what constitutes the difference between the primitive and the later religions? The difference is probably not one of magnitude only; it consists not merely in the fact that the religion of the empire is that of a much larger number of people than that of the tribe; there is a difference in character as well as in dimensions. With a view to the examination of this point it will be found convenient to consider some of the proposed classifications of religions, as most of these, though for different reasons, place the religions of the early world in a different category from those known to us historically. The old-fashioned Classification of Religions was that of the true and the false. This our principle forbids us to accept, since we regard the various faiths of the world as stages in the development of religion, and therefore all relatively true. Another division which has done good service is that into natural and revealed religion. By natural religion has generally been understood such religion as human reason could attain to without supernatural aid. But this description does not apply to any religious system that ever prevailed largely in any country; the actual religions have all been the work of custom and age-long tradition, not of the deliberate operation of reason. Natural religion therefore is a term which is of no use to us in classification; since none of the actual religions which we have to study answers to that title. Nor is revealed religion a term we can conveniently use in such a work as this. Many religions claim to be the result of revelation, but few make it at the outset of their career. The title tells us nothing about the original character of a religion, but only that at some period in its career the claim was made for it that its origin was supernatural. If we grouped the revealed religions together we might find that the members of the group had no similarity to each other beyond the accidental circumstance that the claim of revelation had been made for them. Besides, science cannot possibly take the revealed character of any religion for granted, but must examine each such faith to see if its growth cannot be accounted for without that assumption. The term "natural" religion has, however, other meanings than that just mentioned, and some of these we may find to be of more service. It is proposed to divide religions into "natural" and "positive," or into those which have grown up and those which have been founded. The earlier religions were not due to the personal action of outstanding individuals (at least if they were, as surely they must have been in part, the individuals and their struggles are unrecorded), but were the work of unconscious growth, and were produced by forces, which, as they were at work in every part of the early world, may be called natural. These religions do not appeal to the authority of any founder, but are borne forward by custom and tradition. Some of the later systems, on the contrary, bear the names of their founders, and are said to have been introduced into the world at a certain time and place. Their beginning is fixed, and they have a body of beliefs and practices which belong to their original constitution, and possess authority for all subsequent generations of believers. This classification promises well at first, but it is difficult to apply it; some religions pass imperceptibly from the stage of custom to that of statute, and in many religions both elements are so largely present that it is difficult to strike the balance between them. We are led to the conclusion that the real difference between the earlier and the later religions is a more vital one than any of these classifications would indicate. The authority and the positive character of the later systems is a symptom of the change which has produced them, but the change itself lies deeper. The higher form of religion is due to a great step which has been taken in civilisation; it is one of the features of the advance of society to a new stage. Rise of National Religion.--It is an immense step in human progress when a set of barbarous tribes unite to form a nation. Under the strong hand of some chief or under the pressure of some great necessity, they give up the isolation which is both the weakness and the strength of the tribal state of society, they choose some strong place for their centre, they submit to a common government, and while still remembering their separate tribal traditions and usages, they learn to act as members of a greater community than the tribe. This is the beginning of civilisation proper. Law takes the place of custom; the state undertakes to punish crime, and private vengeance is discouraged; the state also undertakes the protection of the weak, so that humane sentiment appears, and a security is engendered in which the arts and sciences can spring up and flourish. When this takes place a new type of religion also makes its appearance. While each of the tribes may long retain its own gods, and its peculiar rites, some one god, perhaps the god of the strongest tribe, assumes a higher position than the rest; his worship becomes the central religion of the community, round which the other worships arrange themselves by degrees, until there comes to be a system embracing them all, but itself possessing a new character. In this way a national religion comes into existence. The details of this process are in every case beyond our observation. It is not perhaps for centuries after the national religion has come into operation, that reflection is turned towards it; not till the art of writing has come to some perfection is it described and formulated and made statutory; and by that time all accurate memory of its beginnings has faded away, and its origin is explained instead by a set of legends. But though its beginnings, like all beginnings, are obscure, the national religion is there. It has its history; the great man who brought the tribes together, or who first devised for them a higher form of worship, is remembered as its founder; the foundation is ascribed to the inspiration of the chief god himself; its sacred forms are written down and obtain the force of divine laws, the will of the deity is a thing clearly known and expressed in positive terms. It is not asserted that this description will apply to the origin of all the national religions; the character and the circumstances of one nation differ from those of another, and it need not be supposed that they all reached their state worships in the same way. Some religions have become national by conquest rather than growth; while some which may truly be called national never attained to any national organisation. The process we have described, however, may be regarded as the typical one for the rise of a national out of tribal religions, and indicates to us what we may regard as the real and substantial difference between the stage with which we have been occupied and that to which we are now to turn. All other differences between the prehistoric and the historical religions may be traced to this one. Before the religion of a nation has systematised its doctrine and its ritual so as to merit the name of positive, before it has provided itself with a detailed ritual or a fixed creed, or a regular priesthood, or a set of sacred books, the momentous step has already been taken, the new form of religious consciousness has appeared. Men have begun to believe not only in the tribal but in the national god or gods, and a national religion has come into existence. The advance from tribal to national worship is one of the most momentous in the whole history of religion. The nature of the change involved in it may be summed up as follows. 1. Men obtain a Greater God than they had before. Formerly a man believed in the god of his tribe, one deity among many, as his tribe was one among many, each having its own god; but now he comes to know a god who is higher than the other tribal gods, as the king whom the tribes have united to obey is greater than the tribal chiefs. The god stands at a greater distance than before from the worshipper; familiarity is lessened, and religion becomes capable of a deeper reverence and adoration. Although the worship of the tribal god is still kept up, yet if the new-born national consciousness is strong, the national form of religion rather than the tribal will determine the religious sentiment of the individual. 2. New Social Bond.--The nature of the social force exerted by religion is altogether changed. In tribal religion the tie of the worshippers both to their god and to each other is that of blood; the god is their common lineal ancestor, whose blood is in the veins of all the tribesmen. The social bond supplied by such a religion is limited to the members of the tribe; a man's fellow-tribesmen are his brothers, but all other men are his enemies; with them he is at war as his god is. Social duty is a matter of blood relationship, and extends only to the kindred. When a national religion is arrived at, a social obligation of a new kind will evidently make its appearance. The national god is related by blood to only one of the tribes composing the nation; the bond between him and the other tribes must be of another nature. He has conquered their gods or they have voluntarily accepted him as their chief god; in any case it is not the tie of blood that binds them to him, but some more ideal tie, like that between a king and his subjects, or between a patron and his clients. And they now have a religious connection also with men who are not their kindred. The national worship is inconsistent with the gross materialism of the system of kinship, and places instead of it the belief in a god further above the world, and therefore more spiritual, and obligations to men which, as they are not derived from a common blood, are somewhat more purely moral. 3. A Better God.--The new god of the nation as he is higher above the world is a being of higher and better character. He belongs to all the tribes, and is not the mere partisan of any; like the king, he is above tribal jealousies, and is interested in checking the violence of all, and securing justice to all. He may be appealed to by those who have suffered violence and who have no earthly helper; and thus he tends to become an ideal of justice and fatherly kindness, and to reflect in the world above the sentiments springing up in the world below, in favour of the repression of violence and the administration of even-handed justice. In these directions the religion of the nation tends to rise above that of the tribe. The tribal worships may continue almost as they were, the tribal gods may still be worshipped, the tribal jealousies and conflicts still be carried on in spite of the new union, and all the superstitions of early religion may long survive; yet a new religious force has appeared which will in time produce a complete new system. The true principle of classification, therefore, must be drawn from the difference between tribal and national religion, as this is the most vital difference, and that from which all the others which we mentioned may be derived. The transition thus sketched took place at widely different periods in different parts of the world; it began early and has taken place even in modern times, while very many tribes in various parts of the globe have not yet arrived at it. It is a transition of which it is manifestly impossible to exhibit the detail; in most cases the detail is not known, and it were a profitless task to trace how primitive religions met, united or remained apart, and how their crossings in one case led to a national religion, and in many others led to no such result. Much, no doubt, is to be found on such points in special works, and much still remains to be discovered. Various instances of the formation of national religions will meet us in our subsequent chapters. The Inca Religion.--We give, however, at this point an example of the transition we have described, drawn from a quarter remote from the great movements of history, and in which the facts are plain and uncontested. Of the two great civilised communities of the New World, discovered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, Mexico presents a worship compounded of many elements, which, along with high and lofty morality and great magnificence of ritual, yet retains an extraordinary amount of cruelty and savage horror. In Peru, however, we find a state religion which superseded savage cults still remembered in the country, and from the _Royal Commentaries of the Incas_, written by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in the beginning of the seventeenth century,[1] we are able to describe the religion of Peru both before and after the Inca reformation. [Footnote 1: Printed by the Hakluyt Society.] "Before the Incas," this writer tells us, "each province, each nation, and each house had its own gods, different from one another, for they thought that a stranger's god could not attend to them but only their own." They worshipped all manner of deities; of these are mentioned herbs, plants, flowers, all kinds of trees, high hills, great rocks, and the chinks in them; caves, pebbles, emeralds. They also worshipped animals; the tiger, the lion, and the bear for their fierceness, and the monkey for his cunning; these they did not kill, but went down on the ground to worship them and would even suffer themselves to be devoured by them, since they regarded these animals as their own ancestors. All kinds of animals they treated in this way; there was not an animal, how filthy and vile soever, so the quaint words tell us, they did not look on as a god. Other Indians, again, worshipped things from which they derived benefit, such as great fountains and rivers; some worshipped the earth, and called it mother, because it yielded their fruits; some the sea, calling it Mamacocha; and a great number of other objects of adoration are mentioned. They sacrificed animals and maize, but also men and women, and these not only captives taken in war but also their own children, smearing the idol with the blood. (In other quarters of the globe this is a symbolic act showing that the idol and the worshippers all partake in the same life.) Some tribes were fiercer than others, and practised cannibalism more extensively. They were also well provided with sorcerers and witches. All this the Incas altered. They were a princely family, regarding whose origin and accession to power various legends are told; the god they worshipped was the sun, and they considered and called themselves the children of the sun. Their father the sun, they said, had sent their forefathers to teach the tribes various things they very much needed to learn; to cultivate the fields, to breed flocks, to live in peace, to respect the wives and daughters of others, and to have no more than one wife. The Incas knew better, it was said, than the rest how to choose a god, and they declared that men should worship the sun, who gave light and heat and made things grow; they should be grateful for his benefits, and he would reward them if they were obedient. The Indians accordingly took the sun for their god "without father or brothers"; they considered the moon to be his sister and wife, but did not worship her. Besides this, we hear the Incas sought a supreme god, and called him "Pachacamac," that is "soul of the world." This being gave life to the world and supported it, but they did not build temples to him or offer him any sacrifice; they worshipped him in their hearts as an unknown god. The practice of the Inca religion as described to us by several Spanish writers falls a good deal short of this doctrine. Many beings were worshipped besides the sun; a number of prayers were addressed to the Creator and the sun and thunder. Many sacred objects also were adored, such as embalmed bodies of ancestors and various idols. They practised all kinds of magic, and, worst of all, many boys and girls were offered in sacrifice, even before the Incas and on great public occasions. The reformation of the Incas is evidently not complete; if it had not been arrested by the arrival of the Spaniards it may be that the purifying agency of the new religion would have found much still to do. Enough, however, is seen to afford strong confirmation of the principle that religion gains infinitely in elevation when a national worship appears. The Incas were no doubt the heads of a tribe which had conquered others, and imposed its religion on them. The lesser conquered worships do not die out at once, but continue along with the central one. But the latter expresses the national spirit and aspirations; and, as settled life fosters the growth of intelligence and of public spirit, the central worship must more and more supersede the others, while itself casting off its superstitious and backward elements and becoming reasonable and elevating. It will be convenient to indicate at this stage the further line of study to be followed in this volume. As it is our aim to trace, however inadequately, the growth of the religion of the world as a whole, it is necessary that we should confine ourselves to those parts of religious history which lie in the line of that growth, or which serve in a conspicuous manner to illustrate the principles according to which it has taken place. It is by no means our purpose to give an account of all the religions of the world, nor do we seek to form a complete magazine of the curious phenomena with which this vast field of study is in every part so well supplied. If we have interposed the foregoing brief account of the religion of the Incas, it is not because of its own intrinsic importance, but because it supplies within so brief a compass such an apt example of that process which occurs so often in the growth of religion, by which the unorganised rites of a multitude of clans and families give way when the nation comes into being, to the higher and better religion of the state. In the same way the great religions of which we must next speak have, no doubt, only a loose connection with the central line of the world's religious progress. No work professing to deal ever so cursorily with our subject could omit to deal with the religion of China nor with that of Egypt; yet neither of these faiths perhaps has permanently enriched the religious consciousness of mankind. The religion of Babylonia, with which each of these is connected, was also of isolated and independent growth, and is far away from us both in time and in historical connection. Like great and solitary mountains of ancient formation, each on a continent distant from ours, these faiths attract us not because we depend on them, but because they are interesting in themselves. It was out of the same jungle of primitive beliefs and rites, out of which our own religion has at length grown, that each of these lifted its head to such heights as it attained. After disposing of these great systems we come to the developments, much later in point of time, which have led to the highest religion yet attained. And here two great races or groups of peoples have to be considered, each in its own way singularly gifted and each contributing in a distinctive manner to the growth of religion. These are the Semitic and the Indo-European families. Under each of these heads we find several well-marked religions; and the nature of the case itself points out our further procedure. Taking up first the Semitic group,--including Islam,--since this part of the subject lies at a greater distance from ourselves, we shall inquire whether there is any common element in the various religions it comprises, or, in other words, if there is a Semitic religion which may be regarded as the origin from which the Semitic religions alike sprang, and which gave them a common character; and we shall then proceed to discuss the Semitic religions each by itself. We shall then discuss the common belief of the Aryans, and go on to the religions of the more important Aryan nations. Our last chapters will deal with Christianity and will point out the nature of development which our study as a whole may have taught us to recognise in the religion of mankind. BOOKS RECOMMENDED On the classification of Religions see Tiele's article on "Religion" in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, Ninth Edition. Alb. Reville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru. _Hibbert Lectures_, 1884. De la Saussaye, Third Edition, pp. 5-16, gives a good conspectus of the various classifications which have been proposed. PART II ISOLATED NATIONAL RELIGIONS CHAPTER VII BABYLON AND ASSYRIA The religion of Babylonia, of which that of Assyria is a late form, as the Assyrians appropriated all they could of the religion and the literature of this southern empire which they conquered, cannot be classed along with any other without some inconvenience. In point of remoteness in time it takes precedence even of the religions of China and of Egypt; like these great faiths it also is, in its earlier stage, a growth by itself in a land and people of its own, where apparently it grew up independently from rude beginnings. It is undoubtedly one of the Semitic religions; but it had a character of its own which other Semitic religions did not share, and of the simple and early Semitic religious attitude which will be set forth in another chapter it retained but little. It had an immense influence. Its ideas entered the religion of the Old Testament by several roads. Abram came to Canaan through Haran from Ur of the Chaldees; and in Canaan the religious ideas, myths, and legends of Babylon must have been well known. The discovery of this code of Hammurabi has shown that many of the laws of Moses were laws of Babylonia long before Moses. In a later period the tread of Babylonian soldiery was heard in Palestine many a time before the great captivity, in which Israel sat down and wept remembering Zion by the waters of Babylon. In Greece also we find that ideas which came from Babylon had become known, by way of Phenicia, at a very early period. Recent discoveries, however, seems to make it impossible to assign to the religion of Mesopotamia any other place than the first among the great faiths of the world. The ancient connection between Mesopotamia and Egypt, surmised till now rather than known, is coming to light, and it appears, at least, possible that the first of these countries may have to be regarded as the source of all the civilisations of antiquity. The pantheon of Egypt has striking similarities to that of Babylonia, and some of the Egyptian temples show traces of derivation from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. The similarities in the case of China are not so marked, but they are substantial. In Babylonia, therefore, we may be dealing not with one of three isolated religions, but with the mother of the other two. If, as Mr. Lockyer holds,[1] Egypt borrowed astronomy from Babylon in connection with temple-building, more than 5000 years B.C., the religion of Babylon must indeed be carried far into the past. [Footnote 1: _Dawn of Astronomy_, 1894.] People and Literature.--Certain parts of Babylonian religion are much ruder and more superstitious than the exalted star-worship which is its central feature, and these have been ascribed to peoples who dwelt in Babylonia before the supposed Semitic conquest, viz. the Accadians in the north and the Sumerians to the south, peoples not related to the Semites in blood or in language, but generally called Turanian, and thought to be perhaps akin to the Chinese. The cuneiform writing which remained in use for millenniums after the Semitic immigration as the sacred literary form, was supposed to have been the invention of these peoples, who had also made some progress in plastic art. There is, however, no direct evidence of the alleged early Semitic invasion, and the Sumerian hypothesis of which it is a feature is now regarded by some with less confidence. It is based on linguistic phenomena. Hammurabi, 2250 B.C., reigned over a realm whose subjects were of different tongues, and entrusted his records to two methods of writing. The old Sumerian language, which cannot, in the opinion of the best scholars, be shown to have affinity with any language of the ancient world, came to be confined to matters of religion and magic, and was superseded by the Assyro-Babylonian, which was Semitic. But the feeble ray of the Sumerian hypothesis can be dispensed with in the light which is shining on ancient Babylonia from other quarters. For its information about that ancient land the world was formerly dependent on the scanty notices of Greek and Latin writers, but within the last half-century astonishing new sources of information have been opened up. Explorations carried on by scholars of many lands have made us acquainted with Babylonian and Assyrian temples and palaces, and with many a great royal inscription. Great libraries, made of brick tablets, have been discovered buried under the ruins of the cities, and the gradual decipherment and arrangement of this old literature is proceeding as fast as able and devoted workers can overtake it. Those who know the subject best declare that no complete history of Babylonian religion can yet be written. The texts now in our possession embody many documents of much more remote age, yet the information is as yet too fragmentary and often of too doubtful interpretation, while the proportion it bears to the whole of Babylonian life is too little known to supply a solid foundation for history. With this caution we proceed to state the results which are considered likely to prove well founded. As we saw, several features remain in the religion in later times which appear to throw light back upon its early condition, and it may be best to begin with these before describing the noble structure presented on the whole by this religion. 1. Worship of Spirits.--The Babylonians, like the Chinese, believed the world to be thickly peopled with spirits of all kinds; and saw in each movement in nature the action of a "zi" or spirit. These spirits could be to some extent controlled; though their character was not known, yet certain charms and incantations were believed to have power over them, and communication with the unseen world took, therefore, the form of magic. The earliest portions of the sacred literature consist of spells or charms believed to possess this virtue, and these were never displaced from the collection; on the contrary, new spells were written even after higher spiritual beings were known and more ethical forms of addressing them had been devised. Especially were all pains and diseases ascribed to the agency of spirits or of sorcerers and witches, their human allies, and the sick person naturally sent for an exorcist to expel the spirit which was tormenting him. Some spirits were more powerful than others, and the stronger spirit was invoked to rebuke and drive out the weaker. The spirit of heaven and the spirit of earth were adjured to conjure the plague-demon, the demon who was afflicting the eye, the heart, the head, or any other part of the body. Assertions are not wanting in the cuneiform literature that beliefs and practices of this kind formed no part of the true religion of Babylonia, and some scholars regard it as a late degeneration. The analogy of similar cases points, however, to the conclusion that magic is everywhere an early form of religion which is only overshadowed, not killed, when a great religion arises, and which tends to reappear. It may be said that there is no evidence of any break in Babylonian religion; if the Sumerians yielded to the Semites, this led to no religious revolution; the religion is Semitic from first to last. 2. Animals.--A step above this trafficking with spirits is the worship of animals, which Mr. Sayce considers to have been an early form of Babylonian religion, and to afford an explanation of various features in it. Like the gods of Egypt and those of Greece, many of the gods of Babylon have animal emblems; this appears both in the representations of them and in their legends. The winged bulls and eagle-headed men of Babylonian art represent the same rise of the gods which we know to have taken place in Egypt, from the animal to the semi-human, and then to the fully human form. An intermediate stage in Babylonia is that the god stands on the back of the animal with which presumably he was formerly identified. We have an Assyrian Dagon whose head and shoulders are covered with a fish's skin; we have gods and goddesses who are human figures with the exception of their wings; we have winged dragons; we have the great bulls with human head and wings which stood as guardian deities to ward off evil spirits at the portal of a palace. The following animals were also connected with gods: the antelope, the serpent, which came to be the embodiment of cunning and wickedness, the goat, the pig, the vulture. We thus see that the rise from zoomorphism to anthropomorphism which the Greeks afterwards carried to the highest point attainable by the resources of art, began in Babylonia. Like all early religions, that of Babylonia is broken up into a multiplicity of local worships. There is no common system, but each place has its own god or gods and its own sacred rites. In Egypt we shall find reason to believe that this state of matters had its origin in an early totemistic arrangement of society; whether the same was the case in Babylonia or not, it is vain to speculate. Babylonian religion as we see it has risen far above the direct worship of animals. Each god comes before us in a certain local connection and with a special character, but they tend to grow like each other, and their worship is organised on the same plan. The gods of Babylonia undoubtedly belonged to different towns, and though attempts were made in later times to bring them all together in an imperial Babylonian religion, and to settle their relations to each other, these attempts led to no system which was finally accepted. The number of the recognised great gods varied, and there was always a large number of minor gods. Each god has his own early history; here as everywhere it is the case that the individual gods are earlier than the system which seeks to connect them together. The Great Gods.--The great gods of Babylonia belong to the elements and to the heavenly bodies. When we first see them, they are not, like the gods of the western Semites, lords and masters, characters taken from human families; they are not husbands and fathers but creators and universal powers. Another mark about them is that they have originally no wives. When they come to have wives, these are simply doubles of themselves with no special character. A consort is given to the god by adding a feminine termination to his name, thus Bel receives Belit, Anu has Anat. Finally Babylonian religion is more and more directed to the heavenly bodies. It is Astral religion carried to its furthest point. This fixed the arrangement of its temples, the occupations of its priests. We rapidly pass in review the principal Gods. One of the oldest is Ea of Eridu, a town which stood in old times at the head of the Persian Gulf. He is a god of the deep, whether it was that he was considered to have come over the water from another land, or whether he is connected with the belief which was held in Babylonia as elsewhere, that all things originally arose out of the abyss. In later forms of the legend his name appears as Oannes, and he is an amphibious being, half-fish, half-man, who rises from the deep and instructs men in arts and sciences. Works were preserved bearing his name, for he was an author. He continues, even when little direct worship is addressed to him, one of the greatest of the gods. Ana the sky, is the god of Erech on the lower Euphrates. Like the Chinese, the men of Erech regarded the sky itself as the highest god, and the maker and ruler of all things. In Babylonia, however, the notion became spiritualised more than in China; at first we hear that his dwelling became the refuge of the gods during the Deluge, but in later times he is regarded as a being quite above heaven and all created beings, and even all the gods. A third great god is Bel of Nippur, not the later Bel of Babylon, but an older one, identical with the Accadian Mullilla, the lord of the under-world. The earliest gods of this religion are those of the sea, the earth, and the sky. As they belong to different districts of the country, they can scarcely be called a trinity. A better approach to a trinity is formed by Ea of Eridu, Davkina his wife who is the earth, and the sun-god Dumuzi, their offspring. The son of Ea, also named Miri-Dugga or Merodach (Marduk), is identified with the Egyptian Osiris; they have the same symbol, each is a sun-god, and each has a sister who is also his wife, Merodach has Istar, and Osiris, Isis. In Sergul the principal deity was the fire-god, sometimes called Savul; in Cutha they worshipped Nergal the god of death, the "strong one" who had his throne beneath. Cutha was a favourite place of sepulture with the Babylonians. Rimmon was a god of wind, Matu of storms. There is a dragon Tiamat, with whom the great gods have to contend. The sun and the moon were worshipped everywhere; each city had its own sun-god and its own moon-god. The preference generally shown by nomads for the moon, since their journeys are made by night, is kept up in early Babylonia, where the moon-god is regarded as the father of the sun-god, and as the greater being. In Ur of the Chaldees the moon was the principal deity. There were also towns such as Larsa and Sippara, where the sun was the chief god; and many of the great gods of later times were originally sun-gods. The Chaldeans, moreover, were proverbially star-watchers, and a "zigurrath" or observatory, a building of seven spheres corresponding to those of the planets as they pass through the signs of the zodiac, and like them rising up to the seat of God at the North Star, was a regular part of the later Babylonian temple. To Babylonia is due the practice of the orientation of temples; that is to say, the arrangement of the building in such a way that its principal axis shall point exactly in a desired direction. Some of the Babylonian temples were oriented so that the sun should shine to the western end of them on the day of the spring equinox when the inundation of the rivers began on which the prosperity of the country so much depended. The temple was thus an astronomical instrument of a high degree of accuracy, and the priests who directed its building and served in it when built were men of science and learning. A religion which is connected with the heavenly bodies, though it does not fully supply the needs of the lower orders and has too little energy to cope with superstition, tends to produce a priesthood who form centres of enlightenment and civilisation throughout the country. This was in the highest degree the case in Babylonia. To these old astronomers the world owes the signs of the zodiac, which were fixed not later than in the fifth millennium B.C., and in which we see how early man beheld in the nightly heavens the creatures which on earth he regarded as divine, so that he worshipped them in both regions. The institution of the Sabbath is also Babylonian; whether it was connected with the changes of the moon, or with a week of days named after the seven planets, is not certain. Seven is a sacred number in Babylonia, as we find in many a connection. Mythology.--We come lastly, in our attempt to enumerate those parts of Babylonian religion which have entered deeply into human thought, to the myths. The heroic legends and romances are the most interesting and the best-known portions of the newly-recovered literature. We have already noticed some fragments of mythology, such as the story of the fish-god who comes up daily from the sea, the moon being the father of the sun, and the family history of Ea and Davkina, with the sun their child. The two latter are evidently inconsistent with each other. But the story about the son of Ea and Davkina has an important further development. His name is Duzu or Dumuzu, and he is the Tammuz of whom we hear in the Bible (Ezekiel viii. 14), who is adored by women raising lamentations for him. He is said to be the sun-god of spring, to whom the heat of summer is fatal, and who dies in June. It is when moisture is failing from the ground that he is bemoaned. His home is in Eden, for Eden belongs to Babylonian legend, which places it near Eridu. There grows the great world-tree which the gods love; it rises from the centre of the world, and is nourished from springs which Ea himself replenishes. It is a cedar (Yggdrasil, the ash-tree, we shall find, occupies the same position with the Northern Teutons); it is sometimes found in a highly conventional form with the figure of a cherub at each side of it, each of whom holds in his hand a fruit. In this tree scholars recognise both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge with which we are familiar. The knowledge of the priests in Babylonia was not for every one, but was jealously guarded, and kept for the initiated alone. From Tammuz we naturally pass to Istar, one of the few goddesses of old Babylonia, and by far the most famous of them. Istar was originally the goddess of the earth, and both mother and sister of the sun-god, for we are led to believe that she is at first the same as Davkina. The great myth of the descent of Istar describes how she goes down to the kingdom of the shades to seek the waters that shall give life again to her bridegroom Tammuz. The poem in which the narrative is preserved gives a description of the "house of darkness, where they behold no light," and then tells how, at the orders of Ninkigal or Allat, queen of Hades, Istar is deprived, successively, in spite of her remonstrances, of all her ornaments, and how the plague-demon Namtar is bidden to strike her with all manner of diseases. The result of Istar's disappearance under the earth is that all love and courtship cease both among men and the lower animals, and Ea himself is appealed to, to bring to an end so unnatural a state of affairs. A messenger is sent to the lower regions to cause the release of Istar and the reascent of Tammuz. This goddess, however, is known not only from this legend; she has many forms, and passed through various fortunes. The Istar of Erech herself lures Tammuz to his destruction. In early times Istar is also the evening star, the bright companion of the moon. Her leading character, however, seems to be that of a goddess of love. Fertility depends on her; she goes under the earth to find her lover. In this character she attracted in Babylonia a worship noted for impurity, which under the name of Ashtoreth is found also in Phenicia and in Syria. There is also, however, a warlike Istar, a strict goddess served by Amazons, and capable of identification with the Greek Artemis, as the Istar of love is identified with Aphrodite. Much more primitive than the legend of Istar are some parts of the Babylonian accounts of the creation. There are several of these accounts, some newly discovered. In one the old god Ea peoples the original chaos with a variety of strange monsters. In another the birth of the gods is narrated as well as that of the world; we find also that chaos is itself conceived as a female monster, a dragon of evil, and the god has to do battle with this power of darkness and evil, and to bring light and the habitable world up from its realm. It is certainly true that the Babylonian legends of the creation are crude and inconsistent with each other, and that the account in Genesis belongs to a much higher order of thought. The Babylonian account of the deluge and the ark is more closely parallel to the Bible narrative; the two cannot possibly be independent of each other, and there may be no impropriety in holding that the Hebrew writers were acquainted with myths of general diffusion in the world they lived in. The State Religion.--The Babylonian and Assyrian religion of which we hear in the Bible (_cf._ Isa. xl.-lxvi.) is the splendid worship of mighty empires; it has forgotten its humble beginnings, and under the guidance of large priestly and learned corporations has grown much in depth and purity. Of its outward magnificence the monuments furnish ample proof. The temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was a wonder of the world. Being the god of the prevailing city of the empire, Merodach was the greatest of all the gods, and was reverenced and extolled as befitted the friend and patron of the greatest of monarchs. His son Nebo was a prophet and a god of wisdom. What Merodach was to Babylon, Assur was to Assyria; in fact, he was the only god peculiar to Assyria. The rule that as religion grows in outward splendour it also gains in inward strength and spirituality is strikingly exemplified in the case before us. The gods have come to be moral powers, who really care for men, not only for the king, their earthly representative, but for their worshippers in general. Merodach is praised for his mercy; he not only accompanies the king in his wars, of which the inscriptions give us so many a wearisome catalogue, but he heals the sick, he brings relief to him who is mourning for his transgressions, and he brings life out of death and receives the soul committed to his mercy to a blessed dwelling above. Perhaps we pass here somewhat beyond the early period of the religion and touch on its ultimate phase. The penitential hymns of the later literature form a strong contrast to the magical incantations, which fill so much space in the Babylonian sacred literature. The confessions they contain are not very spiritual; the supplicant bewails his sufferings rather than his sins. Indeed, he rather infers from his sufferings that he has sinned, trodden, it may be, where he ought not to have trodden, or eaten what he should not have eaten, than confesses that he deserved to suffer for sins of which he is aware. What is implored is outward redress or ease, not inward peace. The removal of outward ills is taken as forgiveness. There can be no comparison between these hymns and those of the Bible. But what they do show is the rise in Babylonia of a religion for the individual. The gods are sought not only officially by the state or for state ends, but by the individual. They are believed to have regard to individual sufferings; and the friends of a dying person believe that the gods care for and will receive his soul. Our knowledge of the religion of these lands is too imperfect to admit of wide conclusions being drawn from it. We know what the higher religion of Babylonia was; and we also see that the higher worship never entirely prevailed in this land; the god, like Bel or Assur, who bore the character of a human over-lord, never drove out the old set of spirits, nor brought the service of them to an end. As in the case of Egypt, so here the attempts made in the direction of a pure and spiritual worship met with no ultimate success. Babylon and Assyria never came so near to Monotheism as did Egypt three millenniums before Christ. Nabonidos, the last king of Babylon, collected all the gods together in his capital, and endeavoured to organise them in a system under Merodach as their head; but this led to religious discord rather than to peace, since the minor deities vehemently resented the removal of their images from their accustomed shrines, and were understood to refuse their aid to the state on the new conditions. The religion of Babylon was too much broken up into independent local cults to admit of such a unification. The highest that was reached was that one great god was adored in one city, another in another, with some depth and spirituality. To nations which had attained a higher faith, that of Babylon appeared to be an idolatrous worship of many gods. That is a harsh judgment. This religion also had life in it and advanced from a lower to a higher stage; from a timid trafficking with spirits to a service of gods who were ideal heads of human communities, and friends of individual men. It was not a mere system, as the world has been accustomed to think, of astrology and of divination of other kinds. But when Babylon and Assyria ceased to be independent powers, and became provinces of Persia, Bel bowed down and Nebo stooped, not to rise again. The world of that day had no need of them. It had already attained in more than one country to a higher religion than that of these deities. BOOKS RECOMMENDED The Histories of Antiquity, viz.-- Maspéro, _Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient_. Duncker, _The History of Antiquity_, from the German, by Evelyn Abbott. Rawlinson, _The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World: Chaldea, Assyria, Babylonia, Media, and Persia_. Ed. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, 1884. The first volume embraces the History of the East to the foundation of the Persian Empire. Schrader, _Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament_, 1903. Hilprecht, _Old Babylonian Inscriptions_ chiefly from Nippur, 1893. _Records of the Past_, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11. Sayce's _Hibbert Lectures_, 1887. Tiele, _Egyptische en Mesopotamische Godsdiensten_. Jastrow, _The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria_, 1898. The most complete account of the whole subject. Jastrow, "Religion of Babylonia," in _Dictionary of the Bible_, vol. v. Jastrow, "On the Religion of the Semites," in _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. i. p. 225, _sqq._ F. Jeremias in De la Saussaye, pp. 246-347. Bezold, _Niniva and Babylon_, 1903. E. H. W. Johns, _The Oldest Code of Laws in the World_, 1903. "On the Code of Hammurabi." E. H. W. Johns, in _Dictionary of the Bible_, vol. v. CHAPTER VIII CHINA The Chinese have always been a world in themselves, remote from other races of men; yet they developed a civilisation which is in many respects worthy to be compared with that of India or of the West. The people who made gunpowder and paper and who printed books, long before any of these things were done in Europe, might naturally think themselves the foremost nation of the earth. Their civilisation, however, has exercised no influence on the world outside of China, nor has it advanced to the higher achievements of the human mind. As their great wall secludes them from other nations, so do their mental habits prevent them from a free interchange of ideas with foreigners. The Mongolian race, indeed, from which, like the Hungarians and the Finns, they are descended, is so different from other races in many respects that some anthropologists suppose it to have a separate origin. Phlegmatic and matter-of-fact by nature, exact and careful in practical matters, and to a high degree imitative and industrious, the Chinese are singularly devoid of imagination and indisposed to philosophy. Their monosyllabic and uninflected language, belonging to one of the earliest strata of human speech, and ill fitted to express abstract or poetical ideas, is an index to their whole nature. If an awakening, as various signs appear to indicate, is now at hand for them, no one can tell how fast it will proceed, or what the final issue of it may be. China has at present three religions, all recognised by the state and represented in every part of the country--viz. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. For our purpose the first of these is very much the most important, as Taoism, originally a philosophy, quickly degenerated into a system of magic, and Buddhism is imported into China, and has to be spoken of elsewhere. Confucianism, being the direct descendant of the old state religion of China, is the native growth of the mind of the nation. Like the Chinese language, the state religion belongs to a very early formation, and presents the symptoms of a development which was rapid at first but was early arrested. History of China.--Legend goes back to very remote antiquity and tells in a shadowy way of the arrival of the Chinese from the West (which scholars are agreed in regarding as a fact), and of early potentates, patterns to all their successors, who treated the people as their children, and invented for them the arts on which life in China most depends. History proper begins about 2000 B.C., though the Chinese had the art of writing a thousand years before that. Researches, however, which are now being made by several scholars, seem likely to lead to the conclusion that China received at least the seeds of civilisation and some religious ideas from Mesopotamia. That Chinese religion resembles in some respects that of Babylonia was mentioned in the last chapter. In a work like this and in the present state of knowledge it is necessary to deal with the religion of China as an isolated one. When the history of the country opens, the character, manners, and institutions of the people are already fixed. They are already civilised and have an organised religion, though how all this came about we cannot tell. The early kings are men of piety, inventors of arts, and authors of fundamental maxims of policy; but as time went on the kings grew worse and lost the affections of their people. In the twelfth century B.C. the Chow dynasty came into power and gave China some of its best rulers, but it also soon fell off; the country broke up into a number of separate feudal principalities over which the central government lost all control, and in the sixth century Confucius is found wandering from one independent state to another. This confusion led in the third century B.C. to the displacement of the Chow by the Tsin dynasty. Shi-Hoang-Ti, fourth ruler of this line, one of the strongest rulers China ever had, assumed the title of Universal Emperor. He beat back the enemies of China beyond the frontier, began the building of the great wall, and broke down the power of the feudal rulers. It was found, however, that the feudal system still lived in the affections of the people, and as it was the religious books which mainly kept the past in veneration, the emperor ordered their destruction and enforced the edict with great rigour. The House of Han, however, which replaced that of Tsin in 206 B.C., recovered the ancient literature of the country from the hiding-places where copies of the books had been preserved, and established in accordance with them the very conservative constitution which has lasted to this day. Sources.--The books thus condemned and thus recovered supply us with our knowledge of ancient China and of its religion. They are political rather than religious in their nature. China has no Bible, no book guarded by the ministers of religion as the basis of the system they conduct; the religious teachers of China, if there are any, are the literati, the books they preserve and study are the Classics. These are connected with the name of Confucius, who collected or edited them, and himself wrote one of them. They are not thought to be inspired, but are revered because of their immemorial antiquity. No people was ever more completely under the influence of a book, or set of books, than the Chinese. The learned class, who constitute the only nobility of China, receive their whole education from the books ascribed to Confucius; which, like other authoritative literatures, contain matter of various kinds. The Chinese collection consists of the five Classics (King) and the four books (Shu). The former were edited by Confucius; the latter are by the disciples of that sage or by Mencius, a distinguished teacher in his school about a century after him. The five Classics are the most sacred of all. They are as follows:-- I.--1. The _Yih-king_, or Book of Changes. This is a divining book; it consists of a set of interpretations by princes of the twelfth century B.C., of a set of lineal figures. The system is in itself of childlike simplicity, but use and age have collected mysteries about it. It was exempted from the proscription of Shi-Hoang-Ti. 2. The _Shu-king_, or Book of History, contains speeches and documents of the early princes from the twenty-fourth to the eighth century B.C. 3. The _Shi-king_, or Book of Poetry, consists of a collection of 300 songs, selected by Confucius from a mass ten times as great. Some of these pieces are extremely old. 4. The _Le ke_, or Record of Rites. This book is said to have been composed by the duke of Chow in the twelfth century B.C., and is the principal source of information about the ancient state religion of China. It contains precepts not only for religious ceremonies, but also for social and domestic duties, and is the Chinaman's manual of conduct to the present day. 5. _Chun Tsew_, Spring and Autumn, contains the annals of the principality of Loo, of which Confucius was a native, from 721-480 B.C. They are extremely dry; and if we could understand the statement of Mencius that Confucius by writing them (for they are his own work) produced a great effect on the minds of his contemporaries, many things about Chinese religion and manners would be clearer to us than they unfortunately are. To these five Classics is sometimes added, as a sixth, the _Hsiao-king_, or Book of Filial Piety, a conversation on that subject between Confucius and a disciple. It is impossible to tell how much Confucius did for these old books. Some hold that he did not change them much, nor put into them much of his own, and that, in fact, he was himself indebted to these books for all he is reported to have taught. On the other hand, it is declared that he made the ancient books teach his own doctrine, and left out all that did not suit him; and, in confirmation of this view, the fact is pointed out that while these books as we have them teach pure Confucianism, another religion of a different spirit was growing up in China in Confucius's own day, which must have had some support in the old system. It may be that Confucius did not care to report to us all the features of the old religion, but only those of which he approved. But the information given us about that old religion is admittedly correct so far as it goes; and there is little doubt that what Confucius thought best in it, and what passed through him into the subsequent religion of China, was its most characteristic and most important part. II.--The Classics of the second order comprise four books:-- 1. The _Lun Yu_, or Digested Conversations of the Master; or, as Dr. Legge calls it, _The Confucian Analects_. It is from this book that we derive our information about the sage; it was compiled probably by the disciples of his disciples. 2. The _Ta-Heo_, or Great Learning, and 3. The _Chung Yung_, or Doctrine of the Mean, are smaller works, giving a more literary form to the doctrine of the sage. 4. The _Mang-tsze_ contains the teachings of Mencius. The State Religion of Ancient China.--Confucius never imagined himself to be a reformer of the religion of his country. The religion of China is in the main the same to this day[1] as it was before he appeared, and what is called Confucianism is simply that old system. That the worship of Confucius himself has been added to it does not involve any change of its structure. It is already well developed when we first see it, and what is very peculiar, it has already parted with all savage and irrational elements. There is no mythology; the universal legend of the marriage of heaven and earth is dimly recognisable, but there is no set of primitive stories about the gods. Of human sacrifice there is only one ancient instance; there are no rites with anything savage or cruel about them. Everything is proper, dignified, and well arranged. The deities are beings worthy to be worshipped, and they exact no meaningless services. There is nothing in any part of the religion to disturb the propriety of the worshipper or to suggest any doubts to his mind. In no other religion of the world do we find everything in such excellent order. [Footnote 1: The working religion of the present day is fully described by Prof. de Groot in De la Saussaye, _Lehrbuch_, Third edition.] On the other hand, it is not a highly-developed religion. Its beliefs are those of extremely early times, and represent a stage of thought at which no other national religion stood still. The organisation common to developed systems is entirely wanting; there is no idol, no priestly class, no Bible, no theology; the most important doctrines are left so vague and undetermined that scholars interpret them in opposite ways. It is a religion in which, just as in the primitive stage, outward acts are everything, the doctrine nothing, and which is not regulated by an organised code but by custom and precedent. All these marks point to a formation in very early times, and to a very early arrest of growth, before the ordinary developments of mythology and doctrine, priesthood, ritual, and sacred literature had time to take place. They also point to the operation of some powerful cause, which, when the religion had developed its main features, was able to suppress older beliefs and practices, and lead the nation to devote itself altogether to the newer faith. How this took place we can only conjecture, but certainly it could never have been done unless the new faith and the national character had fitted each other perfectly. The classical religion may, as Prof. de Groot says, have come into existence along with the classical constitution set up by the Han dynasty 2000 years ago. But it must have been ready to enter into this position. The objects of worship in the Chinese religion arrange themselves in three classes. The Chinaman of old worshipped and his descendant of to-day worships still-- 1. Heaven. 2. Spirits of various kinds, other than human. 3. The spirits of dead ancestors. 1. Heaven (Thian) is the principal Chinese deity; in strictness we must say the sole deity, for there is no family of upper gods; heaven receives all the worship that is directed aloft. It is the clear vault, the friendly ever-present and all-seeing blue that is meant, not the windy nor the rainy sky, but that which is above all agitations, and which all beings of the air or of the earth look up to and serve. It is conceived as living. It is not a separable spirit, not a power behind, that is worshipped, but heaven itself,--the living heaven of that early thought, which has not yet come to distinguish between matter and spirit,--the living heaven which is over all, knows all, orders and governs all. To this heaven other names are given, even in the oldest writings--Ti, Ruler; or Shang-ti, Supreme Ruler. Did the Chinese conceive this ruler as identical with heaven, or as a personality dwelling in it or above it? It has been held that the two beliefs are not the same; that the Chinese of the earliest times worshipped the Supreme Ruler, _i.e._ the one God, Ti, and afterwards fell away from that position of pure monotheism and declined to the worship of the material object, heaven. The early Catholic missionaries argued that the Chinese Shang-ti was equivalent to the Christian "God," and signified a being other than the sky, the Supreme Power of the universe. The Chinese, however, generally denied that they made any such distinction,[2] and even declared that they could not understand it. The names Heaven and Supreme Ruler are used by them indiscriminately: one notices that Confucius does not use the personal form, but only speaks of heaven; "heaven," he says, when feeling distressed, "is destroying me." We have here, therefore, an early form of nature-worship. [Footnote 2: Dr. Legge, while admitting that the Chinese originally worshipped the vault of heaven itself, maintains that they got past the early mode of thought which considers every natural object as animated, before the dawn of history, and became pure theists, believers in a supreme spiritual being. Confucius he considers to have held a lower religious position than his countrymen had already attained to. He also regards the worship of spirits and of ancestors as a later perversion and degradation of the original religion of one god. In these positions he is followed by Professor Giles, _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. i. p. 105, _sqq._] The Supreme Power directs all things, and is an ever-present governor both in the natural and in the moral sphere. These two spheres indeed are not regarded as distinct. Nature reveals in all its changes the mind of its ruler, and human conduct is regarded as an outward thing, as a phenomenon on the same plane with the movements of nature; the two are supposed to be part of one system and to act directly on each other. As Heaven both governs the weather and looks after men's actions, for "every day heaven witnesses our actions and is present in the places where we are," these two aspects of providence are closely blended and are in fact the same. Heaven makes its will known in a natural way. It is one of the most peculiar features of Chinese religion that it knows no revelation, no miracles, no divine interferences. It has a belief in destiny, Ming; every one has his Ming, but it is only known when it is accomplished. "Does Heaven plainly declare its Ming?" Confucius is asked; and he replies, "No, heaven speaks not; by the order of events its will is known, not otherwise." Man learns by the external occurrences how Heaven is disposed towards him. When there is excessive rain or long drought, this shows that the harmony between Heaven and the earth is disturbed. It belongs to the emperor to put this right. He alone is entitled to offer sacrifice to Heaven; he stands in the closest relation to Heaven, who is the ancestor of his house; and when Heaven is seen to be displeased, the emperor must restore the harmony by governing his subjects better or by sacrifices. In an extreme case, when the emperor is seen to have fallen under the displeasure of Heaven, the conclusion is drawn that he must no longer be emperor. The people then are entitled to depose him and to set up a new ruler, through whom the necessary transactions with Heaven can be carried on. The belief has always been held in China, at least theoretically, and is operative to this day, that it can be known when Heaven has rejected a ruler, and that it belongs to the people to carry out that sentence. 2. The Spirits.--The worship "of the spirits" is a primary religious duty for the Chinaman. The spirits, however, are an ill-defined set of beings; they are generally spoken of in the plural number, and sacrifice was offered to them as a body, no particular spirits being named. The spirits are connected with natural objects, every part of nature has its spirit. The sun, the moon, the five planets, clouds, rain, wind, the five great mountains, but also every smaller mountain, the rivers, each district, and a thousand other things, all have their spirits.[3] The spirits are not flitting about capriciously, but have been collected together and organised in a hierarchy, and this has loosened their connection with natural objects. They are spoken of as a set of beings who may be addressed as a body. A prince alone may sacrifice to the spirit of the earth, and to those of the mountains and rivers of his territory. But to the spirits in general all may and should pray; they assist those who pay them reverence and sacrifice to them. It will be seen that the worship of heaven and that of the spirits are kept separate. The former is the imperial worship; the emperor alone is competent to attend to it. The latter is the official worship of minor states. Nor are the two sets of deities wrought into a homogeneous system; we hear that the spirits, while subordinate to Shang-ti, are not his messengers. The surmise is not to be avoided that these two worships came originally from different circles of ideas, and have not been perfectly blended. The worship of heaven belongs to the higher nature-worship, that of the spirits to the lower; the latter is animistic, it is a worship of detached spirits, while the former is a worship of the natural object itself. The spirits are all good; there are scarcely any bad spirits in Chinese belief. [Footnote 3: The Japanese official religion, "Shin-to" (=way of the gods, as distinguished from Butsudo, way of Buddha, _i.e._ Japanese Buddhism), an easy worship of numberless spirits, without sacrifices and without any moral doctrine, is allied to this branch of the religion of China; as also is the religion of Corea. Shin-to is not ancestral worship, and recognises no life after death.] 3. Ancestors.--The worship of ancestors is that which is assigned to the private individual. He does not approach Shang-ti any more than he would address the emperor on earth; his working religion is directed to his ancestors. The Chinese believed in the continuance of the soul after death, and addressed solemn invitations to it to return to the body it had forsaken. Their belief can scarcely be described as that in personal immortality; it is the continuance of the family rather than of the person that is thought of. The individual does not look forward to his own future life or allow that to influence him; there is little trace of any belief in future rewards and punishments. China has no heaven and no hell. It is the past, not the future, that influences the present; the departed members of the family are believed to be still attached to it, and to have become its tutelary spirits. In every house there is a hall of ancestors, where worship and sacrifice is offered to them, and many even of the details of this worship remind us strongly of the way in which the Romans served their family heroes. Tablets belonging to the ancestors are placed in this hall; and to these they are supposed to come when properly invoked, so as to be present with the family. At every important family event they are summoned to attend. This worship has to be rendered by husband and wife jointly, so that marriage is necessary for its performance, and an early marriage is a religious duty. The family sacrifice, like all sacrifices in China, is of the nature of a banquet, at which the living members of the family, and the spirits who have been summoned, eat and drink together. To heighten the illusion, the grandson was sometimes dressed in the clothes of the departed head of the house and made the principal figure of the celebration-- The dead cannot in form be here, But there are those their part who bear; We lead them to the highest seat And beg that they will drink and eat: So shall our sires our service own, And deign our happiness to crown With blessings still more bright.[4] [Footnote 4: _Shi-king_, II. vi. 5.] It is not only in the family that ancestors are adored. The emperor sacrifices in a public capacity to all the ancestors of his own line, and also to all his predecessors on the throne; a magistrate to all who have occupied his office before him. Ancient China possessed an elaborate ritual, and occasions of sacrifice were frequent. Every change of season, every portent of nature, every important step either in public or in private life, required its consecration. It is in accordance with the genius of the people that the sacrifices are not of the nature of propitiation, but expressions of gratitude and devotion merely. Asceticism has no place in this religion; everything in it is bright and sensible. He who is to offer a sacrifice prepares himself by prayer and retirement to do so worthily; but beyond this reasonable measure there is no afflicting of the soul, and in the prayers belonging to the occasion self-humiliation and confession have no place, but only thanksgivings and petitions. The petitions are for worldly benefits and furtherance; the sacrifices are means of procuring these from the heavenly powers. They consist chiefly of animal victims, but fruits are also used, and with the importance of the occasion the variety and costliness of the offerings increase. Elaborate music also accompanies great sacrifices, and is thought to be very acceptable to the heavenly powers. Religion is not separated from life in China. There is no special class to take care of it; every one has to attend himself to those sacrifices which are incumbent on him; this is a natural, matter-of-course part of a man's duty. As there is no Bible, there is no religious instruction, and the doctrine is quite vague and undefined. The ritual, however, is fixed by tradition in every detail, and if a man attends to it he does his duty; religion is a set of acts properly and exactly done, the proper person sacrificing always to the proper object in the proper way. Confucius was not a man who tried to change the religion of his country; indeed, he disliked to talk of religious subjects, and he practised reverently the religion which had long prevailed in China. His conversation was chiefly about what we should call worldly matters, and it is hard to see why the religion of China, the same after him as it had been before him, should be called by his name. What led to the connection was: (1) That he taught in a clear and simple way, as had never been done before, the theory of government and morals which lies at the root of Chinese religion, and thus did something, though unconsciously, to provide that religion with a doctrine. And (2) that he collected and edited the books which are the only literary documents the religion has, and which have formed ever since the study of the ruling classes in China. Receiving these books at his hands, they have naturally looked to him as the prophet of their faith. His Life.--Kung-fu-tsze (_i.e._ Master Kong; the name was Latinised by the Jesuits) is better known to us than most other religious founders. He lived to the age of seventy-three, surrounded by admiring disciples, who remembered what they saw in him and heard from his lips; and this tradition is preserved in the _Lun Yu_, Digested Conversations,[5] a work compiled, as we observed, by disciples of the second generation. The supernatural element which in other cases gathered so quickly round a venerated figure, is here entirely absent; in China such growths do not take place. There may be some tendency to idealise the moral greatness of the sage, but there are also passages in which this tendency evidently has not been at work; both in its candour and in the homeliness of much that is reported, the book invites confidence as a genuine record. We see the sage as the diligence of students in the present generation enables us to see Kant or Wordsworth; we hear his opinions on a great variety of subjects; we see how he behaved on occasions of state and at his meals in private, towards princes and towards common men; we laugh at his jokes and sigh with him at his privations. [Footnote 5: Dr. Legge, _Confucian Analects_.] He was born in 551 B.C. in a good rank of society, but was brought up in poverty, and owed all his success to his own merits. The bent of his mind showed itself early; as a child he amused himself with playing at ceremonies; at thirteen, he tells us, he bent his mind to learning, the subject of his studies being history and poetry, the ceremonies and the music of the empire. He early arrived at the views he always afterwards held as to the proper way to govern a people, and he believed with all the faith of an enthusiast that a vast improvement of society would follow the adoption of his method. It was to public employment that he aspired from an early period of life; but he did not readily find it in the unquiet times in which his lot was cast. He did enjoy office for certain brief periods, and marvellous things are told of the reformation of manners which at once attended his efforts as a governor. All got their due; there was no thieving, and there was no occasion to put the penal laws in execution, for no offenders showed themselves. What was the method which was held to have had such results? In the counsels which he gave to various rulers who applied to him this is set forth. He believed the power of example to be capable of effecting all that a ruler should desire. Punishments might be dispensed with, and excessive pains need not be bestowed on the machinery of government, but a prince who has "rectified" himself will soon have his people "rectified" too. The first task of a ruler is to "rectify names"; _i.e._ there is good government when the prince is really a prince and the minister a minister, when the father is a real father and the son a real son. The perfect order consists of the due observance by each rank of the duties belonging to it; there is to be a well-regulated hierarchy in which each understands his function and acts it out. The people are naturally good and docile, he held, and if they are well governed they will not do wrong even though rewards be offered for it. Thus by docile respect to tradition and authority, which all men are willing to pay if properly guided towards it, the pillars of the state are established. His Doctrine.--This is the truth which Confucius preached most earnestly. He spoke of heaven but seldom, and of the spirits he professed no certain knowledge; he declared towards the end of his life that he had not prayed for many years. He was a diligent frequenter of all religious ceremonies and a strong upholder of the old order, but his interest in these things was not speculative or mystical, but entirely practical. He regarded himself as a teacher of virtue, not of religious doctrine; his watchword was "propriety," the dutiful observance of all right and customary rules of conduct. Yet there is not wanting an ideal element in his doctrine. He enounces the theory, of which the whole of Chinese religion is the outward expression, that the universe in all its parts, in nature and in man, is an order; that that order is declared to man alike in the ordinances of outward nature, in the constitution of society with its various ranks and classes, and in the ritual of religion; and that it is the whole duty of man to know that order and to conform himself to it. The theory is one in which the state is all, the individual nothing, and in which the present is entirely crushed under the dead hand of the past, and all originality and progress condemned even before they appear. If religion has been delivered from all that is unseemly and irrational, it has also, at least to Western eyes, lost much of its interest; the enthusiasms and excitements of its early stages have departed, and no new enthusiasm has come in their place; no great god-wrought deliverance thrills the memory of posterity, no local cults excite exceptional devotion, no divine historical figure attracts to itself personal affection. Religion has cast off fear but has not yet risen to the inspiration of love. The domestic worship came nearest to this, for the other worships are cold and distant indeed; but that worship was a powerful influence for the prevention of progress. The Christian text which hallows individual daring and innovation, by bidding a man put his convictions above his father and mother, would be a shocking impiety to Chinese ears. A temple was built to Confucius after his death and his worship was added to the state religion. The attempt made by the emperor Shi-Hoang-Ti in the third century after his death to suppress his memory and the books connected with his name, was, though conducted with great vigour, unsuccessful. The teaching of Mencius (371-288 B.C.), the most distinguished of his disciples, added no new element to that of Confucius. Two movements, however, have to be noticed, which in different ways aimed at giving something richer and deeper than Confucianism, and to which China owes the two additional religions of Taoism and Buddhism. Taoism looks to Lao-tsze as its founder; but it has no personal founder and is composed of older elements. Lao was a philosopher who lived at the same time with Confucius, though half a century older; Confucius met him, as we hear in the _Analects_, and spoke of him with great respect. His work, the _Tao-te-king_, has been preserved, and though few profess to understand it, a general idea of his thought may be gathered from it. Lao, like Confucius, founds on the existing system; he quotes largely from older works, and there are sayings common to both the sages. Metaphysical thought, however, which with Confucius was implied rather than reasoned out, here stands in the forefront. Lao's system is a philosophy applied practically. Tao, the ruling idea of the system, from which both it and the religion which followed it are named, is variously rendered Reason, Nature, the Way; the last is the nearest, though by no means a full rendering of it. By the manifold operations attributed to it, it reminds us of the Indian Brahma, and the riddle of Lao's obscurity has been proposed to be solved by the supposition that he was dealing with a doctrine imported from India which Chinese forms of speech could but imperfectly express.[6] Tao is not personal, but something that precedes all persons, all particular beings. It was there before heaven was; all things are from it and return to it at last. It is the principle at the root and the beginning of all things, by which they move, without haste or struggle, ambition or confusion. Existing first absolute and undeveloped, it has now been expressed; men can know it, and the secret of all goodness, all success both for the individual and for the state, is to know Tao and live in it. This makes a man superior to all rules and conventions; at home with himself he is superior to the world; he does not dissipate his energies in learning a great number of outward things, but acts spontaneously from an inner impulse. In this way the philosopher looked for a return of society to simpler manners; he even imagined that men might consent to put away the material arts of which they thought so much, and content themselves with living according to wisdom and being governed by the wisest. [Footnote 6: "Lao-Tzeu et le Brahmanisme," by E. Guimet in the _Verhandlungen_ of the Basal Conference, 1904.] The moral precepts of Lao are often of singular beauty and show a much deeper insight than the cold teaching of Confucius. Lao taught the golden rule: "Recompense injury," he said, "with kindness." Confucius, on being asked about this, did not agree with Lao, but declared that kindness ought to be recompensed with kindness, but injury with justice, as if private morality ought not to rise higher than public policy. "Resent it not when you are reviled," Lao teaches; and "He who overcomes others is strong; he who overcomes himself is mighty." "He who knows when he has enough is rich." "The weakest things in the world subjugate the strongest." The _Book of Recompenses_, which is the practical manual of Taoists and is universally read in China, sets up a high ideal of goodness, and claims to be studied with devotion and earnestness. The task of self-discipline is represented as one requiring faith and courage, the continuous efforts of a lifetime, and unceasing watchfulness. If we judge Taoism either by its philosophy or by its morals, we must assign it a high rank among the efforts which have been made to guide men in the way of wisdom. As a religion, however, it is a dismal failure, and shows how little philosophy and morals can do without a historical religious framework to support them. Taoism was not at first a religion, and was not fitted to become one, as it neither offered any sacred objects of its own for pious sentiment to cling to, nor, like Confucianism, leant upon the state system. The religion which looks to Lao as its chief figure is not based on his teaching; at most it is connected with some of his less important doctrines. It did not take a place in the world till five centuries after the philosopher's death, and its rise was due partly to the emperor named above, who was opposed to Confucius, and partly to teachers who brought forward isolated doctrines of Lao's system which admitted of a popular application. When the religion appears it is a system not of philosophy but of magic. Lao had spoken of immortality as the portion of those who lived according to Tao; under the Chin dynasty (220 B.C.) Taoism is engaged in a search for the fairy islands, where the herb of immortality is to be found; in the first century of our era the head of Taoism is devising a pill which shall renew his youth. When Buddhism enters China, in the same century Taoism borrows from it the apparatus of religion, temples, monasteries, and liturgies, and sets out on its career as a church. It was not without reason that Buddhism was sent for, if we are truly informed, by the rulers of China, or that it spread over the country, in the first century of our era. Neither Confucianism nor Taoism is a religion, in the full sense of the term, as supplying by intercourse with higher beings an inspiration for life. The former is regulative and no more; the latter is a mere set of devices for obtaining benefits from mysterious powers. Buddhism, on the contrary, appeals, as we shall see when we consider it in connection with India, to unselfish motives, and insists on the solemn responsibilities of individual life in such a way as to raise the value of the human person. As it appeared in China it is richer than we shall find it in India; it has a god, unknown to southern Buddhism, and it has a goddess Kouan Yin, "the being who hears the cries of men," sometimes represented with a child on her knee, just like a Western Madonna. While still essentially monastic, it offers salvation and a way of life to all. To faith in Buddha the merciful one is also added a belief in the paradise in which he receives believers. Thus a popular worship is provided, which neither of the older beliefs supplied. It remains true that China has no religion worthy of the name. The phenomenon may there be witnessed, which is seen with certain differences also in Japan, that several religions exist side by side, all of which are supported by the state and live together without rivalry, and to all of which a man may belong at the same time. This could not be the case if any of the three appealed strongly to patriotic sentiment, or gave full expression to the ideals of the nation. BOOKS RECOMMENDED In the Sacred Books of the East, vols. iii., xvi., xxvii., and xxviii. contain translations of Chinese Classics, by Dr. Legge. The same writer has published three convenient volumes of his own, containing: 1. The Life and Teachings of Confucius, 2. The Life and Works of Mencius, 3. The Shi-King. Dr. Legge has also written a popular work, _The Religions of China_, 1880. Also _The Notions of the Chinese concerning God and Spirits_, 1852. The best account of the old State Religion is that of J. H. Plath, _Die Religion und der Cultus der alten Chinesen_, 1862. Réville, _La Religion chinoise_ (1889). The third volume of his History. R. K. Douglas, _Confucianism and Taoism_, 1876. S.P.C.K. De Groot, in De la Saussaye. De Groot, _The Religious System of China_, vols. i.-iv., 1892-1901. Also a small book, _The Religion of the Chinese_, 1910. Beal, _Buddhism in China_, 1884. Murray's _Guide to Japan_. J. Edkins' _Religion in China_, 1878, the account of a modern missionary, may be consulted. On Taoism, Pfizmaier, _Die Lösung der Leichname und Schwerter_, 1870; and _Die Tao-lehre von dem wahren Menschen und den Unsterblichen_, 1870. Julius Grill, _Lao-tsze's Buch vom höchsten Wesen und vom höchsten gut_. _Tao-te-King_, 1910. Vols. xxxix.-xl. of the _S.B.E._ give Taoist Texts. Revon, _Le Shintoisme_, 1907. CHAPTER IX THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT Egypt is a land of still more ancient civilisation than China, and its civilisation is of more interest to us, since from it the nations of the West obtained in part the seeds of their arts and sciences. Even to antiquity everything Egyptian appeared venerable and mysterious, and the air of mystery is not yet removed from the country of the Nile. We have discovered the sources of the river and have learned to read the writing on Egyptian monuments; but the sphinx has other riddles than these--riddles not yet solved. Who are the Egyptians, and where did they come from? In ancient times they were thought to have descended from the interior of Africa; now the opinion gains ground that they were at a very early period connected with the ancestors of the Semitic races; their language is thought to show signs of this remote relationship. How, by whom, and when were they formed into a nation? No one can tell; they come before us four thousand years before Christ, a fully-formed nation, with an elaborately organised public service, and with a civilisation both broad and rich. And lastly, What is the religion of Egypt? What are the earliest gods of the land, and in what relation do the various gods which were worshipped in it stand to each other? That question cannot at the present time be fully answered. Even should it be proved, as it appears likely to be, that Egyptian civilisation was derived originally from Mesopotamia, much will still be dark and enigmatical. The foremost scholars in Egyptology confess that no history of Egyptian religion can as yet be written. Those who have tried to sketch it differ from each other as widely as possible, some alleging monotheism as its starting-point, and some the worship of animals. The religion also comes into view at the early period we have mentioned as a fully-formed and stately public system, whose youthful struggles, if it had any, are long past. What is most peculiar in that religion is, that it embraces elements which appear at first sight to have nothing whatever in common, nay, to be quite irreconcilable with each other. We shall do well not to attempt any construction of Egyptian religion as a whole, but to content ourselves with examining one after another the various elements, almost amounting to different religions, which are found in it side by side. We shall no doubt learn something of the relations in which they stood to each other, but it may prove that we shall find ourselves unable to adopt any of the theological theories by which Egyptian priests or Greek philosophers sought to combine them in one system. History and Literature.--The principal thing to be remembered, in order to understand the history of ancient Egypt, is that the country was divided into a number of provinces or nomes, which, there is every reason to think, were originally independent of each other. Of these nomes there were about twenty in Upper Egypt--that is, in the long gorge of the Nile from Elephantine in the south to Memphis in the north; and about the same number in Lower Egypt--that is, in the flatter country from Memphis to the sea. King Mena or Menes, founder of the first dynasty, whose date, if he was a historical character at all, and not a mythic founder like Minos of Crete, Manu of India, or Mannus of Germany, cannot be later than 3200 B.C., is said to have united for the first time the two crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. But though they became united under one ruler, the nomes never forgot their independence, nor did they cease to maintain their separate existence as states within the empire, each having its own army, its own ruler, its own system of taxation, its own worship. The supreme power resided now in one nome and now in another. The first two dynasties belonged to that of Abydos; the succeeding dynasties, to which the earliest monuments belong, so that Egypt here begins its real history, had their seat at Memphis. The twelfth dynasty, which is known to us, but is both preceded and followed by a gap of half a millennium in Egyptian history, made Thebes the capital. Thebes was also the seat of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which came after the foreign domination of the shepherd kings, and under which Egypt was at the summit of its power. Ramses II. and his successors, the Pharaohs of the book of Genesis, belong to the nineteenth dynasty. How splendid the Imperial Court of Egypt was at various periods, the monuments tell us; these palaces, temples, and tombs are in proportion to a power which considered itself to have the world at its feet, and to be the manifestation of the greatest gods. Literature is at the same high level of development with the other arts, and writing is used for every branch of the public service. This, the most ancient of the literatures of the world, is spread over the immense surfaces of ancient temples and tombs, and stored up in masses of papyrus rolls, much of which is still to be explored. Our knowledge of ancient Egypt and its religion is still in its infancy. The story of the decipherment of the various characters and of the recovery of the early language of Egypt is one of the most wonderful triumphs of scholarship. Only one remark, however, do we now make in connection with Egyptian writing, namely, that it illustrates in a singular manner the conservatism of the Egyptian people, a feature of their character which is strikingly manifested in their religion also. The ancient Egyptian did not cast away an old usage when a new one, even a very superior one, had been introduced. Long after metals had come into use, he still employed for various purposes, especially those connected with religion, implements of stone. The flint knives found in mummy-cases are connected with the work of embalming, and show the retention of an archaic usage. The same is true of the matter of writing. The earliest Egyptian writing was that which is called hieroglyphic, or picture-writing. In this system what is written down does not represent the sounds of words the writer uses, but the ideas in his mind; it is writing without words; a clumsy system we should say, and presenting the greatest possible difficulties to the reader. At a very early time, however, what is called hieratic writing was invented, in which the symbols used represent not things but sounds, though the symbols used are adapted from those of the earlier picture-writing. It is in this hieratic character that the great mass of Egyptian literature is preserved to us; but here again we find that the new system did not banish the old one from use. Especially in religious inscriptions and documents, the matter is given both in the newer writing and in the older; the piece is written twice, first in hieroglyphic, the old and sacred form, and then in hieratic, the new form, which could be easily read. In the matter of different objects of worship, too, it may perhaps be found that the same aversion to discard anything old and sacred manifests itself, the same disposition rather to carry on the old and the new together. I. ANIMAL WORSHIP We begin with that element in Egyptian religion which is to our eyes least rational. In the ages before and after the Christian era, when a number of Greek and Latin writers tell us about Egypt, we find that the religion of the country is described as consisting mainly in the worship of animals. This excited the wonder of these writers in no small degree. Herodotus asserts that the Egyptians counted all animals sacred, and gives a list of those which were specially worshipped. The hippopotamus, he says, is sacred at Papremis, the crocodile at Thebes; and some animals are sacred all over the country. He has much to tell of the manner in which the sacred animals are fed and tended, and of the honours paid to them at their death. Lucian says: "In Egypt the temple is a building of great size and splendour, adorned with precious stones and decorated with gold and with inscriptions; but if you go in and look for the god, you find an ape or an ibis or a goat or a cat." The same statement is made by Clement of Alexandria; and Celsus, the early Roman assailant of Christianity, speaks to the same effect. Thus the popular religion of Egypt, before and after the Christian era, had animals for its principal objects. A representative of the sacred species sat or crawled or hopped in the temple, and in that nome that animal was not eaten. In the nome in which the cat was sacred all cats were inviolable; any insult offered to a cat roused the whole population to frenzy, and one who killed a cat, even though he was a stranger in the place and unacquainted with its manners, forfeited his own life. In the next nome the cat was not sacred but some other animal; and these local differences of religion might occasion war between one nome and another. Juvenal gives in his fifteenth satire an account of a religious war of old standing between two neighbouring nomes, each of which hated and insulted the animal which was worshipped in the other. This may explain why it was impossible for the Israelites to offer sacrifice to Jehovah in Egypt. They had to go out into the wilderness, off Egyptian soil, before they could sacrifice animals Egypt held sacred. The worship of a sacred animal in its own nome, a member of the species dwelling in the temple and the others enjoying respect and protection throughout that nome, this is the normal state of affairs. Sometimes an individual animal acquires sacredness for Egypt generally, as the bull Apis of Memphis, the bull Mnevis of Heliopolis, or the goat of Mendes. These, though originally local deities, might obtain a wider reverence if the nome they belonged to rose to greater power. Animals of every size and kind were worshipped in Egypt. Besides the large animals we have mentioned, the ape, the dog, the little shrew-mouse, each had its local sacredness; also snakes, frogs, and various kinds of fishes. The beetle (_scarab_) can by no means be left without mention; and a number of trees and shrubs were also sacred,[1] but, very curiously, not the palm. [Footnote 1: A very complete list of the sacred animals and trees will be found in Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, vol. iii. p. 258, _sqq._] It will be observed that our account of Egyptian animal worship is drawn from very late sources and applies to a late period of the religion. The religion of the earlier ages of Egypt is of quite a different kind; the kings and priests who wrote the inscriptions of the monuments tell us nothing about animal worship. Is that because such worship did not flourish in their day? Not necessarily. Perhaps they knew it well, but were not interested in it, or did not wish to encourage it. The Egyptians certainly did not believe the worship of animals to have been a late innovation. Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in the third century B.C., says that the worship of animals was introduced under the second king of the second dynasty. That is as if we should say that an old custom of which we did not know the origin was introduced into Britain in the days of King Arthur. The priests of Manetho's day wished animal worship to be considered a corruption of the original religion of their country, but they could not specify the time at which it had come in, and placed its origin in the mythical period of history. The story of Manetho therefore goes to prove that the origin of animal worship is anterior to written records. But we have other evidence to the same effect. The earliest representations of the deities of Egypt on the monuments testify in a way which can scarcely be mistaken that these great beings had originally some connection with members of the animal kingdom. The great gods of Egypt are designated on the monuments in three ways. Their ultimate form is human, the god is a man or woman, and as the human figures of all the deities are drawn after one conventional male and one conventional female pattern, a symbol is added to the head to show which god or goddess is meant. Hathor is a woman with a cow's horns on her head, Seb has a duck on his head, and so on. But an earlier form of the written symbols of the deities is that which represents them partly in human and partly in animal form. Horus appears as a man with the head of a hawk, Hathor as a woman with the head and horns of a cow, Bast is a woman with the head of a cat, Osiris has the head of a bull or of an ibis, Chnum of a ram, Amon has the head now of a ram now of a hawk. Deities also occur with human bodies and the heads of mythical animals such as the phoenix. But along with these semi-human, semi-animal figures there are found still simpler symbols for the deities; they are drawn as animals. It is only about the twelfth dynasty that the change to the higher form takes place, but even after the step was made of representing the gods as half-human, the older pictures of them were not discarded, but placed side by side with the new ones. Thus we find on the same stone two representations of Horus, one of which gives him as a man with a hawk's head, while the other makes him simply a hawk; and similar double representations of the other gods occur. If the gods of Egypt were thus conceived and represented in the earliest times, then the animal worship described by the Greek and Roman writers was not the invention of a late age of decadence, but had its roots at least far back in the past. The early gods of Egypt were animals, whatever else, whatever more they were. It may be that the animal worship of the later and weaker Egyptian periods was a revival, such as takes place in weak periods, of a style of worship which in earlier centuries had to a large extent disappeared in favour of a more spiritual faith.[2] Of this only an Egyptologist can judge, but at any rate animal worship was not a new thing in Egypt, but a very old thing. [Footnote 2: This is held by Le Page Renouf, in his Hibbert Lectures, _On the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religion of Ancient Egypt_.] Theories Accounting for Animal Worship.--What did this worship mean? and how are we to account for it? The Egyptians themselves, and the ancient writers who turned their attention to Egypt, accounted for it by a variety of theories; and various theories are still held on the subject. We can only enumerate the principal ones. (1) The beasts were worshipped for their qualities, as is said to have been the case in Peru before the Incas (chapter vi.); each was reverenced for that divine excellence or virtue which appeared to be manifestly resident in it. Thus the dog was worshipped for his watchfulness and faithfulness; the hawk for its darting flight through the upper air, like the flashing of the sunlight or of the sun-god himself; the cow as a great kind mother; the beetle for that wonderful procedure in the reproduction of his kind, in which he so strikingly brings life out of decay. (2) The beasts are not worshipped themselves; they are only the emblems of the deities with whom they are connected, and it is the deity who is worshipped, not the animal. This may be quite true of later practice, but is by no means a satisfactory explanation of its origin; for how was it arranged, and who was it that ordained at first, that the jackal should be the emblem of Anubis, the cat of Bast, the crocodile of Sebak, and so on? (3) Various mythological and quasi-historical accounts of the origin of the practice are given, such as that men long ago chose different animals for their standards in war, or that some early king, wishing to keep his subjects disunited, ordered that each nome should serve a different animal. It is also told as a story of early times that the gods when they walked on earth assumed the forms of various animals; thus the gods are still in the animals. The gods hid in the beasts in order to be near men and see how they did. But men found them out and worshipped them in the disguise they had assumed. (4) The gods cannot be present in the world and cannot be satisfactorily worshipped unless they have bodies to dwell in--that is involved in Egyptian psychology; and as the gods would be too much alike if they all occupied human bodies, they chose the bodies of different animals. These theories of animal worship are evidently later inventions, to account for a state of matters the real origin of which was not known. Philosophical priests could not accommodate themselves to the animal worship of the temples without a doctrine to justify it to their minds. But those who resorted to such theories about animal worship could have nothing to do with calling the system into existence. We may be sure that a refined and cultivated people did not take up animal worship and cling to it, in spite of its repulsive features, with such tenacity as the Egyptians did, because of a speculative idea of the likeness of certain beasts to certain gods, or to express pantheistic views of the emanations of deity in animal forms. The system, in fact, cannot have sprung up after the Egyptians became civilised, and could not continue to exist among a civilised people, if it was not hallowed by an immemorial antiquity. Only as a mystery, a thing of which the origin was not known, could such a worship continue among such a people. A new explanation of Egyptian animal worship has been put forward in recent times by the Anthropological school of students of religion,[3] and is rapidly gaining ground. The religious circumstances of Egypt as narrated by Juvenal and Diodorus have the strongest resemblance to the totemistic state of society described above (chapter iv.). Here, as in Peru before the Incas, or among the North American Indians of to-day, we have a number of communities each with its special sacred animal, which it does not eat, but reverences and defends. Other traces of totemistic arrangements may be suspected here and there in Egyptian observances, but even did the analogy extend no further than to the facts just mentioned, there would be a case for considering whether the nomes were not first peopled by a set of totemistic clans, who, even after they were united in one people, preserved their early separate traditions. The sacred animals of the nomes would then be "the totems of the clans which first settled in these localities." Later developments of religion never displaced these venerable emblems, if this be so, of tribal life.[4] [Footnote 3: See A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, Second Edition. Frazer's _Totemism_. Most of the modern Egyptologists incline to the theory that animal worship, though not the only, was one of the chief sources of Egyptian religion. Pietschmann first took up this ground.] [Footnote 4: Compare the worship of animals in Babylonia, chapter vii.] II. THE GREAT GODS A very different set of gods are those made known to us by the monuments and books. It is the principal problem of this religion to explain how, along with the sacred animal, the cat or ibis or crocodile, there was worshipped in the Egyptian temple the celestial being, the god of heaven or of the sun, whose nature is light, who is righteous and good, and who more and more fills the mind of the worshipper with noble adoration, and leads him towards the high truths of theism. These high gods of Egypt were represented, as we have seen, from the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, under animal forms. As far back as we can see, Hathor is a cow, and Horus a hawk, and Anubis a jackal. Did beast worship spring by a process of degradation from the worship of the high gods? We have seen how difficult it is to maintain such a view. Did the higher worship then spring by a process of development out of the lower? That also would be hard to prove, for the high gods of Egypt are not beasts, however magnified and spiritualised, but beings of a different order; they are the sky, the sun, the moon, the dawn. And as in our opening chapters we saw reason to believe that the worship of the great powers of nature is an original thing with early man, and explains itself without being derived from lower forms of religion, so we must judge with regard to Egypt too. Even if some of the great gods came from Mesopotamia, that helps us but little to understand their history after they arrived in Egypt. In this field also we are driven to recognise two religions, different in nature and of independent origin, existing side by side, and seeking to come to terms with each other; and the combination of the two is a process in Egyptian religion which took place before the period of which we have knowledge. It is prehistoric. It was formerly considered that the nature-gods of Egypt had very little mythology connected with them; only one considerable story of their doings was known; most of them had no history beyond the few phrases applied by primitive thought to the great natural phenomena to qualify them to be regarded as living and active beings. But as more inscriptions are read, more divine myths are coming to light, and further discoveries of the same kind may be still in store for us. These different myths, however, are formed after the same pattern. The great gods of Egypt are simple beings and easy to understand, and they were never formed into an organised system like the gods of Greece, but remain in separate dynasties or families, and are very like each other. Many of them are sun-gods, or gods of the morning and evening, and their stories cannot differ very widely from each other, but they belong to different districts of the country; that is what constitutes their difference from each other, and keeps them separate. The Great Gods also are Local.--The nature-god as well as the animal-god was worshipped in his own nome, where he dwelt in the midst of his own community of worshippers; he was not recognised in other nomes unless there were special reasons for it. But at the earliest period of our knowledge of Egypt this simple early arrangement has already undergone many modifications. Each nome has its own special deity. Set is the god of Oxyrhynchus, Neith of Sais, but more gods than one are worshipped in each nome. Generally there are three; in many places there is an ennead, a nine of gods, but the nine is a round number; there might be one or two less or more. The god of a nome which had risen to a commanding position extended his influence beyond his own nome, and came to share the temples of other gods, so that he was at home in a number of places. Ra is said to have fourteen persons--that is, fourteen views of his person have been developed in so many different districts. But if one god could thus be divided into several, the converse also took place; two or more gods were combined, by the simple addition of their names together, to form a new god. We have Ra-harmachis, Amon-ra, Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, and some even more elaborately compounded deities. Thus there was a constant tendency to the production of new deities; even the attempts to combine existing deities only add to the number. No attempt in the direction of a system of gods had any success; local deities could not be suppressed; the nomes retained their separate deities and religious establishments to the end. There never was a religious organisation of Egypt generally; a priest could in some cases pass from the religion of one nome to that of another, but there was never a high priest of Egypt as a whole, however much a king might wish to organise all the worships of the country in one system. This local character of the Egyptian high gods was a source of weakness in these great beings, and never ceased to check their upward movement. The temple of a nome had, as a rule, three gods, and these formed a family, the chief god having his consort and the third being their son. Of these triads we may mention some:-- Amen-Mut-Chonsu are the triad of Thebes. Ptah-Sechet-Imhotep " Memphis. Osiris-Isis-Horus " Abydos (Philæ). Sebak-Hathor-Chonsu " Ombos. Har-hat-Hathor-Har-sem-ta " Edfu. The son is the successor of his father, and it is his destiny in turn to marry his mother and so to reproduce himself, that is his own successor; and so though constantly dying he is ever renewed. The mother, not being a sun-god, does not die. If we remember that the gods have to do with the sun these things need not shock us, nor need we wonder at the statement which is very frequently met with, that a god is self-begotten, or that he produces his own members. Mythology.--A few words may be said about Egyptian mythology in general before we speak of some of the principal gods. The usual stories of the beginning of things are not wanting, as when the principal god is said to have been born from a primeval egg, or a whole family of gods to be the children of Seb and Nut; Seb, the earth, being in Egypt the male, and Nut, heaven, the female, of these earliest parents of all things. More than one god, moreover, is held to have been an earthly king, and to be the founder of the royal house which now pays him homage. "The days of Ra," for example, are spoken of as a golden age in which perfect justice and happiness prevailed. Many stories too may be found which profess to furnish an explanation of some feature of nature or some institution of society, to account for the names of places or of animals, or for the presence of the five days which were added to the twelve lunar months in Egypt to produce a satisfactory solar year. Many old stories of the gods have magical efficacy when told in certain situations; one is good against poison, but must be told in a certain way to produce the effect. After these stories of the gods' early reign of peace, come those relating to less happy periods, when the old god grew weak and began to have enemies, when gods and men became disobedient to him, when a war broke out among the gods, which is not yet brought to an end but breaks out ever afresh; or when the old god succumbed to his enemies, and his successor had to set out to avenge him. In some of these stories very primitive and savage traits appear, which show that they originated in a rude state of society. But they are about men, not about beasts, as we might have expected of Egyptian mythology, and the men are undoubtedly solar heroes; it is the fortunes of the daily (not the yearly) sun, his splendid and beneficent reign, his decline, his conflict with the powers of darkness, his decease and his resurrection, or the vengeance exacted on his behalf by his successor, that are spoken of, in connection now with one god and now with another. Dynasties of Gods.--In the history of Egyptian religion one set of such gods succeeds another as the prevailing dynasty, according as the seat of empire in the country shifts to a new nome. These religious changes could take place without great convulsions. It was only the attempt to extinguish old established worships that was fiercely resisted, not the addition of a new god, even as superior to those already seated in the temple. In the earliest times known to us Ra of Heliopolis is the chief god of Egypt; Osiris of Thinis (Abydos) is also a great god, but the most characteristic development of Osiris-worship belongs to a later period. Ptah of Memphis comes to the front in the earliest dynasties. Much later is the rise of Amon to the first place, which he held when the Greeks and Romans had to do with Egypt. A very short account only can be given of the sets of gods of which these are the heads. Ra.--Ra means "sun"; his seat is Heliopolis or "On," where Joseph's master Potiphera, or "Priest of Ra," lived. Heliopolis is the "house of the obelisk," the obelisk being a representation of the sun. First a kindly old king, he is later a warrior; he has to contend with the serpent Apep, the dragon of darkness who appears pierced by the shafts of Ra. But as Ra sinks in the conflict he is comforted by Hathor, the goddess of the western sky, and avenged by Horus, the ever young and ever victorious winged sun.[5] But Ra is a god of the under as well as the upper world. King Pi'anchi, of the twenty-second dynasty, entered into the great temple of Ra at Heliopolis and penetrated to the inmost chamber of it, afterwards sealing it up again. We are told what he saw there.[6] He looked upon "his father Ra," and saw the two boats intended for the daily journey of the god. Ra travels in his boat through the sky, but also at night through the under-world, of which also he is lord. The progress of the god of light through the world of darkness is a theme which was worked out later in much detail in connection with Osiris; but it forms part of the earliest known religious conceptions of the Egyptians, and Ra's voyage through the "Am Duat" or under-world, is described in considerable detail. Many figures accompany him in this voyage, and many are the obstacles to be overcome during the successive hours of night before he reaches again the gates of day. The souls of men who have died are also led by him through those nether spaces; by a hidden knowledge, if they have been at pains to possess themselves of it, they are able to keep close to Ra on the perilous journey. He gives them fields to cultivate in the plains beneath, and they are made glad by his appearance at the appointed hour in the nights that follow. [Footnote 5: There are in Egyptian religion several gods called Horus; this, the oldest one, is fused with Ra, the first sun-god, in the double name Ra-Harmachis, a being to whom the highest attributes are given. The symbol of this god is a recumbent lion with a man's head, the figure in which also the kings of Egypt are represented.] [Footnote 6: See the inscription in _Records of the Past_, ii. 98.] Osiris, the sun-god of Abydos, is also reported to have been a human being who was exalted to divine honours. (The god of the under-world and judge of the dead, who bears the same name, is a different figure; of him we shall speak afterwards.) He is the most interesting and the best known of the gods of Egypt; his myth is found at length in Plutarch, with the mystical interpretations proposed for it in ancient times; he is also the god in whom the affinity of Egyptian with Babylonian religion appears most clearly: cf. chapter vii. Born, according to the myth we mentioned above, at one birth with four other gods, of the venerable parents Seb and Nut (see above), he from the first has Isis for his wife and sister, and his brother Set is also born along with him, with whom he lives in perpetual hostility. Neither can quite overcome the other, and many are the incidents of their warfare. As a rule the gods of Egypt are serene and good beings; here only dualism shows itself. Osiris is the good power both morally and in the sphere of outward nature, while Set is the embodiment of all that the Egyptian regards as evil,--darkness, the desert, the hot south wind, sickness, and red hair. It is not the case that Set was an imported god and belonged to Semitic invaders, but these invaders found him more suited to their notions of deity than any other god of Egypt, and sought to make him supreme, in which, however, they could not succeed. The story of the dismemberment of Osiris and of the search of Isis for his loved remains, which she buried in fourteen different places where she found them, is one which is found connected with other names in other lands. Horus is the avenger of his father. Here we have this deity in three stages--Horus the child in his mother's arms, Horus the avenger, and Horus the successor of his father, the complete sun-god. This family of gods is more human and living to us than that of Ra or than any other set of Egyptian deities. It was also more taken up in other lands, when the gods of older peoples began to find acceptance in the West. We see with special clearness in this case the operation of the principle according to which the contrast of light and darkness when represented in the gods passes into that of moral good and evil, so that the god of light becomes the great upholder of righteousness and dispenser of beneficence. The good god of Egyptian religion, moreover, is accompanied by a goddess who is somewhat more than the pale reflection of the male god, as most Egyptian goddesses are. The incidents of the legend also lend to the divine characters a tragic depth in which the prosperous and happy gods of Egypt do not generally share. Ptah is the god of Memphis, and adjoining his temple is the chapel of the bull Apis, who is called the "second life of Ptah." If these two resided side by side, some theory of their relationship was needed, and the bull became the earthly representative of the unseen deity. Each had a worship of prehistoric antiquity, and it is vain to theorise on their original relation to each other. As for Ptah, his name means "he who forms," and the Greeks called him by the name of their own Hephaistos, the artificer. In later times he came to be identified with the sun, and was called the "honourable," "golden," "beautiful," and "of comely face"; but earlier he seems rather to have to do with the hidden source of the world's heat, the elemental warmth which is at the beginning of all life. He also is, like Ra and Osiris, a god of the under-world to which men go after death. He is said to open the mouth of the dead--that is to say, that he hears them and judges them. But in the upper-world too he has to do with justice; he is called the "Lord of the Ell," a title connecting him with measurements and boundaries, matters of the greatest importance in Egypt. His son is Imhotep, he who comes in peace; the Greeks regarded this god as a physician, and called him Asclepios. The goddess of the triad is Sechet, who was also worshipped at Bubastis under the name of Bast, and whose symbol is a cat. Ptah, it will be seen, is a less distinct figure than either Osiris or Ra, and he very readily passes into combinations with other gods. Ptah-Sokari and Ptah-Sokar-Osiris are found much more frequently than Ptah alone. These are the chief gods of the old kingdom--that is to say, of the first six dynasties. When we come to the great twelfth dynasty, after the gap in the monuments which extends from 2500-2000 B.C., we find that these gods have become faint and new gods have become supreme, namely, the local gods of Thebes, and of the adjoining nomes. Of these, Amon, god of Thebes, has the most distinguished history, though Chem, the agricultural god of Coptos, and Munt of Hermonthis were originally as important. Amon, the hidden, _i.e._ the hidden force of nature, like Ptah, is seldom found alone; he is generally combined with some other god, especially with Ra. The gods of agriculture bow their heads by degrees before the sun-gods who tend to draw to themselves all Egyptian worship; rude country representations connected with the idea of fertility being discredited before the religion of the royal temples which was directed mainly to the god of light. Was the Earliest Religion Monotheistic?--We have mentioned only some of the chief gods of Egypt, out of a countless number. These are the gods favoured by kings and city priesthoods, who, we cannot doubt, desired the religious elevation of the people. The gods they praised were of a nature to promote that end. It will be granted that the worship of the light-gods of Egyptian religion was fitted to lead the minds of the Egyptians to theism. In illustration of this statement extracts may be here given from hymns, which date as we have them from the eighteenth dynasty 1590 B.C., but which are probably much older. TO HORUS The gods recognise the universal lord.... He judges the world according to his will; heaven and earth are in subjection to him. He giveth his commands to men, to the generations present, past, and future; to Egyptians and to strangers. The circuit of the solar orb is under his direction; the winds, the waters, the wood of the plants, and all vegetables. A god of seeds, he giveth all herbs and the abundance of the soil. He affordeth plentifulness, and giveth it to all the earth. All men are in ecstasy, all hearts in sweetness, all bosoms in joy, every one in adoration. Every one glorifieth his goodness, his tenderness encircles our hearts, great is his love in all bosoms. TO TEHUTI OR PTAH To him is due the work of the hands, the walking of the feet, the sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the breathing of the nostrils, the courage of the heart, the vigour of the hand, activity in body and in mouth of all the gods and men, and of all living animals; intelligence and speech, whatever is in the heart and whatever is on the tongue. TO PTAH-TANEN O let us give glory to the god who hath raised up the sky and who causeth his disk to float over the bosom of Nut, who hath made the gods and men and all their generations, who hath made all lands and countries and the great sea, in his name of "Let-the-earth-be." TO AMON-RA Hail to thee, maker of all beings, lord of law, father of the gods; maker of men, creator of beasts; lord of grains, making food for the beast of the field.... The one without a second.... King alone, single among the gods; of many names, unknown is their number. There is a beautiful hymn addressed to the Nile, who is also conceived as the chief deity and the ruler, nourisher, and comforter of all creatures. From these hymns and others like them, important conclusions have been drawn as to the nature of the earliest Egyptian religion; namely, that those who wrote such pieces must have been acquainted with the one true god and addressed him under these various names, so that the true origin of Egyptian religion would be a primitive monotheism. There are some texts indeed which seem to point even more strongly than those cited to the conclusion that Egyptian religion started from the belief in one supreme deity. Mr. Le Page Renouf quotes along with the passages above, one from a Turin papyrus, in which words are put into the mouth of the Almighty God, the self-existent, who made heaven and earth, the waters, the breaths of life, fire, the gods, men, animals, cattle, reptiles, birds, etc. This being speaks as follows:-- I am the maker of the heaven and the earth.... It is I who have given to all the gods the soul which is within them. When I open my eyes there is light, when I close them there is darkness. I am Chepera in the morning, Ra at noon, Tum in the evening. M. de la Rougé maintains that Egyptian religion, monotheistic at first, with a noble belief in the unity of the Supreme God and in His attributes as the Creator and Law-giver of man, fell away from that position and grew more and more polytheistic. "It is more than 5000 years since in the valley of the Nile the hymn began to the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, and we find Egypt arrived in the last ages at the most unbridled Polytheism." The sublimer part of Egyptian religion is demonstrably ancient, as Mr. Le Page Renouf says; yet we are not shut up to the conclusion that Egyptian religion as a whole is nothing but a backsliding and a failure. If we were obliged to regard that monotheism which Egypt had at first but failed to maintain, as a gift conferred from above, which human powers proved unequal to conserve, then the opening of the history of this religion would be indeed most melancholy. But though monotheism appeared in Egypt so early, there is no necessity to think that it was not attained by human powers. For all we know, it was not an early but a mature product of thought, and was reached after a long development. It is not impossible for the human mind, starting from the works of God, to rise by its own efforts to the belief in His invisible power and Godhead. The beginnings of this rise of thought may be witnessed among savages, and the Egyptians in their secluded valley had an opportunity such as no other nation had, to work out, as their civilisation grew up from rude beginnings to its unequalled splendour, a noble view of the Deity whose works they adored. The god ruling from his heaven of light over the great empire of a monarch who knew no equal in the world, possessing for his earthly abode a temple of unsurpassed magnificence, uniting perhaps under his sway districts long at war and extending his influence over remote continents as the armies of Egypt prospered, such a being drew to himself from his worshipping retinue of priests and nobles, the highest praise and adoration, was exalted far above all other powers in heaven and earth, and extolled even as the Creator and Ruler of all. Monotheism is thus approached in thought, but only in a prophetic and anticipatory way; the circumstances of the country forbade its realisation as a general belief or as a working system. Even in the highest flights of those early thinkers, when they seem to be speaking of a god quite universal and supreme, it is a local deity that lies at the basis of their speculations, a being who has his temple in a certain place, who is symbolised in a certain animal, who has a local legend and a limited popular worship. These are the facts that clog the wings of Egyptian monotheistic speculation and bring it to the earth again. Pure monotheism accordingly, the belief in a god beside whom no other god exists, it might be hard to find in Egypt at all. The last extract given above comes nearest to it; but the last line of that extract cannot be called monotheistic. An attempted religious reformation at the end of the eighteenth dynasty may be mentioned here, as it appears to have aimed at concentrating all the worship of Egypt on a single object. The object chosen, however, was a material one,--the sun's disk, Aten,--and though all Egyptian gods tended to become sun-gods, some sun-gods, no doubt, were better than others, and Aten was not the finest of them. King Chut-en-Aten, or Glory of the Sun-disk, the royal fanatic who made this attempt at unity, went great lengths to accomplish his object, but the attempt was a failure, and was abandoned after his death even by the members of his own family. What Chut-en-Aten tried to introduce perhaps came nearer true monotheism than anything that ever existed in Egypt. He made war on other gods and wished to establish one only god in the land, but this exclusiveness the Egyptians could not understand. The Egyptian believed in many gods, and while worshipping one god with fervour, by no means denied the existence or the power of others in other places. Even foreign deities were in his eyes real and potent beings, each in his own territory. It is henotheism, not monotheism, that we see in this most religious land; the worship of one god at a time while other gods are also believed to exist and act. The one god who is before the mind of the worshipper is exalted above the rest, and spoken of as if no other god required to be considered; but the worshipper does not dream as yet of questioning the existence of other gods, or feel himself debarred from worshipping them if he should visit their country. Syncretism.--The hymns contain several other speculative positions about the gods (chapter iv.), and we may briefly mention these. Syncretism, as we saw, is very largely represented in Egyptian thought, and enters, indeed, into its very bone and marrow. In the ennead of a city the great gods may be arranged together after the fashion of a court where one or two rule over the rest; but in numberless passages we find the relations of gods adjusted in another way, by making them one. Ra "comes as" Tum, the god is known here under one name or aspect and there under another. The names of two deities being added together, a new deity is produced; and in later times these gods with double, treble, or multiple names are among the most important. Raharmachis and Amonra are national gods, and have left much evidence of themselves. It is a little step from syncretism to pantheism. Let the gods once lose the individual character that keeps them separate from each other, and it is possible for one god, who grows strong and great enough, to swallow up all the rest, till they appear only as his forms. In the position which they occupied in Egypt the various gods could not disappear, their local connections kept them alive; but they were so like one another that one of them could be regarded as a form of another, and a multitude of them as forms of one. The god who did most in the way of swallowing up the rest was Ra, the great sun-god of Thebes. The Litany of Ra[7] represents that god as eternal and self-begotten, and sings in seventy-five successive verses seventy-five forms which he assumes; they are the forms of the gods and of all the great elements and parts of the world. The separate gods are reduced from the rank of independent potentates to shapes of Ra, and thus a kind of unity is set up in the populous Egyptian Pantheon. But Ra is not strong enough to get the better of these shapes, and to rule a sole monarch by his own right, in his own way. He is the god, but he is not an independent god; it is pantheism, not theism, to which he owes his exaltation. The one in Egypt cannot govern the many; the pure exaltation of Ra as a supreme and absolute god does not prevent the worship of a different being in each different town. The one sole god is for the priests alone, not for the people; and this belief in him does not even lead to attempts to root out the worship of animals, or to concentrate the service of the temples on him alone. And in the absence of such attempts we read the sentence condemning a religion which produced most noble fruits of thought, to grow worse and not better as time went on, and to pass away without bringing any permanent contribution to the development of the religion of the world. [Footnote 7: _Records of the Past_, viii. 105.] Worship.--The Egyptian temple was constructed rather to afford the god a splendid residence among his people than to accommodate a large congregation at an act of worship. The temple was the public place of the community, its point of meeting (for the Egyptian town has no market-place), and its fortress when attacked (for the town is not fortified). But while the courts of the temple were open to the people, there was a holy place which only the priests might enter, where the sacred ark, the symbol of the god, remained, and where sacrifices were offered. The images about the temple were not placed there to be worshipped, but were votive offerings meant to provide the god with a body which he might enter when he chose. The obelisk is such a symbol or incorporation of the sun. On certain days the sacred objects and animals were taken in procession through the temple grounds, or made voyages on the lake belonging to the temple, or were even taken through the nome among the fields and dwellings of their people; and on these occasions representations took place symbolising the principal events in the history of the god. It was thus that the private individual came to know the god; it was a great festival and an occasion of the utmost joy when the divine protectors and benefactors of the nome, who generally remained in their splendid retirement, came forth to mingle for a brief space with the faithful community. The worship of the gods was in Egypt, as in every nation of the ancient world, a matter of state, not of individual concern. It is the chief branch of the public service; the state is under the direct rule of the gods; never was there a more absolute theocracy. The king is a child of the god,--a conception often treated in the most material way,--and being thus of more than human race, becomes himself the object of worship, and even offers sacrifice to himself. It is one of the king's chief cares to provide a stately dwelling for the god; the king himself offers sacrifice on the most important occasions. The god in his sacred ark goes with his people when they are at war and fights along with them, so that every war is a holy war. The priests are public officials, and often exercise immense influence. The king institutes them into their functions; they are exempt, as we may read in Genesis, from public burdens; every function involving learning or art is in their hands. Framed in such institutions religion is not likely to have any free growth; the time is far distant here when men will form voluntary associations of their own for spiritual ends. Yet, no doubt, the lay Egyptian had a private religion of his own as well as his share in the great public acts he witnessed. Though the gods of Egypt are nearly all good, the evil power Set was much worshipped, and would be approached in private as well as in the public acts depicted on the monuments, by all who had anything to fear from him--that is to say, by all. Every one had to treat with kindness and respect the animal species sacred in his nome, and other sacred animals. The belief in magic was strong; hidden powers had to be reckoned with on manifold occasions; sickness was imputed to the agency of evil spirits, and treated by exorcism, by persons duly trained and learned in such arts. Lucky and unlucky days, and days suitable or unsuitable for particular undertakings, filled the calendar; the belief in amulets and charms was universal. Such things we expect to find among the people, even where religious thought has risen highest. THE DOCTRINE OF THE OTHER LIFE Most of our knowledge about ancient Egypt is drawn from the tombs. No other nation ever bestowed so much care on the dead as the Egyptians did, nor thought of the other world so much. The living had to prepare for his further existence after death, and the dead claimed from his successors on earth elaborate offices of piety. It is in this part of the religion that there is most growth, and this part of it in its ultimate form is best known. 1. Treatment of the Dead.--The doctrine of the other world takes its rise with the Egyptians in the belief common to all early races, which was described above (chapter iii.). The spirit still lives when the body dies, and it comes back to the body, and is affected by the treatment the body receives. To care for the dead is the first duty of the living, and a man must marry in order to have offspring who will pay him the necessary attention after his death. Various things are buried with the corpse for the use of the spirit, and offerings are made to it from time to time afterwards. This is no more than the common primitive belief, but the Egyptians carried it out more fully in practice than any other people. They sought to make the body incorruptible, embalming it and restoring to it all its organs, so that the spirit should be able to discharge every function of life. They placed the mummy if possible in such a situation that it should never be disturbed to the end of time; the grave they called an eternal dwelling. They even instituted endowments to secure due offerings to the dead in all coming time. Cultivated as this part of religion was in Egypt, it could not fail to assume a special character. For one thing, there is a variety of names for what survives of man after death; we hear of his heart, his soul, his shade, his luminosity; and in the later doctrine these are all combined and made parts of one theory; all the different parts of the man have to come together again after their dispersion at death before his person is complete. The principal term, however, is the "ka," image, or, as we say, genius, of the man, a non-substantial double of him which has journeys and adventures to make, and to which the offerings are addressed. The "ka" needs food, and regular gifts are made to it of all it can require; it needs guidance and instruction, and these can be conveyed to it by pictures and writings on the walls of the tomb or in the mummy-case; even its amusement and its need of society and of ministration can be to some extent met in this way. It is not peculiar to Egypt that the advantages of wealth and rank are continued after death, and that the rich can do much more, or cause much more to be done for his eternal welfare, than the poor. The king's mummy lies in a pyramid, where it will never be moved; that of the noble in a rock-tomb or a stately edifice or "mastaba"; the poor man has to be content with an inferior kind of embalming, and a tomb of tiles if he gets any at all; and no priest can be retained to pray for him. 2. The Spirit in the Under-world.--Before history opens, this common belief and practice in regard to the dead had come to be combined in Egypt with the worship of a solar deity; a step of immense importance, which added immeasurably to the pathos and the moral power of this kind of religion. Milton says in _Lycidas_-- So sinks the daystar in the ocean bed; And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky; So Lycidas sank low, but mounted high. But what to Milton was a poetic imagination was to the early Egyptian a serious belief. If the sun was his god, he did not say like Wordsworth in his early period-- Our fate how different from thine, blest star, in this, That no to-morrow shall our beams restore, but he was convinced that the history of his god, who sank under the Western horizon, and after a period of darkness came back again to light and triumph, was an undoubted indication of what he himself had to look for after death. The mummy was carried across the Nile and deposited in the west land, which is also the under-world, to share in the repose and in the further progress of the dead. As the jackal pervades that region, the dead is left to the care of Anubis, the jackal-headed deity, who opens paths to him for further travel, and leads him into the presence of the gods. The under-world is elaborately portioned out into various parts and scenes, and manifold are the shapes of evil and mischief with which it is peopled. On the other hand, it contains abundance of blessings, which the departed may secure if the proper means have been taken by himself and by his friends surviving him. The earthly life is there repeated with all its occupations and enjoyments, but free from fear and from decay. The doctrine of the dead accompanying the sun-god to the under-world, and living under his protection, is very old in Egypt; we saw it in an early form in connection with the god Ra. It was in connection with Osiris, however, that it attained its widest diffusion; to the whole Egyptian people Osiris was the lord of the world below, with whom the departed were. The identification of the departed with Osiris was thorough and complete; he becomes Osiris, takes the name of the deity, and is known in the inscriptions as "Osiris N. N." Isis is his sister, Horus his defender, Anubis his herald and guide, and having shared the god's eclipse, he is also to share his triumph and revival. 3. The Book of the Dead, the most famous relic of Egyptian literature, is a collection of pieces many of which are very ancient, bearing on the passage of the soul through the under-world. The book has also been called the _Funeral Ritual_; a better translation of the title is, "Book of Coming out from the Day." The earthly life is the day from which the deceased comes forth into the larger existence of the world beyond. The book (or such parts of it as may be used in each case) is the soul's _vade mecum_ for the under-world, and contains the forms the soul must have at command in order to ward off all the dangers of that region, and to secure an easy and happy passage through it. How the person is to be reconstructed, the different parts coming back to be built up again in one, how he is to know the spirits he meets, how he is to get the gates opened for him,--such are the subjects of various chapters; and the soul's success in its passage depends on its knowledge of these. The words they contain are not merely information, they have magic power to smooth away obstacles and to open doors. Hence it is important for a man to have learned them when alive, and, to assist his memory, a few chapters are written on papyrus or linen, and the rolls placed with the mummy in its case, or they are written on the walls of the tomb. No other Egyptian work, in consequence, has been preserved in so many copies, but one roll or set of inscriptions contains one set of chapters and another another set. Does the fate of the individual after death depend then entirely on magic; is it a question of how many of these formulæ he is able to remember, or how many his relatives have got written out for him? Do no doubts intrude on his mind lest, even if he has all the requisite knowledge at command, he himself should be found unworthy to live with the immortals? For the most part the _Book of the Dead_ stands on the earlier position at which man never thinks of doubting the favour of his god, and trusts to overcome what is hostile by having his magic ready, not by having his heart pure. But in several chapters a deeper tone is heard. There is a form for having the stain rubbed away from the heart of the Osiris, and if there are abundant directions for outward purification, there are also directions for having his sins forgiven. In the great 125th chapter the deceased enters the Hall of the two Truths, and is separated from his sins after he has seen the faces of the gods. Here he stands before forty-two judges (compare the number of the nomes of Egypt) styled Lords of Truth, each of whom is there to judge of a particular sin, and to each he has to profess that he did not when on earth commit that sin. I have not stolen, he has to say; I have not played the hypocrite, I have not stolen the things of the gods, I have not made conspiracies, I have not blasphemed, I have not clipped the skins of the sacred beasts, I have not injured the gods, I have not calumniated the slave to his master; and so on. The line is not yet clearly drawn between moral and ritual or conventional offences; and moral duty is expressed in a negative form, and appears as a shackle, not as an inspiration. Yet the very great advance has been made here, that divine law watches not only over specially religious matters but over social life, and even over the thoughts of the individual heart. The gods enjoin on a man not only to offer sacrifice and to respect the sacred beasts, but also to do his duty as a citizen and as a neighbour, and to keep his own lips unpolluted and his own heart pure. It is to the same effect when we find that a man's justification depends on the state of his heart at death. His heart is weighed against the truth, and if it is found defective, he cannot live again; if it turns out well, then he is justified and goes to the fields of Aalu, the place of the blessed of Osiris. CONCLUSION This doctrine of the life to come, like the theistic doctrine the Egyptians at one time attained, might have seemed destined to lead to a pure spiritual faith, from which superstition should have disappeared. But in neither case is that result attained. The later history of Egyptian religion is that of the increase of magic, and of the rise of a priestly class absorbing to itself, as the older priests who were closely connected with the civil life of the nation had never done, all the functions of religion. Doctrine grows more pantheistic and more recondite, mysteries and symbols are multiplied, all to the increase of the influence of the priesthood, and to the infinite exercise of ingenuity in coming times. Popular religion, on the other hand, comes to be more taken up with such matters as charms and amulets and horoscopes; and while morals did not decline from the high level they had gained from the reign of the gods of light, the spirit of the nation lost vigour under the growth of religiosity at the expense of patriotism, and healthy reform grew more and more impossible. What of the religion of Egypt lived on in other lands which felt her influence, it is hard to say. The religious art of Egypt, and with it no doubt some tincture of the ideas it embodied, undoubtedly went northwards to Phenicia; and Greece owed to Phenicia, as we shall see, many a suggestion in religious matters. Long before Isis and Serapis were introduced in Rome in their own persons, the legend of Osiris had flourished in Greece under new names, and the Greek doctrine of the life to come, taught in the mysteries, has suggested to some scholars an Egyptian origin. To the Greeks and Romans this religion afforded an infinity of puzzles and mysteries; to the modern world it affords the greatest example of a religion the early promise of which was not fulfilled, the splendid moral aspirations of which were stifled amid the superstitions they were too weak to conquer. BOOKS RECOMMENDED For general information Wilkinson's _Egyptians_. E. A. W. Budge, _History of Egypt_, vols. i.-viii., 1902-03. E. A. W. Budge, _The Mummy_; chapters on Egyptian funeral archæology, Cambridge, 1893. E. A. W. Budge, _The Book of the Dead_, English Translation of the Theban Recension, 3 vols., 1910. Flinders Petrie, _A History of Egypt_. Flinders Petrie, in _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. i. p. 184, _sqq._ The Histories of Antiquity of Duncker, Maspero, and especially Ed. Meyer. Erman, _Life in Ancient Egypt_, 1894. Maspero, _Manual of Egyptian Archæology_, Second Edition, 1895. Renouf's _Hibbert Lectures_. Tiele, _History of the Egyptian Religion_, translated by Ballingal. Wiedemann, _Ägyptische Geschichte_, 1884-88; "Die Religion der alten Aegyptier," 1890; also "Egyptian Religion," in Hastings' _Bible Dictionary_, vol. v. A. O. Lange, "Die Ägypter" in De la Saussaye. _Records of the Past_, First Series (1873-81), vols. ii., iv., vi., viii., x., xii. Second Series, 1888-92, vols. ii.-vi. Benson and Gourlay, _The Temple of Mut in Asher_, 1899. Naville, _The Old Egyptian Faith_, translated by Colin Campbell, 1909. Colin Campbell, _Two Theban Queens_, 1909. A study of the inscriptions in two royal tombs. PART III THE SEMITIC GROUP CHAPTER X THE SEMITIC RELIGION As used by the modern scholar, the term Semites or Semitic races includes the Arabs, the Hebrews, the Canaanites and Phenicians, the Syrians or Arameans, the Babylonians and the Assyrians. This enumeration differs from that of the tenth chapter of Genesis, where the children of Shem include Elam, or the dwellers in Susiana, and Lud or the Lydians, while the tribes who dwelt in Canaan before the Hebrews are placed in another and a lower division of the human family. The principle of the enumeration in Genesis is probably that of geographical neighbourhood; the modern principle is that of linguistic affinity. The peoples mentioned above spoke, or still speak, languages which belong to the same family of human speech. The inference from affinity of language to affinity of blood is in this case a strong one, so that the peoples using the Semitic tongues are considered to be of the same race. To the question, where the cradle of the Semitic race is to be sought, most scholars now answer that we must seek it in Arabia. From this isolated land the Semitic dispersion spread in every direction, till Semitic language and customs filled the earth from the south of Arabia to the north of Syria, and from the mountains of Iran to the Mediterranean, and far along the northern shores of Africa; of Babylonia and Assyria, where Semitic culture and religion assumed at the dawn of human history a very special and peculiar form, we have already spoken. We have now to speak of Semitic religion as found in the lands bordering on the eastern Mediterranean in a more original form. The Semitic peoples outside of Babylonia founded no lasting empires, and showed no great aptitude for art or for literary style; but, in point of religion, they communicated to the world impulses of immeasurable force, which will act powerfully on the world as long as the Prophet is named or Christ preached. It is possible to define to a certain extent the typical religion of the Semites. The Burnett lectures of the late lamented Professor Robertson Smith[1] profess to do this; a book in which great learning and bold speculation are remarkably combined, and which forms one of the most important contributions to the early history, not of Semitic religion only, but of early religion in general. The writer was keenly interested in the study of prehistoric man and of primitive institutions, and much of his book refers to an earlier period in the growth of religion than that of the formation of the Semitic type. On the question of the specific character of Semitic as distinguished from other religions, it is one of our principal authorities. [Footnote 1: _Lectures on the Religion of the Semites_. First Series. The Fundamental Institutions, 1889.] The Semitic races differ from the Indo-European, with whom alone we need compare them, in their greater intensity of disposition and a corresponding poverty of imagination. The Semite has a smaller range of ideas, but he applies them more practically and more thoroughly. He has, indeed, an intensely practical turn, and does not touch philosophy except under an irresistible pressure of great practical ideas; while for plastic art he has no native inclination. From this it follows that the religious views he entertains appear to him less as ideas than as facts, which must be reckoned with to their full extent as other common facts of life must, and from which there is no escape. His religious convictions, therefore, are apt to be carried out to their utmost extent, even at the cost of great and painful sacrifices. Religion admits with the Semite of less compromise, and is less affected by fancy, than with the Aryan; it is, in fact, a more practical matter. The result proves to be that the Semitic mind brings religious ideas to bear on life and conduct with the greatest possible force; the substance is more, the form less, than is the case elsewhere. When we ask for the common type of working Semitic religion, where are we to look for it? Not in Babylonia; the characteristic Babylonian religion is Semitic, but late Semitic; it has received the impress of high civilisation and of empire. Nor need we look for it in the town life of Phenicia. It is in the seclusion of the Arabian peninsula that we find it, in the district, as we saw, now regarded as the cradle of the Semitic race, where life continues to this day little changed from what it was before the days of Abraham. There the type of society still exists with which scholars like Wellhausen and Smith consider the earliest Semitic religion to be connected. It is a society of nomad clans, which own no allegiance to any central authority, which have no king and do not yet form a nation. This is a stage of social growth which in every ancient people precedes the rise of the nation and of monarchy. The Hebrews are rising out of this stage when we first see them. Their neighbours the Moabites and Canaanites have already passed beyond it. But all these peoples alike have their root in a state of society when there was no large and orderly community, but only a multitude of small and restless tribes, when there was no written law, but only custom, and when there was no central authority to execute justice, but it was left to a man's fellow-clansmen to avenge his murder. Now the religion of the clan, the ideas of which determine the character of later Semitic systems, may be briefly described as follows. Each clan has its own god, perhaps he was originally an animal, at any rate he is the father or ancestor of the clan, he is of the same blood with them, he belongs to them and to no other clan. So far the assertion that the Semites are naturally monotheists is true; but the same is true of all 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. Should he be expelled from his clan he is driven away from his god, and he cannot obtain access into another clan except by a formal adoption as a stranger client. The link, on the other hand between the god and his clansmen is of the strongest. He joins in all their enterprises, after being consulted on the subject, and having a sacrifice offered to him, which renews the union of the clansmen to him and to each other. Their wars are his wars; when any of them is injured or slain he joins in their necessary acts of retaliation; it is a religious duty for each of them to be faithful to the others, and to keep up the tribal customs, of which the god approves. Thus the Semites have as many gods as they have clans; and these gods do not greatly differ from each other. As long, moreover, as the clans are at constant feud, no single god can grow very great. It is only when one clan conquers others, that a king-god can arise to rule over all alike as a monarch rules over his nobles and their provinces. But in this type of deity the genius of Semitic religion is already expressed. The god of the Semite is not a nature-power who bears the same aspect to all men, but a member of a particular clan, a person to whom the clansman occupies the same position of natural subordination as he does to his father or his chief. The god takes his name not from a part of nature but from a human relationship. He is "Baal," master or owner, he is "Adon," lord; in later circumstances he is "Melech," king. "El," mighty one, hero, is a more generic term; like our "God," it is applied to any divine being. These deities, it will be noticed, are all masculine; but it is not to be supposed that the Semites had no goddesses. Not to speak of the goddesses of Babylonia, mere doubles of the gods whose names they bore (chapter vii.), the earliest Semites are believed by several great scholars to have had a goddess but no god. The matriarchal state of society, in which the mother alone ruled the family, came before the patriarchal, and so the reign of the goddess came before that of the god. Each community has its own Al-lat, "The Lady," as she is called in Arabia, a strict and exacting lady, not to be confounded with the licentious goddesses of later times; and in all Semitic lands traces of her early prevalence are found.[2] As the male god came to the front, the female became a less definite figure, till she was generally a mere counterpart of the male god, with little character of her own. With gods of this type there is little scope for mythology. The history of the god is that of the tribe; the gods are too little independent of their human clients to form a society by themselves, or to give rise to stories about their doings. [Footnote 2: See Robertson Smith's _Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_.] This is one side of the natural history of the Semitic gods; but that history has another side. The lands in which the Semites dwelt were full from the first of sacred spots; and we have to notice that the god of a clan is also the god of a certain piece of earth where he is supposed to dwell, which is regarded as his property, and the fertility of which is ascribed to his beneficence. In the Bible we read of sacred trees, of sacred wells, of sacred stones or mounds, and of stones or pillars which were connected with sacrifice. In various Semitic lands there are also sacred streams and sacred caves. The Semites in fact had their share of the inheritance the whole world has derived from the earliest times, of prehistoric religious sites and objects. A spirit spoke in the rustling of the branches of the tree, counsel could be procured at the spring; wherever there appeared to be something mysterious in nature, a spirit was believed to dwell; and especially in woods and fertile spots, where wild beasts originally had their lair, a spirit was thought to reside, which was approached with fear. Many of these superstitions the various branches of the Semites long continued to hold;[3] but the race superseded in the main this world of spirits by a set of gods, and the magic addressed to spirits by religious observances addressed to gods. The genius or jinn haunting the thicket, who had no regular worshippers, but was an object of fear to all, and had to be propitiated or controlled by mysterious arts, gave way to the god of a clan, who took up his residence there, and received the regular worship of his clansmen; the stone became the symbol of a deity who had been asked and had consented to become identified with it for the purpose of the stated rites of the clan. In this way the clan gods became localised as the clans tended to acquire fixed settlements, and each sacred spot was occupied by the deity of the clan who dwelt around it. The view was held that each god was to be found at the spot where, on some marked occasion, he had given evidence of his power, and he who wished to enquire of that god had to go there. It might happen that the god manifested his power at another spot to one of his dependents on a journey, as Jehovah did to Jacob at Bethel (Genesis xxviii.). Then that spot also was recognised as a holy one where communication could be had with the deity, and the apparatus of worship was erected there so that the intercourse might be suitably carried on, as Jacob is reported to have done. In time also it came to be thought that each god had his land which belonged to him, on which alone his worship was possible, and so the earth was parcelled out among a number of deities; and Naaman, who wishes to worship Jehovah in his Syrian home, carries off two mules' burden of Jehovah's soil, to make in the midst of Syria a little piece of the land of the God of Israel (2 Kings v.). [Footnote 3: The late Professor Ives Curtius in a paper read to the Basel Congress (1905, _Verhandlungen_, p. 154), on "Traces of Early Semitic Religion in Syria," gives details of local sanctuaries still resorted to in that country.] One circumstance remains to be mentioned which constitutes a marked difference between the Semitic and the Aryan religions. Aryan religion has its centre in the household; the hearth is its altar, and the gods of the domestic cult are the departed ancestors of the family. Semitic religion is without this cult; the hearth is not an altar; the religious community is not the family but the clan. The worship of ancestors, if, as there is reason to believe, it had once been practised by the Semites (the Arabs tied a camel to the grave of the dead chief), lost at a very early period all practical importance. While the early Semites believed in the continued existence of the departed, they thought of them as beings quite destitute of energy, as "shades laid in the ground," and did not worship them. The other world occupied, therefore, a very small space in Semitic thought. Religion confined itself to this life; after death, it was held, even religion came to an end. A man must enjoy the society of his god in this life; after death he could take part in no sacrifice, and could render to his god no thanks nor service. From what has been said the character of sacrifice among the Semites is readily understood. Sacrifice is not domestic but takes place at the spot where the god is thought to reside, or where the symbol stands which represents him. Usually this was an upright monolith, such as is found in every part of the world, and the central act of the sacrifice consisted in applying the blood of the new-slain victim to this stone. The blood was thus brought near to the god, the clansmen also may have touched the blood at the same time; and the act meant that the god and the tribesmen, all coming into contact with the blood, which originally perhaps was that of the animal totem of the clan, declared that they were of the same blood, and renewed the bond which connected them with each other. A further feature of early Semitic sacrifice is also that the slaughter and the blood ceremony are succeeded by a banquet, at which the god is thought to sit at table with his clients, his share being exposed for him on the stone or altar. When he came to be believed to dwell aloft, his share was burned with fire so that the smell or finer essence of it might ascend to him. Many examples may be collected in the early historical books of the Old Testament of sacrifices which are at the same time social and festive occasions; in fact, in early Israel every act of slaughter was a sacrifice, and every sacrifice a banquet. The people dance and make merry before their god, of whose favour they have just become assured once more by the act of communion they have observed. The undertaking they have on hand is hallowed by his approval, so that they can boldly advance to it; the corporate spirit of the tribe is quickened by renewed contact with its head; all thoughts of care are far away; the religious act makes the worshippers simply and unaffectedly happy, if it does not even fill them with an orgiastic ecstasy. This careless happiness, in connection with religious acts, is found also in Babylonian sacrifice. It is not, however, peculiar to the Semites, but is characteristic of the religion of the early world in general. Nor is it peculiar to this race that religion does not address the individual as such, but only as a member of his tribe, and that it provides small comfort for private sorrows or longings. The sad face is out of place in the presence of the god. Religion is essentially a happy thing; sin is not yet thought of, and if things go wrong, the tribe never entertains any doubt but that with proper sacrifices and promises the god will show them his favour again and renew their prosperity. All this is not specially Semitic, but simply early religion. What is specially Semitic is, to repeat that with which we set out, that gods are worshipped whose relations to their worshippers are borrowed from existing forms of society. The god is the father or the master or the champion, of the circle of worshippers; he is of their kindred, he is their greatest and strongest clansman, he belongs to them and to none but them. This, whether it is derived--as Professor Robertson Smith thinks--from the ideas of totemism or not, leads to a religion which is exclusive and intense, and cannot be trifled with. The god who is a man's master, and the head of his clan, stands in a more imperative position towards him than the god of the sky, or than a departed ancestor. He does not change with the seasons or the weather, nor is there any doubt as to his intentions and demands. Semitic religion, even at this stage, is a very real thing, and may easily, in favouring circumstances, become a force of overmastering energy. BOOKS RECOMMENDED Hommel, _Die Semitischen Völker und Sprachen_. "Semites," by McCurdy, in Hastings' _Bible Dictionary_, vol. v. Cumont, _Les Religions orientales dans la Paganisme Romain_, 1907. CHAPTER XI CANAANITES AND PHENICIANS When the Children of Israel crossed the Jordan and settled in Palestine, they found that country inhabited by a race of men who spoke the same language as themselves, and who were much further advanced than they in civilisation. The letters of El-Amarna which belong to this period show Syria to have been full of small theocratic states, all pervaded, though now under the power of Egypt, by Babylonian culture, each with a god and a settled worship of its own. The Israelites of a later time regarded the Canaanites with such disdain that they reckoned them (Genesis x. 6, 15) as belonging to an inferior race; but the two peoples belonged to the same race, and had many common ideas and practices. In religion they resembled each other, or Israel could never have been tempted so strongly, and for so long a period, to adopt the rites of the people they conquered. The Israelites were not the only people who invaded the land of the Canaanites and stayed in it. Three such invasions took place: those of the Phenicians, of the Philistines, and of the Hebrews--the first and third being Semitic peoples, and perhaps the second also. The Philistines, settling on the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, had a Semitic religion, of which the fish-god Dagon, the Fly-Baal of Ekron, and the Ashtoreth, probably of Ascalon, are known figures. The Philistines, however, lost ultimately their separate character, and ceased to exist as an independent people. It will not be necessary for us to mention them again. The Phenicians, settling on the northern sea-board of Syria, where great trade routes to East and West converged, and where good harbours could be made, became a nation of merchants, and kept up active communication with the great kingdoms of the East, with Egypt, and with the islands and the distant shores of Western Europe. The carriers of the ancient world, they transmitted to Europe not only the spices and the fabrics but also the ideas and the practices of Asia, and rendered to the world the inestimable service of awaking the slumbering energies of the Aryan peoples to new life. A short chapter may be devoted to the religion of the Canaanites and to that of the Phenicians, not because these were important in themselves, for in neither was there anything original or anything destined to survive, but because of the light they throw on other religions which were to have a great career. It was in conflict with the Canaanite religion that the faith of Israel first realised its true nature and was led to organise itself in a manner befitting its character. And from Phenicia both Israel and Greece accepted many a suggestion, both in external matters connected with worship and in matters of a deeper nature. The religion of the Canaanites is well known to us from the Old Testament. It is such a system as we found that of the Semites to be, with certain peculiar developments, of which we have already seen something in our chapter on Babylonia. A local community recognises an invisible head, with whom it meets at the sacred spot, whom it regards as overlord or master, of whose favour it is in no doubt, and whom it serves with sacrifices and with lively manifestations of joy at certain fixed periods. The god is called Baal. This, however, is not a proper name but a title; it means lord, master, and the Baal may have a name of his own in addition: we hear of Baal Peor, the lord of Peor, and of many another. Baals are spoken of in the plural; we read in Judges ii. 11 and in other passages that the Israelites followed the Baals, that is the gods of the Canaanites. Each place has its own Baal, who is worshipped at the local sanctuary. The sanctuary is at an elevated spot outside the town or village, either on a natural eminence or on a mound artificially made for the purpose; these are the "high places" of the Old Testament; originally Canaanite places of worship, they drew to themselves also the worship of Israel. The apparatus of worship at these shrines is of a very simple nature. An upright stone represents the god; it is not a statue of him, being unhewn and having no resemblance to the human figure. He was supposed to come to the stone when meeting with his worshippers; and in the earliest times of Semitic religion this stone served the purpose of an altar: the gifts, which were not originally burned, were laid upon it, or the blood of the victim was applied to it. But besides the altar and the upright stone or _massebah_ the Canaanite shrine had another piece of furniture. A massive tree-trunk, fixed in the ground and with some of its branches perhaps still remaining, represented the female deity who is the invariable companion of the Baal. This is the Ashera of Canaan, a word which in the Authorised Version is translated "grove," after an error of the Vulgate, but which in the Revised Version is rightly left untranslated. (Judges iii. 7, vi. 25; 2 Kings xxiii. 6, there is one in the Temple at Jerusalem; etc.) The word Ashera is in such passages the designation of the tree which stood to represent the goddess; whether it is ever the proper name of the goddess herself is doubtful. At any rate Ashera, like Baal, is not the name of one historic deity, but a name applied to the goddess of each place all over the country. The character of Canaanite religion is clearly revealed in its apparatus of worship. We saw that the Babylonians added to many of the gods of their country a female counterpart, turning the name of the god into a feminine form (chapter vii., also chapter x.). In Canaan we find that Semitic worship is addressed to pairs of deities; there is a god and a goddess at each shrine. While it would be wrong to regard this as the general type of Semitic religion,--our chapter on that subject points to a different conclusion, and the great gods of Phenicia, of Moab, and of Israel are solitary beings,--we must recognise that the worship of god and goddess was widespread in Semitic peoples. In Canaan it is not difficult to understand it. We have here the worship of an agricultural community; and as the Baal is the lord of the soil and the author of its fertility, who is entitled to receive the first-fruits, so the Ashera is the fertile matron who represents the principle of increase. The Old Testament leaves us in no doubt as to the kind of worship which was carried on at these shrines. The festivals were those of the farmer's calendar; the Baal is presented with the first-fruits of corn and wine and oil, in the midst of general feasting and boisterous merry-making. His consort, on the other hand, is served with rites applying in the most direct manner the principle she represents. The shrine has a staff of female attendants for this part of the service of religion. The rustic worship of Palestine thus shows us a side of the religion of Western Asia which we know from other sources to have been widely diffused. A female deity like the Babylonian Ishtar (chapter vii.), is served with impure rites in great cities as well as in country districts, and her worship spread westwards with other Eastern products. She is found as Baalit, as Mylitta,[1] as Astarte; the Greeks call her Aphrodite, and her horrid worship found entrance in various Greek cities. [Footnote 1: Herod. i. 199.] To the Israelites the worship of Canaan proved a great temptation (Numbers xxv.), but they gradually rose above it. The Phenicians also came to have gods of a much higher character, and of these also we must speak. The Phenicians were not original in their religion any more than in their art; their religion began with the ordinary Semitic notions as these had been applied by the older population in Syria, and they improved it by borrowing from various parts of the world with which they trafficked. So various were their borrowings that it is impossible to draw up a consistent system of their gods. One town has one set of gods, another town another, and the same deity wears different and even opposite characters in different places. All that can be done is to single out a few features which we can see to have been on the whole characteristic of Phenician religion, and to have enabled it to influence the worship of other peoples. The Phenicians were very much in earnest about the maintenance of state and of religion. In their successive city-states of Sidon, Tyre, and Carthage, we see them exhibiting an intense devotion to the commonwealth, and very much under the influence of their priesthood. Semitic religion tends to grow more sombre and intense as it develops; and the Phenicians, while still holding the principle of a god and goddess, concentrate their worship more and more on a single divine figure, and come to regard that figure from a greater distance and with greater awe. The liberal and easy-going Baals and Asheras of agricultural life are not suited to the temple of a great commercial city; a figure of more dignity is wanted. And thus above the crowd of Baals there appears the Moloch or king, a much greater being and requiring a much statelier service. Moloch also is not originally a proper name; there are various Molochs or king-gods who rise above the Baals, and the individuals have special designations, as Melcarth, "king of the city." This type of deity occurs not with the Phenicians only, but with several other Syrian peoples about the same time. The Moloch of Sidon and Tyre is a being of the same character as the chief gods of Moab, Ammon, and Israel. He has to do not only with the blessings of agricultural life, but with state and government. He is the founder of a state; he is the inventor of navigation and of purple; he is the first king; when a colony is sent out, it goes with his approval, and he himself leads the expedition; he is the dread ruler whom none must disobey; the majesty, the power, and the enterprise of the state are all embodied in him. And as the king-god is far above the landlord-god in power, he is infinitely removed from him in character also. The chief gods of Sidon and Tyre have nothing luxurious or effeminate about them. They are strict and awful beings, and must not be incautiously approached. They retain their primitive character as sources of life, but they are destroyers of life as well. Pure and holy themselves, they require purity and holiness in all who draw near to them. Their priests are celibates, their priestesses virgins. They require sacrifices of a very different nature from those of the Baals, more costly and more dreadful. Human sacrifices appear to have been a regular feature of their worship: when the Israelites turn to the worship of Phenician gods, or when they copy Phenician practices, we hear of their "making their children pass through the fire"--that is, offering them up as burnt-sacrifices. The Moloch requires what is most costly as a sacrifice, or what will cause the strongest thrill of terror in his worship. Even the first-born child is not to be kept back from him (2 Kings xxiii. 10, Jerem. vii. 31, cf. Micah vi. 7). So far the origin of the Phenician gods is simple. They are purely Semitic deities, formed on the pattern of human rulers and deriving their attributes from that character. When a state becomes highly organised before it is quite civilised in other respects, its religion is apt to be stern and cruel; of this various instances may be found in the history of religion, and the present is one of them. The Phenician gods were of such a character as to favour the survival of savage practices; the Semite, as we saw, is extremely matter-of-fact and practical in his religion, and a god who was a king would receive the same kind of offerings as the king of Sidon or of Tyre was accustomed to. A strict and dreadful religion thus survives beyond the savage state; pleasure is taken in trampling on natural feelings and in setting forth shocking spectacles at the bidding of the deity. Astral Deities of Phenicia.--It is not possible to arrange in a system the remaining phenomena of Phenician religion. In the historical period the gods have another character besides that of being heads and rulers of communities. They are connected with the heavenly bodies. The chief god, whatever name he bears, El, Baal, Moloch, Rimmon, or Adonis, is always the sun. A sun-god may have come from Egypt or Babylon, but there is no reason why the Phenicians may not have had a sun-god from the first, whose character spread to their other deities. And in accordance with the tendency above spoken of, the sun-god has a consort. Sometimes his consort is the earth; and then we have a sensuous and immoral worship such as that of the Canaanites. Sometimes it is the moon; her name is Astarte or Ashtoreth, and she is a very different being from the Ashera of Canaan; the names are not the same, and the characters are opposite. Ashtoreth, like the primitive Semitic goddess (chapter x.), is a chaste matron; she is represented robed and in stately attitude, and is a fit companion for the strict Moloch of the cities. Her worship is described to us by Jeremiah, in whose time the matrons of Jerusalem made cakes for her and poured out drink-offerings and burned incense to her as the "queen of heaven"; all this was done with the knowledge and co-operation of their husbands, so that the worship had nothing immoral about it. This strict goddess is not to be identified with Istar of Babylonia, although the names are alike. Istar is not a moon-goddess like Ashtoreth; in Babylonia, in fact, the moon is masculine, and the characters of the two goddesses are opposite. The Sidonian Astarte and the Canaanite Ashera represent two opposing types of female deity, both of which may possibly have their reflections in Greece--the latter in the lower forms of the worship of Aphrodite, and the former in the figures of such strict maiden goddesses as Artemis and Athene. Another worship which prevailed in Phenicia should not be left unnoticed--that of the Cabiri. There were temples of the Cabiri in several of the towns; their worship, however, was secret, and little was known of it even in antiquity. We know at all events that the Cabiri were seven in number, and the number is thought to be connected, not with the seven planets, but with the seven heavenly spheres of early astronomy. They have a head called Eshmun, who is the god of the eighth or highest sphere. The Cabiri are beings of a moral character; they are not only mighty ones and creators, but they are the children of Sydyk--that is, of Righteousness; and they give counsel. It is here that the tendency to speculative exaltation of the deity appears in Phenicia; but there is little of it, and neither in this direction nor in that of morals was the religion destined to have any remarkable growth. The service of the gods was so closely identified with the service of the state,--for either the priest and the king were one, as in Israel after the exile, or nothing could be done without the priesthood,--that no independent religious development was possible. In a theocracy religion cannot grow, at least it cannot be openly acknowledged to do so; and the prophet and reformer finds every influence arrayed against him. How greatly Israel was indebted to Phenician art is known to all. It was by artificers from Tyre that Solomon's royal buildings were planned and executed, when he had married a daughter of Egypt and was compelled to aim at some magnificence. A royal temple formed part of these buildings, and was necessarily erected according to the ideas which prevailed in the more advanced neighbouring kingdoms. It was from the same source that the Greeks a century or two later drew suggestions for their sacred architecture; and thus we find that the ground-plan of Solomon's temple and that of the Greek temple are closely similar. Both are to be traced ultimately to the model derived by the Phenicians from Egypt. And those who borrowed from Phenicia the form of their temple, borrowed many other things too. In the porch of Solomon's temple stood two great pillars of bronze, which were called Jachin and Boaz; they were simply the symbols which stood at the entrance to every Phenician temple of the sun-god worshipped there. The priests of Israel were dressed like those of Tyre and Sidon; they offered the same animals as sacrifices, they received the same dues for their maintenance. When so much apparatus was borrowed, it is no wonder that the gods of Phenicia were at times worshipped at Jerusalem. We see from this whole chapter that the religion of Israel was not so much apart from that of the other Syrian peoples as we have been wont to imagine. Even in his religion Israel owed something to his neighbours; his religion came to be better than theirs, but it was the result of a movement in which they also had taken part. BOOKS RECOMMENDED The Histories of Antiquity. E. Meyer, Duncker (see p. 101). Tiele's _Egyptische en Mesopotamische Godsdiensten_. Book II.: Phenicia and Israel. The Histories of Israel, especially Kuenen, _The Religion of Israel_. F. Jeremias, in De la Saussaye, vol. i. pp. 348-383. E. Meyer, "Phenicia," in _Encyclopædia Biblica_. CHAPTER XII ISRAEL It is a circumstance of the greatest value for the science of religion that the Old Testament is so well known. That book is the most valuable literary storehouse we possess of the facts and ideas connected with the early religion of mankind; it is the best text-book of the earlier portion of our subject. In our chapters on primitive worship, as well as in that on the Semites, we have drawn largely from this source, and for the earlier stages of the religion of Israel we may refer to these chapters. We have now, however, to deal specially with the religion of the Old Testament, and to endeavour to show, as has been done in other cases, what was its specific character, and how its character determined its history. The story to be told in this chapter is, even apart from our special interest in it, as fascinating as any in this volume; it was through a mental movement of unparalleled grandeur, as well as through an outward history of tragic and entrancing interest, that the Jews came to possess the religion which was the desire of all nations, and the chief preparation for Christianity. We have to begin, however, with repeating in this case what has been and will be the burden of our opening paragraphs in many chapters of this book, namely that the traditional ideas about the nature of this religion require to be corrected, and that its sacred books as they now stand do not accurately represent its history. The Old Testament literature has suffered in a high degree what seems to be the predestined fate of every set of sacred books. Old materials and new are mixed up together in it; many works have been revised by later editors, and so much changed, that laborious critical processes are necessary before they can be used by the historian. In forming his first impressions as to the relations the books bear to each other, and as to the purport of the whole, the reader is naturally guided by the order in which he finds them; but the order in which the sacred books of the Jews stand in the Old Testament was fixed from a peculiar point of view at a late age in Jewish history, and is in many respects quite unnatural and misleading. To come to particulars; the Old Testament as it stands suggests that the Law was the earliest product of Jewish literature, and that all the details of ritual, as well as of moral and social duty, were fixed for the Jews at the very outset of their history; and it suggests that the books of the prophets were written last. This, till quite recently, was generally believed to be the case, but by the labours of a series of illustrious scholars of the Old Testament the conclusion has been reached, which is now less and less disputed, that the earlier prophetic books come first in chronological order, and that the law, which is not all of one piece, but contains a number of codes of different periods, together with a collection of legends and traditions drawn from various quarters and subjected to editorial treatment, did not assume the form in which we have it till after the exile. The historical books, in which no doubt various ancient pieces are embodied, were written under the inspiration of prophetic ideas; and the latest books of all are those which stand in the centre of the Old Testament in the English Bible; the Psalter, which had been growing during a long period before it came to contain its present number of pieces, the books of morals and philosophy, and the book of Job. Daniel belongs to the period of the Maccabees. The historian, therefore, starts from the age of the prophets of the eighth century B.C. The writings of these great men afford a graphic picture of their time, and an entirely trustworthy account of the mental furniture Israel then possessed. From this fixed point the student is able to infer what happened to Israel in earlier times, and to judge of the spirit in which the early history of the people was afterwards written and edited. The history of Israel which the student arrives at after these critical processes differs, it is true, in very important respects from that which appears at first sight on the face of the Bible. But the same thing has occurred in the case of other nations. The sacred books of Persia also have to be turned outside in before they furnish the historian with an account he can accept. Even of the speeches of Mohammed the same is true. Those who undertake the task of codifying sacred literatures have to consider the purpose to which the books are to be put in the community, and to arrange them so as best to serve that purpose; they do not ask, How must they be arranged so as to exhibit the true sequence of the history?--that interest only arises much later--but, How will they best serve the needs of the community? The order of books in sacred collections is, therefore, fixed by practical considerations, now of one kind and now of another, and not according to the requirements of the student of history. We now proceed to give the outline of the history of the religion of Israel as it appears in the light of recent critical investigation. Israel consisted originally of a group of tribes, bound together by the memory of a great deliverance they had experienced in common, and of battles in which they had fought side by side. Accustomed to the free life of shepherds, they had been enslaved in Egypt and held to intolerable tasks; but they had made their escape in a wonderful manner under a leader who had known how to kindle them to heroic efforts by reminding them of their religious traditions. Under his leadership they had visited the Sinaitic peninsula after leaving Egypt, and had wandered in the regions to the north of Sinai, till at last they conquered territory to the east of Jordan, on which some of them settled, while others crossed the Jordan, and took up their abodes among the Canaanite tribes whom they found there. The nation and the religion came into the world at the same time. Although the tribes retained their separate gods and religious observances, and families among them also had their own family cults, the bond by which they had been formed into a people and made capable of common action was stronger than these earlier ties; the God whom Moses proclaimed as their head inspired in them an enthusiasm and vigour unknown before. His name was Yahweh, and is said to have a metaphysical meaning, and to designate the god as more really existing than any other. This is doubted; what is certain is that Moses declared that Yahweh promised to be with the tribes, and that they took him for their God. Jehovah, to use the more familiar form of the name, was perhaps the God of the most powerful of the tribes; he was probably a nature-god, and connected with storms and thunder, and he had his seat at Mount Sinai. Thither the tribes repaired to hold a solemn meeting with him; from there he was afterwards represented as coming forth when about to do any mighty act for his people. He is thought of as a being who cannot be seen, since he dwells in clouds and darkness. He utters his voice in thunder and storm; he is possessed of irresistible energy which he unfolds in battle, and in which he causes his people to share when he goes before them to war. But he is also a god of counsel, and takes the greatest interest in the moral and social life of his people. His human representatives, aided by his spirit, settle disputes which are laid before them, and pronounce authoritative counsels on difficult matters. This kind of guidance is constantly going on, so that Jehovah is felt to be watching over the conduct of his people, and to be an effective helper and guide in their domestic concerns, which not every god attends to, as well as in their meetings with their enemies. The Early Ritual was Simple.--In all this we have a very apt example of the advance which, as we saw in a former chapter, religion makes when it becomes national instead of merely tribal; when the great god of the nation takes his place above the gods of the tribes. In Israel, however, it is not the case that the national religion, when it appears, at once develops a higher style of worship, and draws attention to itself by greater pomp and deeper solemnity of form. The priestly legislation of Exodus and Leviticus, indeed, represents this as having been the case. Here the tribes have scarcely adopted the service of Jehovah, when an army of thousands of priests is called into being, for whose maintenance elaborate provision is made, and a splendid and highly-organised worship is arranged. This directory of worship, however, most scholars are agreed, never was in operation till after the exile: we see in it the worship which Ezra and his fellow-scribes aimed at introducing in the second temple at Jerusalem. The worship of the wilderness and of the early period of Israel in Canaan was of a very different nature. The leading features and principles of it differed little from what we have described in former parts of this book (chapter v., chapter x.). It was conducted according to custom rather than statute, and its leading characteristic was that it was a common meal at which the god was present along with his worshippers, and assurances were given that the good understanding still continued which bound the tribesmen to their god and each other. It was by the person of his god rather than by a more elaborate worship, or a more numerous priesthood, that Israel was distinguished from Moab and Ammon. Contact with Canaanite Religion.--After being delivered out of Egypt by the power of Jehovah, and entering Canaan, Israel was placed in a position in which it is wonderful, indeed, that the national character and the national religion were not merged in those of the surrounding population. Bringing with them the few ideas and the scanty appliances of the wilderness, they found themselves dwelling amid a people whose civilisation was fully formed, and who possessed a comparatively elaborate worship. The tribes of Canaan spoke the same language, and were of the same race with themselves, but had advanced to the higher life of agriculture and of cities. Their worship was the same in principle as that of Israel, but it had a higher organisation. The land was studded with sacred places, the sanctity of which Israel could not deny, and which formed centres of pilgrimage and worship. The worship of the Canaanites was described in last chapter (chapter xi.); the reader will remember the upright stone (masseba) representing the Baal, and the tree-trunk (ashera), if there was no living tree, representing the goddess. If all this or most of it was new to the Israelites, so was the sacred year which fixed the seasons of worship in Canaan. Minor festivals were fixed by the appearance of the new moon, or by the regular return of the seventh day (it is doubtful if the Sabbath was observed in the wilderness, it is connected with agriculture, and is scarcely compatible with pastoral life); greater ones by the epochs of the year, such as harvest and vintage. The worship connected with agriculture in the early world is of a noisy and frantic order; and where gods are worshipped who are connected with fertility, it is apt, as we saw, to be marked by sexual features. Danger of Fusion.--The Israelites were naturally prompted to adopt what they could of the religion of the Canaanites. The old sacred places of the land, whether connected with their own ancestral traditions or not, they could not help adopting; it would have been strange, indeed, if, when they became agriculturists, they had not adopted the agricultural festivals; and if, as was natural, they regarded the Baal of the Canaanite as the lord of the land and the giver of its fertility, their thanks for the harvest would be addressed to him (Hosea ii. 8). Their worship of Jehovah could not be left poorer than that which their neighbours addressed to Baal; for it also they erected asheras and made use of standing stones, and of Jehovah also they had images. One of these, which was destroyed by Hezekiah, was in the form of a serpent: in other places Jehovah was worshipped under the form of a bull. Where an image of him was kept, he could be consulted by means of lots or in other ways. The ark or chest which was kept at one of the more important shrines, represented him most fully; it was carried into battle, and he was thought to go with it. Religious Conflict.--But the more developed worship thus paid to Jehovah after the settlement in Canaan, as it had not grown out of the religion of Jehovah, did not truly express its spirit, and was felt by those who believed most thoroughly in the national god, to be a wrong way of serving him. If, moreover, the Israelites, who lived scattered and far apart from each other among the older inhabitants, went so far in adopting Canaanite practices, there was a danger that Israel would forget the faith which had made him a nation, and thus part entirely with his character and nationality. A contest thus arose, which continued during the whole of Israelite history down to the exile, between the few who cared for Jehovah only, and desired to see the principles of his religion carried out purely and without reserve, and the many who, while also professing to follow Jehovah, saw no harm in worshipping him as other gods were worshipped, or even in addressing other gods as well as him. This struggle is represented in the histories as if Israel had from time to time become entirely apostate from its own faith. But it is clear that Israel never forgot Jehovah so far as to be incapable of being called back to him. The call was generally a call to war. The people, having forgotten the true source of their strength, and so lost spirit and became a prey to their enemies, were summoned by one in whom the spirit of Jehovah was burning freshly, to follow him to battle against their enemies. The spirit of Jehovah, thus applied anew to the hearts of his people, did not fail of its effect. The wave of courage and of martial ardour spread from place to place, from tribe to tribe, and soon an army stood in the field which struck with the old vigour, and soon shook off the yoke of the oppressor. Jehovah thus proved himself to be Jehovah Sebaoth, _i.e._, in the most probable rendering of the phrase, the God of the armies of his people. A religion which proved itself in this way could never cease to be a power in the heart of the nation; even if the tribes, dispersing again after a victory, soon seemed to lose touch of each other, and to be sinking deeper than ever in the surrounding tide of Canaanite life, yet the faith, which was associated with all the highest moments of their past history, and was the secret of all their victories, could not die. The Monarchy.--It was a great advance, however, in the history of the religion of Israel, when the judges or heroes who appeared, at distant intervals of time and in different parts of the country, to summon Israel to fight for freedom in the name of Jehovah, were succeeded by the monarchy. This was a step which those most zealous for the national faith warmly approved, and, indeed, themselves brought about; the monarchy was founded, in the case of the first two kings, on religious enthusiasm. The religion of Jehovah at once became the state religion, and a more satisfactory worship was formed at the court. The permanent union of the tribes under the monarchy soon showed Israel to be possessed of much greater force than could have been imagined, and within a century the people of Jehovah formed a considerable power, which was heard of in all ends of the earth. Instead of a set of scattered tribes they were now a homogeneous people, conscious of a great past and looking forward to a still greater future. As they passed rapidly from barbarism to civilisation, Jehovah shared their rise. His energy had always been undoubted, but he now put on in addition all the settled attributes of kingly power--he was a great god, and a great king, a just judge, a liberal friend--all his doings were wonderful. He had chosen Israel for his people, and by a series of mighty acts had guided and preserved them, and made them great. His people stood in a peculiar position in the world; with such a god they must rise higher still, there could be no limit to what he could do for them. Religion not Centralised.--We must not, however, suppose that the rise of Jehovah to a great position, and the institution of his worship at the court, made any great or sudden change in the religious arrangements of the people at large. While the worship of the monarch went on at Gibeon or at Jerusalem, the great shrines at Bethel, at Dan, and at Beersheba were still frequented, and the sacred places throughout the land remained in honour. Stories indeed were told to show that they had been founded by the patriarchs for the worship of their god, so that there need be no scruple in frequenting them. The worship of Baal and that of Jehovah went on at these places side by side, and neither could fail to be influenced by the other. Sacrifice was guided by more than one principle: on the one hand it was a common meal with the deity; and as Jehovah was thought to have his dwelling in Heaven, his part of the banquet was burned, so that it might ascend to him in the column of smoke. The sacrifice of agriculturists, however, naturally turns to the idea of presenting to the god, with joy and thankfulness, a part of the gifts, or the first or best part of the gifts, which, as lord of the soil, he has bestowed. The idea of propitiation or atonement does not enter into the ordinary sacrifices at this time. Jehovah in his sterner moods may demand more awful offerings. As we see from the story of Abraham offering up Isaac, it was thought that Jehovah might demand human sacrifice, and instances of such sacrifice actually occur in the records. Jephthah dedicates his daughter; after a war the best of the booty is offered to Jehovah, and Samuel hews Agag in pieces before him. But such occurrences lie quite apart from ordinary worship, which is of a joyful character and is accompanied by merry-making of various kinds. No fixed ritual prevailed throughout the country; the attempt to introduce uniformity came much later. Every one knew how to sacrifice, as the stories of Manoah and of Gideon show; it was by no means necessary that a priest should be present. The functions of the priest indeed were often connected with other matters than sacrifice, and might be of a humble description. Eli with a few attendants was the guardian of the ark which was the symbol of the presence of Jehovah. A young priest was engaged by Micah for ten pieces of silver yearly to take charge of his collection of idols. But the most important duty of the priesthood, and that on which their influence mainly depended, was that of consulting Jehovah and ascertaining his will. This was done by some sacred object in the charge of the priest, and various objects are named (Ephod and Teraphim are images of deities; Urim and Thummim are the lots used on such occasions) which possessed this virtue. The priest also acted as a judge in matters brought to him for decision, and thus was in a position to form the unwritten law of the people, and to set up principles of conduct which came in course of time to be regarded as sacred. The priests' "torah" or law is the beginning of the Jewish legislation, and we see from the humane and kindly provisions of the earliest codes that this important function was discharged in no unworthy way. It was thus that Jehovah acted as the living lawgiver of his people, long before any written law existed. With his character as a warrior, a mighty lord, and a giver of rich gifts, he combines from the first that of one who watches over the conduct of his people, checks their excesses, and is willing and able to lead them on to better living. This fact will be of much importance when the mind of the people expands and seeks to understand more clearly his being and character. The Prophets.--Israel, like other nations of antiquity, had, in addition to the priests who were professionally connected with religion, a class of men who were organs of the deity not on account of their position but by a special personal gift. The inspiration of Jehovah appeared in early times in somewhat crude forms. Bands of fervid devotees were seen, who produced in themselves by dance and song an ecstatic enthusiasm, in which they were thought to become the organs of the deity. These men lived in societies or guilds, which were found in Israel for several centuries. There were such prophets of Baal as well as of Jehovah, so that the phenomenon is not specifically Israelite. What we hear of them does not always give us a lofty idea of their character. They are found practising magical tricks, and when they prophesy they all say the same thing; sometimes they are willing to prophesy what a king wishes to hear. The greater prophecy of Israel arose out of such beginnings as these. Israel was accustomed to expect to hear the will of Jehovah declared by a speaker of whom the spirit had laid hold, and among those who came forward to meet this expectation there appeared from time to time men of commanding insight and of great intensity of character. The name "seer" indicates the nature of this kind of prophecy. The seer is one to whom Jehovah communicates his intentions personally, perhaps without any steps having been taken on his part to place himself in the way of the god. He sees visions while awake and in his ordinary frame of mind, he also hears what others do not hear; and the vision and the message have reference to the future. Things are intimated which are shortly to come to pass, and they are things concerning the state or the monarchy: the fate of Israel is the burden of the prophet's intimation. Samuel's seeing led him to institute the monarchy under Saul. The prophet Abijah declared for the division of the kingdom into two; and his prophecy was not vain. Elijah foretold the downfall of the house of Omri, and Elisha saw to the accomplishment of that prediction. The prophets we see were a great power in public affairs, and were able in important crises to determine the course of the nation's history. Often the prophet stands quite alone, and in opposition to the court and apparently to the nation, and yet his words have a tendency to get themselves fulfilled; Jehovah's word does not return to him void. At other times the prophet seems to have many sympathisers among the nation, and to speak as the mouthpiece of the most earnest section of the community, the section most devoted to Jehovah; and in these cases it is less wonderful that his words come true. When, however, we speak of the prophets as a whole, the expression is a loose one; the prophets are not a party that always acts together, nor a school in which the leader is always sure of a following. A great voice sounds, perhaps once in a century or a half-century; and these voices represent the true tradition of Israelite religion, and develop it further. In the time of Elijah we notice that there is a puritan movement in Israel; a number of men are agreed together in detestation of the foreign worships which are practised at court, and are heartily agreed in wishing to bring back the good old ways and the pure worship of Jehovah only. And when Elijah speaks, he gives voice to this tendency; he claims that everything should be determined by religion; no considerations of state should for a moment stand in the way of the pure faith of Jehovah, by which everything should be decided; and whatever stands in the way of this policy is dedicated to destruction. This, broadly speaking, is the keynote of Hebrew prophecy. When we come to the canonical prophets, however, we feel that there is a great deal more in their teaching than the bare demand that everything must give way to the requirements of religion. A great change has taken place in their world of thought. It is no less than that a new god and a new religion have announced themselves in the thinking of these men. They do not say so; they are not aware of it, and yet it is so. The Old Religion National.--The religion of Israel during the monarchy is, in the full sense of the term, a national one. From a cluster of tribes Israel has become a nation, and has begun to think of itself as a unity. It has its national history, its national rulers, as other nations have. In their nationality it cannot be denied that the Israelites had much to be proud of; nor did their rapid growth in wealth and power, which gave them several centuries of prosperity, tend to lesson that pride. Now as they have their own king, they have also their own god. Jehovah is the god of Israel; Israel is the people of Jehovah, on this they were all agreed. That Jehovah was their god did not prevent them from believing in the existence of other gods: Chemosh was the god of Moab, a being not very unlike Jehovah, the Baals were the old gods of Canaan. Jehovah, of course, was the greatest and strongest, and an Israelite should worship him, in Canaan at least; but there was no great harm if he worshipped other gods too, when it came in his way to do so. He might join in the worship of Baal in country places; and the king might, without doing any harm, set up the images of the gods of his wives beside the images of Jehovah in the capital, and if many of his subjects joined in these other worships, it was but natural. In this way a great variety of gods was in some reigns brought together from different countries. Jehovah, however, was the special god of Israel, there could be no doubt of that; Israel was specially pledged to him; and he on his side was pledged to Israel, who was entitled to look to him for help in every emergency. Jehovah had no other people; he was entirely bound up with Israel, he must, if only for his own honour, come to the aid of his own people when they needed him. He never could permit Israel to suffer any fatal injury, such as deportation to a foreign country. Religious faith forbade the thought that such a thing was possible; if Israel was destroyed, where would Israel's religion be? It was utter impiety, therefore, to doubt that Israel was safe, that Jehovah watched over his own land and his own people, or that he would guard them from any fatal harm. If, on the other hand, as was too often the case, Israel had to submit to injury and insult from other peoples, there could be no doubt that Jehovah took notice of the fact, and that in due time he would set things right. It might be some time before his attention was sufficiently directed to the case; he might be waiting till more of the same kind of occurrences took place before he finally interposed; but the time would come, the "Day of the Lord" would arrive in due season, when the spoilers and insulters of Israel would be dealt with according to their deserts, and Israel set on high in full deliverance and peace. Criticism of the Old Religion by the Prophets.--The prophets, impressed more deeply than the people by the moral character of Jehovah, and under the pressure of great national dangers and calamities, attained to views of God and of his ways so different from those current at the time as to appear, when first produced, most unpatriotic and even impious. In their character of seers they foresaw with clearness the terrible catastrophes which were about to burst upon their people. Amos prophesies that Israel will be carried away captive out of his land; Isaiah announces the same thing in the southern kingdom, and declares that only a remnant shall return. These men are in no doubt as to the impending political annihilation of Israel, and they set themselves to find some reason for an occurrence so portentous, so impossible to harmonise with ordinary religious faith. They account for it by a view of the nature of Jehovah far exalted above that of their people. He is punishing them for their iniquities, they say, he is so righteous that he must punish sin, and he must punish the sin of Israel his beloved people not less strictly, but more strictly than that of other peoples. As a husband whose wife has gone astray must subject her to discipline before he can receive her again to his favour, so Hosea, made a prophet by such a domestic affliction, contends that Jehovah cannot but deal strictly with Israel. This theory of the meaning of the impending calamities is supported by the prophets by those denunciations of the national sins which give so gloomy a complexion to their works. Among the national delinquencies the disorganisation and apparent wilfulness shown in worship have a prominent place. Worship is not what the service of Jehovah ought to be. Other beings than he are sought after; heathenish festivals are kept, the indecent practices of heathen worship are introduced into that of Jehovah: there is no seriousness, no dignity, no worthy order, in the acts of worship that are done. Any place does for them, and many of the places used are quite unfit, from their associations, for the service of Jehovah. They are celebrated more as wild orgies than as solemn approaches to the deity. The interests of the prophets, however, do not centre in ritual. The worship of other gods than Jehovah, or the service of Jehovah in unfitting ways, they could not but denounce, but they have no positive instructions to give about worship. When the people have apparently given up the wrong worships, and are applying themselves with zeal to that of Jehovah, seeking his favour by austerities, or by costly offerings, the prophets are no less severe on this line of conduct. Every one is familiar with the passages in which they apparently denounce sacrifice altogether as a thing God has never asked, and by which Israel cannot hope to win his favour. These passages do not prove that the prophets desired the entire discontinuance of sacrifice; they merely compare sacrifice with another line of duty which is said to be vastly more important. Not sacrifice but mercy, not sacrifice but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God,--is the burden of these utterances. Even more than by the irregularities of worship, the prophets are shocked by the more directly moral shortcomings of their people. The people are accused of all the acts that are forbidden in the decalogue of Exodus xx., and of many offences not there named. Especially are the prophets indignant at the hardheartedness of the rich towards the poor, and at the frequent disregard of faith and truth; oppression and bribery, gluttony and other luxurious excesses, are frequently their mark. These most of all are the sins which have called down the divine judgments; these are the transgressions which make it impossible for Jehovah to turn away the punishment of Israel and of Judah. He is, above all things, a righteous god, who loves judgment and mercy, and a people which so manifestly fails to practice justice and mercy cannot continue to be his people; he must destroy them. The prophets therefore declare that Jehovah has decided on the rejection of his people. This shows that they have advanced to a new conception of what Jehovah is. To them he is something more than the mere national deity indissolubly linked to the fortunes of his people, pledged to advance them in the world, and doomed when they fall to fall himself along with them. He is first of all a moral ruler; the maintenance and promotion of righteousness is far more to him than the prosperity of any single people, even of Israel. He loves Israel it is true; Israel is his son, whom he loves, the wife of his youth, the people of his covenant. But that makes it the more and not the less necessary that Israel should not be allowed to go on in iniquity. Jehovah can be no partisan of a people that does not walk according to his laws. Thus the prophets have arrived at a new conception of Jehovah's character, which necessarily unfits him, though they do not yet see this, for the _rôle_ of a national god. They have identified him with the ideal of righteousness and mercy, and in so doing they have made the great step, at least in principle, from national to universal religion, from the religion that is bound up with the history of one particular people, and cannot pass beyond them, to the religion which is capable of being understood by all men, and fit to be preached to all men of whatever race. Appearance of Universalism.--To the deeper view which they have gained of the character of Jehovah the prophets add a wider and higher view of his relation to the world, and to the various nations in it. They frankly state that Jehovah has relations to other nations than Israel. He might if he had chosen have taken some other race to be his people; they were all at his disposal and he regarded none of them as hostile. He is not dependent on Israel, and the inference is clear, that if he could have done without Israel at first, he could do without Israel still, were he driven to that. Israel is not indispensable to the continuance of the true religion. Jehovah indeed has a position far above that which Israelite national thought ascribed to him. He is lord not of one nation only, but of all the nations. He can use any of them as his instrument when and as he chooses. It is he who has brought each of them to its present seat, it is he who is directing their movements now. And for what end does he wield this mighty rule? He is governing the world not in the interests of one nation only, but in the interests of righteousness. He is guiding the destinies of nations so as to bring about an end which he has fixed, namely the establishment of a world-wide kingdom of truth. The day is indeed coming as the Israelites believed when he would hold a judgment over the world, only let Israel beware lest that day should be darkness and not light to them; it will bring about the punishment of sinners of whatever race. An end is to be made of sin both in Israel and in other nations, that a new world may begin. The position thus given to Jehovah is clearly one which lifts him high above the rank of a national deity. The prophets understand with growing clearness that Jehovah is the creator of the world, and the author of all the glories, both of the celestial and of the terrestrial frame. The Maker of the ends of the earth, and the Governor of all the nations, though he has chosen to reveal himself to one particular race, cannot be limited to them. The position of Monotheism has been attained. The earlier prophets speak of the gods of other nations as if they really existed, though for Israel Jehovah is the only god, but by degrees the advance is made to the position that these beings do not exist at all, and are simply "vanities" or "nothings." Instead of saying that Jehovah is the greatest among the gods, and that there is none like him, these preachers say that Jehovah alone is god, and that he is the author of all that exists and of all that takes place in the universe. A god has been unveiled whom all beings exist to glorify, and whom all the nations of the earth can confidently be summoned to praise. Ethical Monotheism.--These results were reached gradually: there is a great difference between the teaching of Amos and that of Jeremiah. And it must be remembered that they were attained not as other monotheisms have been, by philosophical speculation, but by purely moral ways. It is because Jehovah is supremely just and holy, that he grows so great. The justice and holiness which are seen in him are the strongest of all; the world exists for nothing else but to realise them, and everything that stands opposed to them, whether in Israel or in any other nation, must go down before them. It is in this way that the conclusion is reached that Jehovah is the only God. The moral ideal must be one. The whole of the religion of the prophets is governed by moral considerations. God asks from man nothing but goodness; the true sacrifices are those of the heart and conduct. Man's intercourse with God is to be kept up as that of an affectionate human relationship, into which no motives either of force or of commerce enter. Although God is so just and holy, he is perfectly placable, and ready to greet the approaches which are made to him. It is absurd to spend so much money and toil on sacrifice, when the happiest relations with God can be attained so much more simply. God forgives without any sacrifice; his love and his desire to meet with love surpass all that human relationships can show; his constancy is like that of the returning seasons, or of the stars. He yearns over Israel as a father over a wayward son, and will leave nothing undone that he can do to bring his son back to him. He will alter all his former plans to bring about that result. He will change man's nature, and give him a new heart, if nothing short of that will suffice; or he will change his own procedure entirely, and deal with man not by way of commandments, but by way of inspiration, placing his law in man's inward part, writing it in his heart, so that the great union of God and man may be attained, which he desires. Individualism of the Prophetic Teaching.--Here we must pause to notice another great advance which the prophets have been led to make in religious knowledge. Their view of Jehovah as a purely moral being, and of man's relation to him as a moral relation, like that between two human beings who have to live together, such as a husband and wife or a father and son, makes religion less a matter for the people as a body, more a matter for the individual. When religion is carried on by public sacrifices and stately festivals and ceremonies, then it is the people as a whole that transacts with God, and the individual need feel no great weight of responsibility in the matter. But if God asks for love, if he says he does not care for sacrifice, but insists on love and devotion, and rather than not have it will work a miracle on man's nature, then the individual is addressed. Every one who has any love to offer feels himself appealed to. Only in his own heart can any one know whether or not God's desire is met; every one, therefore, who understands the appeal becomes personally responsible for the answer, and religion becomes a matter, not only between God and the people, but between God and the individual as well. Personal religion, therefore, makes its appearance among the Jews at this time. Jeremiah carries on dialogues with God; prayer is met with, as the outpouring, not of public needs alone, but of private feeling; the soul has learned that it is called to a life of its own with God, and not merely to a share in the life of the nation with him. We have dwelt at some length on the ideas of the prophets; not at such length, indeed, as to satisfy any of those who love their writings, for we have thrown together in one view what belongs historically to different centuries, while to the personalities of the prophets, to their sublime certainty and their stupendous courage, we have given no attention. We have stated the outlines also of the great movement of thought in which advances of such transcendent importance were made in religion. They are advances which have not been lost, but which we still enjoy. If it is the gift of the Semitic race to bring the thought of God to bear on life with such direct practical force as Aryan religion never by itself exerted, we must look with profound veneration on those Semitic thinkers who applied this great force in the service of a God, who has no other nature and property but that of justice and love. Religion thus became to them and to all they influenced an engine for the direct promotion of justice and love among men; and we do not think the less of the prophets that the harvest of which they sowed the seed could not be reaped in their day. Prophecy leads to no Immediate Reform.--The message of the prophets seems at first sight to have been delivered long before the world was ready for it. Even the practical measures which can be traced to their influence are far from being in accordance with their ideas. The causes of this we have already to some extent seen. The prophets were not practical reformers. The amendment they called for was one to be realised in individual lives rather than in public policy, and they do not bring forward schemes of reform which they urge the people as a whole to adopt; they rather fling great ideas upon the mind of their nation, and leave it to others to find out how practical effect may be given to their teaching. To the very end of the Jewish state the prophets and their sympathisers appear to be in a small minority of their nation. The people as a whole is unconverted, the worship of idols goes on, and so does the worship of other gods, even in the temple at Jerusalem. It has seemed to some great scholars that Israel, as a whole, was a heathen people up to the time of the exile, and still needed to be converted to the religion of Jehovah. Kuenen shows[1] in a convincing way that this is an exaggeration, and that people and prophets alike held the religion of Jehovah to be the true religion of Israel; but up to the exile that religion was not reformed in the way the prophets desired. [Footnote 1: _Hibbert Lectures_, ii.] The Reforms.--Yet the word of Jehovah had not returned to him void even during this period. A considerable series of reforms are narrated in the histories, and attested by successive codes of law now embodied in the Pentateuch. These show that the prophetic ideas had gained for themselves a strong party among the people, and that in several reigns the court was under their influence. These reforms show progress in two directions. There is a growing desire to make the worship of Jehovah correspond to the exalted new conceptions of his character as a being of incomparable majesty and holiness; and there is, on the other hand, a rapid growth of moral sentiment; justice and kindness to others are placed more and more in the forefront of the divine requirements. We can do little more than name the passages where the details of these matters may be found. The reforms of Hezekiah (1 Kings xviii.) did not last long. He destroyed a celebrated image of Jehovah, a fate which other images may have shared, and he remodelled the worship of the holy places throughout Judah, so as to remove its more heathenish features, and concentrate it on Jehovah alone. Manasseh, Hezekiah's successor, pursued the opposite policy. In his reign a large collection of strange cults, some of them perhaps those of the individual tribes, were brought back into use; even the barbarous rite of human sacrifice was established at Jerusalem, and the worship of Jehovah became more intense and darker. The shadow of the Assyrian is upon Israel, and as generally happens in times of public anxiety, rites long disused are imagined to have a specially national character and a peculiar potency, and are fetched back from oblivion. The reform of Josiah (2 Kings xxii., xxiii.) was more thorough-going than that of Hezekiah. He made an end of all the unseemly worships his predecessor had encouraged at Jerusalem, so that nothing but the direct worship of Jehovah was left. The strongest step he took, however, was that he attempted to put an end altogether to the shrines at which local worship had hitherto been conducted, thus making a clean sweep of the idolatry of the rural districts. All this was done, we are told, in accordance with a law-book which had been found in the temple by certain high officials, and which, after duly consulting a prophetess about the matter, Josiah brought into operation, and solemnly pledged himself and his people to observe. We are in no doubt as to the nature of this book. The book of Deuteronomy prescribes just such reforms as Josiah carried out, and is generally allowed to have been the written law which was promulgated on this occasion. Now Deuteronomy, while incorporating no doubt many old laws, is in spirit and effect a work of the prophetic school. Its moral teaching and its exhortations to love Jehovah, and to be true to him alone, are quite in the manner of Jeremiah, who was living in the reign of Josiah. And the principal reform of Josiah, namely, the suppression of the local worships, and the concentration of all worship at the temple of Jerusalem alone, stands in the forefront of the special laws in Deuteronomy. Those who aimed at the reform of religion, according to the ideas of the prophets, had thought this out. The worship of the one supreme God should take place, they had concluded, at one place only, and should be national in its character; the whole people should worship the one God at its capital. Provision was made that this should not imply the deprivation of the dwellers in country districts of the use of flesh meat. Formerly, every act of slaughter was a sacrifice, and it was only in connection with a sacrifice that this food could be enjoyed. But in future, animals may be slaughtered at a distance from Jerusalem for food only, apart from any connection with sacrifice. The promulgation of Deuteronomy is an important epoch in the religion of Israel. That work is the first sacred book of Israel; from this time forward Israel knows the will of Jehovah, not only from the prophet's living voice, but from a book which is regarded as having divine authority. This principle once introduced could not fail to develop; to Deuteronomy other books were afterwards added as part of the same law, though in reality they superseded it, and it thus proved the nucleus of the whole Jewish canon. Earlier Codes.--Deuteronomy was not the earliest law drawn up under prophetic influence. Leviticus xvii.-xxvi. is recognised as being a code by itself, and is an earlier attempt in the same direction as Deuteronomy. The decalogue contained in Deuteronomy v., identical in the main with that of Exodus xx., is of earlier origin than Deuteronomy itself, but is also a prophetical work. It deals with ritual only to the extent of removing certain obstacles to a right worship of God, and places the chief weight of his requirements in the fulfilment of the natural duties. An earlier decalogue which deals principally with ritual, and which contains an early prophetic attempt to free the worship of Jehovah from heathen abuses, is found in Exodus xxxiv. 10-26. The oldest legislation of all is the code found in Exodus xx. 22 to xxiii. 33, which goes by the name of the Book of the Covenant. It is true that in form and in many of its precepts it is identical with the Code of Hammurabi (2250 B.C.), and so bears strong testimony to Babylonian influence. It is, however, much more humane than that old code, and in many particulars is independent of it. As it appears in Exodus it belongs to the times of the early canonical prophets, and as it scarcely deals with ritual at all, it shows the just and humane spirit cultivated by the religion of Jehovah in an agricultural community. The Exile.--The reformation of Josiah was quickly undone by his successor on the throne, and there was no further opportunity for a reform while the people remained in Palestine. But the exile did not cause the friends of reform to abandon their ideas. The prophets had foretold the exile, and had maintained that the religion of Israel would not be destroyed but rather would be saved by it, and the event proved that they were right in this point also. The exile cured the people definitely of idolatry, and gave them a strong grasp of the idea that they were a peculiar people, called to a work which no other people could accomplish or indeed understand, namely to hold aloft in the world, and for the benefit of the world, the true religion. This conviction forms the burden of the prophecy of the Unknown prophet of the exile (Isaiah xl.-lxvi.). He exalts still more highly than his predecessors the name and power of Jehovah. He is the Creator of the ends of the earth, to whom the nations, including even that great Babylon, are as a drop of the bucket, to be flung whither one will; it is he who has chosen Israel for his people and who now comforts Israel for the sorrows of the exile. In the great drama he is unfolding in the earth Israel has a principal part to play. Israel is called to make known to the nations who do not know him, the true God. It had been prophesied before that the heathen nations would come to Mount Zion to ask counsel of the God of Judah, and that Jehovah should become law-giver and judge over them. The Unknown enlarges on this theme with splendid imagery, and strives to persuade the people to make this cause their own, and to rise to the responsibility it involves. Israel is to be a prince, a leader and commander, of the peoples. The Gentiles are to come from far bringing their treasures and doing homage to the people of the true faith. If Israel as a whole is not fit as yet to discharge this duty for the world, yet there is an inner Israel, a faithful elect of the people who sympathise entirely with Jehovah's purposes and are entirely devoted to his will. This "Servant of Jehovah," at least, has risen to the height of his calling; Jehovah's spirit is in him. He will not fail nor be discouraged till the true religion is established in the earth. At another part of the prophecy the fate of the Servant is seen in darker colours. He is subject to ill-treatment and misrepresentation of all sorts; even when he is suffering for the sake of others he is derided and despised; nay, more,--he is called to suffer martyrdom, and die for sins not his own. But even so, the Servant will conquer in the end. He will know that his sufferings have not been in vain; he will be the means of leading many to righteousness and will be the instrument of Jehovah to bring in the true religion. The Return. The Reform of Ezra.--Such utterances could not fail of effect on the nation to whom they were addressed, and when the Jews came back to Palestine they were undoubtedly inspired with a new sense of their peculiar national mission. They at once proceeded to show that they were to be a people apart from others, by separating themselves rigorously and even cruelly from entanglements with the surrounding population. They also at once set up the worship of Jehovah as the sole God who had his one shrine at Jerusalem. Their early experiences in Palestine were not encouraging. For a century they remained a struggling and poor community, and it might seem doubtful if they would prove strong enough to maintain their separate position, and to hold up their special testimony to the world. But at that time the Jews who had remained in Babylon came to their aid. These men had never ceased to labour along with their brethren in Palestine for the advancement of their nation; and in particular they had laboured earnestly at the problem of worship, and the result of their labours was a religious constitution so rigid in its ideas, so logically worked out in detail, and so skilfully incorporating and appropriating to itself all the past traditions and usages of the race, that it might almost be said to be strong enough to stand by itself, and would certainly afford to the people, if they adopted it, the support and the discipline they needed. This constitution was introduced by Ezra, the priest and scribe, in the year 444 B.C.,[2] when he read in the ears of the people at Jerusalem (Nehemiah viii., ix.) the new law he had brought with him from Babylon fourteen years before, and had waited all that time to promulgate. The new law of this period was what is called the Priestly Code; it occupies the latter part of Exodus and a large part of Leviticus and Numbers; and the older writings are skilfully interwoven with it, but in general it may easily be distinguished by its tone from the work of earlier periods. Deuteronomy, the earliest law-book, is simply tacked on to it as if it were a part of the same code, though in reality it is often inconsistent with the latter law. The result is the Torah or law, or, as we call it, the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses (Moses being regarded by a convenient fiction as the source of all Jewish laws). This was thenceforward the law of the Jews. [Footnote 2: This date and many features of the story of Ezra and the return have of late been much questioned. See "Ezra" in _Encyclopædia Biblica_. The account given above follows Wellhausen.] The Jewish religion, of which this is the code, is generally distinguished from the religion of Israel which prevailed down to the exile; and several important new principles undoubtedly make their appearance at this point. This chapter may fittingly conclude with an enumeration first of the features of Jewish religious life connected with the law or the priestly system, and then of those features of it which lie outside that system. 1. The priestly religion is founded on a sentiment which forms but little part of the faith of early peoples, namely the sense of sin. The prophetic denunciations of Israel's backslidings have at last found entrance, and the people is found submitting to a system which implies that the whole of its past history was sinful and mistaken, and that there is a constant need for supplicating forgiveness. Every prayer begins with a long confession of national sin, in which the present generation also shares. "We have sinned with our fathers," they say. This view is spread over the historical books in the sweeping judgments passed on individual monarchs, on periods of the national life, and especially on the whole of the Northern Kingdom (cf. Nehemiah ix.). The old confidence in the presence of Jehovah with his people has now departed. The earlier Israelites never doubted that Jehovah was in the midst of them; that could be taken for granted except when events proved the contrary. But now Jehovah has grown greater and more awful, while the people have become painfully aware of their deficiencies and cannot assume that he is with them, but must take steps to secure his presence. This is no doubt connected with the growing sense of an individual position and responsibility in religion. To the nation or the tribe it is natural to feel that its cause is just and that its God is with it; but the individual, thrown upon his own inner world for his alliances, is less apt to feel that confidence. Now the religion preached by the prophets is essentially one for the individual. Ezekiel especially felt himself responsible for the fate of individuals, and laboured to awaken his fellow-countrymen one by one to a sense of their danger and responsibility; he taught that each man had to see to his own salvation, that each man would receive the fruit of his own acts. All this tends to a deeper feeling and a more anxious mood in religion, and helps to explain how the sense of sin, on which religious progress at its higher stages depends so much, was fixed so strongly in the Jewish mind. That the Jews underwent a radical change in their disposition is proved by the fact that they submitted to the yoke of the law: for it may be questioned if any people ever sacrificed their natural liberty for the sake of their religion to such an extent as this people did. 2. The divine will is now received by the people in the shape of a sacred book. They cease to look for the living voice of prophecy, and come to think that God has given them in the Torah a perfect and complete revelation. The book takes the place of the prophet, and in time also to some extent of conscience. A man ceases to think for himself what is right and good, and only asks, What does the law say? It is true that a great part of the book is taken up with ritual, with which the ordinary individual has not much to do, but he also believes that the whole of his own duty is to be found there in it, as is no doubt the case. We see from the 119th Psalm how beautiful a form religion may assume even under these terms, when the book in question is felt to be a spiritual treasure, and to speak the words of a living God; but the system of a book-religion has in it the germs of very different fruits. The sacred book is believed to be an exhaustive directory of conduct; but to make it apply to the various cases that arise in practical life it has to be interpreted, and deductions have to be drawn from it. It thus comes to give many a direction which does not appear on the surface. The secondary law, or "tradition," is thus founded, a system which calls for the services of a special class of students. The scribes, who interpret the law and apply it to life, obtain great influence and become the virtual rulers of the nation. While no doubt guided in the main by the noble spirit of their religion, they are led by their system into many absurdities, and their casuistry even becomes at times immoral. They afford the classical example of the results which flow from the doctrine of verbal inspiration, thoroughly worked out; and the life of the Jews under them becomes highly unnatural and artificial, and tends to occupy itself with the husk instead of the kernel of religion. 3. The principal part of the divine will, as expressed in the law, is that connected with sacrifice. Sacrifice occupies the central place in the book, and in the history it records. In this book the temple service, thinly disguised as the service of the tabernacle in the wilderness, is set forth as the great end and aim for which God created the world, settled the nations in it, and called Israel to be a people. The ritual which was observed from the exile to the destruction of Jerusalem may be studied in Exodus and Leviticus. We read of orders and companies of priests who offer daily and other sacrifices according to a rule in which the smallest details are carefully arranged, sacrifices in which little of the old cheerful common meal now lingers, but which are mostly of a purificatory or piacular character. The ritual of sacrifice would not appear to an outward observer to differ very much from that in use among the Greeks or Romans; the Jews certainly conducted it on a larger scale. What end precisely was aimed at in it, the Jew would have found it perhaps hard to say. It was done, he would say, because the law so ordered it, and the law must be obeyed even if one did not quite understand what was enjoined. The daily sacrifice removed the impurity of the temple staff, and enabled the people to be sure that the favour of the deity continued with them. Many sacrifices aimed at the removal of particular sins; thankfulness also was expressed in them, and other feelings may also have ascended with the smoke from the altar. To Jews living at a distance the sacrifice, which could be offered nowhere but at Jerusalem, was the chief symbol, the great mystery, of their faith. 4. The notion of holiness is closely connected with worship. Things and persons are holy which belong to Jehovah, and are withdrawn from common use. These it is dangerous to touch unwarily. Jehovah is an unapproachable being; the high priest may come into the innermost part of the temple, but only once a year, and no one else may come there; the priests may enter the Holy Place, but not the people. To speak lightly of the temple was a crime the Jews could not forgive. The Sabbath was the Lord's day; man must not attend on it to his own worldly concerns. The deity is surrounded with dread to an unparalleled extent; all that belongs to him is to be regarded with awe. Connected with the notion of holiness is that of purity. In the later Persian religion the distinction has always to be anxiously remembered by the believer between what belongs to the good spirit and what has fallen under the power of the evil spirit. The Jew, also, who is called to be holy and separate from other men, lives in constant dread lest he should touch something unclean, and so forfeit his own purity. There are clean animals, and unclean ones which he must not eat; various washings of the hands and of domestic utensils are needed in order to keep up the state of purity; many trades involve contact with substances which make purity almost impossible. Above all, it is defiling to eat what a heathen has cooked, or to sit at the same table with heathens. Thus the Jew was confirmed in the belief of his own superiority to men of other races; and was prevented by many barriers from mingling with them, or even regarding them as brethren. His circumcision, his Sabbath, his laws of purity, his peculiarities of diet, the absolute impossibility of his eating along with Gentiles, kept him separate, and helped to nourish in him the spirit of haughtiness and exclusiveness. The accepted worshipper of Jehovah is, with the early prophets, the man who is morally sound, who has curbed his passions and his selfish impulses; with the later Jew that may still be the case, but there are also a number of indispensable preliminaries of which the prophets certainly did not dream. The man who would go up to the hill of Jehovah must be one who has not eaten shell-fish or pork, nor opened his shop on the Sabbath, nor touched a dead body, nor used a spoon handed to him by a Gentile without washing it. How all this unfitted the Jewish people to be a missionary of the pure religion, and how adverse the whole Levitical system was to the earnest apprehension of that religion no less than to its diffusion, the New Testament amply shows. But it kept the people separate from the world and constant to their faith amid even the greatest temptations and the severest persecutions, and so enabled them to preserve the precious treasure committed to them till the time should come when the world was to receive it from their hands. Heathenish Elements of Judaism.--In the system we have sketched, in which the prophetic teaching was hardened into a ritual and a law, there are various elements which do not belong to an advanced stage of religious progress. While the sacrificial ritual, not outwardly exalted above heathenism, is to some extent redeemed by the motives which enter into it, the great system of clean and unclean rests on no rational basis, and resembles the set of taboos, which no one can explain, of a savage tribe; and the reduction of daily life under a set of minute and troublesome rules, shows the devotion more than the enlightenment of those who submitted to it. There was a necessity that the vessel should be so narrow and so hard which was to keep the wine of Jewish religion from being mixed with other liquids, but the vessel itself belongs to the rude and early world. In the Jewish religion of this time there are far different elements, which point forward and not backward, and in which the future course of religious progress is clearly anticipated. If his temple ritual was crude, and if his law pursued him into every one of his actions, the thoughts of the Jew were free; the truths which were unfolding their riches in his mind were sufficient compensation for much outward restraint, and the fair world of imagination was open to him in which the past clothed itself with legend and the future with splendid hopes. Spiritual Elements.--The period after the exile is that of the composition of the Psalms. Many of these poems may have been written earlier; many were undoubtedly written at this time, and the belief gains ground that the Psalmist came after the prophet, and adopted for popular use the prophet's ideas. In the Psalter we hear the thrill of joy and triumph as the great truths of theism come to be grasped as certainties. The congregation now utters in song what, when the prophet first announced it, so few had courage to believe, that Jehovah is king, that he rules over the nations, that he is far above all the gods, nay, that there is no other God than he. The joy of having embraced this thought, of having escaped from all confusion with regard to the powers that rule the world, and of seeing all things in this splendid light, finds manifold expression. The believers delight themselves anew in the worship of Jehovah, and see fresh beauties in his courts, and in the service of him there; they delight in his word in connection with every part of their experience. They understand the world as they never did before, since it is his work, and praise the Creator as they follow the whole process of creation. New lights open to them on the history of their race, new solutions occur to them of the moral difficulties they have felt, as they saw the wicked prosper and the good cast down. There is very little about ritual in the Psalms; it is regarded chiefly as an offering of thanks and praise to Jehovah for his wonderful works, and for his mercies; and it is viewed ideally as an act of homage in which not only the immediate worshippers, but all nations on the earth may be conceived as taking part. On the other hand, the observance of Jehovah's moral requirements, and implicit trust in him while one seeks to do his will, is insisted on again and again, as the true method to please him, and to obtain his protection against all dangers. There are few moods of the religious life that are not represented in the Psalms: penitence, intellectual perplexity, domestic sorrow, feebleness, loneliness, the approach of death, the excitement of great events, the agony of persecution, quiet contemplation of nature, each has its word. The imprecations of some of the Psalms show a trait of the national character without which the picture would be incomplete. It may be in part extenuated by the consideration that in these Psalms it is the community that speaks, and that the enemy of the good cause deserves less forbearance than the private adversary. Whether the Psalms in general are to be conceived as uttered by the community rather than as private outpourings, is a question not yet decided. In either sense the Psalms have been used and are still used as the hymn-book of Christendom, as well as of the Jews; and it will always be a wonderful feature in the religion of Israel, that so soon after the truth of the one God was discovered by the prophets, it received a form of expression which has proved fitted for the use of every nation in the world. The Jews after the exile are in possession of a new form of religious association which belongs to a high stage of growth. The temple worship is one in which the ordinary layman has no part, or only an occasional part to play. The priest does everything in it; even the singing of Psalms is done by choirs of priests. And the dweller in the country might rarely be a witness of these great solemnities. But we know that in the Maccabean period the country was covered with synagogues: with buildings, that is to say, where the surrounding population met on the Sabbath, and perhaps on other days as well, to join in common prayer, and to hear lessons of Scripture and exhortations. Some local religious meeting was necessary; an earnest people could not do without it, and the local sacrifices were now of the past. But the synagogue service marks a great advance in the religious position of the Jews. They can now meet without any act or sacrament which they have to do in common, to engage in purely intellectual religious exercises. The same advance, as we shall see, took place in Greece about the same time; what moral or religious furtherance they wanted, the earnest there began to seek from the lectures of philosophers. The synagogue, however, was a territorial institution; all the Jews in the neighbourhood came to its services. It kept them acquainted with the law which otherwise they might have forgotten, and also with the writings of the prophets, which were regularly read, and thus strengthened the bonds which held all Jews together, in the past history and in the growing hopes of their race. The National Hopes.--Judaism becomes more and more, as befits a faith of which prophets are the principal exponents, a religion of hope. Debarred by their subjection under successive heathen powers from political activity, and keenly aware of their outward humiliation, the Jews turn to an ideal world in which they are free. The prophets had spoken of a judgment in which Jehovah would judge the whole world, of a happy time when Israel would be at peace from all his enemies, and God and people would dwell together in full communion; and when the land of Israel would become the religious capital of the world. They had added to their picture features even more ideal, and had declared that the conflicts of external nature would cease, the wild animals would grow tame and friendly, all physical as well as all moral evil would disappear. It was in this world, not in a remote region or in the land beyond death, that all this was to be realised. Jerusalem is the centre of the picture and the Jewish nation stands in the foreground of it as the chosen people of the God of all the world. Now these predictions, which with the prophets are vague and idealised, were taken by the Jews always more seriously and worked out in detail. After the prophet comes the apocalyptic writer, such as Daniel (the Apocalypse of the New Testament belongs to the same class of literature), who is able to give the exact course of the history which is to lead up to the final judgment, to fix its precise date, and to give many details of the ultimate state of affairs. These "revelations," which were written generally to comfort the Jews in their trials and to encourage them to steadfastness in persecution, were very popular. It is true that they nourished the national pride, and enabled the Jew to feel himself superior to a world in which he occupied outwardly no great position; but on the other hand the hopes they fed were not necessarily unspiritual; at the Christian era we find it to be a mark of the most genuine piety that one should be "waiting for the redemption of Israel." At this period the national hope was occupied with the figure of a Messiah, a God-sent Deliverer, whose coming was to be the prelude to the establishment of the divine kingdom. We learn from the Gospels what various ideas were entertained by the Jews of the first century about this "coming one," and how little Jesus Christ was felt to answer to the common expectation. A few words must be said of Jewish beliefs concerning the other world. While there are traces of an old ancestor-worship in the earlier parts of Jewish history, no belief of the kind had much importance in Israel. The Jews shared the general belief of the early world that the dead continued in a shadowy existence without any power for action. They have an under-world, Sheol, where the dead are; Isaiah has a magnificent description of the dead kings sitting on thrones together in Sheol and rising up to greet a newcomer who was a great potentate on earth, with the words "Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?" The dead are conceived as continuing in a weak and unsubstantial reflection of their former selves. They can be fetched up to the earth by magic arts to tell the future, but this was strictly forbidden at a very early time. The Psalms and other later books contain many plain denials that man has any continuance to look for after death. The religion of the Old Testament, as has often been said, is for this life. God's rewards are to be looked for before death; once gone to the grave one can no more enjoy God's bounty or give him thanks. God's kingdom of the future is also a kingdom of this world; Jerusalem is its capital, and nature is to be transformed for it. In the later period of Jewish history, however, the hope of the future which has been so entirely abandoned, which Job, for example, in an early chapter puts so peremptorily away from him, creates itself afresh in a new form. In the time of Christ the Jews believe, as a matter of course, that men will rise again. It has been contended that the Jews derived their later doctrine of a future life from their contact with Persia, but it is not necessary to account for it in this way. It arose naturally among the Jews in more ways than one. The individual believer like Job, entirely sure of his own innocence, and feeling that he was doomed to die of his disease without any vindication in this life, claimed that an opportunity should be found beyond the grave to pronounce the sentence which a just God could not omit to give. In Daniel xii. it is foretold that men of conspicuous virtue and men of conspicuous wickedness will have a resurrection--the former to share the glories of the kingdom from which as teachers and martyrs they could not be wanting, the latter to receive their punishment. And as prophets who have been long dead are expected to return to the earth, the gate of death is not so firmly closed as formerly and the belief in a future life easily became current. Thus Judaism comes to be a religion full of contradictions, and could not as a whole pass to other nations. The temple and the synagogue represent opposite principles of worship. The Jew feels himself to be entrusted with a world-religion, and yet shuts himself up in such exclusiveness as to draw upon himself the hatred of all peoples, and to be charged in turn with hatred of the human race. A religion of faith and love consorts with a religion of rules and limitations. If the faith of Israel was to fulfil its mission to the world it was necessary that some one should come who could purge this threshing-floor, burning the chaff and gathering up the wheat to be the seed of the progress of mankind. BOOKS RECOMMENDED The Books of the Old Testament, including the Apocrypha, in the Revised Version. The Histories of Israel; Ewald, Kuenen, Wellhausen, Stade. Robertson Smith's _The Old Testament in the Jewish Church_, and articles in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. Smend's _Alttestamentliche Religionsgeschichte_. Stade, _Biblische Theologie des Alten Testaments_, 1905. For a criticism of the critical historians the reader may consult _The Early Religion of Israel_, by Prof. James Robertson. Prof. Valeton, _Die Israeliten_, in De la Saussaye. Schürer, _History of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ_, 1885-90. Kantzsch, "Religion of Israel," in _Dictionary of the Bible_, vol. v. E. J. Foakes-Jackson, _The Biblical History of the Hebrews_, Second Edition. CHAPTER XIII ISLAM In chronological order Islam stands last of all the great religions; it appeared six centuries after Christianity, and Christian ideas enter into it. It is, however, so essentially Semitic that it can only be understood aright if studied in connection with the group now occupying our attention. In Islam Semitic religion opens its arms to embrace mankind, and accomplishes, in a fashion, the destiny to which Judaism was invited, but which Judaism failed to realise till it was transformed in Christianity. In Islam Semitic religion is not transformed, but enters in its own stern and uncompromising character into the position of a universal faith. This religion sprang up and entered on its career of conquest with startling suddenness and even, some scholars hold, without any natural preparation for its coming in the country of its birth. The Arabs called the period before Islam the "time of ignorance"; in that period they considered their race had no history; the new religion, when it arose, had made a clean sweep of all that had gone before, and had caused a new world to begin. The labours of Arabic scholars have, however, done something to dispel the mists which hung over early Arabia, and it is possible both to give a much more satisfactory sketch than formerly of the earlier religion of the Arabs, and to discern to some extent the processes which had unconsciously been preparing for the advent of a higher and stronger faith. Arabia before Mahomet.--The Arabs of the central peninsula in the times before Mahomet were not a nation but a set of tribes--mostly nomadic, but some of them settled in cities, who, while united by language, custom, and traditions, had no central government or organisation. The desert which they inhabited, as it admitted no cultivation, kept human life uniform and unprogressive; external influences penetrated slowly into this corner of the world, and society was still arranged as it had been for thousands of years. The strongest tie was that of blood. A man's fellow-tribesmen were bound to avenge his murder; and so one slaughter led to another, and from generation to generation the land was filled with a perpetual series of blood-feuds. Twice a year, however, a cessation of these feuds took place; a month came round in which there was a universal truce. Men who were enemies then made the same pilgrimage to a distant shrine; at such a time trade caravans could set out and travel in safety; and the great markets or festivals then took place, which, while based at first on religious ideas, had in most part ceased to have any religious character. Some of these markets were, at the time of Mahomet, national occasions: men of every tribe met and came to know each other there; the poetry which had been composed during the preceding months was publicly recited, so that the rise of a new poet was known to all Arabia; the news of all the tribes circulated, and foreign ideas and doctrines were also to be heard. In proportion as the face of nature was hard and forbidding, social life was bright and gay; wine, women, wit, and war provided the themes of poets and the ordinary aims of life. The Old Religion.--It has generally been said that the Arabs before Islam were irreligious. They themselves contrasted the sternness of the new period with the gaiety of the old one. The truth is, as Wellhausen has admirably shown,[1] that the working religion of the country had become before the period of Islam entirely effete. Arab religion was based on the ideas and usages which have been described in chap. x. of this book; it is mainly from Arabia, indeed, that the original character of Semitic religion is known to us. Each tribe had its god, whom it regarded as a magnified master or ruler, and with whom it held communion by sacrifice, the blood being brought in contact with the god and the victim devoured by the tribesmen. The god is represented sometimes by a tree, generally by a stone; a piece of fertile land belongs to him, within which the plants and animals are sacred; the religious meeting can be held in no other spot. Hence the Arabs are said to be stone worshippers; but the phrase is an awkward one: what they worshipped was not the stone but a god connected with it. And the early gods of Arabia are a motley company; it is only in their relations to their worshippers and in the order of the worship paid them that they have some uniformity. The greatest and oldest deity of the Arabs is Allat or Alilat, "the Lady." Like the female deity found in all primitive Semitic religions, she is a stately and commanding lady. She is not the wife of a god, nor are unseemly ideas connected with her. She belongs to the early world in which motherhood was synonymous with rule, since the family had no male head; she has a character but no history: mythology has not gathered round her. Arabia has also certain nature-gods. The stellar deities are mostly female; there is a male sun-god Dusares. Heaven is worshipped by some, not the blue but the rainy heaven, which is a source of blessings. There are no gods belonging to the region under the earth. The serpent is the only animal that receives worship. [Footnote 1: _Reste Arabischen Heidenthums_, p. 188.] But the gods of Arabia belong mostly to another class than that of nature-gods; or at least if they ever were connected with nature, they have parted with such associations. They are uncouth figures, with vague legends and miscellaneous attributes. One set of them is said to have been worshipped by the contemporaries of Noah; they are big men, and it is their property to drink milk. Hubal was the chief god of Mecca. It was his property to bring rain. Vadd was a great man, with two garments, and a sword and spear, bow and quiver. Jaghuth, "the Helper," was a portable god, not a stone probably, since he was carried into battle by his tribe, as the ark was by the Israelites. Another god is called "the Burner," no doubt from the sacrifices offered to him. Each tribe has its god or set of gods, and certain sacred objects connected with its gods. One god is found by those who kiss or rub a certain black stone, another in connection with a white stone, another with a tree. And of many of them there are images; the stone has some work done on it, or there is a wooden block roughly hewn. The "Caaba" is originally a black stone which is kissed or rubbed at Mecca. The name was given, however, to the cube-shaped building, in one of the walls of which the black stone had been fixed. In this building there stood in old days images of Abraham and Ishmael, each with divining arrows in his hand. Of such idols a large number existed in Mahomet's time, and were destroyed by him. In some cases the image had a house, and a person was needed to guard it; this functionary also kept some simple apparatus for casting lots or otherwise obtaining counsel from the deity, and oaths and vows were made before him, to which the deity became a witness. To these beliefs of early Arabia must be added a lively belief in jinns, spirits who are not gods, since the gods are above the earth, but the jinn is compelled to haunt some part of the earth's surface. The jinns can assume any form they choose, and are often met with in the shape of serpents. Wellhausen surmises that the seraphs of the Jews are to be traced to some such origin. They infest desert places, and are nocturnal in their habits. What they do is often not observed till afterwards. They spy upon the gods, and may bring information from above to men whom they haunt or with whom they are in league. Of the magic of Arabia, the signs and omens drawn from birds, from dreams, and other occurrences, it is not necessary to speak; and we need only say, in concluding this rough sketch of the ideas of the early Arabs, that the belief in a life beyond was very faint; they set out food for the dead, whom they professed to think of as still existing, but the belief, if they entertained it, was perfunctory and had no influence. Confusion of Worship.--At the period of Islam the worship of Arabia had fallen into great confusion. The gods were stationary, but the tribes wandered; and the consequence was that the wandering tribe left its shrine behind it to be cared for by its successors in that piece of country, and itself also, when it gained a new seat, succeeded to the guardianship of a new god. Thus, on the one hand, the worship of each shrine was constantly gathering new associations, as each tribe which had been there left behind it some new legend or practice; and on the other hand, pilgrimage became universal, since each tribe had to pay periodical visits to its gods whom it had left behind. At Mecca we read of hundreds of idols; a hundred tribes have left there something of their own. Thus Mecca became a sacred place for tribes far and near, and rose into national importance; and the same was the case to a less degree in other places also. But as this process went on, it inevitably led to the weakening of religion. The tie of blood, which was felt always, was a far stronger thing than the tie of a common worship for which the tribe had to go to another part of the country, and to come in contact with a multitude of other cults. Worship therefore became more and more a superstition: a thing, that is to say, whose real sacredness was in the past, and which was only kept up from pious habit; it did not supply the inspiration of ordinary life nor guide the more active minds among the people. We have not yet spoken of Allah, who is understood to be the god _par excellence_ of Arabia. But for this there is a good reason. Allah is not, like the other beings we have spoken of, a historical god, with a legend, a shrine, a tribe all to himself. He is not a historical personage, but an idea consolidated, no doubt at an early period, into a god. Wellhausen traces the rise of Allah for us in a most interesting way. The name, he shows, is not a proper name that belonged to one particular figure in the pantheon of Arabia; it is the title which the Arab conferred on his god, whatever the proper name of that being might be. Whatever god he worshipped, he called him Allah, Lord; and thus every Arabic god was Allah, as every head of a household has the name of "father" and every monarch that of "king." And as every tribal god was Allah, the thought arose, no doubt in very early times, of one god who was common to the tribes. Language paved the way for thought; while the tribal gods were still believed in and adored, this figure rose above them--a being who has no special worship of his own, who does not ask for it nor need it, but who yet fills, as none of the lesser beings does, the character of deity. Allah was the god of all the tribes; and as his figure grew in the mind of the country, it was inevitable that the worship of the historical gods should still further lose its importance, till only the women and children really cared for it. A monotheism of a grave and earnest kind thus made its way beside the old belief in many gods. Mahomet found that his fellow-countrymen did not really believe in the minor gods; when they were in danger or in urgent need of any blessing, it was to Allah that they called. The fall of the idols, when it came about, took place very easily; they were no longer needed. The Arabs had come to believe in a god who dwelt in heaven and was the creator of the world, who ordained man's life with an irreversible decree, by whom the bitter and the sweet, both the hitting of the mark and the missing it, were alike fixed. The moral character of Allah was not markedly in advance of that of his people. What a man gains by robbery he calls the gift of Allah, while what is gained by industry is called by another name. Yet Allah is also felt by some to keep them back from robbery; he powerfully upholds the moral standards which have been reached. He is the defender of strangers, the avenger of treason. His moral influence is negative, however, rather than positive. He does not inspire with ideals of goodness; but he holds back from evil. He is not a being who is ever likely to enter, like the God of the Jews, into intimate and affectionate relations with men; he is too abstract and has too little history to be capable of such unbending; his religion, when it comes to be fully formed, will be one of puritans and fanatics rather than of the meek and lowly. He is the one great instance of a god without any natural basis who has come to exercise rule. He is a god of whom reason can thoroughly approve--no absurd legends cling to him; he is from the first great, mighty, and moral; and he rules the world in righteousness by inflexible standards. This religion is coming to the surface even in the "time of ignorance." Judaism and Christianity in Arabia.--The question has been much discussed whether the new religion of Arabia was due to contact with Judaism or with Christianity. Both of these faiths were known in Arabia before the time of the Prophet. There was a large Jewish population at Medina, and synagogues existed in many other places; and there were Christians in Arabia, though their Christianity was that only of small sects and of lonely ascetics, and had failed to convert the country as a whole. To the Arabs the Jews were "the people of the Book," the book in the traditions of which they also had some share. Ignorant themselves for the most part of the arts of reading and writing, and divided among a multitude of petty worships which they were ceasing to respect, they looked up with envy to those whose faith had been fixed for so many ages in a literary standard. But while the Jews were respected in Arabia, they were far from popular. The qualities which have drawn down on them the bitter hatred of modern peoples among whom they dwell, acted there in the same way; their pride and exclusiveness, their keenness in business, their profession as money-lenders, made them detested in Arabia as in modern Germany. On the other hand, the ascetic view of life which the Christians represented had attractions even for some of the higher minds among the Arabs. A set of men called "Hanyfs" were well known in Mahomet's time, who were seeking for a better religion than the Arab worships afforded, and a better life than that of eternal feud. The meaning of the name is controverted; those to whom it was applied had not attached themselves to Judaism nor to Christianity; they were people in earnest about religion who had not reached any definite position. Even where, as with Mahomet himself, the facts of Judaism and of Christianity were most inaccurately known, the view of God held in these religions and the moral standard they set up could not fail to exercise much influence. If in Arab thought itself a god like Allah was rising to definite personal character and to a position of great superiority over the old gods, then the inner movement was in the same direction as the influence of older religions from without, and the time was ripe for a new faith. It was not to be expected that a people like the Arabs should accept a religion which had its origin in another country, or which threatened like Christianity to bring to an end the old tribal system; a new growth from within was needed, and this was ready to appear. The beginnings of most religions are wrapt in obscurity; but the rise of Islam is known to us with perfect certainty and in considerable detail. The only difficulties in the way of understanding it are of a psychological nature; we have to account for the foundation of a religion which spread with lightning speed over many lands, and which still continues to spread, by one whose character was in some respects far from noble, and who was capable of stooping to compromise and to the darkest treachery in order to gain his ends. How a religion fitted for many races and many generations of men could be founded by a barbarian and by the aid of barbarous means--that is the problem of this religion. The materials for solving it lie open before us. The Koran is undoubtedly the authentic work of Mahomet himself: the suras or chapters are arranged in a wrong order, and if they are read as they stand do not tell any intelligible story; but when placed, as has now been done by scholars,[2] in the true historical order, they show the history of Mahomet's mind with great clearness. After the Koran came the traditions. From the immense volume of these the industry of the scholars of Islam as well as others has succeeded in sifting out what is most to be relied on. In no other case is the separation of the mythical from the historical element in the early traditions so easily made, and the religion comes into view in the full light of day. [Footnote 2: S. Lane-Poole, _The Speeches of Mohammad_, 1882; the most important parts of the Koran chronologically arranged with a very useful introduction.] Mahomet. Early Life.--Mahomet was born about 570 A.D., of a family belonging to the Mecca branch of the Coreish, a powerful tribe, who carried on a large caravan trade with Syria, and who were the guardians of the sanctuary which was the central point of Arabian religion. He entered therefore from his birth into the centre of the faith of his country. He was early left an orphan, and was brought up by relatives, who were kind to him but who were very poor. He had to make his living at an early age by herding sheep, an occupation which conduced in his case, as it has done in others, to contemplation and thought. In early manhood he entered the service of Khadija, a rich widow; and he made journeys in her affairs to Syria and Palestine, where he may have seen places famous in Jewish history and may also have come in contact with Christianity. At the age of twenty-five he married Khadija, who was fifteen years older than himself; the marriage was a happy one, and there were several children. He is described as a man of middle height, with a fair skin, a pleasant countenance, and pleasing manners; and he had proved his ability in business. Some years after his marriage he began to think deeply about religious subjects. He came into connection apparently with some of those Hanyfs or penitents, mentioned above, who, without being formed into a sect, were at one in seeking for a more satisfactory religious position. The religion to which they were feeling their way was a monotheism, a service of the one God of Abraham, but not that of Judaism with its exaltation of the Jewish race, nor that of Christianity, in which God had a Son for his companion. Submission to the one God was to them the essence of religion. "Islam" means submission, and the "Moslem" is the person who thus submits himself to the one sole God, whether he be Jew or Christian or neither. The Hanyfs also held the belief of the Christians in a coming judgment; and the effect of their beliefs on their lives was that they practised austerities and often retired from the world. His Religious Impressions.--Mahomet at this part of his life began also to withdraw himself, and to go apart to lonely spots for meditation. What he meditated we see from his sayings and doings afterwards. The contrast between the pure religion of Allah, as held by the Hanyfs, and the popular religion of Mecca with which his birth connected him, with its trade associations, its idols, its unintelligible rites, was certainly a tremendous one; and if a judgment was impending over all but the believers in Allah, it was a terrible prospect. For many years, however, Mahomet was simply a Hanyf. He was one who had surrendered himself, with a tender and impressionable soul, to the divine will and guidance, and was filled with the sense of Allah's presence and power, and of his own accountability to him in the great and tremendous realities of life. In addition to this, however, we have to mention a circumstance which is generally thought to have had a determining influence in Mahomet's production of Islam. He had a peculiar temperament; mental excitement led in him to inner catastrophes which, whether they are classed under epilepsy or hysteria, caused him to see visions and to believe that certain words had been addressed to him by heavenly visitants. The new religious movement in Arabia had secured an adherent in whom its teachings would be felt with tremendous intensity, and would possibly break forth with irresistible force. The Revelations.--Mahomet was forty years of age when the thoughts which had long been working within him burst into open expression. This took place by means of a vision. An angel appeared to him as he slept on Mount Hira on one of his nightly wanderings, and held a scroll before him which he bade him read. He had not learned to read, but the angel insisted, and so he read; and what he read was the earliest revealed piece of the Koran (sura 96):-- Read,[3] in the name of thy Lord who created, created man from a drop. Read, for thy Lord is the Most High, who hath taught by the pen, hath taught to man what he knew not. Nay, truly man walketh in delusion when he deemeth that he sufficeth for himself; to thy Lord they must all return. All men, _i.e._, however they may think, as the Arabs were given to think, that they need no help but that of their own right arm, must come before Allah's judgment and render an account to him: this is the doctrine by which Mahomet first appealed to his fellow-countrymen. It is a revelation. Allah teaches it by sending down a copy of what is written in the Book in heaven, the "mother of the Book" from which all revelations, Jewish, Christian, or Mahomet's own, are alike derived. Mahomet has thus begun to prophesy. The first outburst of revelation threw him into great agitation; he thought he was possessed by a jinn; and it tended to his further distress that an interval of two or three years elapsed before another vision took place. Then the vision came again. "Rise up and warn!" it said to him; "and thy Lord magnify, and thy garments purify, and abomination shun, and grant not favours to gain increase; and wait for thy Lord." The revelations now began to come in rapid succession, and Mahomet now believed in his own inspiration. In this conviction he never wavered afterwards; and there can be no doubt that the earlier revelations were felt by him as if they came from without and were dictated by a power he could not resist. His fellow-countrymen naturally took another view; like other prophets, Mahomet was said to be mad and to be possessed by a spirit; and these accusations stung him, because he himself had at first apprehended something of the kind. The later pieces were of a different character; he had the power afterwards of producing a revelation to suit any situation which arose; but the contents of the earlier ones were not unworthy of being revelations, and such he felt them to be. [Footnote 3: Or, Preach!--loud reading or repetition being the mode of claiming attention for the divine word.] His Preaching.--He preached the new truth at first to those with whom he was intimate. It was not new but old; it was the religion of Abraham that he preached, that of the Book of which both Jews and Christians had counterparts; he did not think of founding a new religion. He called his own household and his relatives to submit themselves to Allah, the supreme Lord and the righteous Judge, before whose judgment they must soon stand. They were to put away heathen vices and to practise the duty of regular prayer, of giving alms without hoping for any advantage from it, and of temperance. After a time he is encouraged by new suras to preach publicly, and does so. The Meccans, however, do not listen to him. The prophet's preaching acquires by this opposition a sternness it did not possess at first, and he proceeds to attack the popular worship in a way fitted to stir up against him the bitterest hostility. The Meccans hear from him that the religion to which all Arabia flocks together, and without which they would do little trade, is not only a vanity but a thing abhorrent to Allah, and undoubtedly drawing down damnation on all who partake in it; and that their forefathers are unquestionably in hell. Such preaching could not be tolerated; Mahomet's friends are appealed to to stop his mouth, but in vain, and his fellow-tribesmen, though they do not believe in him, yet protect him, as the laws of kindred require. Persecution.--Mahomet suffers as other prophets have done; he is ridiculed, misjudged, threatened. On the other hand he has his consolations; when depressed he receives encouraging messages from above. His enemies will perish; his cause will succeed; the day will come when men will flock to his doctrine in crowds. Persecution, however, is not without effect on him: on one occasion he attempted to compromise matters with idolatry; in a sura recited at the Caaba he allowed himself to use certain complimentary expressions about the three daughters of Allah, in whom the Meccans put their trust. The Meccans were much pleased with this, but Mahomet had to suffer the reproaches of the angel Gabriel after he went home, and the concession was erelong withdrawn. If, as appears likely, the compromise had been deliberately planned, a strange light is thrown on the nature of the revelations at a time not long after they had begun to flow. But there is no approach to compromise after this. The position of the prophet naturally grew worse after this display of weakness, and the persecution of the townsmen more embittered; for two years Mahomet and his followers were rigorously cut off from intercourse with their fellow-citizens. On the other hand the prophet's tone became harder and more sombre as he saw that no turning back was possible. Never were the terrors of hell preached with more intensity; it makes one's blood run cold to read the denunciations of the Mecca unbelievers, men personally known to the prophet, and to hear him forecast the words with which they will be bidden to take their place for ever in the fire. Personal irritation gives edge to the denunciations of fanaticism. Examples are sought in Jewish history of those who rejected prophets, Moses or Noah, and suffered a prompt and terrible judgment for so doing. The Meccans were little moved by such threats; they had no real belief in a future life, and scoffed at the idea of a resurrection of the body; and for this scepticism also parallels are found by the prophet in history, which show what fate the doubters may expect. From reading the Koran we should judge Mahomet to have been a disagreeable fanatic; but he also possessed very different qualities. Those who knew him best were most devoted to him. His followers adhered to him with a faith which was proof against all persecutions; we find him even ordaining that slaves who are converts may dissemble their connection with him in order to avoid the cruel treatment it drew down on them. Such attachment could only have been inspired by a noble nature; his followers felt him to be indeed a teacher sent by Allah, and were enthusiastically convinced of the truth of his doctrine. Trials. He decides to leave Mecca.--In spite of this his position was a precarious and trying one. His wife Khadija, to whom he had been most faithful, died; so did his most powerful protector. The cause, moreover, was not advancing at Mecca, and was not likely to do so; and Mahomet began to consider the propriety of transferring it to new ground. The first attempt to do so was not successful; at Taif, where he asked to be received and to be allowed to preach, he was rudely repulsed, so that he came back to Mecca in deep dejection. The new opening which he sought was, however, about to present itself in another quarter. Among the visitors to one of the feasts he met a company of pilgrims from Medina, who both addressed him with respect and showed that they understood his doctrines. Medina was well acquainted with Jewish ideas, and presented a more favourable soil for the prophet to work on; it is even suggested that the Arabs of Medina, having heard of the Jewish expectation of a Messiah, considered that it would be an advantage for them if the Messiah should be of their own race, and that Mahomet might possibly be He. The transference of the cause to Medina was, however, brought about with great deliberation. Those who wished Mahomet to come preached his doctrine at Medina for a year, and with encouraging success. Pledges were given and repeated by his friends there, that they would have no god but Allah, that they would withhold their hands from what was not their own, that they would flee fornication, that they would not kill new-born infants, that they would shun slander, and that they would obey God's messenger as far as was reasonable:--these are the practical reforms which Islam at this time demanded. The result of these proceedings was that Mahomet advised his followers to go to Medina. He himself waited till nearly all had gone, and did not set out till a plot had been laid by his enemies the Coreish to assassinate him. The Hegira or flight took place on 16th June 622 A.D. The flight, not the birth of the prophet, forms the era of Mohammedan chronology, since it was from the moment of the flight that Islam entered on its victorious career. Mahomet at Medina.--From this point onwards the prophet is seen in a different position and a different character. At Mecca he is a persecuted, struggling, and unsuccessful preacher, but at Medina he rapidly becomes the most powerful person in the commonwealth. He organises the service of religion, but he also gives new life to the community in other ways, terminating its feuds, uniting all its forces in the service of Allah, and by his decisions in the cases which are brought to him laying the foundation of a new jurisprudence. A pure theocracy was set up at Medina, and he as the prophet was its sole organ and administrator. In this capacity he displayed consummate ability. Alike in religious and in civil matters he showed the most perfect comprehension of his countrymen. He resorted freely to compromise in order to make his religion and policy suitable to the masses of his people and to secure their adhesion. In this way he soon secured for himself an absolute authority. The new religion thus became the cement by which a strong commonwealth was formed out of elements formerly at variance. Mahomet's first care on reaching Medina was to organise the service of the faith. A place was built where the congregation could meet for prayer and exhortation; the prophet's house beside it, or rather the apartments of his wives, for he now had two, and was soon to have more. The mosque, which all over the world is the local habitation of Islam, may have been derived from the synagogue or the Christian church. The service which takes place in it is not a sacrifice, but consists of intellectual exercises which nourish in the hearers the spirit of the religion. In the Mosque of Medina Mahomet taught his converts the practices and duties which were required of them. He taught this with great precision, and himself set an example how each exercise was to be done; so that, as Wellhausen says, the mosque became the exercise ground where the people were drilled in the requirements of the new faith. "There the Moslems acquired the _esprit de corps_ and the rigid discipline which distinguish their armies." New Religious Union.--A new bond of union thus took the place of the old tie of blood, which had been by far the strongest in Arabia. Every Moslem regarded every other Moslem as his brother, even though belonging to a different tribe. The claims of religion came to supersede all others; all natural tastes, all family affections, were taught to yield to them. Within a few years of his coming to Medina Mahomet had forbidden the use of wine and the pursuit of art, and had imposed on all women who adhered to him the use of the veil. In every way the community was taught to regard itself as separated from the former life of the country and from all who did not share the new faith. It was represented as the duty of believers to fight against all unbelievers: in this way the universal prevalence of the religion was to be brought about. The courage of the faithful was stimulated by the promise of rich booty and by the assurance that those who fell in battle would go straight to the joys of Paradise; and the wars they waged acquired in consequence a relentless character which was new in Arabia. They were allowed to fight in the sacred month, in which ancient custom ordained a universal truce. They fought with a gloomy determination, and used their victories with a relentless cruelty, which excited the consternation and horror of all witnesses. They did not scruple, as other Arabs did, to fight against their kinsmen. "Islam has rent all bonds asunder, Islam has blotted out all treaties," they said, when reproached with their disregard of old understandings. The prophet himself was foremost in this unrelenting policy. Captives taken in battle were slaughtered; a whole tribe was massacred which had joined the enemy, and had surrendered after a siege in the hope of merciful treatment. Breach with Judaism and Christianity.--As Mahomet thus freed himself, in spreading the faith of "the most merciful God," from all considerations of mercy and of honour, he also shook off, as his position grew strong, relations which might have proved embarrassing with other religions. In his earlier teaching he speaks of his own religion as being substantially the same as Judaism and Christianity. All three have "the Book"; the Koran is a continuation and supplement of the Jewish and Christian revelations, and he is only the last figure in the great line of prophets who had appeared in these religions. Like other founders, he did not at first intend to found a new religion, but only to bring to light again and restore to authority the original truths of these faiths, which had become obscured. His attitude at first, therefore, was friendly to both Jews and Christians, and his friendly feelings for the former were likely to be strengthened by the circumstances of his coming to Medina. Not long after his arrival, however, his attitude towards the Jews was changed. His followers had at first prayed with their faces turned in the direction of Jerusalem; but the prophet ordained that this should be altered, and that they should pray with their faces turned not towards Jerusalem but towards Mecca. This setting of a new "kiblah" as it is called, declared that Islam was a different religion from Judaism, and had an Arab not a Jewish centre. The hostility to the Jews, of which this was a symptom, grew more intense; quarrels were sought with them which ended in the utter annihilation of the Jewish power at Medina. From Christianity also Mahomet was careful to distinguish his religion. The Christians of Arabia were less tenacious of their faith than were the Jews, and easily accepted Islam, so that the hostility was not in this case so intense. The doctrines of the Trinity and of the Incarnation were of course denounced as intolerable blasphemies against the sole deity of Allah. Domestic.--The history of Mahomet during the Medina period is taken up to some extent with the various marriages into which he entered, and with the scandals of his household. On several occasions he produced revelations to warrant a step in this connection which he felt to require justification, and the modern reader is forced to wonder how his credit survived some of those proceedings. While it is undoubtedly the case that he did much to improve the position of women in Arabia, the absence of any high ideal in this matter is very apparent. Conquest of Mecca.--In giving his followers a new kiblah and bidding them turn their faces towards Mecca at their prayers, Mahomet declared that city to be the religious capital of Arabia. Though he had left Mecca in anger, he could not forget or ignore the city which held this place in his eyes. At first his thoughts of Mecca were those of vengeance; he had a score to settle with the Coreish, who had scorned and persecuted him, and had driven him forth. For several years there was war between Medina and the Coreish; the Moslems plundered the rich caravans of Mecca; in the great battle of Bedr (A.D. 623) Mahomet defeated his enemies and compelled them to respect and fear him; and they afterwards attacked and besieged him at Medina, with no decisive result. The next step was that Mahomet made use of the sacred month to attempt a pilgrimage to Mecca, from which he had been absent for six years (628); and though he was prevented from performing his devotions at the Caaba on this occasion, the Coreish found it good to make a treaty with him, thus recognising him as a potentate, and to promise that he should be allowed to make the pilgrimage on a future occasion. That pilgrimage took place; and so quickly was Mahomet's power increasing in the rest of Arabia that the Meccans began to feel that they could not long resist him. In the year 630 he moved against Mecca with a large army, and met with but faint opposition. Mecca fell into his hands. He used his victory nobly: only four persons were put to death. It was at once shown that no injury was to be done to the city. The old worship and its various ceremonies were preserved. All idols, of course, were destroyed, both those about the Caaba, of which there are said to have been one for each day in the year, and those in private houses. Mecca made the Capital of Islam.--In fact Mecca gained new importance from this conquest. It was constituted by the irresistible power of Mahomet the central sanctuary of the true religion. A year after the victory Mahomet again visited Mecca, and performed the pilgrimage with all its rites in his own person, setting the correct pattern in every detail, which all pilgrims were to observe in all time coming. Those who wish to know what the rites of Mecca are, will find them graphically and minutely described in Captain Burton's _Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca_; that gallant officer was one of the three Europeans who, during the nineteenth century, assumed the disguise of pilgrims and took part in the observances. The kissing of the sacred black stone in the wall of the Caaba, the sevenfold circuit of the building, the drinking of the water of the well Zem-zem, the race from one hill-top to another in the neighbourhood of Mecca, the throwing of seven stones at a certain spot, and the sacrifice of an animal in a certain valley--these form a collection of rites each of which had probably a separate origin, and of some of which the original meaning can scarcely be made out.[4] This "block of heathenism" Mahomet made part of his religion. He could not have abolished it, and by adopting it in an improved form as a part of his own system he served himself heir to the national religious traditions, and acquired for his own religion the authority of a national faith. "This day have I appointed your religion unto you," are his words after fixing the forms of the pilgrimage, "and applied Islam for you to be your religion." Islam adopts the Mecca rites, and thereby becomes the national religion of Arabia. Hubal, the chief god of the Caaba, disappears; Allah becomes the sole god of the shrine. The legend that Abraham founded it is put in circulation, and it is thus connected with the supposed earliest Arabian religion, the religion before idolatry, the Islam before Islam. As Paul appeals to the faith of Abraham as being a Christianity before Christ, so Mahomet claims the Caaba for the pure worship of Allah in primeval times. It is sacred henceforth to him alone. The rule was set up that no idolater should be admitted to the pilgrimage, and it thus lost its character as a heathen, and became instead a Moslem, institution. [Footnote 4: See for this Wellhausen's _Reste arabischen Heidenthums_, pp. 64-98.] Spread of Islam.--Mecca once converted, the rest of Arabia could not long remain outside. There was reluctance in various places to make the change which Mahomet now required of all his countrymen. But the penalty of refusing it was the prophet's wrath, with its terrible attendants, war and rapine, and none of the Arabs cared enough for their old gods to brave such terrors for their sake. The inhabitants of Taif endeavoured to make terms, so that the change might be less abrupt. Their ambassadors urged that fornication, usury, and the use of wine might be allowed them, but this could not be granted; the Taifites must accept the deprivations to which all the Moslems had agreed. Then they asked that their Rabba, their goddess, might be spared to them for three years, and as this was refused, for two years, a year, a month. But the only concession they could obtain was that they should not be obliged to destroy their goddess with their own hands. The ancient paganism, it will be seen, fell easily and without any tragedy. Mahomet did not long survive the national acceptance of his religion; he died on 8th June 632. But he did not die without having opened up to his followers very wide views for the future of his cause, and started them on a career of religious war and conquest which was not soon to be arrested. From a comparatively early period of his career he had considered that Islam was destined to prevail not only in Arabia but in other lands. Starting with the idea that his revelation was only a later stage of that which had taken place in Judaism and Christianity, he had advanced to the position that these were false religions, and his own the only true one. Wherever he looked in the world he could see no true religion but his own; it must therefore take the place of all others. Accordingly he sent embassies from Medina to Heraclius the emperor of the East, to the king of Persia, to the governor of Egypt, and to other potentates, announcing himself to be the "Prophet of God," and calling upon them to give up their idolatrous worships and return to the religion of the one true God. These embassies had small effect; but Mahomet was prepared to take much more forcible measures in order to spread the faith. War against infidels being one of the standing duties of the faithful, various regulations were laid down for the treatment of captives and the disposal of booty in such wars. God, who is said in every verse to be forgiving and merciful, encourages the faithful in such passages to slay and rob, and to make concubines of women taken in sacred wars. At the moment of his death an expedition, not the first, was ready to start against the Greek power. It is in this guise that Islam assumes the _rôle_ of a universal religion. The Duties of the Moslem.--The missionary of Islam requires of his converts nothing very difficult either in the way of belief or in the way of action. His demands are brief and precise. They consist of the following five points:--1. The profession of belief in the unity of God and the mission of Mahomet. The formula runs: "There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is the prophet of Allah." 2. Prayer. This consists of the repetition of a certain form of words at five separate times each day, the worshipper standing up with his face towards Mecca. The mosques are always open for prayer, and there is a special service on Friday, the day of the week chosen by Mahomet in contradistinction to the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. 3. Almsgiving. This is done on a fixed scale, and the contributions were, in Mahomet's time, devoted to the support of war against infidels. 4. Fasting. This takes place during the month of Ramadan, and the fast is very strictly observed. 5. The Hagg or pilgrimage to Mecca. The Koran is the sacred book of Islam. The name means "reading"; see above in this chapter. Like other sacred books, the Koran is arranged in such an order that he who reads it as it stands finds it very confused, and fails to grasp its historical meaning. The claim to divine inspiration is made in every chapter and every line of it; God himself is the speaker. But the divine oracles refer to very various matters. All sorts of legal decisions, military orders, injunctions about religious affairs, legends and speculations, have a place in it. Of prediction of the future, indeed, there is but one instance; the prophet disclaimed the power to work miracles, and held that no wonders beyond those of the splendid order of the universe are necessary to faith; and similarly he does not pose as a foreteller, but as an organ of the divine will for the present. As the ruler of a theocracy, the leader of armies, the judge in many a civil case, the guardian of the manners of the people, the officiating minister in public worship, and, let it also be mentioned, the head of a very peculiar domestic establishment, he has a hundred matters of immediate concern to attend to; and when he has formed his decision on any of these matters, it takes its place in the Koran. The book thus produced is far from being an attractive one; even in the translation of Professor Palmer[5] it can afford pleasure to no reader. The translation, it is true, loses the poetry and music of the original, which are highly spoken of; but the main obstacle to reading the Koran is its want of arrangement. The earliest suras (chapters; literally courses of bricks) stand mostly towards the end of the collection; the long ones in the beginning and middle are later, and many of them are composite: two or several chapters have been joined into one. When read in their historical order, the suras can be read with pleasure by the student as showing the growth of the prophet's ideas and of his cause. The earliest ones are short, poetical, and intense. These are the suras which threw the prophet into such excitement and distress that his hair turned white. They are full of the wonders of God in nature and in history, of fiery denunciation of idolatry, and of fearful threatenings. In later pieces we come to long legends taken chiefly from the Jewish Haggadah and the Christian Apocrypha, in which the prophet displays much ignorance of the commonest facts of the Bible history; and as his power increases and his functions multiply, we come to the miscellaneous matters spoken of above. The style, at first poetic and exalted, becomes afterwards prosaic and diffuse; it is not the inspired seer who speaks, but the statesman or the judge; and the placing of these later utterances in the mouth of God could not deceive the original hearers. The Koran, like the Vedas and the Gathas and the Jewish Scriptures, was exalted in later stages of the religion to the highest conceivable honours; and one of the greatest controversies of Islam raged round the question whether it had existed from eternity and was uncreated. [Footnote 5: _Sacred Books of the East_, vols. vi. and xi.] Islam a Universal Religion.--What is most remarkable about Islam is the rapidity of its growth. Mahomet begins life a poor and lowly herdsman, and at his death bequeaths to his successors a kingdom which he has formed, and which is shortly to prevail over all its neighbours. In the same way his doctrine, confined at first to a small circle and bitterly opposed, becomes within half a century the faith of his nation, and not only of his nation, but of many other lands. Within that brief space it has entered on the career of a national religion, and has also passed beyond the national into the universal stage, at which only two other religions have arrived at all. The progress which Christianity took centuries to accomplish, Islam accomplished in so many decades. The title of a universal religion cannot be denied to it. The truth which it declared--the doctrine of the unity and the omnipotence of God, and of the responsibility of every human being to his Creator and Judge--is one which does not belong to any particular race of men, but to all men. The attitude of soul which is called Islam--that of implicit surrender to the great God, of entire acquiescence in his decrees and entire obedience to his will--is good for all. All should be called to take an earnest view of their life and to realise their deep responsibilities; and the idea expressed by the title given to God on every page of the Koran, "The Merciful and Compassionate," that God sympathises with the aspirations and efforts of his servants, and that they may look up to him with love as well as fear, is one which all can understand and feel helpful. Especially at the stage when the world is given up to idolatry, Islam may well rank as a universal religion; when each place has its idol, each nation its greater idols, religion divides instead of uniting, and the frivolous and senseless service of such petty deities prevents men from realising their solemn obligations to the great God before whom they are all alike, since he is the Governor and Judge of all. Islam is an admirable corrective of heathenism; it brings the scattered and bewildered worshippers of idols together in one lofty faith and one simple rule. The weakness of Islam is that it is not progressive. Its ideas are bald and poor; it grew too fast; its doctrines and forms were stereotyped at the very outset of its career, and do not admit of change. Its morality is that of the stage at which men emerge from idolatry, and does not advance beyond that stage, so that it perpetuates institutions and customs which are a drag on civilisation. Mahomet's Paradise, in which the warrior is to be ministered to by beauteous houris (the number of whom is not mentioned), may not have been an immoral conception in his day; but it is so now, and apparently cannot be left behind. An admirable instrument for the discipline of populations at a low stage of culture, and well fitted to teach them a certain measure of self-restraint and piety, Islam cannot carry them on to the higher development of human life and thought. It is repressive of freedom, and the reason is that its doctrine is after all no more than negative. Allah is but a negation of other gods; there is no store of positive riches in his character, he does not sympathise with the manifold growth of human activity; the inspiration he affords is a negative inspiration, an impulse of hostility to what is over against him, not an impulse to strive after high and fair ideals. He remains eternally apart upon a frosty throne; his voice is heard, but he cannot condescend. He does not enter into humanity, and therefore cannot render to humanity the highest services. BOOKS RECOMMENDED _The Life of Mahomet_, by Sir W. Muir, 1858. _Mohammed_, by Wellhausen, and "The Koran," by Nöldeke, in _Encyclopædia Britannica_, vol. xvi. The Preliminary Discourse prefixed to Sale's _Koran_; and Professor Palmer's Introduction in _S. B. E._, vol. vi. _Islam_, by J. W. H. Stobart, in the "Non-Christian Religious Systems" Series of the S.P.C.K. _Der Islam_, by Houtsma, in De la Saussaye. Hughes, _A Dictionary of Islam_ (1885, 1896). Sell, _The Faith of Islam_, Second Edition, 1896. Stanley Lane-Poole, _The Speeches and Table-talk of Mohammad_, 1882; the most important parts of the Koran, chronologically arranged, with a very useful introduction. Margoliouth. _Mohammed and the Rise of Islam_, 1905. PART IV THE ARYAN GROUP CHAPTER XIV THE ARYAN RELIGION The science of language has placed it beyond dispute that the languages of the leading European peoples are genealogically related to each other, and that the languages of India and of Persia also belong to the same family of speech. The Indo-European languages, those, namely, of the higher race in India, and of the Persians, and those of the Greeks, Italians, Celts, Germans, Slavs, Letts, and Albanians, approach each other always more nearly as they are traced upwards. Sanscrit is not the source of these tongues but an older sister of the group; the mother language, which the facts prove to have at one time existed, was a highly-inflected speech, and is perhaps more nearly represented by Lettic than by Sanscrit; but it can now be known only by a study of the common features of its surviving children. The fact that the peoples named above are related to each other in point of language led at once, when it was discovered, to the conclusion that they were also of the same race, and must have come originally from the same quarter of the world. Where, then, was the early home of the undivided Aryan[1] race, from which the swarms first issued which were to conquer and rule the various lands? At first it was found in the East; the fact that Indian civilisation was much earlier in time than that of any other Aryan people, naturally suggested this. Professor Max Müller described in a very poetical way how the European as well as the Indian must find in the East the cradle of his race. From the high tableland of Asia, it was held, the superior races came who were to rule nearly the whole of Europe, while another migration descended towards Persia and the plains of India. [Footnote 1: "Aryan" was the name of the conquering race of India. The title "Indo-European" tells us that the race now dwells in India and in Europe. "Indo-Germanic" describes the group by its Eastern, and what is supposed to be its principal Western, member.] The theory, however, which placed the home of the Aryans on the inhospitable steppes, the "high Pamere," of Asia, did not long command assent; and attempts were made to place that home elsewhere, in the valley of the Danube, on the south shores of the Baltic, or even in the Scandinavian peninsula. The conquest, it is argued, cannot have come from the East; it is much more probable that Aryan speech and custom originated in the West, where it has the larger number of representatives, and that it spread eastward. The more extreme step has also been taken of denying that the Aryans are related to each other at all in point of race. Unity of language, it is argued, is no proof of unity of race--a glance over the British Empire or even the British Islands is enough to show this. It is maintained, therefore, that the relationship of the Aryan peoples is not one of race but only of language and of culture; the word Aryan denotes no more than a certain type of speech, and of accompanying civilisation, which spread over all the peoples in question at a very early time. Aryan language and civilisation laid hold of a number of races not otherwise related to each other. The view, however, still prevails that the various lands where Aryan speech and culture prevail were settled from one centre. When society was in the nomadic stage, it may naturally be presumed that a superior civilisation which had established itself in any one quarter of the world would be carried by wandering hordes in various directions, and that the bearers of the new civilisation would become the conquerors and masters of the countries to which their wanderings led them. And there is now some agreement on the part of leading authorities as to the quarter of the world from which the migrations of the Aryans proceeded. In the Southern Steppes of Russia, in the great plains north of the Black Sea, the Caspian, and the Sea of Aral, there dwelt, we are told, in times far before the dawn of history, hordes rather than tribes of men, who, though they had originally spoken the same language, were coming to differ from each other in speech and culture. These hordes were peoples in the process of formation. It was natural to them to wander, and as each wandered farther from the centre, it came to differ more markedly from the common type. Some of these went southwards and eastwards to Persia and India; others went westward, to conquer and possess the countries of Europe.[2] [Footnote 2: _Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples_; Schrader and Jevons (Griffin, 1890). This is the English of Schrader's _Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte_. Compare Dr. E. Meyer's _History of Antiquity_, vol. i. book vi. Dr. Isaac Taylor's _Origin of the Aryans_ gives a compendious account of the question, concluding against the unity of the Aryans in point of race.] The Aryan question lies at the threshold of the history of each of the Aryan peoples, and has to be met in the study of each of the religions. It must be confessed that the world now knows less on this point than it thought it did a generation ago. The difference between the Semitic and the Aryan spirit is real and substantial, as will appear from the study of the Aryan religions, but it is more important as well as more possible to know these well in their individual character than to have a correct theory of their historical relation to each other. The student ought, however, to be informed as to the course of a deeply interesting enquiry. The civilisation of the Aryans was primitive enough. The following is from Dr. Taylor:-- The undivided Aryans were a pastoral people, who wandered with their herds as the Hebrew patriarchs wandered in Canaan. Dogs, cattle, and sheep had been domesticated, but not the pig, the horse, the goat, or the ass; and domestic poultry were unknown. The fibres of certain plants were plaited into mats, but wool was not woven, and the skins of beasts were scraped with stone knives, and sewed together into garments with sinews by the aid of needles of bone, wood, or stone. Their food consisted of flesh and milk, which was not yet made into cheese or butter. Mead, prepared from the honey of wild bees, was the only intoxicating drink, both beer and wine being unknown. Salt was unknown to the Asiatic branch of the Aryans, but its use had spread rapidly among the European branches of the race. In winter they lived in pits dug in the earth and roofed over with poles covered with turf, or plastered with cow dung. In summer they lived in rude waggons or in huts made of the branches of trees. Of metals, native copper may have been beaten into ornaments, but tools and weapons were mostly of stone. Bows were made of the wood of the yew, ... trees were hollowed out for canoes by stone axes, aided by the use of fire. According to Hehn, the old or sick were killed, wives were obtained by purchase or capture, infants were exposed or killed. After a time, with tillage, came the possession of property, and established custom grew slowly into law. Their religious ideas were based on magic and superstitious terrors, the powers of nature had as yet assumed no anthropomorphic forms, the great name of Dyaus, which afterwards came to mean God, signified only the bright sky. They counted on their fingers, but they had not attained to the idea of any number higher than one hundred.[3] [Footnote 3: _Origin of the Aryans_, p. 188.] These sketches of the early Aryan certainly attest more vigour than refinement; and it takes some effort to realise that those who lived in this way had already made much progress, and that these early arts and institutions were full of promise. Savage as the early Aryan is, he is better than his neighbours, and has made a good start in the way of civilisation. His family arrangements, especially, are fitted to survive and to develop. The early domestic architecture of the Aryan countries, while it belongs to a much later period, yet gives good evidence that the patriarchal ideal of the family was part of the common inheritance. In every country they conquered the Aryans lived in large patriarchal households. The sons, with their wives and children, remained under their father's roof, the father being judge and priest of this domestic community. We can specify other features of the society connected with this type of household. As the family increases and becomes too large to dwell under one roof, another house is built, in which son or grandson, with his wife, founds a new family. Thus a group of families arises, all related to each other by blood, and in a position of equality, but looking to the original house as their centre. This type of society must have been carried to India by the Aryan invaders, who there set up patriarchal establishments in houses which are similar in arrangement to those of North Holland, of Iceland, or of early England. The men who lived in this way were not agriculturists, they were shepherds and huntsmen, and when they settled in a district they were wont to force the former dwellers in it to till the land for them as their inferiors.[4] [Footnote 4: See two recent works by Mr. G. L. Gomme, _The Village Community_ and _Ethnology in Folklore_; also Hearn's _Aryan Household_.] It is this type of civilisation which overspread the lands in early times, and by its coming created in most instances a new world. Some of the Aryan peoples made more rapid progress than others. They passed early into the age of metals, and appear before us at the dawn of history with fully-formed institutions, which bear the impress of patriarchal ideas. Others remained longer in the stone age, and only in historic times received the impulse which caused them to advance to the rank of nations. The arts and inventions which are found in many or in all of them are not necessarily a common inheritance from the undivided Aryan age. Many of them may have come into being in each of the lands independently, or one Aryan people may have borrowed them from another at a later time. Starting from the common stock of civilisation, the various races worked it out each in a way of its own, and often, as we shall see, with wonderful similarities. Is it possible to give any description of the religion the Aryans had in common before they developed it in different ways in their various lands? We can no longer, following Mr. Max Müller, look to India to tell us what was the common Aryan religion. Indian religion, when we first become acquainted with it, has already grown into an elaborate priestly system, and is evidently at a much later stage of Aryan development than the rustic cults, with which we have a good deal of acquaintance, in various European lands. If, however, we cannot follow the great German scholar in this, we gladly use his words on another aspect of the subject, when he is showing the etymological identity of the chief god of the Aryan peoples. In his _Lectures on the Science of Language_, vol. ii. p. 468, he tells us that "Zeus, the most sacred name in Greek mythology, is the same word as Dyaus in Sanscrit, Jovis or Ju in Jupiter in Latin, Tiw in Anglo-Saxon, preserved in Tiwsdæg, Tuesday, the day of the Eddic god Tyr; Zio in old High-German. "This word was framed," he says, "once and once only; it was not borrowed by the Greeks from the Hindus, nor by the Romans and Germans from the Greeks. It must have existed before the ancestors of those primeval races became separate in language and religion; before they left their common pastures to migrate to the right hand and to the left.... Here, then, in this venerable word, we may look for some of the earliest religious thoughts of our race."[5] [Footnote 5: See also Mr. Müller's _Hibbert Lectures_, and his _Biographies of Words_.] In this instance etymology admittedly points out one of the principal features of the common Aryan religions. But if we hope that etymology will reveal to us many further instances of the same kind, and introduce us to the whole Pantheon of the Aryans, we shall be disappointed. There are one or two more cases of etymological agreement between the gods of India and those of Europe,[6] but the agreement is in some of these cases no more than etymological. The Tiw or Tyr of the Teutonic mythology does not correspond in office or character with Zeus or Jupiter, though the names are etymologically akin. The agreement does not extend to all the religions in question, nor does it extend in any two religions to all their gods; most of the gods of Europe have no parallels in India. The evidence of etymology, therefore, tells us but little of that early religion of which we are in search. But if we consider the views and habits of the barbarous shepherd-huntsman, who is now seen to be the typical figure of common Aryanism, we need not seek long before we find something that was common to all the Aryan faiths. The patriarchal household has a religion which belongs to itself, and which is the working bond of union of its members. The hearth is its altar, because the forefathers of the house lie buried under it, or for another reason. These forefathers certainly are its gods. This hearth-cult has for its priest the father of the family; he in his turn will be gathered to his fathers if he has a legitimate son to do the last rites for him. No one but members of the family can partake in the domestic worship, all unconnected with the family by blood must be kept at a distance from these rites. This is not a religion in which the individual counts anything for his own sake, any more than totemistic religion is; in both it is the community alone that serves the deity, in the one case, those acknowledging the same totem, in the second, those united by blood in the same family. In totemism the individual sacrifices himself to the tribe; here he is nothing apart from his family. Aryan piety is family religion pure and simple. It fosters sentiments which have been the strength of Aryan society in all lands. It makes family life a sacred thing, lends to all domestic ties the highest sanction, and causes the mere mention of "hearth and home" to be the strongest incentive to valour and self-denial. Even in the wild-beast ferocity with which early men defend their homes against the intrusion of strangers, the germs of lofty domestic and patriotic virtues may be seen. Thus ancestor-worship, which is a part of the very beginnings of human religion, is a more effective force among the Aryans than anywhere else. In Egypt and China that worship is a highly artificial thing, and has lost much of its original force. In Egypt it is the fortunes of the dead that are most thought of; in China the cult has been smoothed down and deprived, according to the character of the people, of its intenser motives. Among the Aryans it combines actively with strong family feeling, causing them to cling with an extreme tenacity to their own gods and their own worship.[7] [Footnote 6: The principal are the following:-- 1. Dyaus, god of the sky, see above. 2. Sans. Ushas, goddess of dawn; Gr. [Greek: hêôs]; Lat. aurora; Lith. auszra; A.-S. eostra. 3. Sans. Agni, fire, god of fire; Lat. ignis; Lith. ugnis; O.-S. ogni. 4. Sans. Surya, sun; Lat. sol; Gr. [Greek: helios], also [Greek: Seirios]; Cymr. seul. 5. Sans. Mâs, moon; Gr. [Greek: mênê]; Lat. mena; Lith. menu. Mars=Maruts, Manu=Minos=Mannus, Varuna=Ouranos, and other equations formerly brought forward, are not now relied on by etymologists.] [Footnote 7: The comparative absence of ancestor-worship among the Greeks leads Dr. Schrader to doubt whether their religion is Aryan. The Semites and the Greeks occupy the same position in this respect (see chapter x., chapter xvi.).] But those of whom we are speaking worshipped other gods besides those of the household. The second great characteristic of Aryan religion is its adoration of gods who are neither local nor tribal, but universal. Dyaus, the sky, the heaven-god, can be worshipped anywhere; so can the earth, so can the heavenly twins, who were objects of early Aryan religion, so can the sun and moon. Not that the Aryans always remembered that these beings were not local or tribal. The god of heaven could be the god of a particular place too, having a special name there; or he could be appropriated by a tribe who gave him a title as their own particular patron. Each family could have its own heaven-god as well as its own hearth-god. Nor are we to think that when they worshipped beings who could be found in every place, the Aryans overlooked the sacred places, and the sacred objects worshipped formerly. They had themselves risen out of savagery, and still held many of the ideas of savages. Though they had a few great gods they could still believe in a large number of smaller ones. The tree, the stream, still had its spirit for them, the cave or the dark fissure its bad demon. And many a piece of magic did they practise, such as the rain-charm which would cause even the highest god to send what was needed. The world was well peopled with gods, and to keep on good terms with them all was, no doubt, a matter that required much attention and skill. Other features which have been stated to be characteristic of Aryan religion are its non-priestly character, and the fact that its gods are generally arranged in a monarchical pantheon. But neither of these constitutes a specific difference of the kind we are in search of. All primitive religions are non-priestly; a religion becomes priestly at a certain stage of its growth, when it is organised separately from the state. The monarchical pantheon, too, such as that of Homer and of the Eddas, is an indication, not of the genius of a religion, but of its having reached the systematising stage, and of the political ideas according to which the system is drawn up. The Aryan religions, it is true, arrange their gods when the time comes to do so, after the pattern of an Aryan patriarchal establishment, the father at the head, his sons and daughters near him, the servants in attendance, the unorganised host of spirits, nymphs and elves, outside. But to know the original character of the religion it is less important to ask how the pantheon is arranged, than what gods are worshipped, and how they are related to man. And the point which stands out clearly is that while Semitic religion is purely tribal and local, there is an element in Aryan religion which naturally transcends these limits. On Semitic ground the body with whom the god transacts is the tribe, the link is that of blood which connects all the members of the tribe with their divine head or ancestor. In Aryan religion also blood counts for much. The family altar is the seat of worship, and he who has been cast out of his own family cannot worship anywhere. The family gods are most thought of, no doubt, and exercise immense power in the ways we have mentioned. But the worship of which blood is the tie is not to the Aryan, as to the Semite, the whole of religion. There are beings aloft as well as beings on the earth and under the earth, and the worship of these beings is wider than the family. The family may address Heaven by a special private name, or at a particular spot, but Heaven itself was above all these titles and places. The spirits of the household made, as all the Semitic gods do, for separation, but the gods above made for union, and as any community grew, the upper gods, who were worshipped by all its members alike, became more lofty and more important. Thus we may agree with Mr. Gomme when he speaks (_Ethnology of Folklore_, p. 68) of the emancipation of the Aryans from the principle of local worship, and says that the rise of the conception of gods who could and did accompany the tribes wheresoever they travelled, was "the greatest triumph of the Aryan race." Farther than this it may be dangerous to go in a field so full of uncertainty. In all Aryan worships there are sacrifices of various kinds and degrees of importance. The horse sacrifice appears in several of the nations as one of distinction, but human sacrifice was most important of all, though in each of the Aryan lands commutations are made for it at a very early stage. The strife of Aryan with non-Aryan religions gave rise to many superstitions; after the conquest the gods of the latter often became the bad gods or demons of the former, the ministers of the defeated cult were regarded as sorcerers or witches, the dethroned gods made many an attempt to come back to their seats, and to revive disused practices. But a religion based, as we have seen the Aryan to be, in the family affections is destined to rise as civilisation advances. It will be found that the Aryan draws a less absolute distinction than the Semite between the human and the divine. To the Semite God is, broadly speaking, a master, or Lord, whose word is a command, in regard to whom man is a subject, a slave. To the Aryan the relation is a freer one. His god is more human, and art and imagination can do more in his service. BOOKS RECOMMENDED E. Siecke, _Die religion d. Indogermanen_, 1897. C. F. Keary, _Outlines of Primitive Belief among the Indo-European Races_, 1882. CHAPTER XV THE TEUTONS The Aryans in Europe.--There is more than one European people which before it was touched by Roman civilisation had remained for an indefinite period--a period to be measured probably rather by millenniums than by centuries--in the state of society described in last chapter (see above) as occurring when the Aryans dwelt among those whom they had conquered. In various lands alike we meet with the combination of the patriarchal household with the village, the combination of agricultural with pastoral life, to which the Aryans early settled down among non-Aryan populations. This type of society, which is the basis of feudalism, is recognised alike in India and in Germany. It stretches far back into the past, and may even be recognised in some quarters at the present day. As with civilisation so with religion. The early faith of the Slavs, the Celts, and the Teutons is now generally regarded as best representing that of the Aryans. It was a religion in which rite and belief were indefinite and variable compared with those of the later Aryan faiths of India and of Southern Europe, there being neither a regular priesthood nor the use of writing to impart fixity to religious forms. The river, the fountain, and the aged oak, each had its legend and its observance of unknown antiquity. The pre-Aryan and the Aryan elements of religion acted and reacted on each other, the Aryan, no doubt, being the element of progress, but blending with the other in indistinguishable mixture. The spirits of ancestors lived in the belief and the practice of posterity; a thousand unseen agents in the sky, and in the earth, and under the earth were believed in and treated according to tradition, fed or flouted, bribed or exorcised, as occasion suggested. New gods appeared, or old ones were combined into new, or a god migrated from one province to another. Here also myths and rituals were formed by various processes. But a more constant growth of belief took place in connection with some gods as larger social organisms came into existence, village communities combining into tribes, tribes into nations. The great gods of heaven, whatever the history of their early growth, proved specially fitted to unite together clans and peoples. These beings received different names in different countries. Their early history, no doubt, was not the same in all, yet in each mythology there were figures and stories which occurred also in others, whether in consequence of parallel growth out of similar circumstances in each land, or from a process of borrowing at a later time, or from both, we need not try to decide. We give a short account of the religion of the Germans. That of the Celts, which may be studied in the Hibbert Lectures of Professor Rhys,[1] or that of the Slavs (of which there is an excellent short summary by Mr. W. R. Morfill in _Religious Systems of the World_), would have equally well served the purpose of exhibiting an Aryan religion at a low stage of development, and held by a people not thoroughly compacted into a nation. The religion of the Teutons has the advantage for our study over these others, that it remained longer unsuppressed by Christianity, and in its Scandinavian branch put forth a vigorous original growth in comparatively recent times. The latest paganism which flourished in Europe, it is also the religion of our ancestors, on which the Christianity of the Northern lands was grafted, and many a survival of which may still be recognised in our own land. It therefore possesses for us even in itself considerable interest. [Footnote 1: _Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by Celtic Heathendom_, 1886.] Of the ancient Germans, of the dwellers in the basins of the Rhine and the Danube, we have accounts by Cæsar and by Tacitus.[2] After this there is a dearth of information; the Christian missionaries to the Germans thought it their duty to cover the former beliefs and rites of their converts in oblivion, and abstained from giving information about them. What we know is drawn from Church writers. The Eddas belong to a much more developed stage of Teutonic life; they tell their own tale, which will be noticed in its turn. [Footnote 2: Cæsar, _B. Gall._ vi. 21. Tacitus, _Germania_.] The early Germans dwelt in scattered settlements surrounded by the great forests and marshes which then covered Central Europe. Every one has read the description of the brave and warlike people of whom the Romans justly stood so much in awe, and knows about their fierce blue eyes and their fair hair, their tall stature, their battle-cries and charges, their hardy habits and strict morals. As the Roman writers describe them, they are by no means savages. They do not live in towns, but migrate from one spot to another, the community cultivating the land it takes possession of, on a system of common ownership with rotation of occupants. The women did the hard work, Tacitus says; the men spent their time in the chase and in fighting. They had an organisation beyond that of the village, being arranged in what we may call hundreds and shires, each district having to furnish so many men for war, electing its own heads and holding meetings for various purposes. Amidst these local and tribal divisions they did not forget that they were a nation different from other nations, and invasion found them a united people. The religious expression of this is to be found in the legend which represents the three great divisions of the nation as descended alike from the god Mannus, son of the earth-born Tuisco; hymns were sung to the latter as the father of the German race. It was by hymns that this people remembered things which were important. The Early German Gods.--There is a national god, then; and other gods of whom Tacitus tells us are national too, not local or tribal. The tribes to the south of the Baltic worship Herthus, which, Tacitus says, is their name for Terra Mater, Mother Earth. The other gods he mentions are called by Roman names. They worship Mercury, he says, as their principal god; on certain days they worship him with human sacrifices. They also worship Mars and Hercules with animal victims; and a particular tribe, the Suevi, worship Isis. Cæsar says the Germans worship the sun, and Vulcan, and the moon. Tacitus mentions other German gods; the two statements are both true. Tacitus gives the German gods Roman names according to a common practice of antiquity, which has been the source of much confusion; we shall see afterwards how the Romans identified the gods of Greece also with those of Rome. The equation which Tacitus gives of the German gods with Latin ones is still in daily use in the names of the days of the week. The Romans applied the names of the planets, which were the names of their own gods, to the days of the week as early as the first Christian century; and in Germany the days were called after the German gods supposed to answer to the Roman gods in question. Half Europe to this day calls the days of the week after the Roman, and the other half after the German gods. We give the Latin names with the modern French and over against them the English, in which the names of the German gods appear more clearly than in modern German:-- Dies Solis, the Sun's day=Sunday. (The French _Dimanche_ is from _Dominicus_, the Lord's Day.) Dies Lunæ (Lundi)=Monday or Moon's day. Dies Martis (Mardi)=Tuesday, the day of Tiw or Ziu. Dies Mercurii (Mercredi)=Wednesday, the day of Wodan. Dies Jovis (Jeudi)=Thursday, the day of Thor. In German this is _Donnerstag_, the day of Donar=Thor. Dies Veneris (Vendredi)=Friday, the day of Freya. Dies Saturni retains the Latin god's name in our Saturday. (The French _Samedi_ is derived from Sabbath.) These Teutonic names for the days of the week are common to all the branches of Teutonic speech, and must have a high antiquity. They tell us what gods the Germans had in early times, and to what Roman gods these were believed to correspond; but it would be a vain endeavour to attempt to deduce from this, or indeed from any early information we possess on the subject, the origin and nature of these gods. From Grimm's laborious study of the question (_German Mythology_, vol. i.) we gather that it is a matter mainly of speculation what it was in Wodan that led the Romans to identify him with their Mercury. Thor, who is identified with Jupiter, was probably a sky-god, while Tiw or Ziu (whom etymology identifies with Zeus, not Mars) was a god of war, and Freya, like Venus, had to do with female beauty. We come to know more of these gods when we find them in the Eddas, but it is scarcely legitimate to fill in the South German gods of the first century from the North German gods of the same names of the eleventh or twelfth. We reserve, therefore, our description of the German gods till we come to the Northern mythology. The Roman writers do not furnish any accurate idea of the working religion of the Germans of their day. Cæsar says they were not so much under the guidance of priests as the Gauls were, and that they were not greatly addicted to sacrifice; neither statement can be received without scrutiny. Tacitus idealises the untutored savage as Rousseau does, in order to rebuke the vices of a luxurious civilisation; but his statements of actual facts may be trusted. Knowledge recently acquired of early forest-cults disposes us to trust him when he speaks, as he does more than once, of the peculiar sacredness the Germans attached to woods and groves. He is idealising when he says, "They did not confine their gods in walls nor represent them under the likeness of men, being led thereto by considering the greatness of the heavenly beings." A few centuries later at least we find Christian bishops busy destroying temples of German heathenism and burning images found in them. Undoubtedly, however, the great sanctuary of a district was frequently, as he represents, in the recesses of a wood. Under a mighty tree a tribe would hold its meetings and sit in judgment and in council; and there were sacred groves in which no human foot might stray, where the god was supposed to dwell, where great sacrifices both of animal and of human victims took place, where the boughs were hung with the bones of former sacrifices which in war were carried forth at the head of the tribe as its sacred standards. This was done by the priests, who accompanied the host to battle, and were charged at such a time with the infliction of all necessary punishments, since they represented the god who was supposed to be personally present as commander. The priests had to work the auguries when consulted on matters of state; on private matters the paterfamilias might do this himself. The priests also had charge of the sacred white horses, by whose neighing the will of the deity became known. Several women are also mentioned as having enjoyed the reputation of sacred personages; and "even in their wives they considered that there was a certain holiness and inspiration." To judge from Tacitus and from other writers of the first Christian centuries, there was little system in the religion of Germany in those days; the gods were not organised in a divine family, the priests were not a caste like the Druids of France and Britain, and religious practice was loose and variable. It must also be remembered that what foreign writers reported on the subject was connected rather with national and official cults than with popular local observances. Of the latter there was an abundant growth; a distinguished foreign writer might not know about it, but the evidence of it survives in various forms which are only now being seriously studied. To know the practical religion of early Germany we have to consult the village festival and legend (as has been done by Mannhardt in his _Wald- und Feld-kulte_ and Mr. Frazer in _The Golden Bough_, and many a student of folklore), which, though now apparently meaningless, were once the serious religious observance and doctrine of the peasantry. The peasant carried his wishes and prayers to the familiar wishing-well, and presented offerings to the spirit of the well by throwing them into the water or hanging them on the surrounding trees. The fairy rather than far-off Wodan was looked to for good fortune; the rite of the fabulous village hero, with its quaint immemorial usages, roused more enthusiasm than the stately public ceremonial. Another side of the mind of early Germany is to be gathered from the heroic legends and the fairy tales, many of the elements of which, we are assured, were even then in existence. Were these legends formed by a process of degradation; did they begin with telling about the gods, and were they afterwards applied to heroes and princes and common men? Or was the process in the opposite direction from this; were the stories, first of all, those of human warriors, their wars and loves, and did they then become mixed up with solar and celestial ideas? Were the fairy tales originally stories of the gods, and did they by popular and familiar treatment fall below the dignity of their original themes till they came to be a debased and broken-down mythology? or were they at first stories about beasts and about clever tricks, such as savages love to tell, and did they rise to something more dignified, till in some of them we may trace the stories of the gods? It is not necessary that we should answer these questions, which carry us back to an earlier time than that with which we are concerned; but any one who knows the tales, and will try to realise the state of mind of those who received them not as fancy but as serious fact, will know something of the religion of early Germany; of the strange beings, fairies, dwarfs, magicians, talking animals, animated sun and moon and winds, by which the German believed himself to be surrounded. Later German Religion.--In Southern Germany the introduction of Christianity early put an end to any development of Teutonic religion which might have taken place there. The old faith, however, still maintained itself in more Northern latitudes. It was brought to Britain by the German invaders, continued there till the seventh century, and was brought in again in a more Northern form by the Norsemen, who in their turn "gradually deserted Thor and Odin for the white Christ."[3] Bede tells hardly anything of the paganism which had been the religion of England a century before he wrote; in this he is like other Christian teachers who might have told but did not. But though it came to an end in England, Teutonic religion continued to prevail in the countries from which the invaders had come. In Frisia in the eighth century we hear of a goddess Hulda, a kind goddess, as her name implies, who sends increase to plants and is a patroness of fishing. A god called Fosete, or Forsete (Forseti in modern Icelandic=chairman), identified both with Odin and with Balder, was worshipped in Heligoland; he had a sacred well there, from which water had to be drawn in silence. There are temples, often in the middle of a wood, with priestly incumbents, and rich endowments, both of lands and treasure; and human sacrifice in various forms is said to have been in use. Idols are mentioned, even (at Upsala in Sweden) a trinity of idols; but this is what Church writers would naturally impute to heathens, and the statement is discredited. No Teutonic idol has survived; the loss to art may not be great, but such a relic would have settled the controversy. [Footnote 3: Kingsley's _Hereward the Wake_.] Iceland.--Teutonic paganism reached its highest development in Iceland. Of this branch of it alone is there a literature, for many of the sagas are the fruit of a literary movement in Iceland anterior to the establishment of Christianity; and the historian Ari, who wrote within a century after that event, gives careful information of the earlier state of affairs. The reader of _Burnt Njal_ sees that among the Icelanders life was short and precarious. With the spirit of adventure, which led them to be constantly setting out on warlike and piratical expeditions, they combined a strong tendency to local quarrels, which filled up their life at home with a constant series of blood-feuds. These latter are gone about in a methodical and business-like way; custom sanctions them, the meetings of the popular assembly do not seek to suppress or punish them if only they are conducted according to the rules. No public authority had as yet arisen to carry out the law between one household and another; the avenger has his recognised place and duty. Society is patriarchal as in other Aryan communities; each family is a community of blood-kindred for mutual defence and also for worship. The leading cult of Icelandic religion was the domestic worship of ancestors, conducted by the head of the household. The dead were buried in knolls or burrows near the dwelling, and their spirits were thought to inhabit these places; they are said to "die into the hill." Altars are erected and sacrifices offered there; the blood of the victim poured out upon the ground is supposed to be enjoyed by them. These knolls became the sacred places of their district, and many a belief existed about these quiet neighbours and the help they afforded to the living. "Elves" they were called, and they were thought of as a cleanly and kindly race. The spirits of bad men, on the contrary, lived an uneasy life, as demons, and were the workers of mischief. Along with this belief in the spirits of the dead as inhabiting the burial hill of the household, there is another conception, namely, that the dead go to a distant region of the unseen world. In Homer also these two conceptions are combined. The Icelandic burial rites are founded on the latter view. The "departed" is going on a long journey, and his friends escort him as far as they can; shoes are bound on his feet, the Hel-shoes, for Hel is the name of the region of the dead. Gifts are given to him; horses, male and female attendants, hawks and hounds, are burned with him on the pyre, and his wife voluntarily accompanies him; all these he is to have with him in the country beyond. In addition to the domestic cult we have that of local objects; holy wells, waterfalls, groves, stones are worshipped. Mother Earth is called on, so is Thunder, so is Heaven. But besides these minor worships there is the public one, connected with a large tribe or with a king's court. A temple on the same plan as a large dwelling-house forms a place of meeting and of sacrifice, an asylum, and a place of oaths and covenants. On a table in front of the high seat stands the bowl which, filled with blood and along with certain sticks, forms a means of divination. A gold ring also lies there, which a man puts on when he is about to swear an oath, and which the priest puts on at meetings. The priest has the duty of keeping up the building and property of the temple and of maintaining the sacrifices. At the latter various rites are done with the blood of victims, and those present feast on the flesh and drink toasts. The first cup is for Wodan, various other gods are celebrated, and there is a cup of remembrance for the departed. Sacrifices are offered for the crops, for victory, for any great object on which the community is bent. In this ritual there is no evidence of any idols. Though the Icelanders are not without art, the great gods have not yet perhaps assumed to their minds such definite figures as to be thus set forth: no Homer has placed them clear before the inward eye. The rites are bloody, the altar has ever anew to be made to shine with the blood of victims. Human sacrifices are only resorted to in times of great common danger, as a terrible last resort; the god to whom the human victim is devoted is moved by the bloodshed to avert his anger, or to make greater exertions for his people. Bloodshed forms the strongest of all bonds. To link themselves together in an indissoluble brotherhood, two friends mingle their blood on the ground and then each of them treads on it. The shedding of human blood at the launching of a ship or at the laying of the foundation of a building is also known. Savage and cruel as this religion is, there are signs that it is softening, and that some of its darker rites are beginning to admit of commutation. When Christianity approaches, the Icelanders feel that it must make a great change, and that some of the cruelties which they regard as the good old customs, will have to be laid aside. We hear of the stipulation being made that if they receive baptism they shall not be required to give up the removal of unpromising children nor the eating of horseflesh. The Eddas, in which Scandinavian mythology reaches its ultimate form, seem to belong to a higher plane of human life than the religion we have described, and it has appeared to many scholars of late years that they cannot be regarded as a pure product of paganism, but are in great part influenced by Christianity both in matter and in sentiment. The older Edda, written in verse, is said to have been collected by Sæmund Sigfusson the learned, one of the early Christian priests of Iceland, who lived about the eleventh century. The other Edda is in prose; it is a collection made about two centuries later. The form given to the myths in these collections is due to the Skalds, who flourished in Iceland in the early Middle Ages; but the legends themselves are older. Nothing is known precisely about their origin or early diffusion. The Eddas may be compared in many respects with the Homeric poems. As in the latter, the gods form a family, the members of which come together to a certain place for meetings, while individually they have their own adventures, their loves, their jealousies, their jokes, their tricks. In the Eddas too we find that the gods are not, strictly speaking, eternal; they succeeded an older race of gods, and their turn too may come to pass away. They are called Æsir, which is the plural of As. The etymology of this is uncertain; compare the Sanscrit Asura, said to mean the living or breathing one. The Æsir are spoken of in later times, not in the Eddas, as if they had been a race of warriors; they are said to have come in to Scandinavia and got the better of those who lived there before, because they worshipped a superior set of gods.[4] An historic reminiscence may lurk here. Before the Æsir there were giants, and the earth with all its parts is made of the body of one of these giants,[5] whom the new race superseded as governors of the world. But the giants are still there and their spirit is unchanged; there is a danger of their interfering to subvert the rule of their successors. [Footnote 4: See a similar statement about the Incas, chapter vi.] [Footnote 5: Compare "Purusha" in the _Rigveda_.] There are other cosmogonic myths besides that of the division of the giant Ymir. One is on this wise. Ere this world began, there was on one side Niflheim, the land of mist and cold, on the other side Muspelheim, the region of fire; between these two lay Ginnungagap, the north side of it frozen, the south side glowing hot, and life originated by the meeting, in one way or another, of the heat and cold. There are very primitive myths of the shaping of man out of two pieces of wood, of Night and Day as drivers of chariots and horses, of the sun and moon fleeing from wolves, and so on. A more poetic conception is the division of the world into Asgard, the garden of the Æsir; Midgard, the world of man; and Utgard, the world outside. In the first Odin has his seat Hlidskjalf; when he sits in it he can see and understand whatever is happening in any part of the broad world (is he the sun, then?). The third region is generally called Jötunheim, the home of the giants, an icy region at the extreme part of the habitable world. A bridge exists from the dwelling of men to that of the gods; it is called Bifröst, and is the rainbow. The gods have various places of meeting; but their principal seat is under a great tree, the ash. Yggdrasil[6] is a tree worthy of the gods; it is a world-tree; its roots extend to all the worlds; its branches spread even over heaven. Under it is the fountain Mimir, spring of wisdom, from which Odin drinks daily. Near it is the dwelling of the Norns, fates or weird sisters, who establish laws and uphold them by their judgments, and allot to every man his span of life. They are named Urd the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future. Daily do they water the ash from the spring to keep its leaves fresh, and help it to contend with its numerous foes, for a great serpent is continually gnawing at its root, and it has also other troubles. This myth of Yggdrasil is the apotheosis of Teutonic tree-worship, and is richly suggestive.[7] [Footnote 6: Yggdrasil=Odin's horse=the gallows. Is it the cross?] [Footnote 7: Carlyle in his _Heroes_, p. 18, draws out the spiritual significance of it and of Norse mythology generally.] The Gods of the Eddas.--We now come to the gods of the system. Odin is in the Eddas the founder of the world as now constituted. He has displaced the old formless race of gods, and is the leader of a new and vigorous race now ruling in their stead. The old scholars rationalised Odin into a chief who had led a migration from Asia to Norway in early times. He is the inventor of the art of writing by runes and the founder of poetry; thus he has the aspect of a culture-hero; that is to say, of a man of advanced views who, for the benefits he conferred on his people, was exalted first to a hero and then to a god. But the worship of Odin or Wodan is one of the earliest things we know about the German race. He is the god of the South-Germans from the very first. His earliest character is that of a storm-god. Whether his name is connected with the German _wüthen_, rage (Scot. _wud_) or with the Vedic Vata, who is a god of storm, he is from the first an impetuous being. The early myth of him is scarcely dead at this day; the peasant hears him rushing through the woods at night. That is the "wild hunt of Wodan," he says; the god is out with his followers, and woe to him who gets in his way! The early Germans thought of him as a kind being who fulfilled the wishes of men, and it was probably this side of his character that caused him to be identified with Mercury. In the Eddic theology he is a patron of war, as becomes the chief god of a warlike people. He arranges battle and dispenses victory; the heroes who fall in battle he receives into his heavenly army; they live with him in Valhalla or Valhöll, the hall of choice. Odin chooses those who are to go there; he is assisted in this by the Valkyries or choice-maidens. Life in Valhalla is a constant round of fighting, the wounds of which are healed at once, and feasting, the materials for which are ever renewed. Odin, like other great gods, bears traces of low surroundings, as if he had once lived among savages. He can turn himself into an eagle or other animal to gain his object, and he has engaged in disreputable adventures. But he tends to improve, and the Eddas show him at his best. Here he is called the All-father, the Ruler of all, who gave man a soul that shall never perish; and we hear that he needs no food and takes no share himself in the feasts of the heroes. All the righteous shall be with him in Vingolf (the same as Valhalla), but the wicked shall go to Hel, the kingdom of Hel or Hela, the goddess of the under-world. Thor or Donar, Thunder, is said to be the mightiest of the gods; he is identified, as we saw, with Jove, but he is a rougher and more primitive deity. He drives in a chariot drawn by two goats, and is possessed of three things which have wonderful properties. The first is the hammer Mjölnir, which the Frost- and Mountain-giants cannot resist when he throws it; the second is the belt of strength, which makes him twice as strong when he puts it on; and the third a pair of gauntlets with which he grasps his mallet. Many stories are told of his prowess, of his conflicts with the giants, who, however, give him a good deal of trouble with their cunning; and of his catching the Midgard serpent which surrounds the world at the bottom of the sea. Being a god of storm, he forms a connection with agriculture, and thus gains a more sedate aspect; he has also to do with marriage, and a hammer is used symbolically at Icelandic weddings. Thor is only half-brother to the other sons of Odin; his mother was Fiörgyn, the earth; the worships of Odin and Thor, originally distinct, seem to have been united at an early period. The god Tyr, son of Odin by a giantess, is the Eddic figure of the German Tiw or Ziu, etymologically equivalent to Zeus or Jupiter, but identified by the Romans with Mars. His greatness belongs to early times; he was then a sword-god, and had an extensive worship in various parts of Europe. In the Eddas he has scarcely any character, and seldom takes a prominent part in the legend. Loki, by etymology a fire-god (Germ. _Löhe_, Scot. _Lowe_),[8] is in one account the brother of Odin, in another his son by a giantess. His character is fitful; sometimes he acts a brotherly part by the gods and helps them out of their difficulties by clever devices, and sometimes he provides entertainment for them; but for the most part he is an embodiment of cunning and mischief; his course is downwards, he tends to become a being purely evil, setting himself heartlessly against the wishes of the other gods, and acting so as to imperil them and their world till they are obliged to cast him out of heaven. He is thus a kind of Lucifer or Satan, and like the Christian devil, his ultimate fate is to be bound till the end of the world shall arrive. Baldur, the son of Odin and Frigga, is the best and brightest of the gods. Like Apollo, he has to do with light, and no pollution can come near him; he has also to do with the administration of justice, and pronounces sentences which can never be reversed. Heimdall also is a light and gracious god; he is the warder of the Æsir, and stays near the bridge Bifröst. Of him it is told that he wants less sleep than a bird, sees a hundred miles off by night or day, and hears the grass grow on the ground and the wool on the sheep's back. Bragi is the god of poetry and eloquence, the best of all skalds. [Footnote 8: The etymology is not perhaps correct, but it suggested itself and influenced the view taken of this god, in very early times.] Of the goddesses, Frigga, wife of Odin, stands first, an august matron of mysterious knowledge, whom even gods consult, and by whom men swear; she has also to do with marriage, and the childless appeal to her. Etymologically she is scarcely to be distinguished from Freya, wife of Odur, who, however, is lighter in character, and is rather a goddess of love. The goddesses in the Eddas are more shadowy figures than the gods; there are others, and an attempt is made to reckon up twelve of them to answer to the twelve chief gods, but their names are taken from the qualities they represent, and they have little reality. The story of the death of Baldur, brought about by the evil mind of Loki in defiance of the whole divine family, sounds the note of tragedy in the divine family of the Eddas. The gods themselves suffer, and are unable to retrieve the misfortune which has come upon them. With one accord they try to get Baldur brought back from the under-world, but they are foiled by the same agency of evil which carried him off. With the death of Baldur the gods feel that their rule, which, we saw, had a beginning, and with it the world they govern, for the two are inseparably bound up with each other, is coming to an end. The gods perish in the ruin of the world; and this is well, for sin cleaves to them and to their house, and they are not fit to endure. Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, comes on; the universe is burnt up in a mighty conflagration, and while there are abodes of bliss and abodes of misery where some survive, the universe as a whole is entirely changed, and a milder race of gods will rule over a better world. If this mythology were found to be of native Scandinavian growth, it would prove that Teutonic religion was capable of lofty development, and would throw back an interesting light upon its previous history. Here, it has been maintained, we see the Teutonic faith rising to monotheism. Odin has among his other titles that of All-father; he is rising above the other gods to a position of supremacy, which will fit him, if the process were allowed, as it was not, to advance somewhat further, to represent pure deity and to attract to himself an undivided reverence. Here also we find a religion which was formerly a rude intercourse between barbarous men and savage gods, clothing itself with an ideal element. As the Greeks found religion in beauty and the Romans in utility, so did the Germans find it at last in pathos. They attain to the conception of suffering deity; in Baldur a god falls victim to malice and wickedness, and the sorrow of his fall takes possession of the whole of heaven. Thus pain and sacrifice are hallowed, for man by the history of the gods, and his intercourse with them leads him into heights and depths unknown before. But the conviction is now establishing itself that this phase of Teutonic religion is borrowed from Christianity, which was then seriously menacing the existence of the old faith, and that it is the shadow of their approaching extinction by the new religion, which occasions among the Northern gods this feeling of sadness. They feel themselves falling from their position; they are to be gods no longer, but are to yield to the world-order, based on a deeper law than theirs, which called them into being and now is preparing their dismissal. Distinctly Christian ideas enter the old world of gods; the ideas of sin, of sacrifice, of a final judgment, of a good god who dies, of an evil spirit who, after prevailing for a time, is chained up to await his doom. That a sense of guilt rests on the gods shows that they are abandoning their rule, and they acknowledge that their successors will be better than they have been. BOOKS RECOMMENDED Grimm's _German Mythology_, translated by Stallybrass, 4 vols. Grimm's _Fairy Tales_. Mr. Lang writes an Introduction to the English translation in Bell's edition. Mannhardt, _Germanische Mythen_, 1858, and _Wald- und Feld-kulte_, 1875, 77. For the later Northern section, Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, especially the Excursus on Religion, i. 401. Dasent, _Burnt Njal; or Life in Iceland at the end of the tenth century_. Mallet's _Northern Antiquities_. Thorpe, _Northern Mythology_. De la Saussaye, _The Religion of the Teutons_, 1902, the most comprehensive statement of the whole subject. Ralston, _Songs of Russian People_, and _Russian Folk Tales_. Simrock, _Handb. der deutschen Mythologie_. R. M. Meyer, _Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte_, 1910. Sir John Rhys, _Oxford Proceedings_, p. 201, _sqq._ CHAPTER XVI GREECE The history of Europe begins in Greece. It is there that the Aryans in Europe first feel the touch of the arts and civilisation of the East, and are stirred up to new activities; and the life thus quickened in Greece transmitted its spark to Italy, and so to the whole of Europe. People and Land.--There is no direct evidence that the Greeks came to their country from elsewhere; and the theory of a Græco-Italic period, in which the future inhabitants of Greece and Italy lived together somewhere to the north of both these countries and made common advances in civilisation, is now abandoned. There are, however, faint indications that the Greeks spread over their country from the north southwards. What people dwelt in it before them it is impossible to say; the Pelasgi and Leleges, whom they themselves conceived to have preceded them, left behind them no other trace than that belief. When first we descry this land in the faint dawn of history, it is tenanted by the people whose name it bears, touched only by the Thracians to the north, and the Illyrians to the west, these also being Aryan races. Though the Greeks are on both sides of the Egean, which seems from the earliest times to have connected rather than divided them, their centre of gravity is in the mainland of Hellas, including the Peloponnesus. In this country many a migration no doubt took place before the people was finally arranged in it; and some of these migrations are faintly known to history. When once the settlement had been accomplished, the nature of the country did much to fix the institutions of the people and the mutual relations of their various communities. Large tribes coming into the narrow valleys and sequestered coasts of Greece necessarily broke up into small cantons, each of which, though not cut off from intercourse with its neighbours, was free to develop by itself. The country is said by travellers to be the most beautiful in the world. The branch of the Aryans which settled in it may have brought scanty acquirements with them, but they brought great capacities. The Greeks had an unrivalled talent for doing what they saw others do, in a much better way, and so making it their own. They had an inborn disposition to what is reasonable. That they had a deep-seated inclination to what is harmonious and beautiful is proved by their first great work of art, their language. Of that language there were several dialects in the earliest times; the principal ones being the broad Doric of the peninsula and the colonies, and the softer Ionic of which the classical language is a branch. But the Greeks of all dialects could understand each other, and regarded as barbarians those without who spoke other tongues. Thus from the first this people was much divided, but was also held together by strong bonds. Earliest Religion--Functional Deities.--The religion the Greeks brought with them to their country was undoubtedly that which we have discussed in our chapter on the Aryans. The primitive elements of Aryan religion all reappear in Greece; the combination of many small household worships with the supra-family worship of a great god or gods, the few great gods who are surrounded by a multitude of spirits, some of these also growing into gods, the recognition of spiritual presences in many a natural object, living or dead. All this we find in early Greece. The whole nation believes in Zeus; to all he is the Lord of heaven, the giver of rain, the fertiliser of mother earth, the supreme ruler in earth as well as in heaven, the father of the gods as well as of men. This is the first bond of unity in Greek religion. But every family, every village, every town has its own peculiar worship which is to be found nowhere else. That worship may be addressed to Zeus with a local title; each circle of men has its own particular Zeus, who is their protector and ruler; and thus Zeus has many forms and names. In each community there is also the worship of the goddess of the hearth (Hestia); each household has its own Hestia, and carries on the worship which in other Aryan peoples is connected with the memory of departed ancestors. But the family or the township has also other objects of worship. There are other gods besides Zeus who are connected with heaven, such as Apollo and Heracles. There are gods connected with each activity of the people. Artemis is goddess of hunting, Aphrodite of the peaceful life of nature and of gardens, and also of love. Poseidon, the sea-god, was also worshipped inland, and was perhaps originally a god of horses and oxen; Hephæstus was the god of workers in metal, Ares the god of battle. These are in their origin what are called functional deities, that is to say, gods who are present in the function with which they are associated, and of which they constitute the ideal or sacred side, and who have no existence apart from it. The gods of Greece in fact had their origin in that view of nature as animated in every part, which the Greeks shared with other branches of the Aryans, and with early man generally. Like the Latins, the Greeks at first saw a mystery, a spirit, in every part of life; each fountain had its nymph, each forest glade its dryad; and they felt the gods to be returning to fresh life when spring came with its flowers. Each of their own activities also had its unseen genius. Each enclosure for flocks had its Apollo, "him of the sheepfold," who protected the flock and the shepherd; and each boundary stone its Hermes, "him of the boundary," who also watched over flocks and took charge of marches and of paths. Growth of Greek Gods.--Such beings, however, are something less than gods; and the Greeks, long before we know them, had made the step which the Romans scarcely made at all, from the spirit to the god, from the vague unseen power behind an object or an act, to the free being conceived with human attributes and feelings, who can be the patron of a community, and afford help in all its concerns. Not all the spirits rise into gods; it depends on circumstances which of them are selected for that advance; but the choice once made, their rise was rapid. As the gods grew into personality and definite character, though the function out of which they first sprang was not forgotten, other functions were added to them; and as a god grew in power and consideration, his worship was set up in new places, where other titles and attributes awaited him. The local god might be identified with the great god from a distance. The god of a powerful community, as Athene ("she of Athens"), might be adopted wherever the influence of that community extended; thus new gods arose and old ones took local form. When a change took place in the habits of the people, it was followed by a corresponding change in the character of their gods. When agriculture comes in, the gods have to take notice of it, the pastoral god turns agricultural, and even the huntress Artemis becomes an encourager of fertility. When navigation rises in importance, a number of the gods, Poseidon at their head, become sea-gods. Stones, Animals, Trees.--In Greece the worship of the gods soon superseded that of objects not possessing any human character. Traces of such lower worships survive, it is true, in the later religion in great abundance, but they have no influence in its development; they only tell their story of the otherwise forgotten past. Stones were worshipped in early Greece. Not to speak of the cromlechs and dolmens, which are found there as in all parts of Asia and Europe, and the meaning of which is so little understood, stones were preserved as sacred objects in various places, even to late times, and had no doubt originally been worshipped. The god Hermes was represented in every period by a slab of stone set upright, a human head and other human features being indicated on it. Even in later Greece, boards or blocks of wood were in some places exhibited on rare occasions, which were the oldest images of the Artemis or the Aphrodite there adored. Though for the public eye splendid statues had taken the place of the goddess, the original image was still thought to have a sanctity all its own. We also notice that the gods of Greece are associated with animals. Zeus is a bull in Crete; he has also other transformations: Pan is a goat; Artemis is a bear in some provinces, elsewhere a doe. The Athene of the Acropolis is a serpent. Apollo is sometimes connected with the mouse. Along with these identifications of the gods with animals we may mention the animal emblems with which they are generally represented. The eagle is the bird of Zeus, the owl of Athene, the peacock of Hera, the dove of Aphrodite. In this connection we cannot help thinking of the sacred animals of the Egyptian nomes; and the question may be asked whether such animals must be taken to be in Greece also the signs of a primitive totemism? Of the tree-worship of Greece much has been written of late. The oak was the sacred tree of Zeus; he must have been conceived as living in it; he gave oracles at Dodona by the rustling of the branches of the tree. Athene has the olive, Apollo the palm, and also the laurel. After the introduction of agriculture rustic cults arose, in which the inhabitants of a village followed in sympathetic rites the fortunes of the gods who live in the life of the plants in summer and die with them in autumn. The god of the Semites is generally a changeless being, who himself conducts and orders the changes of the seasons, but in Greece we find gods whom man can accompany in the tragedy of their fall and the triumph of their rise. We shall see afterwards that the rustic worships of Demeter and Proserpine were brought forward at a critical period in Greek religion, to supply an element which was much required in it. These worships, similar, as Mr. Frazer suggests,[1] to those still kept up by our own peasantry, were doubtless of immemorial antiquity in Greece, though in the earlier period they are little heard of. [Footnote 1: _Golden Bough_, vol. i. p. 356.] Thus the Greek gods grew up in the period before Greece was awakened to new thoughts by contact with foreign peoples. Many harsh and cruel rites were no doubt practised; human sacrifice, heard of even in later times in remote parts of the country, was not unknown, and practices were connected with the service of stern gods and goddesses which, though literature is silent about them, left their mark on custom. Zeus and one or two other gods are essentially moral, and some duties were strongly encouraged by religion, such as those of hospitality and strict regard for boundaries, of faithfulness to pledge, of respect for strangers. But many of the gods are too closely interwoven with external nature to be very decidedly moral powers; they are like the plants and animals, neither good nor bad but natural. Greek Religion is Local.--What strikes us most strongly about this early Greek religion is its entire want of system and its local and disintegrated character. Every town, every family, has its own religion. There is no central authority. New gods are constantly springing up; the old ones are constantly receiving new titles and forming new unions with each other or with newer gods. The god of one place is in another only a hero; the same god is represented in different places in entirely different ways, and entirely different legends are attached to his name. Thus the Greeks have from the first a mythology singularly extensive and inconsistent, and their worship also varies in each place. There is no general religion, but only a multitude of local ones. In story and in rite old and new are mixed up together,--what is local and what is imported, what is savage in its nature and origin, and what is on the side of progress. This is a state of matters which lies in every land before the beginning of organised religion. Rites and legends are everywhere of local growth, and the attempt to frame the various rites and legends into a consistent ritual and a systematic account of the gods, comes later. In Greece, as Mr. Robertson Smith observes, the earlier state of matters continued longer and influenced the national faith more deeply than elsewhere. As the Greeks never succeeded in forming a central political system, so they never attained to unity in worship. No national temple arose, the priesthood of which had power to frame the national religion, to lay down rules for sacrifice, or to edit sacred texts. The Greeks were less than any other people under the sway of religious authority. While local practice was fixed, and custom and tradition declared plainly enough what was to be regarded as religious duty, belief was quite free to grow as circumstances or the growth of culture dictated. A religion in such a position, and among a people of lively imagination and specially gifted in the direction of art, must necessarily receive its forms rather from the artist than the priest. Artistic Tendency.--Thus we can discern from the first the direction which Greek religion must take. The Greeks shaped their gods earlier and more freely than other peoples, and went on shaping them till no further advance could be made in that way. Long before Homer they had been making their gods such as free men, and men endowed with a sense of beauty, could worship. They were not content to worship lifeless objects, but must have living beings. They were not content to worship beings without reason, they must worship reasonable beings. They were not inclined to regard the natural objects they worshipped with terror or self-prostration, but rather in a spirit of genial friendliness and sympathy as being something like themselves. And so they turned their gods into men. The anthropomorphising tendency, present as we have seen in other lands and at much earlier periods, present indeed wherever religion is a growing power, had freer play with them than with any other people. Thus the spirits of the fountain and the tree, and of every part of nature that was worshipped, took human form. At first, no doubt, the nymph was in the fountain, the dryad in the oak, but as time went on the human maiden cast off her mosses and her bark and leaves, and stood forth to imagination a being wholly human, dwelling beside the fountain or the tree. In the same way heaven becomes a great human father, the sea an earth-shaking potentate drawn by dolphins over the waves, the sun a mighty archer, fire a lame craftsman (from the flickering of flame?) whose smithy is underground where the volcanoes are. And the figures once arrived at, it was no hard task to spin out their stories and their relations with each other, and to connect with them older tales, as taste or fancy suggested. The thorough humanisation of the gods, the clothing of the gods in the highest types connected with free human society, is the first great contribution made by this gifted race to the progress of religion. Receiving from the earlier world the same kind of gods as other nations did, Greece proceeded to treat them in a way of her own, idealised and refined the parts of nature held divine, and ascribed to them not only, as all early races do, human motives and human passions, but also human beauty and wisdom and goodness. Whatever rude materials she received to work on, either from the earlier dwellers on Greek soil or from foreign lands, she made them her own by transfiguring them into ideal men and women. Thus the Greeks reached the position, which they taught the world first in immortal poetry and then in immortal plastic art, that man should not bow down to anything that is beneath him, and that nature can only become fit to be worshipped by being idealised and made human. An end was made to the dark imagination which was so apt to creep over all early religion, that deity and humanity may be different and opposite; that an object devoid of reason, an object or an animal admired not for its goodness but for something about it which man cannot understand, may be his god and have a claim to his allegiance. God and man are of the same nature, the Greeks found; to arrive at a true idea of a god we have to form, on the basis of the natural object where he is supposed to dwell, the image of an ideal man or woman. This was a great step, but in this conception of deity the Greeks also laid up for themselves, as we shall see, many difficulties. Early Eastern Influences.--Our positive knowledge of Greek history begins about the middle of the second millennium B.C.; we have information of this period in the ruins of Mycenæ and Tiryns and other places. These remains attest a political condition widely different from that of the patriarchal settlements of the period when the Greeks were emerging from Aryan barbarism; very different also from the free city life which came afterwards. The recent excavations have brought to light the palaces of kings, built, it is evident, according to an Eastern type, and with arrangements for the burial and worship of dead potentates, not unlike those of the pyramids. The art is rude, but shows large forces to have been at the command of those who directed it. We have here, therefore, a state of matters such as that described in the Homeric poems, in which petty kings rule in many of the Greek towns, some of them being personages of great rank and power. The movement in civilisation attested by these remains is admitted to be due to an impulse from the East; but whether this impulse was imparted by the voyages of Phenician discoverers and merchants, or whether it came by land along the trade routes of Asia Minor and across the Egean, is uncertain. It is in any case traceable to North Syria, where in the early part of the second millennium B.C. Babylonian and Egyptian influences met and gave rise to some rude civilisation. Greece was not conquered from the East, but stirred to new life by the communication of Eastern ideas. Greek religion was not much assisted, or indeed much modified in any way, by this movement. The worship of ancestors which went on in the palaces was not contrary to Greek sentiment, perhaps not even much more elaborate than that sentiment required. But this part of religion was not a growing thing in Greece; and the royal practices did not prevent it from dying gradually away in later times. That any god was imported into Greece at this time, is not proved. Where Greeks and Phenicians met, as in some of the islands, a Greek and an Eastern god might be identified; the worship of Aphrodite and that of Astarte were fused in this way in Cyprus, and Aphrodite may thus have acquired some new characteristics even in Greece. This is not certain. Perhaps the most important thing to notice in this connection is that the new type of society at the royal courts may have furnished a model for the arrangement of the heavenly family when that arrangement came to be made. The Eastern influence came to an end in time, and the pressure being removed, the monarchies crumbled away, the court worships were discontinued, and Greece was left free, after this awaking to fuller life, to pursue her own thoughts in her own fashion. Homer was regarded by the Greeks who lived after him as the founder of their religion. Herodotus considers (ii. 53) that Homer and Hesiod lived four hundred years before his time, and that it was they who framed a theogony for the Greeks, gave names to the gods, assigned to them honours and arts, and declared their several forms. These writers accordingly formed a standard of religious belief; we know that their works were the basis of the education of the Greek, and they thus provided an early bond of national unity. The Homeric poems are the outcome, whether we regard them as the work of one singer or of two, or of a whole school, of long processes of growth. The poetic art which makes them the delight of all mankind is not a first experiment, but the ripe result of an elaborate method. The stories and the wisdom they contain are brought together from many quarters by long accumulation. And in the same way the accounts they give of the gods individually and of their relations to each other are not thrown together at haphazard, but are the result of a work of unconscious art which must have been carried on for centuries before it issued in this form. Homer does not by any means repeat all the stories he knows about the gods. He passes over many local myths, especially those of the more repulsive order, which were known for centuries after, and undoubtedly existed in his day; only what is "worthy of a pious bard" does he reproduce. A pious bard, however, had considerable latitude; and the phrase does not represent all that Homer was. He was an entertainer of the public at royal courts, where a feast was incomplete without him (_Odyssey_ viii.); he had to produce his songs at banquets or in the open air at festivals; what he gave had to be entertaining. This could not but influence his choice of materials even when the gods were his theme. He could not deal in what was most terrible about the gods, nor could he enter into speculations or mysteries, nor could he make use of a legend which, though it had point for the locality it belonged to, was not generally interesting. What was powerful and dramatic, what all men could understand, what was curious and piquant, what met the general sentiment, that he would be led to adopt and to work up into a telling form; he naturally sought after broad pictures, amusing conversations, simple and true emotions, curious incidents connected with well-known characters. Religion, it is plain, could not gain in depth and intensity from the treatment of such poets; many of the thoughts men had about the gods could not find expression in their lines. But, on the other hand, we have the fact that the Greeks accepted the Homeric representation of their religion as the standard one; not till it had existed for centuries were voices raised against it. And this is not strange. Homer took away nothing from the religion of any Greek; no local worship was in any way infringed upon by him; and on the other side he gave to the Greek world, whose belief consisted formerly in a multitude of disconnected or even inconsistent legends, a united system of gods, in which there was at that stage rest for the mind, and for the imagination an inexhaustible spring of ideal beauty. The Homeric Gods.--What, then, is the religion of Homer? The gods are a set of beings not very unlike men; they present a curious combination of human frailty with superhuman powers and virtues. To speak first of the physical side of their nature, the gods are far stronger than men, their frame is huger, their eye keener, their voice louder; like the sorcerer of savage times, they can assume other shapes to gain their ends, they can become invisible, or they can travel very swiftly through the air. Yet, on the other hand, they can be wounded when they strive even with men; accidents happen to them, they require to eat and drink. They eat, it is true, ambrosia, and drink nectar, which give immortality; and they have in their veins not human blood but divine ichor. It is the fact of their immortality that makes them different from men; it has happened that a man obtained immortality and became thereby a god. The line between gods and men may be crossed; in former times it was crossed more frequently. The gods entered into relations with mortals; many of the heroes are of divine extraction, and the gods are still interested in the royal houses they thus founded. But such unions do not take place in the poet's time. The world is growing less divine. Homer, however, looks further back than this, and we find in him the belief, found also in India and in Iceland, that an older and more savage race of gods once ruled, whom the present dynasty conquered and dethroned. Of that older set was Kronos, the father of Zeus, and the Titans, who are now cast down to Tartarus, the nethermost region of all. The world known to men was apportioned at the beginning of the present age to the three sons of Kronos, Zeus obtaining the upper world, including heaven, which is at the top of Mount Olympus in Thessaly; Poseidon the sea, and Hades the under-world, above Tartarus, to which men go after death. Zeus rules in Olympus. He presides there over those gods who are at present in power. He summons them to council, he sits at meals with them. They are a very human set of beings. They are moved by ordinary human motives; love and revenge, jealousy and anger, rule in their breasts. They do not act from eternal principles, but as men do, from sudden impulses or from the desire of temporary advantages for themselves or for their favourites. They even indulge in loose amours, and are brought into ridiculous situations. They laugh at each other; the stronger god hurls the weaker out of Olympus to the earth. Taking them together, we do not find the Olympians an impressive set of beings. Taking them, however, one by one, we judge of them quite differently. The individual gods represent lofty ideals and are not unworthy of worship. Whatever they were once, powers of nature, fetishes or men, whatever village legends they have brought with them from their native place, or whatever traits of savage life still cleave to them, to the poet they are the embodiments of various moral excellences. Zeus, father of gods and men, combines in his character the attributes of righteousness and of kindness; he is the founder of social order and the defender of suppliants, he possesses all wisdom. Hera is the matron of fully unfolded beauty and matchless dignity; Apollo is the faithful son who carries out his father's counsel; Athene is the warrior-maiden skilled in battle but equipped with every kind of skill, best counsellor and guide for the mortal whom she favours; Aphrodite is the goddess of love, in whose girdle are contained all charms; Ares is the impetuous warrior, Hermes the trusty messenger, of the heavenly circle; Hephæstus, the lame and awkward smith, is the artificer for the gods of all manner of cunning work in metal. Around and under the Olympians are many other deities; such as Hebe, the budding girl, and Ganymede, the youth born of human race but taken up to heaven for his beauty to minister to the gods at their banquets. Aphrodite is attended by the graces, Apollo by the Muses, and the world is not stripped by Homer of its local deities, although the chief deities now dwell aloft; mountains, rivers, caves and isles of ocean, all have their immortal occupants. Worship in Homer.--The gods being of such a nature, what relations does man keep up with them, and how do they affect his life? Worship follows the simple practice of the early world. It is not priestly. There are priests, and they offer sacrifices regularly at the shrines of which they have charge, but the king can sacrifice, or the head of the house; and while one or two temples are mentioned in the _Iliad_, sacrifice may be offered anywhere. Temples first appear in Greece merely as shelters for images, but in the _Iliad_ the god is generally worshipped not by means of an image but as himself directly present; the need of temples has not yet arisen. In the _Odyssey_ temples of the gods are spoken of as buildings no town could be without, but this is less primitive. Sacrifice is a feast in which the god's portion of the viands is first offered to him, and the worshippers then eat and drink to their hearts' content. There is a detailed description of the proceedings in _Iliad_ i. 456 _sqq._ Here after the feast there is music; "All day long worshipped they the god with music, singing the beautiful pæan to the Fardarter (Apollo); and his heart was glad to hear." "The gods appear manifest amongst us," we read in the seventh book of the _Odyssey_, "whensoever we offer glorious hecatombs, and they feast by our side, sitting at the same board." There is nothing of the nature of an expiation about such a sacrifice; it is simply the renewal of the bond between the god and those who look for his aid, when a new enterprise is about to be undertaken or a solemn engagement is entered on. Prayers are very simple. Thus prays the wounded Diomede to Athene (_Iliad_ v. 115): "Hear me, daughter of ægis-bearing Zeus, unwearied maiden! If ever in kindly mood thou stoodest by my father in the heat of battle, even so be thou kind to me, Athene! Grant me to slay this man, and bring within my spear-cast him that took advantage to shoot me, and boasteth over me!" As there are no bad gods, good and evil are considered to be sent by the same beings. Thus there is a great deal of uncertainty in men's relations to the gods. "All men need the gods," we read; the Homeric hero regards the companionship of a god as proper and necessary for his enterprises. But some trouble must be taken in order to secure their favour. They must not be neglected; their signs must be attended to; above all, a man must be reverent and must studiously practise moderation in his conduct and in his ways of thinking; else the gods may easily be offended or made jealous, and withdraw their countenance. And if they are to a certain extent capricious, there is another consideration which impairs confidence in them. They are not all-powerful. There is a point beyond which they cannot give a man any help. Each man has a fate or destiny, which the gods did not fix and with which they cannot interfere. When his hour comes, they must leave him to his doom; indeed they may even deceive him, and lead him into folly so that his fate shall overtake him. The punishment of crime, both in this world and afterwards, is committed to a special set of beings, the Erinnyes. The gods who are most worshipped do not exercise that function; they are not immovably identified with the moral order of the world, but frequently deviate from it themselves. In the _Odyssey_, it is true, we meet with a deeper feeling. Here Zeus is a kind of providence, in whom a man may trust when he does right, and to all whose dispensations it behoves him humbly to submit. A root of monotheism is present here, as in all the Aryan religions from the first, and in Greece it is destined to have a stately growth. The Homeric pantheon, however, as a whole, shows religion at a stage in which it is rather an external ornament to life than an inner inspiration. Perhaps there was never a set of real men who thought of the gods and addressed them according to the fashion of Homer. If such a religion ever actually existed, it was not a strong one. These gods, with their caprices and infirmities and their limited power, could never exercise any strong moral influence or rouse any passion in their worshippers. They are fair-weather gods; the religion is one of children, in whom conscience is not yet awake and the deeper spiritual needs have not yet appeared. What the mind of the Greek has done up to this stage is to discover that nature is not above him; the powers of nature are human to him; they are divine not because they are essentially different from himself, but because they are matchless ideals of his own qualities. It is a religion of free men. But the Greek has not yet discovered how different he himself is from all that is around him; that element of himself which is above nature will when he discovers it make such a religion as the Homeric for ever impossible to him. Omens.--As the godhead is never far away from the Homeric Greek, and is an active being who takes an interest in human affairs, signs of his presence are not infrequent. The air is the scene of them; in the flight of birds, in sudden noises, the gods send messages; lightning is a sign from Zeus of approaching rain or hail, it may be of approaching war. There are rules for the interpretation of signs, which, however, are in many cases of doubtful significance. Dreams also are a favourite channel for divine communications, but they also may be interpreted wrongly. There are persons who have a special gift for knowing the divine will; the seer ([Greek: mantis]) is enlightened by the deity not by an outward sign but inwardly; he hears the god's voice, and can declare the divine will directly. This gift may reside in a certain family, and may be attached to a certain spot, where a regular oracle is open for consultation. At Dodona we read that the Selloi or Helloi, a band or family of priests of ascetic habits, interpret the rustling of the sacred oak, and Agamemnon consults the Pythia, the Delphic priestess, before the Trojan war. The State after Death.--With regard to the state after death, belief is not uniform in Homer. There are elaborate funeral rites which point to the assumption that the spirit of the hero is living somewhere and needs various things. But the life of the departed was not mapped out in Greece as it was in Egypt. The ritual of Mycenæ had little influence, for the funeral celebrations in Homer are very similar to those of other early Aryan peoples, and undoubtedly were not imported. What then is thought of the present existence of the hero? He has ceased to exist. The body is the man, the spirit when it has left the body has but a shadow-life, without any strength or hope; at the most it may revive a little at the taste of blood. But while the worship of the departed is seen from Homer to be decaying among the Greeks, imagination is seen to be occupied in more than one direction with the regions where they are, and to be asserting for them a more real and active existence than the old beliefs allowed. The subterranean kingdom of Hades (the "Invisible") is acquiring clearer shape. The punishments are described which certain great transgressors, such as Tantalus and Ixion, are there undergoing; and other details are also known. Of a different spirit is the conception of the Elysian plains in the far west, whither the hero is taken by the gods when he dies, and where there is no snow nor storm nor rain. Homer was not the only poet who furnished the Greeks with a system of their gods; nor was his system everywhere accepted without demur. Hesiod, writing in the latter half of the eighth century B.C., gives a "theogony" or birth of the gods, which is also a genesis or origin of the world, for to the Greek mind the gods and the world came into existence together. He complains of those who on this subject have taught fictions which resemble truths, referring perhaps to Homer. His own system of the world is not a light and airy fabric but a laborious work, due no doubt to professional or priestly industry, in which the attempt is made to treat all the divine figures or half-figured spirits the Greeks knew, genealogically, and to give a complete enumeration of them. Myths are given, some of them of a horrible character, which do not occur in Homer. The battle of the gods with the Titans occupies a large part of the poem, and it concludes with a collection of stories showing the descent of heroes from alliances between gods and mortals. This work, as we saw, was considered, along with the Homeric poems, as a standard authority on the subject of the gods, and was appealed to even in the early Christian centuries as showing what the Greeks believed. The Poets and the Working Religion.--The work of these poets proves that the Greeks in their days were anxious to arrive at clear and harmonious conceptions about the gods. The movement on which Homer and Hesiod set their seal, of fixing the characters and attributes of the various deities, must have been long going on; and it led, as we see, to different results in different places. That labour when accomplished endowed Greece with a new religion. The local rite still went on, which acknowledged no central authority and presented the spectacle of an infinite diversity. Each city carried on in grave and solemn fashion the traditional worship of its own gods, on whose favour its prosperity depended. The other gods of the Pantheon the city did not need to worship; and moreover local worship was addressed to a large extent to the Chthonian or earth-gods, as Demeter and Dionysus, of whom the epic poems know but little. The poets were of little assistance therefore to the working religion; but on the other hand the happy and beautiful deities of Homer found entrance wherever poetry was loved. This was a religion for all Greece; these gods were national; though some of them belonged originally to Æolia, they had become national by being enshrined in poetry which the whole nation regarded as its own. The Homeric conception of deity acted therefore on the whole Greek mind; all gods rose in rank by the example, a subject was set before the mind of the people, which the closely succeeding development of religious art shows to have been studied in the noblest way. Rise of Religious Art.--The seventh century B.C. was a period of rapid development and of great prosperity in Greece. It was the age of colonisation; manufacture and trade were active, and though the Phenicians were not now in the Egean, Greeks sailed to the East and brought home with them many ideas. It was a time like the sixteenth century in Europe, when the world of geography was quickly opening out, and views and sentiments were also widening. Worship could not fail to share in the upward movement of such a period, and it is here that we find the appearance of the ideas in religious art which have made Greece the envy of the world. Architecture received a new impulse from Egypt and Babylon; dwellings were built, not for human rulers, as in the Mycenæan period, but for the gods. In country districts or small towns the wooden shed might still suffice to shelter the rude image, but in large towns, where the higher conception of the gods and the artistic impulse were both present in many minds, temples of more durable material were built. This came to be a universal practice; among the first tasks of a new colony was always that of erecting on a commanding site in the rising town, splendid temples to the gods of the mother city. The Greek temple is not a place to accommodate a large body of worshippers, but a dwelling for the god. It is of oblong shape, and is placed on a raised platform which is ascended by steps. It is generally surrounded by pillars, is roofed, and has a low gable at each end. The most important chamber in it is that containing the image of the god. From his dim chamber the god looks out to the east through the doorway facing him, which opens on the pillared portico in front. Here the worshipper stands when praying, his face turned westward to the god. As it was essential that the smoke of the sacrifice should ascend freely to heaven, the god's real dwelling, the altar stood outside. In some cases the roof was partly open, and the altar could stand under the sky in the _cella_ of the god. In the building and adornment of the temples Greek art found its highest exercise. The architecture of those specimens which can still be seen or described is of a dignity and beauty never before attained; the beings must have been lofty and reverend indeed for whom such dwellings were formed. The gable spaces and the flat surfaces between the tops of the pillars and the roof gave opportunity for sculpture; and the archæologist traces on these metopes (spaces between the beam-ends under the roof) and friezes, the progress of Greek sculpture from a rude stage to that in which the sculptor has gained complete mastery over his material, and can give an imposing representation of a myth, or place on the marble a complete religious procession of brave men and fair women. The images of the gods to be placed in the temples called forth the artist's highest skill; even when the rude old god was retained, a fine work of art could also find place. It is the ideal gods of poetry that are coming to be worshipped; the conception of the poet is expressed in marble. Sculpture, however, came to its highest point in Greece somewhat later than architecture. And offerings were made to the temples of just such rare and costly things as men loved then and love still to store up in their houses,--bowls and cups wrought curiously in precious metals, statues and tapestries and all kinds of treasure. Festivals and Games.--The temple for which so much was done, formed the centre of the city where it stood. In it the town deposited its treasure and its documents; there oaths and agreements were ratified. There also at certain times, such as the annual festival of the god or the anniversary of some happy event in the history of the town,--and as time went on such occasions tended to multiply,--the town kept holiday. Women escaped from their monotonous confinement and joined the procession to the holy place, perhaps carrying a new dress for the deity. A sacrifice was offered, the god received his share of the victim or victims, and the worshippers feasted on what remained. But before this part of the proceedings arrived there was a pause, which was filled up with various exercises all connected with the act of worship, but tending also in a high degree to the delight of those taking part in it. Dancing formed a part of every rite, accompanied of course with music, and consisting not of a careless exercise of the limbs, but of a measured and carefully trained set of movements expressive of the emotions connected with the occasion. This part of the religious act is obviously capable of great expansion. We find the art of poetry also making its contributions to religious art; poems are recited bearing on the history of the god. The sacrifice is followed by contests of various kinds; the singers compete for a prize, and athletic sports also take place, the competitors for which have long been in training for them. The winners are crowned with a wreath or branch of the plant sacred to the god. The games of Greece, which thus arose out of acts of worship, and some of which became so famous and attracted competitors from every Greek-speaking land, are a notable sign of the spirit of Greek piety. There is no asceticism in Greek religion; the god is represented as a beautiful human person, and his worshippers appear before him naked, in the fulness of their youthful beauty and of their well-trained vigour, and offer him their strength and skill in highest exercise;--the whole city, or a crowd much larger than the city, rejoicing in the spectacle. Thus does Greek religion enlist in its service all the arts, and increase as they increase. At this period irrational manifestations of piety tend to disappear, human sacrifice and the worship of animals are heard of afterwards only in remote quarters. The religion which now prevails is a bright and happy self-identification with a being conceived as a type of human beauty and excellence, by being as far as possible beautiful oneself, creating beautiful objects, composing beautiful verse, training the body to its highest pitch of strength and agility, and displaying its powers in manly contests. This conception of religion, for a short time realised in Greece, still haunts the mind as a vision which once seen can never be forgotten. No one whose eyes have opened to that vision can regard any religious acts in which the effort after harmony and beauty forms no part, as other than degraded and unworthy. Zeus and Apollo.--It is impossible here to enter specially on the worship of the individual gods. Two of the gods, however, the same who even in Homer stand above the level of the rest, still maintain that superiority. Zeus draws to himself more and more all the attributes of pure deity; his name comes more and more to stand simply for "God," as if there were no other. He is the father of gods and men; goodness and love are natural to him. He is the supreme Ruler and Disposer, whose word is fate and whose ways pious thought feels called to justify; but he is also the Saviour, to whom every one may appeal. He is the source of all wisdom; all revelations come from him. The other god who occupies a marked position is Apollo, the god of light and the prophet of his father Zeus. His oracle at Delphi was the most important in Greece; it was held to be the centre of the earth, and was a meeting-place for Greeks from every quarter. His priests exercised through the oracle a great influence on Greek life, and as their god required strict purity and truthfulness and was the inspirer of every kind of art and of none but noble purposes, the worship of Apollo is one of the highest forms of Greek religion. Change of the Greek Spirit in the Sixth Century B.C.--But the time was at hand when the worship of the gods of the poets was to prove, in spite of all that art had done for it, inadequate to meet the spiritual needs of Greece. Civilisation advances in the sixth century B.C. with immense rapidity; the Greeks, no longer prompted by any foreign influence, quickly learn to exercise their own powers, and to apply them in new directions. Life grows richer and deeper, new modes of sentiment appear, the nation grows more conscious of its unity, and at the same time the individual learns to value himself more highly and to assert himself more strongly. On one side thought awakes to an independent career and traditional beliefs are subjected to criticism; on the other spiritual needs are felt which the old worship does not satisfy, and for which religion has to find new outlets. It is far beyond our scope to deal with the religious movements of a people thus passing into the self-conscious stage, and unfolding with unparalleled freshness and power all the various activities of the human mind. We can only point out a few of the lines of development which become prominent at this period. And firstly we notice the rise of _rationalism_, that is of the impulse to criticise belief and to ask for that element in it which approves itself to the reflecting mind. Reason asserts its right to judge of tradition; the doubter suggests emendations in the legend; the piously inclined turn their attention to those parts only which are capable of lofty treatment. This tendency is fatal to polytheism. As reason knows not gods but only God, the gods can only hold their place on condition that they are what God must be, and so they all tend to become alike in their character; attention is turned most of all to Zeus, the highest god, and when others are worshipped, it is as his prophets or delegates. The poets of the fifth century reflect the conviction which all the higher minds of their country were now coming to hold, that the world is under the rule of one god. From this they are led to take up the questions of theodicy or of the principles of the divine government. Æschylus and Sophocles, writing perhaps about the same time as the author of the Book of Job, are full of problems of this nature. Why is Prometheus, though the noblest benefactor of the human race, doomed to undergo such sufferings? Why does a curse cleave to a certain house, evil producing evil from generation to generation? What is the relation between the divine laws which are written in the hearts of all men, and human laws which sometimes contradict these older ones? Thus to the educated Greeks of the fifth century the old religion had in its essence passed away. With unexampled rapidity had the journey here been traced which India made more slowly, which Egypt made at a very early period, but was not able to maintain, and which every people starting from polytheism must make if their religion is to prosper. New Religious Feeling; the Mysteries.--But the conscience as well as the mind of Greece awakes at this period, and Greek religion becomes inspired with a deeper feeling. The simple objectivity of the Homeric spirit is gone in which man could frankly worship beings like himself and not very far above himself. God at this time is growing greater and more awful, and man, less certain of himself, is beginning to feel a new sense of mystery and of shortcoming. Whether it was due to the anxiety and depression felt in Greece during the century before the Persian wars, or to foreign influences, or mainly to the natural growth of the Greek mind itself, religious phenomena of a new kind now appear. Sacrifices are heard of, which are not merely social reunions with the deity, but are intended to expiate some guilt or to remove some pollution. The sense of sin has arisen, which the Homeric world knows not, and gives a new colour to man's converse with the deity. Another new feature is the rise into prominence of cults in which man feels himself taken possession of and inspired by his god. Some of these belonged to Asia Minor, the great centre of worships accompanied with ecstasy and frenzy, but some were of native growth. In these the common man found a satisfaction which the stately ceremonial of the temples did not afford. The official religion had grown cold and distant; but in the worship of Demeter or Dionysus, as afterwards of the Phrygian Cybele, the "Great Mother" whom the Romans imported, the least educated could feel the joy of enthusiasm and of self-forgetting under the influence of the god, and could be closely identified with the object of worship by performing acts in which the experience of the god was symbolically repeated. The rapid rise of the worships of Demeter and Dionysus thus furnishes an instance of the law that a religion of intellect and of art is apt to be confronted, even when it appears to have overcome all obstacles, by a religion of feeling, in which all the fair progress that was made appears to be entirely set at naught. When the worship of Zeus, Apollo, and Athene was coming to its highest splendour, these cults began to spread rapidly. They were originally peasant rites of unknown antiquity in Attica and Boeotia, in which, after the manner of rustic festivals, the coming of spring or the dying of the year were celebrated amid jest and song, and with certain prescribed actions in which the fortune of the god, corresponding to the season, was dramatically set forth. In spring Demeter, the mother goddess, received her daughter Persephone, who had left her for the winter; or in autumn Dionysus, the god of vegetation, was defeated by his enemies and driven away or torn in pieces. These worships, when developed and forming a prominent part of Greek religion, were called "mysteries," not because the knowledge of them was confined to few, but because some parts of them were transacted in deep silence, and were the objects of such awe and reverence that they were not spoken of. No one, moreover, could assist at these rites without being solemnly initiated after a period of probation and purification. Of the Eleusinian mysteries at least, which were the most widely diffused and which formed part of the state religion of Athens, ancient writers agree in their report that the course of training before admission was powerfully elevating and solemnising, so that the period of initiation was the highest point of the religious life. It was a condition that the candidate should be pure in heart and not conscious of any crime. There was apparently no doctrinal instruction; everything was to be inferred from the spectacle. The mind was kept in a state of intense and devout expectation, knowledge and insight growing, it was held, as the time of admission came near. Before the final act there came a period of fasting, then a march from Athens to Eleusis along the sacred way, which was studded with shrines; then a search for the lost goddess in the dark of a moonless night on the plains of Eleusis, and then at last admission to the brightly-lighted building. Here all the arts were enlisted to furnish a spectacle of unparalleled magnificence, during which the candidate was allowed to touch and kiss certain sacred objects of a simple nature, and repeated a solemn formula at his admission. By partaking in these rites a man was believed to part with his former sins, to form a special union with the deity, in whose nature he was made to partake, and to be started on a career in which he could not fail to grow morally better. It is easy to see the immense superiority of this worship to the official rites of the temples. The great point is that a new principle of religious association is here introduced. The tie which binds the worshipper to his god and to his fellow-worshippers is no longer that of blood or of common political interests, but the higher one of a common spiritual experience. All Greeks were eligible for initiation at Eleusis. A man was not born into this circle, but entered it of his own free will and by means of voluntary effort and self-denial. A community of a higher order thus makes its appearance in Greek history, in which the limits of race and of locality are overstepped, and each is connected with the rest, because all have turned of their own voluntary motion to the same ideal centre. The analogies between the community formed on the mysteries and the Christian Church are too obvious to need to be insisted on. The adversaries of Christianity asserted that in the mysteries all the truths and the whole morality of that religion were to be found. Religion and Philosophy.--But while the mysteries met to some extent the craving for a closer union with deity, another need which had long been growing in the Greek mind was to be satisfied in a very different manner. The Greek religion we have described had very little to offer in the way of doctrine. There are no sacred books in it, there is no theology, there is no religious instruction. When the mind of Greece awoke to intellectual life, and the demand was made for an explanation of the world, and for a view of the origin of things which should explain man to himself, the Greek religion was manifestly little fitted to meet such a demand. But man has everywhere looked to religion to do him this service, and a religion which is incapable of rendering it, or which like Buddhism explicitly refuses to take up the task, stands in a perilous position. If the shrine has no doctrine enabling man to understand the origin and the connection of things, he will seek such a doctrine elsewhere, and religion will have no control over it. Another alternative is that of Buddhism where in default of such a doctrine man is condemned to subside into intellectual apathy. This, however, could never be the case with the Greeks, and their fate in this respect proved different from that of any other people. After their intellectual awakening took place, and when they had begun to seek in every direction for a first principle of all things, never doubting that the world was a system of reason, but trying one key after another to unlock its secret, we find that religion itself became aware of the need of the times, and that the attempt was made, late in the day but with deep earnestness and great ability, to construct out of the myths a reasoned account of the origin of things. This was the aim of the Orphic poets. Orpheus, the mythical singer of Thrace, who charmed men and beasts with his songs on earth, had descended into Hades to fetch back his wife, who had been taken from him, and had beheld the secrets of the under-world. The school which was named after him dealt with the deepest problems, and sought to explain both the nature of the gods and the destiny of the human soul. It insisted strongly on the power and sole headship of Zeus, in whom Greek religion had possessed from Homer downwards a figure fitted for a monotheistic position. "Zeus is the head, Zeus the middle, from Zeus are all things made. He is male and female, he is the foundation of the earth and of the starry heaven, the breath in all, the strength of fire, the root of the sea, sun, and moon. Zeus is the king, the progenitor of all things." The god Dionysus also is placed by the Orphic writers at the head of the whole process of creation. The myth of his dismemberment and of the scattering of his ashes over the whole world is made to symbolise the great thought of the connection of all things with the same source of life. Descriptions were also given, answering to the growing sense of personal responsibility, of the abodes of Hades and of the fate of souls there, and of the metempsychoses through which the soul must pass. This teaching had an influence which it is difficult to measure; it acted on the tragedians in their magnificent attempts to reform the beliefs of their country by making them moral; it is to be traced in Plato, it also found expression in the mysteries. In its own development it gave rise to a new phenomenon in Greek religion, that of itinerant preachers who went about appealing to individuals to take thought for the salvation of their souls, and also, strange to say, offering private charms and spells to put them on the right way of salvation. But Greek religion was not thus to be reformed. It was not from the priests that the growth of the higher faith of Greece was to proceed, but from the philosophers. While much of the teaching of the philosophers was apparently negative and destructive of faith,--for Greece had her religious sceptics who turned the shafts of ridicule on existing beliefs, her Agnostics who considered that nothing certain could be affirmed about the gods, and even her secularists who held religion to be a mere invention of priests and rulers for their own purposes,--the course of Greek philosophy was, on the whole, constructive, even in matters of faith, and laboured to provide religion with a stable foundation in thought. In this great movement of the human mind the thinkers of Greece--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, to name no more--were working at the same problem which occupied the prophets of Israel, and building up the rule of one God, a Being supremely wise and good, source of all beauty, and the worker of all that is wrought in the universe, in place of the many fickle and weak deities who formerly bore sway. In many ways the schools of Greece were the forerunners of Christianity. As the Jews, carried far from their temple, form a new principle of religious association and learn to meet for the service of God, without any sacrifice, in pious mental exercises, so the Greeks, for whom their temples could do so little, form little communities of earnest seekers after truth under some teacher. The philosopher's discourse is held by students of the early Christianity of the West to be the model on which the Christian sermon was formed. Some of the schools even developed a true pastoral activity, exercising an oversight of their members, and seeking to mould their moral life and habits according to the dictates of true wisdom. Thus there arose on Greek soil, after the temples had grown cold, what may truly be called a second Greek religion. It took possession of the Roman world, and was, when Christianity appeared, the prevailing form of religion among the more educated. Both in its outward forms of association, in its doctrine of God, which went through later developments very similar to those of Judaism, and in its concentration of thought on ethical problems and on the moral life of the individual, it powerfully prepared for Christianity. It was not a religion, for it had neither any historical root nor any belief and practice definite enough for the guidance of the common people. Yet Christianity could not have conquered the world without it. BOOKS RECOMMENDED E. Meyer, _Geschichte des Alterthums_, vol. ii., contains the first attempt to deal with Greek religion in the manner now required. The Histories of Greece of Grote, Curtius, Abbott, and Holm. Roscher, _Lexikon der griechischen, a Rômischen Mythologie_. Dyer, _The Gods of Greece_. Gardner and Jevons, _Manual of Greek Antiquities_, 1895. L. R. Farnell, _The Cults of the Greek States_, 1896-1907. Nägelsbach, _die Homerische Theologie_. Williamowitz, _Homerische Untersuchungen_. G. Anrich, _das Antike Mysterienwesen_. Rohde, _Psyche_, 1891. L. Campbell's Gifford Lectures on _Religion in Greek Literature_, 1898. E. Caird, _The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, 1904. Holwerda, in De la Saussaye, Third Edition. Ramsay on "Religion of Greece and Asia Minor" in Hastings' _Bible Dictionary_. S. Reinach, in _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. ii. p. 117, _sqq._ CHAPTER XVII THE RELIGION OF ROME The Romans themselves at a certain period in their history identified their own gods with those of Greece, and borrowed largely both from Greek ritual and Greek mythology, so that they came to the conclusion that the Roman and the Greek religions were essentially the same. To the early Christian writers the religions of Greece and Rome form one system; and the world has retained the impression that there was one old pagan religion which assumed certain local differences in the two countries, but was substantially the same in both. Roman Religion was different from Greek.--Now the fact is that while Greek religion conquered Rome, Italy had an older religion of its own, which was not annihilated by the more brilliant newcomer, but remained beside it and never entered into entire fusion with it. The Romans were not a thinking so much as an organising race; in politics they were far ahead of the rest of the world, but in thought and imagination they were children; and so it happened that they borrowed ideas and usages from neighbours on this side and on that, and organised the whole into a system they could use, the organism being their own, but only little of the contents. We must therefore inquire, in the first place, as to the religion the Romans had before they came under the influence of Greek ideas. Their earliest religion is to be traced in the calendar of their sacred year, in the lists of gods preserved for us in the writings of the fathers, and in numberless usages and institutions descended from early times. The sacred year of early Rome is that of an agricultural community. The festivals have to do with sowing and reaping and storing corn, with vintage, with flocks and herds, with wolves, with spirits of the woods, with boundaries, with fountains, with changes of the sun and of the moon. There are festivals of domestic life, of the household fire, and of the spirits of the storeroom, of the spirits of the departed, and of the household ghosts. There are also festivals connected with warlike matters, some connected with the river and the harbour at its mouth, and some having to do with the arts of a simple population. The calendar, taken by itself, would create the impression that the community using it began with agriculture and added to it afterwards various other activities; there is nothing in it to contradict the supposition that Roman religion had its beginnings in the fields and in the woods. The earliest gods of Rome also agree with this. They are, however, a very peculiar set of gods. Leaving the great gods in the meantime, we notice two of the agricultural deities; there is a Saturnus, god of sowing, and a Terminus, god of boundaries. These are what are called functional deities, such as we met with in Greece, see chapter xvi.; they take their name from the act or province over which they preside. Saturnus means one who has to do with sowing; Terminus is a boundary pure and simple. The god then, in these examples, is not a great being who has come to have these functions placed under him as well as others. He and the particular function belong together; he owes all his deity to it. Now these are only examples; the same is found to be the case with all or nearly all the distinctively Roman gods; they are, broadly speaking, all functional beings. Each bears the name of an object or a process; and on the other hand there is no object and no act which has not its god. It is astounding to observe how far the principle of the division of labour is carried among these beings. Silvanus is the god of the wood, Lympha of the stream, each wood and each stream having its own Silvanus or Lympha. Seia has to do with the corn before it sprouts, Segetia with corn when shot up, Tutilina with corn stored in the granary, Nodotus has for his care the knots in the straw. There is a god Door, a goddess Hinge, a god Threshold. Each act in opening infancy has its god or goddess. The child has Cunina when lying in the cradle, Statina when he stands, Edula when he eats, Locutius when he begins to speak, Adeona when he makes for his mother, Abeona when he leaves her; forty-three such gods of childhood have been counted. Pilumnus, god of the pestle, and Diverra, goddess of the broom, may close our small sample of the limitless crowd. It is usually said about these multitudinous petty deities that the Roman was very religious, and saw in every act and everything for which he had a name, something mysterious and supernatural. The Greek, it is said, sees things on his own level, and adds to them a god who is human; it is by the human spirit that he interprets them. The Roman, on the contrary, sees things as mysteries and fills them with gods who are not human. That is true; but the question to be asked about these Roman gods is, to what stage of religious development do they belong: do they prove a primitive or an advanced stage of religious thought? It has been observed that these names of gods are all epithets, or adjectives; and it has been supposed that there was originally a noun belonging to them, that they were all epithets of one great deity, or, as some are masculine and some feminine, of a great male and a great female deity. The noun fell out of use, it is supposed, but was still present to the mind of the Roman, and thus his regiments of divine names are not really designations of different persons, but titles of the same person, supposed to be present alike in all these numberless manifestations. But it is not easy to conceive how, if primitive Italy had reached the conception of the unity of deity, that deity became so remarkably subdivided, nor how his own proper name and character were lost. It is much more natural to suppose that the petty gods of Rome were all the deities the early Latins had, and were worshipped for their own sake. They represent the stage of thought called Animism (see chapter iii.) when every part of nature is thought to have its spirit, and the number of invisible beings is liable to be multiplied indefinitely. While other Aryan races had passed beyond this stage when we first know them, and advanced to the belief in great gods ruling great provinces of nature, the Latins, whose mind was organising rather than productive, made this advance more slowly, and instead of making it organised the spiritual world of animism with a thoroughness nowhere else equalled.[1] They had, therefore, no gods properly so called, but only a host of spirits. Even the beings they possessed, who afterwards became great gods, were at first no more than functional spirits. Janus, afterwards one of the chief deities of Rome, is originally the "spirit of opening"; an abstraction capable of great multiplication; a Janus could be invoked for each act of that kind. Vesta is the spirit of the hearth; each household had its Vesta, both in early and in later times. Juno is not one but many: as each man had his genius, a spiritual self accompanying or guarding him, so each woman had--not her genius, but her Juno. There were many Vestas, many Junos; and it is only later that the great goddess arises, who may be looked to from every quarter. Others of the great gods of later Rome have a similar early history. Mars was at first the spirit which made the corn grow; Diana was a tree-spirit, Jovis or Diovis himself, though his name connects him with the Greek Zeus and the Sanscrit Dyaus, and though he is afterwards, like these, the god of the sky, was originally in Latin a spirit of wine, and was worshipped, the Jovis of each village or each farm, at the wine-feast in April when the first cask was broached. Thus the gods of the Latins are not beings who have an independent existence and features of their own; they are limited each to the particular object or process from which he derives his character, and have no realm beyond it. And the same is true of the family and house-gods, whose worship formed perhaps the principal part of the working religion of the Roman. The Lares represent the departed ancestors of the family; they dwell near the spot in the house where they were buried, and still preside over the household as they did in life. They are worshipped daily with prayers and offerings of food and drink; the family adore in them not so much the dead individuals, though their masks hang on the wall, as the abstraction of its own family continuity. The Penates or spirits of the store-chamber are worshipped along with the Lares, they represent the continuity of the family fortune. A more general name for the departed is the Manes, the kind ones; they are thought of as living below the earth; it is not individuals who are worshipped at their festivals, but the dead in the abstract, the former upholders of the family or of the people. [Footnote 1: See on this Mr. Jevons's preface to Plutarch's _Romane Questions_ (Nutt, 1892); which deserves to be published in a more accessible form.] The character of Roman worship is determined by the nature of its objects. As each of the gods has his basis in a material object or action, there can be no need of any images of them; where the object or the act is, there is the god, his character is expressed in it and not to be expressed otherwise. Nor could such gods require any temples. And what need of priests for them, when every one who knew their names (a great deal depended on that) could place himself in contact with them as soon as he saw the object or took in hand the action behind which they stood? Nor can many stories be told about gods like these,--the Romans have no mythology. The beings they worship are not persons but abstractions. They have just enough character to be male or female, but they cannot move about or act independently of their natural basis; they cannot marry, nor breed scandal, nor make war. Nor can there be any motive for identifying with such beings a great man who has died; where there are no true gods, there cannot be any demi-gods or heroes. Only a very limited power can possibly be put forth by such beings; all they can do is to give or to withhold prosperity, each in the narrow section of affairs he has to do with. The aim of worship where such a set of beings is concerned, is to get hold of the spirit or god connected with the act one has in view, and so to deal with him as to avert his disfavour, which the Roman always apprehended, and gain his concurrence. The house-gods are beings possessing a stated cult, but outside the house-cult the worshipper has to face the question at each emergency which god he ought to address. He might choose the wrong one, which would make his act of worship vain. If he names the god correctly he will have a hold on him; in a case of uncertainty, therefore, he names a number of gods, in the hope that one of them will be the right one; or he invokes them all. "Whether thou be god or goddess" he will further say, if he is in doubt on that point, "or by whatever name thou desirest to be called." Each god has his proper style and title, and it is vain to approach him without these; lists of the various gods and of their correct styles were therefore drawn up in very early times to serve as guides to the subject. The Latin word "indigito," to point out, from "digitus," a finger, is the term used of addressing a god; the lists of deities with their proper appellations were called "indigitamenta"; and the gods named in them "Dii indigetes." The act of worship is grave and formal; it has to be done with precision and in strict accordance with the rules; silence is commanded; the sacrificer repeats the prayer proper for the occasion after some one who knows it by rote; the worshippers veil their heads. In this the Roman ritual is markedly different from the Greek. Mommsen says the Greek prayed bareheaded, because his prayer was contemplation, looking at and to the gods; and the Roman with head covered, because his prayer was an exercise of thought; and in this he sees a characteristic indication of the difference between the two religions. A more modern interpretation of the Roman practice is that it arose from the fear that the worshipper might see the god whom he has just summoned by name, which would be dangerous. If any mistake is made in worship, the act is vain and has to be done over again. The Great Gods.--The foregoing is the logic of the system on which the Roman religion, as distinguished from the foreign elements afterwards added to it, was based; the religion, however, does not come into view historically till it has begun to rise above such a worship of abstractions or of petty spirits, towards a worship of gods. It was apparently by the growth of larger social organisms that the Latin tribes advanced to the worship of greater gods. While the family religions continued to the end, the tribe had, as in the case of other early peoples, a larger religion than the family, and a union of tribes produced a religion on a still greater scale. The history of early Rome consists of a succession of such fusions of tribes into a larger political whole. When history opens, "Rome is a fully-formed and united city"; but Rome is made up of several tribes, which maintain many separate institutions. The religion of after times bears witness to these successive unions. "Deus Fidius," the god of good faith, is the sacred impersonation of an alliance. Mars and Quirinus are precisely similar to each other, and each has a flamen, or blower of the sacrificial flame, and a staff of twelve salii or dancers. Mars is the Roman, Quirinus the Sabine deity; and we see that the two tribes had, before they were united, very similar worships, which were both kept up after the union. The feriae Latinae, or Latin festival, celebrated on Mons Albanus, is common to the Latin tribes and commemorates their union. Jovis rises into importance with the growth of city life; he comes to be called father Jovis, Jupiter; there are many Jupiters, but the Jupiter of the city of Rome is the greatest and best of all; he bears the title of Optimus Maximus. He rises above Mars, in earlier times the first Roman god, after whom the first month of the year was called, before the month of Janus and the month of Februus, the purifier, were added to it. Janus, the great state-god of opening, was the only one of whom there was a representation; Mars was represented symbolically by a spear, but Janus was figured as a man with two faces. Vesta, the hearth-goddess of the state, was of course a great deity with a very important worship. Here we must mention a side of Roman religion which no doubt has its roots far back in prehistoric darkness, but which could scarcely be organised as we find it till the greater gods had risen to some degree of power. It was believed that the gods were constantly making signs to men, especially in occurrences which take place in the air, such as thunder and lightning, and the flight of birds, but also in many other ways. Some of the signs were simple, so that any one could tell if they were lucky or the reverse, but some were not to be interpreted except by men possessing a special knowledge of the subject. And such men might be asked by an individual or by the state when about to enter on any undertaking, to seek a sign from heaven concerning that business. This became with the Romans a great and important act, and those who had it in their hands exercised great power. Sacred Persons.--The priest in the earliest times was, in the domestic religion, the paterfamilias, in that of the tribe, which was but an extended household, the head of the leading family, and in the city, which was constituted after the same model, the king. Religion was the principal part of the service of the state; the king as such had to offer sacrifice, to cause the gods to be consulted, to prosecute and judge and punish those who had violated the laws and came under the anger of the gods. But as the state grew larger, various offices were set up to relieve the king of part of these duties; when new worships were added to the old ones, the care of them was in some cases committed to a special person or college; and these priesthoods and sacred guilds of early Rome maintained their place in the constitution for many centuries, and carried on this part of the public service long after the words they spoke and the acts they did had become meaningless. Beginning with the sacred persons attached to special cults, we have, first, three flamens, one of Mars, one of Quirinus, and one of Jovis (fl. Martialis, Quirinalis, Dialis). Mars and Quirinus have their dancers, as we mentioned above. Other flamens of lower rank were afterwards instituted for the separate worships of the tribes. Very old are the "fratres arvales," field-brothers, who served the creative goddess (Dea Dia) in the country in the month of May, with a view to a good growing summer, dancing to her and addressing hymns to her which may be read now but cannot be understood, and were unintelligible to the Romans themselves. The Luperci (wolf-men) held a shepherd's festival in the month of February, sacrificing goats and dogs to some rustic deity, and running naked through the streets afterwards, striking those they met with thongs cut from the hides of the victims. The six vestal virgins are well known, who had charge of keeping up the fire of Vesta, the house-fire of the state. They devoted their whole lives to this office, and enjoyed great respect. These priesthoods and corporations, instituted to secure the continuance of special cults, are not of a nature to bring the whole of life under the influence of the priests and so to foster a priestly type of religion. Nor were those other religious offices of a nature to do so, which were not attached to special cults but served the more general purpose of assisting and advising the state in matters connected with religion. First among these comes the office of pontifex, a word which is variously interpreted, either as "bridge-maker,"--that being a very important and solemn proceeding,--or as leader in a religious procession. There were originally five pontifices, and the number was afterwards raised to fifteen. They exercised a great variety of functions, and had a general oversight of all religious matters, both public and domestic. They were experts in ritual and in canon law; they advised the state as to the proper sacrifices to be offered for the public, and, when consulted, would also direct the private individual. Funerals, marriages, and other domestic occurrences into which religious considerations entered, were under their charge; and on the occurrence of portents and omens it was their duty to indicate the steps to be taken in order to find out what the gods wished to signify. They had charge of the calendar, and had to fix what days were proper for carrying on the business of the courts (_dies fasti_), and they were the authorities on the forms of legal process. The chief pontiff is called the "judge and arbiter of things divine and human," and the college had manifestly a very strong position. The same is true of the _augurs_ or experts in signs and omens. Though they did not consult the gods about public undertakings until the magistrate or the general asked them to do so, they had power to stop proceedings of which they disapproved; and this at certain periods of Roman history they very frequently did. In Cicero's treatise on Divination a great deal of interesting matter may be found on this subject. Another sacred college of somewhat later date is that of the men, at first three in number, afterwards fifteen, who acted as expounders of the sacred Sibylline books, which King Tarquin purchased from the old woman or Sibyl, of Cumae. Roman Religion Legal rather than Priestly.--While some of these priestly colleges exercised large powers, these powers were always regarded not as inherent but deputed. The sacred offices were not hereditary but elective; no course of training was necessary to qualify for them; men were chosen for them by the state as for any other public office, and those who became priests did not cease to be citizens but continued to sit in the Senate, and, as it might happen, to hold other offices at the same time. The growth of a priestly caste was thus effectively prevented; religion was precluded from having any free development of its own, and kept in the position of an instrument for the furtherance of ends of state. There is no great religion in which ritual is so much, doctrine and enthusiasm so little. All these priests and colleges exist for no end but to carry out with strict exactitude the ritual usage which is deemed necessary to keep on good terms with the gods. They have no doctrine to teach, no fervour to communicate, they do not even tell any stories. Punctiliousness and anxiety attend all their proceedings. To the Roman, Ihne says, "religion turns out to be the fear lest the gods should punish them for neglect; any unusual occurrence may be a sign that the gods are withdrawing their co-operation from the state, and this must be looked into, and the due expiations used if judged necessary." Ritual must always be carried out with the utmost precision; it is not the goodwill of the worshipper but his exactitude that counts. He may even cheat the gods of their due if he is formally correct in his observance. For example, if the auspices (the signs derived from birds) were unfavourable, they could be repeated till a better result was obtained. What we have described is the religion of Rome in its original form, before it accepted foreign modifications. Its gods are spirits of the woods and fields, of the market, of the foray, of the treaty, of all the aspects, in fact, which life had borne to the tribes of Central Italy, especially to the Latins and the Sabines who combined to form the state of Rome. These gods form no family and have no history, they do not, like the gods of Greece, lay hold of the imagination, nor, like those of Germany, of the affections. They are only dimly known; but they are powerful, and it is necessary to reckon with them; and the only relations which can be kept up with such beings are those of business and of law. It follows that this religion is one of constraint and not of inspiration. In this it agrees with the Roman character, which is much more inclined to order than to freedom, to law than to art. The word religion has here its origin; its primary meaning is restraint or check, since the chief feeling with which the Roman regarded his gods was that of anxiety. Not that the gods were bad; Vediovis, the bad counterpart of Jovis, is a vanishing figure,--but they were ill-known, and might have cause to be angry. Worship, therefore, the practical cultivation of the friendship of the gods, swallows up here the other elements of religion as a whole. Religion does not free the forces of human nature to realise themselves in spontaneous activity, but enchains them to the punctilious service of a nonhuman authority. Everything exciting is kept at a distance, and men are trained in obedience and scrupulousness and self-denial. They produce no beautiful works of art, and have hardly any stories to delight in; but they are reverent and conscientious; private feeling is sacrificed with an austere satisfaction to the public interest, and they accordingly build up a great power. Living in an atmosphere of magic, where unseen dangers lurk on every side, and there is virtue in words and forms correctly used to avert these dangers, the Roman develops to perfection one side of religion. To its inspirations and enthusiasms and hidden consolation he is a stranger; but he knows it better than others as a conservative and regulating force, which checks passion, calls for wary and orderly conduct, and causes the individual to subordinate himself to the community. Changes introduced from without.--The Roman religion had, properly speaking, no development. What it might have become had it been left to unfold itself without interference from without, we can only guess; but it was early brought under the influence of more highly developed religions, and it proved to have so little power of resisting innovations that it speedily parted with much of its own native character. The Romans were not unconscious that their religion was an imperfect one; they never claimed, when they were conquering the world, that their religion was the only true one, or had any mission to prevail over others. They were tolerant from the first of the religions of other peoples. The gods of other peoples they always believed to be real beings, with whom it was well for them also to be on good terms. If everything in the world had its spirit, these gods also were the spirits of their own countries and nations; the very notion of deity which the Romans entertained prevented them from having any exclusive belief in their own gods or from denying the right of the gods of others.[2] When therefore they came in contact with foreign religions, they were not protected by any profound conviction of the truth of their own, and were exposed to the full force of the new ideas. The new religions came to them along with the culture of peoples much further advanced in art and in thought than they were themselves; at each such contact, therefore, they felt the foreigner to be superior to themselves in intellectual matters; and wherever this happens, the less highly gifted race is likely to change in its religion as well as in other things. We have to note the changes which were produced by such external influences. [Footnote 2: Cf. Celsus in Origen, _Contra Celsum_, vii. 68.] In the first place, Rome borrowed from Etruria. Etruscan religion was both more developed and more savage than that of Rome. Human sacrifice was an acknowledged feature of it; divination was carried to absurd lengths, one great branch of it consisting in the prediction of the future from the appearance of the entrails of slaughtered animals. Etruria had a hell with regular torments for the departed; in Rome the belief in a future life was much less definite. On the other hand, Etruria had deities who were something more than abstractions; there was a circle of twelve gods, who held meetings on high, and regulated the affairs of the world. Above them was a power, little defined, to which the gods were subject, a kind of fate. Greek influence, so notably apparent in Etruscan art, is present, too, we see, in Etruscan religion; it is through this somewhat dark passage that Greek religious ideas first came to Rome. Under this influence various innovations took place at Rome. Before the end of the monarchy the Romans had begun to build houses for their gods, after being for 170 years, we are told, without any such arrangement. The Roman "templum" was not originally a building, but a space marked off, according to the rules of augury, for the observation of signs. A part of the sky was also marked off for such "observation" and "contemplation." On such a holy site, on the Capitoline hill, there was founded by the earlier Tarquin the temple of Jupiter which always continued to be the principal site of Roman religion. Its architecture was Tuscan; and it contained not only a cella or holy place for the image of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, but also a cella for Juno and one for Minerva. The latter was both an Etruscan and a Roman deity, the goddess of memory. Art was thus enlisted in the service of the gods; the divine figures acquired a reality and distinctness quite wanting to the earlier divine abstractions; and a new notion of deity was presented to the Roman mind. Other temples followed, to Jupiter under other names than that which he had in the Capitol, and to other deities. That of Faith was a very early one. It was a rule in temple-building that the image in the cella faced the west, so that the worshipper, praying towards it, faced the east. Here also the Roman custom is a departure from the Greek; for in Greek temples it is the rule that the image faces the east, and the worshipper the west. The Roman orientation of sacred buildings has passed into the practice of the Christian Church. From Etruria the Romans also derived a great addition to the rules of divination; but the more childish parts of Etruscan divination were regarded at Rome as superstitious, though private persons might frequently resort to them. Greek Gods in Rome.--While Greek ideas thus came indirectly from the north, the south of the peninsula was becoming more and more Greek, and the gods and temples of Hellas, established first at the sea-ports and colonies, gradually came to Rome. This movement is connected with the Sibylline books which were acquired by the last of the kings. These books were brought to Rome from the Greek town of Cumae; they were written in Greek, and contained oracles which were ascribed to an old Greek prophetess. They were consulted in grave emergencies of state through the officials who had charge of them, and what they generally prescribed was that a god should be sent for from Greece, and his worship set up in Rome. Many foreign worships were thus imported. First came Apollo, disguised under the Latin name of Aperta, "opener," for the books contained many of his oracles; he was received and worshipped as a god of purification, since the state was in need of that process at the time, as well as of prophecy. In the year 496 B.C. came in the same way Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus, identified with the old Latin Ceres, Libera, and Liber; and, a century later, Heracles, identified with the Latin Hercules. In the year 291, on the occurrence of a plague, Asclepios, in Latin Aesculapius, was brought from Epidauros; and when the crisis of the contest with Hannibal was at hand (204 B.C.) Cybele, the great mother of the gods, was fetched from Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of that town generously handed over to the Roman ambassadors the field-stone which was their image of the goddess, and her journey to Rome had the desired effect, in the expulsion of Hannibal from Italy. The Venus of Mount Eryx in Sicily arrived in Rome about the same time; a goddess combining the characters of Aphrodite and Astarte, and quite different from the simple old Roman Venus, who was a goddess of Spring, and presided over gardens. The process of which these are the outward landmarks went on during the whole period of the Republic, and resulted in the substitution of what may be called with Mommsen the Græco-Roman, for the old Roman religion. The change was a very profound one. Not only were some new gods added to the old ones, not only did Greek art come to be employed in Roman temples, not only were new rites introduced, such as the _lectisternium_, in which couches were arranged, each with the image of a god and that of a goddess, and tables spread to regale the recumbent deities. The very notion of deity was changed; the Greek god, represented by an image in human form and moving freely in the upper world, was substituted for the Latin god who was the unseen side of an act or process or quality, from which he had his name, and apart from which he was not. The following is a list of the principal Roman gods and of the Greek ones with whom they were identified:--Jupiter (Zeus), Juno (Hera), Neptunus (Poseidon), Minerva (Athene), Mars (Ares), Venus (Aphrodite), Diana (Artemis), Vulcanus (Hephaestus), Vesta (Hestia), Mercurius (Hermes), Ceres (Demeter). The identifications are by no means accurate; Jupiter and Vesta, as we have seen, are the only two Roman gods who are really identical with Greek gods, the other equations are founded on accidental resemblances, and are more arbitrary than real. The result of them was, however, that the Romans forgot to a large extent their own gods, and got Greek ones instead. With the divine figures they took over the mythology of Greece, and thus the gods came to be well known with all their weaknesses, instead of as before surrounded with mystery and awe. The worship founded on the earlier conception of the deity, and kept up with unwavering regularity, was inapplicable to these new gods, and inevitably lost all its reality. This is not the only cause, but it is one of the chief causes which prepared for the fearful spectacle presented by Roman religion at the end of the Republic, when men of learning and distinction officiated as the heads of a religion in which they had no belief, and which they scoffed at in their writings. Among the worships which came to Rome from the East there were several which are not of Greek, but of Oriental origin. The worship of Cybele belongs to Asia Minor, though it had spread over Greece; that of Dionysus also came to Greece from Asia. The practice of both these cults was accompanied by excitement and self-abandonment on the part of the worshippers; and they formed a great contrast to the staid and formal worship of the Romans, the only admissible passion in which was a calm passion for correctness. The worship of Cybele was carried on by eunuchs, it had noisy processions, and depended on begging for its support. When the Romans brought it to their city, they ordained that Roman citizens should not fill leading offices in it; but it flourished so strongly, among the numerous foreigners in the capital and among the poor, as to show that it met a great want there. The worship of Bacchus had to be suppressed by the state; it was carried on at nocturnal meetings, which even citizens attended, and it led to all kinds of irregularities. As the subject of this chapter is not the religions of Rome, but the Roman religion, we do not here review the numerous foreign worships which were brought to the capital from every part of the Empire, and made Rome, towards the close of the Republic, the residence of the gods of every nation. The Romans as we saw were not led by any convictions of their own to deny the truth of foreign religions; and their policy as rulers also inclined them to tolerate all worships which did not offend against civil order. In the provinces it was the rule not to interfere with local religion; at Rome the authorities recognised not the imported religion itself, of which the state did not feel called to judge, but the association practising it, which received permission to do so. The worship was then protected by the state--it became a _religio licita_. Amid the meeting of all the gods and the clashing of all the creeds which were thus brought about at Rome, the Roman religion itself maintained its place, not as a doctrine which any one believed, for the very priests and augurs laughed at the rites and ceremonies they carried on, but as a ritual which was bound up with the whole past history of Rome, and believed to be necessary for the welfare of the state as well as for the satisfaction of the common people. In the atmosphere of discussion and of far-reaching scepticism which then prevailed it was not to be expected that faith could again find any strong support in the historical religion of Rome. The Emperor Augustus made a serious attempt to reform and revive religion. He selected the domestic worship of the Lares as the most living part of the old system, and ordained that the two Lares should be worshipped along with the genius of the Emperor, and that Rome should be divided into districts, each with its temple of this strange trinity; while in the provinces each district was to support a worship of Rome and of the Emperor in addition to its existing cults. Temples were rebuilt at Rome, new ones were raised, sacred offices were filled which had been vacant, religious games were instituted to carry the Roman mind back to the sacred past. Livy and Virgil treated the past from a religious point of view, showing the sacred mission of the Roman race, and exhibiting the valour and piety of the founders of the state. If the Roman religion could be revived these were the proper means to do it. But the religion of the future was not to be prepared in this way. BOOKS RECOMMENDED The sections on religion in Mommsen's _History of Rome_. Ramsay's _Roman Antiquities_. Wissowa, _Religion und Cultur der Römer_. Holwerda, in De la Saussaye. For the period of the Empire, Boissier's _La Religion Romaine_. See also the work of Cumont, cited at the end of chapter x. CHAPTER XVIII THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA I. _The Vedic Religion_ No contrast could well be greater than that between the German religion and that of India. In the one case we have a people full of vigour, but not yet civilised; in the other a people of high organisation and culture, but deficient in vigour; the former religion is one of action, the latter one of speculation. From the original Aryan faith, to which that of the Teutons most closely approximates, Indian religion is removed by two great steps. First we have as a variety of Aryan faith the Indo-Iranian religion, that of the undivided ancestors of Persians and Indians alike, in the dim period antecedent to the Aryan settlement of India. Of this religion, the common mother of those of Persia and of India, we shall give some sketch after we have made acquaintance with the gods of India, at the beginning of our Persian chapter. Indian religion is a variety of Indo-Iranian, which is a variety of the Aryan type. Neither its genealogy nor its character entitles it to be taken as a typical example of the Aryan religions. In literary chronology it is the earliest of them, inasmuch as its books are the oldest sacred literature of Aryan faith; but in point of development it is not an early but an advanced product. The absorbing interest it offers to the student of our science is due to the fact that it presents in an unbroken sequence a growth of religious thought, which, beginning with simple conceptions and advancing to a great priestly ritual, can be seen to pass into mysticism and asceticism, and thence to the rejection of all gods and rites, and a system of salvation by individual good conduct. Nowhere else can the progress of religion through what we might call its seven ages of life be seen so clearly, nor the logical connection of these ages with each other be recognised so unmistakably. The present chapter deals with the infancy and lusty youth of the religion as seen in Vedism; the later stages of Brahmanism and Buddhism will be spoken of in subsequent chapters. The Rigveda.--The Vedic religion takes its name from the Rigveda, the oldest portion of Indian literature, and the earliest literary document of Aryan religion. Of four vedas or collections of hymns, the Rigveda is the oldest and most interesting. It contains a set of hymns which, with much more of their early religious literature, the Hindus ascribed to direct divine revelation, but which we know to have been written by men who claimed no special inspiration. Most of them date from the time when the Aryans, having made good their entry in India, but without by any means altogether subduing the former inhabitants, were dwelling in the Punjaub. The religion of the hymns is a strongly national one. The Aryans appeal to their gods to help them against the races, afterwards driven to the south and to the sea coasts, who differ from themselves in colour, in physiognomy, in language, in manners, and in religion. Nor are these conquerors by any means an uncultivated people; they had long been using metals; they built houses,--a number together in a village; they lived principally by keeping cattle, but also by tillage, and by hunting. They drank Sura, a kind of brandy, and Soma, a kind of strong ale, of which we shall hear more. They were, as a rule, monogamous, the wife occupying a high position in the household, and assisting her husband in offering the domestic sacrifice. At the head of each state was a king, as among the Greeks of Homer; he was not, however, an absolute monarch; his people met in council and controlled him. The king himself offered sacrifice for his tribe in his own house,--there were no temples,--but he was frequently assisted by a man or several men of special learning in such rites. The hymns of the Rigveda were written for use at sacrifices. The sacrifice consists of food and drink of which the god who is addressed is invited to come and partake, or which are conveyed to the gods seated on their heavenly thrones, by means of fire. Soma, the intoxicating juice of the soma plant, is an invariable feature of the banquets in these hymns; the solid part consists of butter, milk, rice or cakes; but animals were also killed, and the horse-sacrifice was a specially important one. The hymn also is an essential part of the rite; the sacrifice would have no virtue without it. It consists of praise and prayer. The deity is extolled for the exploits he has done, for his strength, for his beauty, for his wisdom or his goodness, he is invoked again and again to partake of what has been provided for him, and in return he is asked to send the worshipper food or cows, guidance or protection, or whatever the latter is in want of. The Vedic Gods.--And who are the gods who receive this worship? They are parts of nature or celestial phenomena, more or less personified. Worship is directed now to one divine being, now to another; each has a story which is dwelt on and a number of functions belonging to him, for the sake of which he is extolled and sought after; each god, that is to say, has his myth. In this set of gods the myths are so clear that we can identify with perfect confidence each of the gods with that part of Nature from which he arose. M. Barth classifies the Vedic gods according to the degree in which they have become detached from their natural basis. There are two which are not so detached at all. Agni, who is one of the chief deities of the Rigveda, is fire, and Soma, the deity to whom all the hymns of the ninth book are addressed, is simply the juice of the soma plant, the liquid part of every sacrifice. Agni is not any particular fire, but fire as a cosmic principle, born in heaven, born also daily at the sacrifice by the rubbing together of two pieces of wood, his parents whom he consumes. He is a priest carrying the offerings of men up to the gods, but he was a priest at the first sacrifice, the primeval heavenly sacrifice, before he had come down to men. He is also the guest and household friend of man, a kindly and familiar being. But he pervades all nature, and all growth and energy are due to him. Soma, also inseparably connected with all sacrifice, who strengthens the gods and makes them immortal, is likewise a universal principle; he too came at first from heaven, and he too is at work all through the world. There are stories of his first production among the gods, and of the first effects of his appearance; he is the nourisher of plants, he gives inspiration to the poet and fervour to prayer. Along with Agni he kindled the sun and the stars. In other gods there is a nearer approach to a human figure, and the physical side is not so obtrusive. Indra is most frequently invoked of all the gods, and may be called the national god of this period. He is described as a chieftain standing in a chariot drawn by two horses. He waged a great battle, but still wages it constantly, against the monsters of heat and drought, Vrittra, the coverer, and Ahi the dragon, for the deliverance of the cows, the heavenly waters, kept by them in captivity. The contest between the god and the demon goes on for ever. Indra is also the giver of good things of every kind, he keeps the heavenly bodies in their places, he is the author and preserver of all life, the inspirer of all noble thoughts and the answerer of pious prayers, the rewarder of all who trust in him, and the forgiver of the penitent. It is good to sacrifice to him and to offer him soma in abundance; for it strengthens him to take up afresh his conflicts and labours as the champion of man. Indra is surrounded by the Maruts, the storm-gods, who are separately invoked in many hymns. They drive through the sky with splendour and with mighty music, and bring rain to the parched earth. Their father is Rudra, also a god of storms, the handsomest of all the gods, and, in spite of his thunderbolts, a helpful and kindly being. Wherever he sees evil done, he hurls his spear to smite the evildoer, but he is also a healer of both physical and moral evils, and the best of all physicians. Of the same order of deities are Vata or Vayu, the wind, and Parjanya, the rain-storm. But the loftiest of all the Vedic gods is Varuna, the great serene luminous heaven. The hymns addressed to him are comparatively few, but among them are those which rise to the highest moral and religious level. In language recalling that of the psalmists and prophets of the Bible, they exalt Varuna as the creator of the world and of heaven and the stars, as the omniscient defender of the good and avenger of all evil, as just and holy, and yet full of compassion, so that the conscience-stricken suppliant is encouraged to turn to him. We here give a few extracts from hymns addressed to some of the gods we have spoken of. The versions are those of the late Dr. John Muir. A metrical version can scarcely represent the hymns with the accuracy the scholar would desire, but, on the other hand, a literal translation, such as that of Professor Max Müller in vol. xxxii. of the Sacred Books of the East, gives a less true idea of the spirit of the pieces, and is less fitted at least for a work like this. TO INDRA Thou, Indra, oft of old hast quaffed With keen delight, our Soma draught. All gods delicious Soma love; But thou, all other gods above. Thy mother knew how well this juice Was fitted for her infant's use, Into a cup she crushed the sap Which thou didst sip upon her lap; Yes, Indra, on thy natal morn, The very hour that thou wast born, Thou didst those jovial tastes display, Which still survive in strength to-day. And once, thou prince of genial souls, Men say thou drained'st thirty bowls. To thee the Soma draughts proceed, As streamlets to the lake they feed, Or rivers to the ocean speed. Our cup is foaming to the brim With Soma pressed to sound of hymn. Come, drink, thy utmost craving slake, Like thirsty stag in forest lake, Or bull that roams in arid waste, And burns the cooling brook to taste. Indulge thy taste, and quaff at will; Drink, drink again, profusely swill! ANOTHER TO INDRA And thou dost view with special grace, The fair complexioned Aryan race, Who own the gods, their laws obey, And pious homage duly pay. Thou giv'st us horses, cattle, gold, As thou didst give our sires of old. Thou sweep'st away the dark-skinned brood, Inhuman, lawless, senseless, rude, Who know not Indra, hate his friends, And spoil the race which he defends. Chase far away, the robbers, chase, Slay those barbarians black and base. And save us, Indra, from the spite Of sprites that haunt us in the night, Our rites disturb by contact vile, Our hallowed offerings defile. Preserve us, friend, dispel our fears, And let us live a hundred years. And when our earthly course we've run, And gained the region of the Sun, Then let us live in ceaseless glee, Sweet Soma quaffing there with thee. TO AGNI Great Agni, though thine essence be but one, Thy forms are three; as fire thou blazest here, As lightning flashest in the atmosphere, In heaven thou flamest as the golden sun. It was in heaven thou hadst thy primal birth, But thence of yore a holy sage benign, Conveyed thee down on human hearths to shine, And thou abid'st a denizen of earth. Sprung from the mystic pair by priestly hands, In wedlock joined, forth flashes Agni bright; But--O ye heaven and earth I tell you right-- The unnatural child devours the parent brands. TO VARUNA The mighty lord on high our deeds, as if at hand, espies; The gods know all men do, though men would fain their acts disguise. Whoever stands, whoever moves, or steals from place to place, Or hides him in his secret cell,--the gods his movements trace. Wherever two together plot, and deem they are alone King Varuna is there, a third, and all their schemes are known. This earth is his, to him belong those vast and boundless skies; Both seas within him rest, and yet in that small pool he lies. Whoever far beyond the sky should think his way to wing, He could not there elude the grasp of Varuna the king. His spies, descending from the skies, glide all this world around, Their thousand eyes all-scanning sweep to earth's remotest bound. Whate'er exists in heaven and earth, whate'er beyond the skies, Before the eyes of Varuna, the king, unfolded lies. The ceaseless winkings all he counts of every mortal's eyes, He wields this universal frame as gamester throws his dice. Those knotted nooses which thou fling'st, O God, the bad to snare, All liars let them overtake, but all the truthful spare. Varuna, the all-embracing sky, is also in many hymns a solar deity. There are also other solar deities; Mitra who is frequently invoked along with Varuna; Surya, Savitri, Vishnu, and Pushan, are all gods of this class. Each of these has some attributes or some story of his own. Surya keeps his eye on men and reports their failings to Varuna and Mitra. Savitri, the quickener, raises all things from sleep in the morning with his long arms of gold, and covers them with sleep in the evening. Vishnu, the active, traverses the universe with three strides. Pushan is a shepherd who loses none of his flock; a guide also, both in the journeys of this world and in the last journey. A number of the principal gods have the common title of Adityas or children of Aditi, immensity, a being too vast and undetermined to be clearly represented. We should also mention Ushas, the dawn, a goddess whom the sun-god is daily chasing; the Asvins or two heavenly charioteers, who daily make the circuit of the heavens; Tvashtri, the smith who made the thunderbolt of Indra; the Ribhus, artificers who were once men and have been admitted to the society of the gods. Yama is the god of the dead, he first traversed the road to the country beyond, and now he rules over it, and comforts with substantial joys the spirits guided there by Agni (this points to cremation which was frequent but not universal) or by Pushan. There the Pitris or fathers sit at the same tables with the gods, and are eternally happy. Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, is a god of another type, a personification of the act of ritual, and his presence in the Vedas, beside the elemental deities, shows how early speculation had begun. To what Stage does this Religion belong?--Our sketch of this system is necessarily brief; we have now to inquire as to the place it occupies in the religious growth of India. It is held, on the one hand, that it is a primitive religious product, that it shows us some of the very first efforts men made to have a religion; while on the other hand it is held that the Vedic hymns and the Vedic system are sacerdotal, and are due to an advanced organisation of worship and to a special set of men who were much in advance of their age. 1. It is Primitive.--Mr. Max Müller[1] says that "the sacred books of India offer the same advantages ... for the study of the origin and growth of religion ... which Sanscrit has offered for the study of the origin and growth of human speech." Dr. Muir[2] claims that the Vedic hymns illustrate the natural workings of the human mind in the period of its infancy. In the Vedas, these writers consider, we are able to watch the process by which the earliest men rose to the belief in gods, and the naïve and simple methods by which man's first intercourse with gods was carried on. The undoubted antiquity of these pieces favours this view; the Rigveda is admitted on all hands to be the earliest part of Indian literature, and many of the hymns were written about 1500 B.C.[3] The pure and simple nature of the Vedic religion may also appear to favour this view. It is a religion singularly free from the lower elements of man's early faith. Savage legends and especially immoral stories of the gods are markedly absent from the hymns; they are also free from the element of magic and fetishism; the gods are great beings, and religion consists in intercourse with these great beings. Now the later religious literature of India, the brahmanas or commentaries on the Rigveda and the other later Vedas, contain a variety of legends and a religion by no means free from magic. It may be maintained therefore that the pure religion of the Aryans afterwards became contaminated by contact with the lower religion of the tribes the Aryans had conquered. It was from the Dravidian and Kolarian aborigines, we are told, that Indian religion took its later corruptions. The Vedic religion has no idols, it has no dark descriptions of hell, the caste system on which later Brahmanism was based is absent from it, it has no demons to be guarded against, and no bad deities. The doctrine of metempsychosis is not found here, except perhaps in germ. The immolation of the widow on the funeral pile of her husband is not sanctioned by the Vedas, and of ancestor-worship only a few traces are found. All these, it may be held, are later corruptions. The Vedic religion is a bright and happy system, and the primitive beliefs of mankind, less changed by the Indians than they were elsewhere, are here to be seen; the hymns show the kind of faith to which a strong and happy race of men naturally came, as their minds began to open to the wonders of the world they lived in, the faith of "primitive shepherds praising their gods as they lead their flocks to the pasture." The Indians had preserved, longer than other peoples, the gift of recognising deity in nature; and the primitive beliefs of mankind survive here in something like their first integrity, while elsewhere they were broken up and confused. [Footnote 1: _Origin of Religion_, p. 135.] [Footnote 2: _Sanscrit Texts_, vol. v. p. 4.] [Footnote 3: According to Mr. Max Müller the Mantra or hymn period is to be placed 1000-800 B.C.; but other scholars place it earlier.] 2. It is Advanced.--On the other hand, it is urged that the society in which the hymns arose was not a primitive one, but one considerably advanced both in arts and institutions. The Rishis (seers), who composed them, belonged to families who cultivated such an art; and the hymns were no artless outpourings of childlike emotion, but were written on an elaborate metrical system for a definite purpose, namely, to form part of great acts of worship. As for the absence from them of savage myths and of immoral stories of the gods, this fact does not prove that such things were not known to the people at the time, but only that the poets did not put them in their hymns. Mr. Lang has collected the savage myths, similar to those of other peoples in various parts of the world, which are found in Indian literature of a later date, and has also shown that the hymns themselves were not quite ignorant of some of them. The Indians knew the myth of the marriage of heaven and earth, with the consequent birth of the gods. They had the story of the deluge. They had the still more primitive story of the raising up of the earth from the bottom of the sea. They had various myths of old conflicts of the gods, and of the production of the earth and all the men in it from the dissection of an immense prototypal human monster. Men were of different castes, they held, because they came from different portions of Purusha's body when it was cut up. Many stories are to be found in Indian literature which when found elsewhere are judged to be products of savage imagination, and the fact that the Rigveda ignores some of them and refines others, simply shows that the authors of that collection were on a higher level than their people in point of cultivation and of piety, as the psalmists and the prophets of Israel were in advance of theirs. We are led, accordingly, towards the conclusion that during the period when the hymns were written those who took charge of the development of worship in India were seeking to draw away attention from the more superstitious and childish elements of religion, and to bring to the front the pure and lofty intercourse man could have with the good gods. Bad gods are not cultivated; if there are foolish stories about the gods, they are not repeated, everything dark and terrible, as well as everything irrational, is removed from the working religion. Ancestor-worship is not encouraged; family rites continued, but the worship was wider than the family, and was not restricted to particular places. The ideas connected with sacrifice are not indeed very lofty. Sacrifice is, in the first place, barter. Gifts are provided for the gods, that they may give in their turn. In the second place it is a social function in which the god and the worshipper both take part. The food, and especially the soma, strengthens the god, and man and god are thereby drawn into close sympathy. But in the third place sacrifice was a piece of magic. The mere accurate performance of the rite had a mystic efficacy. It was believed to help to uphold the order of the world; without it the gods would grow weak, the ordinances of nature would fail, and man would relapse to the state of savagery. The gods themselves first sacrificed; from sacrifice they themselves were born, so that sacrifice is an essential principle of the universe, was so in the beginning, and must always be so. The Vedic leaders of religion, therefore, were not merely champions of enlightenment in religion; they were also ritualists, the rite was to them an end in itself; the proper performance of sacrifice was their principal object. This side of their work had, as we shall see, grave consequences. But the Rigveda did a great work for India in cultivating gods who were moral, and to whom man was drawn by higher than selfish motives. Gods who are just and who watch man's conduct, and do not fail to reward him according to his deeds, must quicken the conscience of those who believe in them, and gods who are able to help the weak and to forgive the penitent must make their people also merciful. In all the aberrations of Indian religion the high moral standard set by the Vedic gods is never lost sight of. Where a plurality of gods is believed in, these gods must stand in some relation to each other; and it is of importance to notice how the gods of the Veda are arranged. We can see here very clearly how unstable a thing polytheism is. The position of the gods is constantly changing with reference to each other. We find Agni addressed as if he were undoubtedly supreme; he dwells in the highest heavens, he generates the gods, he ordains the order of the universe; but then we find Indra spoken of in the same way, and Varuna, and Mitra, and others. Then we find pairs of gods addressed together. Indra and Agni are frequently so treated; so are Varuna and Mitra. There is no supreme god, or rather, each god is supreme in turn; the poet wants a god capable of being exalted in every way, and does so exalt the god he has before him. In this way a Monotheism is reached; the mind recognises a god to whom unlimited adoration can be paid. But it is a monotheism, as M. Barth well puts it, the titular god of which is always changing; and Mr. Max Müller gives to this partial monotheism the name of Kathenotheism; that is, the worship of one god at a time without any denial that other gods exist and are worthy of adoration. Now this form of religion, in which several gods are worshipped, each of whom in turn is regarded as supreme, is not peculiar to India; we have met with it already, we shall meet with it again. But in India a peculiar way was found out of the difficulty. The Indian gods were too little defined, too little personal, too much alike, to maintain their separate personalities with great tenacity; nor did they lend themselves to a monarchical form of pantheon; no one of them was sufficiently marked out from the rest or above the rest, to rule permanently over them. Yet the sense of unity in Indian religion is very strong; from the first the Indian mind is seeking a way to adjust the claims of the various gods, and view them all as one. An early idea which makes in this direction is that of Rita, the order, not specially connected with any one god, which rules both in the physical and the moral world, and with which all beings have to reckon. Philosophy is busy from the first with the Vedic gods; the impulse to good conduct and that to mysticism are equally innate in this religion. We can see, even in the Rigveda, that India is to solve the problem of its many gods not in the way of Monotheism, by making one god rule over the others, but in the way of Pantheism, by making all the gods modes or manifestations of one being. "Agni is all the Gods" we read here. And a religion which arranges its objects of worship in this way will not be a religion of action, but of speculation and of resignation. BOOKS RECOMMENDED _S. B. E._ vol. xxxii. Vedic Hymns. xlvi. Hymns to Agni. Muir's _Sanscrit Texts_. M. Müller's _Hibbert Lectures_. Monier Williams, _Indian Wisdom; Hinduism_ in "Non-Christian Religious Systems" (S.P.C.K.). Kaegi, _The Rigveda, the oldest literature of the Indians_, 1886. Barth, _The Religions of India_, in Trübner's Oriental Series. Herrmann Oldenberg, _Die Religion der Veda_, 1894. Bergaigne, _La Religion Védique_, 3 vols., 1878-83. E. Hardy, _Die Vedisch Brahmanische Periode der Religion des alten Indiens_. Lehmann, in De la Saussaye. Rhys Davids, _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. i. p. 1, _sqq._ CHAPTER XIX INDIA II. _Brahmanism_ The period in which the songs were collected by the Aryans dwelling in the Punjaub was succeeded by a period of wars and troubles, after which the successful race is found to have spread further towards the East, and to have settled on the Ganges and its tributaries. Along with this change of position a great change has also taken place in the spirit of the people, a change which is strikingly seen in their religion. The priesthood has come to occupy the position of a separate class to an extent not formerly the case, and all the phenomena are apparent which are generally found associated with a hierocracy or rule of priests. The early religious writings have been formed into a sacred canon: there is an active production of new works which explain the old ones; the sacrifices grow more elaborate and new virtues are attributed to them; and along with this hardening and formalising of the outward parts of religion there is a religious speculation of great volume and of great freedom of character. The Caste System: The Brahmans.--The key to the whole movement is to be found in the new position of the priesthood, or in the establishment at this period of the system of caste. Though this system is only once mentioned in the Rigveda, and that in a hymn of late date, scholars find traces of it in the arrangement of the hymns, and as it is found in Persia, the Indians probably had it before they entered India. It may even, it is judged, be traceable to the division of ranks among the primitive Aryan families. Teutonic as well as Indian legends are found explaining how mankind were divided from the first into different classes.[1] But the primitive differences of rank must have had a great development before they took shape in the rigid caste system of India. This system appears to be organised with a view expressly to the exaltation of the priesthood, and must have been the result of a struggle between the priests and the warrior or ruling classes. The priests have made themselves indispensable in nearly all religious acts. Their very title shows this. While _Brahman_, as the name of a god, means primarily growth, and later, devotion or prayer, _brahmana_ (neut.) signifies the ritual texts according to which worship is performed, and _brahman_ (mas.) is the name of those who use such texts, and comes to stand for the highest caste of Indian society. Without the brahman there can be no satisfactory worship, because there can be no security that any rite is performed correctly; and a rite which is not performed correctly has no efficacy. Religion, therefore, is in the hands of this caste, whose sacredness is hereditary, and cannot be acquired in any other way than by birth. The members of that caste and they alone are qualified to superintend religious observances, and without them the intercourse between man and the gods cannot be kept up. From his birth the brahman is a being of superior holiness; he is destined for higher ends than other men, and the distinction between him and them must be manifested in all his acts and habits throughout his life. He is the natural lord of all the classes. [Footnote 1: Compare Hans Sachs, _Die Ungleichen Kinder Eva's_.] If the highest caste is strictly defined, so also are the others. The second caste is that of the Kshatriyas, warriors or rulers, the third that of the Vaisyas or farmers. These three have rank, they are the twice-born classes (their second birth answers to confirmation, and takes place when a young man is invested with the sacred thread). The Sudras are the fourth and lowest class; no duty is assigned to them in the law books but that of serving meekly the other castes. It has been thought that the Sudras represent the conquered aborigines, the three classes of rank belonging to the Aryan invaders, but this is open to question. The student of religion has to fix his attention on the Brahmans, who have secured themselves in the position of the leading caste. We speak first of the literary movement in which they were concerned, then of the sacrifices they conducted, and of their gods. We shall then say something of the practical operation of their religion as a rule of life, and lastly we shall come to the speculative work of their period, which is not, however, to be set down to them alone. 1. The Growth of the Sacred Literature.--The Vedas rose in sacredness after the age which produced them passed away. A few centuries after they were written they were not generally intelligible; they needed interpretation, but at the same time the doctrine of their inspiration rose higher and higher. The brahmans had both to interpret the words of the old hymns and to explain how, when used at the sacrifice, they produced the effect ascribed to them. This led to the production of the earliest Indian prose, the brahmanas or ritual treatises. Primarily intended to be directories of worship for the priests, these works were enriched with all sorts of ideas about the sacrifices, their origin, and their effects; points in the ritual are explained in them by mythological stories which we should not otherwise know, and we see from them that many superstitions, to which the Vedas gave no encouragement, yet lived among the people. Each Samhita, or collection of hymns, had its Brahmana, and some of the collections had several. These works, though transcending in dreariness most directories of worship, are yet of great value for the light they throw on the history of Indian manners and ideas, as well as on that of mythology. And as it happened among the Jews in their later period so it happened here;--the sanctity of the text was extended to the commentary, the brahmana also was held to be god-given and inspired, and by some was even more highly esteemed than the hymns themselves. A third class of inspired writings consists of the Upanishads, or speculative treatises, of which we shall speak later. The "Veda" in the larger sense is made up of these three bodies of compositions, mantras, brahmanas, and upanishads. These three belong to revelation or "S'ruti," _i.e._ hearing; what is contained in these is to be regarded as having been heard by inspired men from a higher source. The counterpart of S'ruti is "smriti," _i.e._ recollection, tradition. This embraces the Sutras or works dealing with ceremonial in the way of short rules gathered from the older literature, with the exposition of the Vedas, with domestic rites and conventional usages. The law books, the epics, and the Puranas, or ancient legendary histories, also belong to this class. The doctrine of the Vedas, of their sacredness and of their virtues, played a great part in Indian thought. They were revered not as a written word, for they were not written but handed down by memory,--the Brahman still knows his sacred literature by heart,--but as hymns possessing supernatural powers and of far higher than human origin. They were raised to the rank of a divinity, they were said to have had to do with the creation of the world, or to have been among the first created beings. The value of the study of them was not to be exaggerated; he who engages in it, we hear, offers a complete sacrifice, obtains for himself the world which does not pass away, and becomes united with Brahma. The class of men who had installed themselves as the authorised interpreters of the hymns, had evidently taken up a very strong position. 2. Sacrifice.--Indian ritual is an immense subject. In the Vedic period there were several orders of sacrifice--the hymns of the Rigveda have to do with the Soma-sacrifice alone--and several kinds of priests, and it stands to reason that an elaborate ritual derived from a distant age and cherished by a priestly caste which was growing in power, could not quickly change. In spite of the considerable amount of materials accessible in the Brahmanas and Sutras, a history of Indian sacrifice as a whole has still to be written. It is characteristic of early Indian sacrifice that it is not confined to a temple or to any sacred spot, and that it does not require any image of the deity. Instructions are always given for choosing and preparing a place for the rite, and for erecting an altar; a place had to be prepared on each occasion. The gods were asked to come, or were thought to be seated in heaven looking on; the sacrifice is in the open air. While the celebration proceeded according to a certain ritual, it lay with the worshippers to fix to what god or gods the sacrifice should be addressed. There was not one ritual for Agni and another for Indra, but the same would serve for either or for both. The sacrifices of which we hear in the Brahmanas are domestic rites; they are offered by the heads of the household, who invite ancestors also to be present. A Brahman is present to direct those who sacrifice and the inferior priests who assist them, and the benefits of the act extend to all the dependants of the household. The time was determined by natural seasons or by household events. Some sacrifices were greater than others, the more elaborate ones requiring several days, months, or even years for their celebration. Among the kinds of offerings which might be made we find that of man enumerated; human sacrifice, however, if it had prevailed in earlier times, had now grown obsolete. The rise of the Brahmans into a caste changed the character of the sacrifice by making its due celebration depend more on special knowledge, and by increasing its elaborate mystery. Once the hymn was recognised as an essential element of such an act, the person who could interpret the hymn and explain its effects acquired great importance. And when the explanation of all the various features of the sacrifice was once begun, a wide door was opened to minute ingenuity. It is astonishing to what trifles these priestly directories descend, what explanations are brought from every part of earth and heaven of the most trivial circumstances, and what sacredness is found in the very blades of grass around the altar. Now the effect of such a treatment of ritual is inevitably that the rite itself, the outward mechanical performance, comes to be regarded as important, and that the ethical and religious end which was originally aimed at, is lost sight of. The priest and those he acts for are so intent on the minutiæ of their celebration that they forget about the god it is intended for. And as they are quite convinced that the sacrifice, if offered with perfect correctness and with nothing left out, must produce its effect, the sacrifice itself comes to appear as the agent of the desired blessing; the god grows less but the sacrifice grows more. This process, which may be observed wherever ritualism exists, was carried in the period of Brahmanism to its utmost length. In this period the old gods lost the strong hold they had before over the people's mind; men ceased to look for their gods to the sky or to the tempest, and began to look instead to the long ceremonies of the priest or to the hymn he chanted at the altar, or to the austerities he practised. Gods of a new type now make their appearance. As in the Vedic period we saw that Brahmanaspati, lord of prayer, had a place beside Indra and Varuna, so now we see that the supreme deity is named Brahma. The prayer connected with the sacrifice has given its name to the ruler of the universe. Other names for the supreme are also found to be making their way to general use, as the old historical and mythological gods fall into the background, and an abstract divine unity is sought after. Prajapati, lord of creatures, who is little heard of in the hymns, is frequently invoked as the head of all the gods, and a triad of gods is heard of, consisting of Agni, Vayu, Surya, fire, the air, the sun, and summing up the divine energies. The attributes of the gods are personified, and a set of pale abstractions is thus added to the Pantheon; and spirits and goblins not heard of in the hymns, though not therefore necessarily unknown in the former period, make their appearance. These are, perhaps, the gods of the aborigines, who thus revenge themselves, as the religion of the invaders which at first suppressed them loses its earlier vigour. The strong gods retire and weak gods, many and shadowy, and bad as well as good, are worshipped. The Asuras were formerly the gods generally, now they are evil beings with whom the good gods have to contend. 3. Practical Life.--We possess very complete pictures of Indian life and manners in the period of Brahmanism. Of the codes of ancient sages by which Hindu society was supposed to be governed many are extant to us; and in Mr. Max Müller's _Sacred Books of the East_ the English reader may make himself acquainted with several of these. The most famous and the longest, is the laws of Manu, a mythical progenitor of mankind. In the form in which we have it this work dates probably from the second century A.D., but the body of the work is much older. Originally a local collection of rules, it extended its authority gradually over the entire Hindu population of India. With other collections, also of local origin, it represents to us the condition of Indian society after the caste system became fixed; but much of the law thus handed down to us must have had its origin in prehistoric times. The law of Manu hinges on the superiority of the Brahman over the other castes. The Brahmans form the centre of the state and really control everything; but their life, in turn, is framed in strict rules, and their whole history and actions are laid down for them to the last detail from the moment of their birth. The life of the Brahman is divided into four periods. For a quarter of his life he is a student living with a teacher and learning from him the sacred knowledge of the Vedas. Every act of study begins with the so-called Savitri-verse, "Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine Vivifier. May he enlighten our understandings." This prayer, with the mystic syllable, Om (thought to have to do with the three gods of a triad, but probably the original meaning is Yes, an abstract all-embracing yes, in which nothing but pure being is affirmed), is repeated at every return to study, and also with great frequency at other times. The teacher is more to the student than his father, and is to be treated with the greatest deference and courtesy; these years are a training in gentle and seemly conduct as well as in law. His student days completed, the Brahman offers his first sacrifice, marries, and becomes a householder. Little is said of earning a living; the Brahman is not to be worldly, but he is to be independent if he can. He is, however, allowed to beg if in want. But more stress is laid on the continued pursuit of knowledge, and on the domestic sacrifices to gods and manes which are to be his daily care. After he has brought up a son to take charge of his house and goods, the third stage of his life is reached; he may retire from the world and become a recluse, giving himself to contemplation and austerities. The fourth stage is that of the ascetic, _bhikku_ or _sannyasin_, the aged man who having given up all possessions, all human society, and the practice of all rites, and subsisting only on alms, seeks to purge his heart of all desire and to become united by deep meditation with the supreme soul, thus attaining union with Brahma and final liberation. In this section of the laws of Manu an ideal of moral perfection is set forth, which is not demanded at the earlier stages of life. "_Let him not desire to die; let him not desire to live; let him wait for his time as a servant for the payment of his wages._ "_Let him patiently bear hard words, let him not insult any one, nor become any one's enemy for the sake of this perishable body. Against an angry man let him not in return show anger; let him bless when he is cursed._" He is to be sedulously careful not to injure any living creature, he is to meditate on the supreme soul which is present in all organisms, both the highest and the lowest. He is to give up all attachments, and in this way, as his body decays, he enters even here into a state of perfect freedom and repose and union with the great spirit. Such ideas prove that the mind of Brahmanism was not occupied with sacrifices alone. Manu speaks of the superintendence of sacrifices as only one of several careers which the Brahman might choose; and if he might with equal right devote himself to study or to self-discipline, we see that another side of religion than that directing itself to external gods or occupying itself with outward acts, was pressing itself forward. The inner world of the mind is growing larger as the outward gods grow shadowy; it is being found that salvation may be reached by inwards efforts as well as by outward rites, that the search for wisdom and the work of self-conquest, and a union with the deity which is quite apart from any offering or from any form of worship, also lead to salvation. It is objected to the ethics of Manu that the ideal they set up is not an active but a suffering one; the ascetic is placed on a higher platform than the householder, men are encouraged to withdraw from the performance of their duties in the family and in society, and to devote themselves to an aim which, however lofty, is personal and, so far, selfish. It is certainly a weakness in the religion that it has no higher aim than this to set before its most eager minds. Apart from this, life is regulated in a way we cannot but admire. Amid the mass of trivialities and formalities in which every action is involved there breathes a grave humane and gentle spirit, and a sound practical morality, and the ordinary household of the Brahman may have been a scene of activity and cheerfulness. The Sudra, however, is spoken of everywhere as a being whose degradation can never be removed, and to touch whom is to be defiled. Those who belonged to no caste were in a still worse plight and lived in the greatest misery. 4. Philosophy.--We have seen how both in the ritual system they administered and in the ideal they formed of the highest good, the Brahmans were led forward from the old ground of the Vedic nature-worship to a more inward and subjective religious attitude. The exaltation of Brahma, the power of prayer, to be the supreme god, was an advance from an external deity to a deity both external and present in man's own experience; and the appearance of a new way of salvation, though only permitted at first to the world-weary ascetic, in which inner contemplation and absorption could lead to the highest consummation of life, also showed that a new form of religion was at hand. In the philosophy of the Brahmanic period, the transition is made from the service of gods external to man, by the mechanism of rites, to the acknowledgment of a divine being with whom man feels himself to be inwardly akin and to whom he draws near by his own spiritual effort. In this movement, to which we learn that members of the lay aristocracy and even women of intellectual distinction made important contributions, and which may have appeared in its beginnings as a sceptical revolt against their own system, the Brahmans yet took part, and the works in which the record of it is contained became a part of revelation. The "Upanishads" or "communicated doctrines," form the third branch of the sacred knowledge, and much of this literature belongs to the period before Buddhism. These books are read still by the educated Hindu as part of scripture, and the philosophy of them is a part of his religion. We can only point out the principal terms and notions of that philosophy. Seeking to escape from the confusion of many gods the Indian mind is looking out even from the Vedic period for some means to conceive of them all as one. In the earliest period each reigned in turn as the supreme; a god is supreme not because he is essentially the greatest of the gods, but because circumstances have brought him to the front. This is Henotheism. Then we have attempts to sum them all up in one expression. Prajapati, lord of creatures, Visvakarman, maker of all things, represent such attempts. Then we have as the supreme, Brahma, the power of prayer,[2] a being of a different character from all his predecessors. Brahma is an intellectual deity. He is a thinker, a knower, he is the "Mahan Atma" or great spirit, which sits in unbroken calm above the change and distraction of the universe. In rendering Mahan Atma by great spirit, however, we are anticipating. Atma, originally breath or life, comes, afterwards, to mean the person, the self when all that is accidental is removed from it, the essential, innermost self. Now Brahma is the great self, the inmost essence of all things, which was before them, and is unaffected by their changes. But man also has an atma, a self; it may be very small and lodge in a part of the body where it cannot be detected, but it is there, and the small atma is the same as the great one. By what physiological doctrines this is upheld, cannot here be traced; but the notion of the atma, the great form of which in Brahma is identical with its small form in man, lies at the basis of Brahmanic thought. [Footnote 2: On the etymology of Brahma see Mr. Max Müller's _Hibbert Lectures_, p. 366.] In Brahma one god has been reached, but he has been reached by thinking away from him everything concrete. All predicates are unsuitable to him, as any predicate implies a limitation; he can only be described in negatives, or in questionable metaphors. He is meant to satisfy the religious craving for a being quite free from any imperfection and entirely supreme--and it is the penalty of this that he has no clear outline or character. And how indeed is he to be related to the world? This world of change and decay, of disappointment and sorrow, what has the perfect being to do with that? Did he make it, and is he responsible for it? The answer to this in Hindu thought is that the world is due to Maya, illusion. It was due to an aberration in Brahma, which is represented in various ways, that the transition was made from the one to the many, and this error has been productive of all that has been suffered on the earth. Or else it is held that it was not Brahma who became subject to illusion, but that the illusion resides in man's views and thoughts about the world; and if a man could free himself from the meshes of Maya by recognising that the world is an illusion, and that nothing exists but Brahma only, then he would have done something for his own emancipation, the Brahma in him would be free from illusion, and he would also have done something, though little, for the salvation of the world from its great error. That the whole world-process is nothing but an illusion, a confused and troubled dream passing over the mind of Brahma, who himself alone is real, this is the cardinal doctrine of Brahmanism, from which Buddhism also, as we shall see, sets out. The world is really nothing but an apparent world; and the true wisdom, the only salvation consists in knowing this, and in living a life in accordance with that knowledge. The wise man should regard a world which he knows to be illusion, with complete indifference; it can do nothing to him, he can do nothing for it; it affects him only with an ineradicable regret that it exists at all, and with a longing for its disappearance. The practical outcome of the state of matters which he recognises is firstly negative, that he must not allow the world to influence him at all, and, secondly, positive, that he must strive to be united with Brahma. The negative task is performed by withdrawing the mind from all particular things, and letting it be filled with the general, the absolute alone; and similarly by forbidding the desires to fasten on any worldly objects, by extinguishing desire and ceasing to be affected in any way by worldly things. The positive task is performed by means of a mental process which we cannot here describe, but by which the mind returns to the self that is within and realises it as it is, cleared from all particular thoughts and affections. These exercises cannot be called moral; where all is illusion morality disappears. There is no good, no evil, no effort to promote the good and lessen the evil. It is not because the world is bad that it is condemned, but because it exists. The energy which in other faiths is devoted to a moral struggle, is here poured into the ascetic discipline by which the individual looks to escape altogether from the world as it is. There are no good works, what is good is to abstain from all works; there is no benevolence further than that the mind must be kept clear of all that confuses or degrades; the salvation of the individual alone is sought after; there is no desire to spread the light and save others, since few are capable of that knowledge of the illusive nature of all things by which alone salvation is possible. This, it is plain, could never be a popular religion. Brahma, the abstract one, does not appeal to the imagination; he could not drive out the popular nature-gods with their definite myths and attributes. Nor could a religion spread among the people, which regarded the social and the domestic state as inferior, and could only be practised by one who had left his home and family. The hermits and ascetics and begging monks may form the religious aristocracy; but a teaching of a different nature was necessary for the people. And we find, in fact, two religions prevailing in India in the period of Brahmanism; that which we have described for the enlightened, who escapes in it from all law, all creed, all ritual, whose whole religion more than any other which ever flourished in the world is within the mind;[3] and on the other hand, a religion in which outward gods are worshipped, an outward law enforced which is counted sacred because a god or gods inspired it, and in which superstitions gathered from all quarters find shelter. The higher religion by no means killed the lower one, as we see in India to this day. On the contrary, the withdrawal of the higher religion of the country to a region whither the people could not follow, left the religion of the people to sink into a degradation unknown before. One doctrine must here be noticed. The belief in transmigration which Buddhism received from the religion it found existing in India, does not belong to the higher thought of Brahmanism described in this section; the atman or self, which is identical with the supreme self, belongs to quite a different order of thought from the soul which was formerly in some one else, is now in me, and may yet come to be in many another being. The doctrine is thought to have been an importation into India about the time we are speaking of. It admits of being made a powerful deterrent from vice and incentive to virtue. If my present sufferings are due not to my acts, but to the acts of the person in whom my soul dwelt before, it is possible for me so to act that my soul's future existence may be better and not worse than this one, and that it shall not sink but rise in the order of beings, and draw nearer to its final deliverance. Of this we shall hear more in connection with Buddhism. [Footnote 3: "From the standpoint of unity with Brahma, the gods are no-gods, the Vedas no-Vedas."] The further development of Indian religion, apart from Buddhism, is in two directions. There is a philosophical movement, in which the Brahmanic ideas on God, the world, the soul and its changes, are further worked out, and which leads to the six schools of Hindu philosophy. On the other hand, the gods have their history. Brahma remains the great god, but as his character is so undefined he is little worshipped. Indra, the old national god, yields to Vishnu, the old sun-god of the three steps (heaven, the air, the earth), who becomes the favourite deity. The stern and destructive S'iva is a new figure, and seems to be partly an adaptation of a god of the savage aborigines: his worship is the most fanatical. These three, the Creator, the Upholder, and the Destroyer, form the Trimurti, or divine trinity of India,--a trinity arrived at not by unfolding the riches of the one great god, but by compounding the claims of three gods who were rivals. The doctrine of incarnation is also found here. Vishnu has ten avatars or incarnations in human form; he comes down to the earth when there is a special reason for his interference. In these avatars, especially in Krishna, the dark god, whose exploits as a hero are told in the great epic the Mahabharata, the need is to some extent met, of which both Buddhism and Christianity lay hold, of a divine figure who is not too far away from man, and who can be regarded with personal affection. BOOKS RECOMMENDED Most of the books mentioned at the end of last chapter deal also with Brahmanism. Of the Brahmanic literature given in the Sacred Books of the East, the following may be mentioned:-- Vols. i. and xv. Upanishads. Vols. ii. and xiv. Sacred Laws of the Aryas. Vol. vii. The Institutes of Vishnu. Vols. xii., xxvi., and xli. The Satapatha-Brahmana (Sacrificial Rituals). Vol. xxv. Manu. Vols. xxix., and xxx. Grihya-Sutras (Domestic Ceremonies). Vol. xxxiv. Vedic Hymns. xlvi. Hymns to Agni. Vols. xlii.-xliv. Hymns of the Atharva-Veda. Vols. xxxiv., xxxviii., xlviii. Vedanta Sutras. Muir's _Sanscrit Texts_. Weber, _Indische Skizzen_. Haug, _Aitareya Brahmana_. CHAPTER XX INDIA III. _Buddhism_ In Buddhism the great movement of Indian religion works itself out to its ultimate conclusion and reaches a stage beyond which there can be no advance. Here we have a religion, if such it may be called, without a god, without prayer, without priesthood or worship; a religion which owes its great success, not to its theology, nor to its ritual, since it has neither, but to its moral sentiment and to its external organisation. Originating in the centre of India, and giving practical form to Indian ideas, it spread rapidly and widely both in the country of its birth and in neighbouring lands. It is now extinct in India, yet it numbers more adherents than any other religion. It has been divided since the Christian era into two great branches. Southern Buddhism is the religion of Ceylon, of Burmah, and of Siam; while Northern Buddhism extends over Tibet, China, and Japan, and the islands of Java and Sumatra. The Literature.--These two branches of Buddhism have different literary traditions, though some works are common to both; and these literatures, differing from each other in language, also differ widely in contents and in spirit. The southern tradition, composed in Pali, the literary language of Ceylon, has recently been opened up to scholars, and has greatly changed their views of the origin and the true nature of this religion. The Canon of Southern Buddhism, which we might call the Pali Bible, is a literature about twice as large as the Bible of Europe, although if the repetitions in it were removed, it would be somewhat smaller than the Bible. It consists of three Pitakas, baskets or collections. The first is the Vinaya Pitaka, dealing with discipline, but including the Mahavagga, a history of the first beginnings of the order as the founder gathered it around him. The second is the Sutta Pitaka or collection of teachings. It contains the earliest account of the later life of the founder, books of meditation and devotion, collections of sayings by the Master, poems, fairy tales, and fables, stories about Buddhist saints, and so on. The third collection, the Abidhamma, contains speculations and discussions on various subjects. Much of these materials is not peculiar to Buddhism, there is much pre-Buddhistic speculation, and there are many stories which are not peculiar even to India. Along with all this, however, the books give us the earliest accounts of the life and of the death of the founder, and contain a representation written a century after his death, of what he was considered to have taught. The founder himself wrote nothing; but the work of composing books about him and his doctrine began early, and much of the canon is considered, especially by English scholars, to have been in existence during the first Buddhist century.[1] For many centuries they were preserved by memory alone. [Footnote 1: The Buddhist literature given in the _Sacred Books of the East_ is as follows: Vol. x. The Dhammapada, containing the quintessence of Buddhist morality, and the Sutta-nipata, giving teachings of Buddha on religion. Vol. xi. Buddhist Suttas. Religious, moral, and philosophical discourses. Vol. xlix. Buddhist Mahayana Sutras. Vol. xiii. Vinaya Texts. The Patimokha or order of discipline, and the beginning of the Mahavagga, containing an account of the opening of the ministry of the founder. Vol. xvii. Vinaya Texts ii. Mahavagga continued. Kullavagga or discipline as established by the Master. Vol. xx. Kullavagga continued. Vols. xxii., xlv. contain Suttas of the religion of the Jainas. Vols. xxxv., xxxvi. Questions of King Milinda.] Was there a Personal Founder?--Senart in his _Essai sur la légende du Buddha_, and Kern in his _Het Buddhisme in Indie_, both hold that we have here to do with a sun-myth, and interpret the various features of the legend in a very ingenious way in accordance with that theory. This view has made few converts. Many incidents in the story are natural, and appear to be due to a real tradition; there is literary evidence of the early existence of the books, and the religion can be best understood if regarded as the work of a real personality of commanding greatness.[2] [Footnote 2: Recent archæological discoveries, of which an account is given by Mr. Rhys Davids in the _Century Magazine_, April 1902, place it beyond doubt that the Buddha really existed, and that pious offices were paid to his ashes after his cremation by the members of his own clan as well as by others. Inscriptions brought to light in 1898 show that the Sakhya clan, of which he was a member, dwelt at the time of his death in what is now a frontier district of Nepal. Three years before that event they were driven from their old capital Kapilavastu; but they formed a new one fifteen miles further south, just beyond the present frontier of Nepal, and there they erected a _stupa_ or massive stone cairn, to guard the portion of the ashes of the Buddha which was committed to their keeping.] Scholars, however, are agreed as to the difficulty of drawing the line between what is history and what is legend. Even in the early Pali accounts the hero has become a religious figure, he wears titles which lift him above mankind, and he has supernatural powers at his command. A laborious critical process must be undertaken, comparing the various narratives with each other and testing them in other ways, before the real history can be regarded as made out beyond question. The slight sketch of the story which we give does not aim at such critical correctness; we merely indicate the outline of a narrative which is one of the principal sources of the strength of the religion. The Story of the Founder.--The founder's family name was Gautama, and by that name he was commonly known during his lifetime. The personal name given him as a child was Siddartha. Those who wished after his death to speak of him with reverence called him Sakya-Muni, the Sage of the Sakyas. These were a tribe who dwelt, at the period of the story, _i.e._ half a millennium before Christ, in the country to the north of the sacred Ganges, a few days' journey from the city of Benares. Gautama's father, Suddhodana, was rajah (chief) of the Sakyas; his residence was Kapilavastu, near Oude. The future sage thus belonged to the Kshatriya class, and was accustomed to a position of rank and ease. We hear little of his youth; he had been married ten years, and his wife, whom he loved, had just brought him a son, when, at the age of twenty-nine, he suddenly and secretly left his home to devote himself to the religious life. He was led to this step by witnessing various painful sights which caused him vividly to realise the suffering which accompanies all existence, and made him scorn a life of luxury. It was a time when many were seeking a better way, and when a superior mind naturally turned to that retirement and absorption in which it was believed that the key to life's pains and mysteries was to be found. In the "Great Renunciation," as this act is called, there is nothing we cannot understand. This lofty act, however, was followed by a temptation; Mara, the spirit of evil, urged him, but urged him in vain, to give up the purpose he had formed. He then attached himself to Brahmanic ascetics, from whom he learned their philosophy; and after this he devoted himself for six years to a life of fasting and penance, the Brahmanic method for drawing nearer the goal of the religious life. After this period he gave up his fasting, not having profited by it as he had expected, and returned to an ordinary diet. This change cost him the adhesion of five disciples who had become attached to him, and had been filled with wonder at his mortifications. But the loss was a small one compared with the gain which was at hand. After a second great spiritual struggle and a renewal of the temptation, he at last reached that which he had long been seeking. Seated under a _ficus religiosa_, the tree afterwards called the tree of knowledge, or the Bo-tree, he rose in contemplation above all his temptations and doubts till he beheld at length the true nature of things. From this moment he was Buddha, Enlightened; he had the key of truth, and for himself he was assured that sorrow and evil had lost all hold on him. His doctrine had dawned in his mind. He had discovered the cause of the sorrow which is so closely intertwined in man's life, and had divined the way in which sorrow might be overcome. The method had been found by which one could escape from the unending succession of new lives, all painful, to which, according to the general belief of the time, men were condemned. The words placed in the mouth of the founder when he attained to Buddhahood tell their own tale. "Looking for the Maker of this tabernacle, I have to run through a course of many births so long as I do not find him; and painful is birth again and again. But now, Maker of the tabernacle, thou hast been seen; thou shalt not make up this tabernacle again. All thy rafters are broken; thy ridge-pole is sundered; the mind, approaching the eternal, has attained to the extinction of all desires."[3] [Footnote 3: Dhammapada, _S. B. E._ x. 42.] The great discovery being made, and duly pondered and realised, the question arose, What was to be done with it? The Buddha shrinks from the work of preaching it to others. Brahma himself is brought into the story to encourage him to make his secret known to others, and to assure him that many will receive it with great joy. The Blessed One consents, and thus replies: "Wide open is the gate of the Immortal to all who have ears to hear; let them send forth faith to meet it. The teaching is sweet and good; because I despaired of the task, I spake not to men before."[4] He turns his steps, guided by his own supernatural knowledge, to the city of Benares, to seek the five monks who had formerly abandoned him. On his way thither he meets a naked ascetic who asks the reason of his cheerful mien; he answers that he has overcome all foes, has reached emancipation by the destruction of desire, and has obtained Nirvana. "To found the kingdom of Truth I go to the city of the Kasis (Benares); I will beat the drum of the Immortal in the darkness of this world." The account which follows of the opening of the "kingdom of righteousness" presents many analogies to the early stages of other spiritual movements. The founder, immovably sure of himself and of his doctrines, goes from place to place, spending the rainy season in town, and preaching everywhere. It is at Benares that the "wheel of the law" is first set in motion; there the first sermon was preached. The circumstances are also narrated under which other sermons were delivered, details being given as to time, place, the persons who heard them, the incidents which occasioned them. His converts at first are few and their names are recorded, but by degrees they become more numerous. The more devoted of them become members of his order, Bhikkus (for Bhikshus), mendicants; they forsake domestic life, shave their heads, adopt the yellow dress and the alms-bowl. They also are sent out to preach. "Go ye, O Bhikkus, and wander, for the welfare of many, out of compassion for the world, for the gain and for the welfare of gods and men. Let not two of you go the same way. Preach, O Bhikkus, the doctrine which is glorious in the beginning, glorious in the middle, glorious in the end, in the spirit, and in the letter; proclaim a consummate, perfect, and pure life of holiness. There are beings whose mental eyes are covered with scarcely any dust, but if the doctrine is not preached to them they cannot attain salvation." The incidents narrated in this part of the story are mostly connected with persons seeking admission to the order, or persons requiring to be convinced; the doctrine and its spread are everything. That spread takes place, as it is desired by the Buddha, chiefly among the higher classes of society; a great triumph is reached when Bimbisara, king of Magadha, becomes a patron of the order, and some accounts tell of the conversion of the Buddha's own father and mother. The work of the mission is of a peaceful nature; the Buddha lives on good terms with the Brahmans and with other teachers and their pupils. The only formidable opposition he had to meet arose within the order. His cousin Dewadatta, who had become a monk, wished to found a new order with much stricter rules than those of the original one. The Buddha refused to attach importance, as was proposed, to matters of clothes and food, or living in the open air; to do so would have made his movement narrower and less universal than he desired. [Footnote 4: Mahavagga, _S. B. E._ xiii. 88.] The beginning of the ministry is told in some detail, but of a long period of the life only a few scattered incidents are given. There is a detailed account of the three last months of the life. The Buddha is now eighty years of age, and in the Maha-paranibbana Sutta[5] the tale of his migrations and preachings is carried on according to the same scheme as in the accounts of his early days. During the rainy season, however, when he has reached the age of eighty, he has an illness, and sees he cannot live long. This he tells his monks, exhorting them with urgency to be true to the teaching and the order, and to shed the light abroad. His end is hastened by a meal of pork set before him by a goldsmith, a man of low caste, who hospitably entertained him. After this his face shines with a heavenly radiance, and as the end approaches many heavenly signs appear. The Buddha is fully conscious that he is about to leave the world, and that his death is an event of supreme interest to the heavenly powers, whom he believes to be thronging around to watch his last hours. He is solicitous, however, to soothe the grief of his friends, large numbers of whom also are around him, and to give them such counsels and such incentives to a faithful upholding of the cause as he yet may. They ask about his obsequies, and he claims that the remains of such an one as he is, of a Tathagata, "one who has attained perfection," should be treated as men treat the remains of a king of kings. He recognises the kindness of Ananda, his most intimate disciple, and tries to comfort him by encouraging him to be earnest in effort, so that he too may soon be free from evils. He directs his disciples generally not to mourn too much at his removal as if they were being deserted. The truths which he has set forth, and the rules of the order he has laid down for them, are to be their teacher after he is gone. He asks if any of them has any doubt or misgiving as to the Buddha, or the truth, or the faith, or the way. If so, they are to inquire freely, so that they may not reproach themselves afterwards for not having consulted him while still among them. The brethren, however, are silent, though addressed again and again in the same way. In the whole assembly there is not one who has any doubt or misgiving. Even the most backward of these brethren has become converted (lit. "entered into the current"); he is no longer liable to be born to a state of suffering, but is assured of eternal salvation. [Footnote 5: _S. B. E._ vol. xl.] "Then the Blessed One addressed the brethren and said, 'Behold now, brethren, I exhort you,' saying, 'Decay is inherent in all things that have come into being. Work out your salvation with diligence!' "This was the last word of the Tathagata!" His death or Nirvana forms the era of Buddhist chronology, and the date has now been approximately fixed with some certainty; it took place somewhere in the decade 482-472 B.C. Is Buddhism a Revolt against Brahmanism?--Before proceeding to discuss the religion to which this somewhat monkish narrative forms the preface, it is necessary to say a few words on the relation which that religion is now supposed to hold to the general history of Indian piety. It was customary, till recently, to regard Buddha as a great reformer, and his religion as a great revolt against that which it found prevailing in India. He is credited with having preached atheism as a reaction against the burdensome worship of too many gods, with having instituted a great social movement consisting in the abolition of caste, with having openly denied the authority of the Vedas, till then unchallenged, and with having rebuked the pride of Brahmanism by making his order of mendicants the representatives of his religion. None of these assertions can now be upheld. Instead of having been a tremendous reaction against Brahmanism it is seen that Buddhism was the natural outgrowth of that system. The closer knowledge of both, gained by the opening up of the sacred books of India, tends to show that much that was formerly thought distinctive of Buddhism was in reality inherited from Brahmanism. We saw in dealing with the earlier form of Indian religion that a form of piety had been struck out in it which made the ascetic independent of sacrifice, priesthood, even of the gods, all save the one God who is in all things. In that phase of Indian religion the authority of the Vedas had already been impugned, an inner discipline had taken the place of outward worship, the saint had learned to forsake the world. This turn of religious thought produced all the phenomena of Buddhism before the period of Gautama. The sannyasin (_vide sup._, chapter xix.) of Brahmanism is also called bhikku, mendicant; the rules of the older ascetics are closely similar to those of the Buddhist monk; their very outfit, their cloak and alms-bowl, are the same. A circumstance which shows very clearly how far Buddhism was from bearing the character of a revolt, is the occurrence at the same time and in the same district of India of another movement of a very similar nature. Jainism is an Indian religion so like Buddhism as to have been considered by many to be a sect of the latter. It also has an order of monks with robes and with a rule like those of the Buddhist fraternity. It also has a human founder on whom many of the same titles are conferred as on Gautama, and who is afterwards deified and worshipped. Mahavira, the founder of Jainism, is, like Gautama, the son of a royal house; and the Jainist and the Buddhist legend have many features in common. Was the legend of Mahavira, then, a sectarian version of the legend of Gautama, did no such person exist, at least as the founder of a religious body? So it was formerly considered; but it has now been discovered that the Buddhist scriptures themselves bear witness to the actual existence of Mahavira in the lifetime of Gautama, who once had an encounter with him and confuted him. It appears then that two similar movements were going on close together at the same time. They were independent of each other; the two rules differ in important particulars. Jainism carries to a much greater length than Buddhism the "ahimsa," or prohibition of the destruction of life; the Jainists practise austerities which Buddhism discards, and in the philosophies of the two systems there are far-reaching discrepancies. On the other hand, both Buddhism and Jainism borrow from Brahmanism most of their practices and institutions; both are developments of the way of salvation struck out not by Brahmans alone, but by men of other castes and other views, when faith in the old national gods was growing dim. We now proceed to discuss the Buddhist system, taking it as it appears in the early books, which tell us at least what was believed in the fourth century B.C. to have been the ideas and intentions of the founder. The following is the formula in which the convert expressed his desire to be admitted to the order: "I take shelter in the Buddha, I take shelter in the Dhamma (doctrine), I take shelter in the Samgha (order)." 1. The Buddha.--This confession of faith is directed to a triad of which the Buddha is the first member. Now the title Buddha was not invented by Buddhism, but belongs to earlier Indian thought, which held that from time to time, in a specially favoured age, an Enlightened One and Enlightener, an omniscient and perfect teacher, visited the world. Of these there had been in former ages twenty-four, and the followers of Gautama held him to be the twenty-fifth, but not the last. The application to Gautama of this title removed him, to the believer, from the ranks of ordinary men, and was the signal for a constantly increasing exaltation of his person. In adhering to the Buddha, therefore, the convert is not bowing to a mere man, but to one in whom a new type of deity is on the way to be realised. He is a man; there is a record of his human life, in which he made a great renunciation, abandoning, out of compassion for men's sufferings, a position of lordly ease for that of the mendicant. In this way he is a saviour not too exalted for the pious heart to love and follow. Having found out in his own experience the way of peace, and opened up that way for others, he is a pattern and an encouragement as well as a lawgiver to the earnest soul; and the personal relation which may thus be enjoyed with the founder is one great secret of the success of the religion. On the other hand, he is more than a man. The belief grew up very early that he was not born in the ordinary way, but that his birth had been his own voluntary act, and that his great renunciation consisted in his choosing, out of compassion for men, to enter human life and to bear the burden of its sufferings. In this way a religion which originally had no gods and no worship began to supply itself with these. Some scholars hold that it was among the lay community, among men not thoroughly initiated into Buddhist thought, and failing to find in the new faith what their former religions had afforded, that the deification of the Buddha and the worship of him began; it may certainly be doubted whether the religion could have lived long or spread far if these deficiencies had not been early supplied. 2. The Doctrine.--The life of the founder gives us the key to his doctrine. We see at once that that doctrine was not negative but positive and constructive. Neither was it socially of a revolutionary character, nor did it deny any part of the existing religion. We never read that Gautama's teaching was assailed by the Brahmans as unsound; it was centuries after his death that antagonism broke out between the order and the upholders of other systems. Nor again did the teaching put forward a new philosophy. On certain points which we shall notice there is a development of thought in it; but this was not obtruded. In fact the doctrine is not a speculation at all, but a way of salvation which is preached for its own sake, and carefully guarded from being mixed up with speculative or religious controversy. The Buddha is one who has found out a new way to be saved, and he comes forward to preach what he has discovered, and that alone. Other matters he leaves as they are. "All his discourses savour of redemption as all the sea is salt." Other men may draw inferences as to the relation his doctrine bears to the position of the Brahmans, or to the sacrifices, or to existing beliefs; he does not draw these inferences, he feels no need to do so. The doctrine professes to be an answer to a definite problem--the problem of pain. It is the most characteristic thing about both the founder and the doctrine, that they start from the universal existence of pain, to seek a remedy for it; they are inspired therefore from the first by a dark view of human life, and by the sentiment of compassion. It was the impression made on the young prince, of the general prevalence of suffering, that drove him forth from the palace to be a sannyasin or devotee. In a striking sermon he uses the figure of fire to indicate how universal is the rule of pain in all parts of nature and of human life. "All is burning; the eye is burning, and all it looks on and all it remembers of what it has seen"; so it is with each of the senses, so also with the mind. The fire is that of passion, of malice, of illusion, of birth, of age, of death, of pain, despondency, and despair. But the nature of the complaint from which man suffers, and also the remedy for it, are described most clearly in the "Four Noble Truths" set forth in the opening sermon at Benares. In these memorable utterances the teacher expresses himself according to the rules of the medical art, first setting forth the nature of the disease, then its cause, then how it takes end, and lastly, the means to be adopted in order that it may do so. 1. The Noble Truth of _Suffering_. Birth is suffering, decay is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering. Presence of objects we hate is suffering, separation from objects we love is suffering, not to obtain what we desire is suffering. Briefly, the fivefold clinging to existence is suffering. 2. The Noble Truth of the _Cause of Suffering_. Thirst that leads to rebirth, accompanied by pleasure and lust, finding its delight here and there. This thirst is threefold, namely, thirst for pleasure, thirst for existence, thirst for prosperity. 3. The Noble Truth of the _Cessation of Suffering_. It ceases with the complete cessation of this thirst, a cessation which consists in the absence of every passion, with the abandoning of this thirst, with the deliverance from it, with the destruction of desire. 4. The Noble Truth of the _Path which leads to the Cessation of Suffering_. The holy eightfold Path; that is to say, Right Belief, Right Aspiration, Right Speech, Right Conduct, Right Means of Livelihood, Right Endeavour, Right Memory, Right Meditation. In these statements there are some things which we can readily understand, but also some things which are not so easy. It is a thought with which Christians are familiar, that desire is the parent of all sorts of pain and disappointment, that the assertion of the self, the putting forward of personal wishes and claims, involves suffering. And we read in the Gospels that the way to escape from such suffering is to cease from desire, no longer to be anxious about what this world can give us or take from us, and not to lay up treasures. Buddhist doctrine has its moral basis in the perception of the vanity of all human effort and desire, and in the conviction that the true riches for man cannot consist in any of those goods to which the heart naturally clings. Where that perception does not exist, where the first of the Noble Truths is not accepted as beyond all question, Buddhism can have no hold. So far the doctrine is easy to follow. But in the second of the Truths we find that the cause of suffering is sought in the history of the human person as Indian thought conceives it. Man suffers because he has been born again, has suffered a rebirth, and the cause of his rebirth is the thirst which has been felt or even nourished in a previous existence. The thought that suffering is due to desire is not presented simply, as it is in our Gospels, but in connection with a doctrine of man's life and of the connection of one generation with another, which is quite strange to us, but apart from which primitive Buddhism held that its doctrine of suffering could not be understood. The Buddha, after discovering the doctrine, is at first in doubt whether or not he will preach it; and the cause of his doubt is that he is not sure if men will be able to understand the law of causality and the chain of existence, on which he himself meditated a whole night after his enlightenment, and his discovery of which he regards as a great part of his achievement. This chain of causation is stated in a long series of asserted processes, in which the connection between one generation and another, and the transmission from life to life of the melancholy heritage of desire and sorrow, is obscurely and enigmatically traced. The beginning of all is ignorance (of the four truths); from ignorance proceed the "samkharas" or forms of production, from these in turn consciousness, the senses, contact, sensation, thirst, and so on to birth and the miseries of life. Suffering is destroyed by tracing this sequence over again in a negative way, so that, the first member of it being destroyed, each subsequent member is destroyed in turn. It is no wonder that the founder doubted whether this doctrine of causation would be generally understood; for it is in fact an attempt to reconcile two opposite views of the nature of the human person. In the first place we find in early Buddhism the thought that there is no such thing as a self in the human being; a man is made up of various bundles of attributes and sensations called _skandhas_, but he himself is none of these. There is no persistent substratum of a self under these activities and forms, any more than there is a carriage in addition to the wheels, shafts, nails, etc., of which a carriage is composed. The Buddhist is called on to give up the belief in a permanent ego; only where the various parts come together is the man there. This is the well-known denial of the soul in this religion; the soul is nothing but the "name and form" of a chance collocation of elements. It is hard to know where this doctrine came from; Kern says it is derived from the science of dissection, others compare it with the doctrine of Heraclitus, taught about the same time in Greece, that all things are in constant flux, nothing permanent. The last words of the Master assert that decay is universal; and the doctrine of the skandhas is a corollary from that principle; if all the elements of which the human person is made up are in process of decay, then the self cannot be a substantial and persistent thing. That doctrine, however, does not go well together with the belief in the universality and inexorableness of suffering. If there is no self, must not consciousness come to an end when the elements fall asunder which chance has brought together, and must not the hour of death be also the hour of complete emancipation? This, however, it was impossible to hold in India at the time of Gautama; the belief in transmigration was too firmly fixed, he never thought of disputing it. That belief indeed is what chiefly makes the suffering of the world so lamentable. To Indian eyes the pain actually in the world was magnified a hundred-fold by the dark imagination of its connection with the past and with the future. What a man suffered was the result of acts done in many former lives, all spent in the vain misery of desire; and the sad prospect was extended before him that death would not end his pains, but that he would be born again and again to suffer ever anew so long as desire continued. But if this is the case, then the soul would seem to be a durable and persistent thing which is able to go through many lives and much suffering without being brought to an end. On the theory of transmigration the soul is not a mere shadow-name of an aggregation of qualities, but the one durable thing which survives when all that is accidental and temporary falls away from it. The doctrine of the Skandhas and that of transmigration are thus opposed, and the doctrine of the _nidanas_ or the chain of causation is the bridge which satisfied Gautama's own mind, but which he was doubtful about presenting to others, to bring them into harmony. He aimed at showing by his catalogue of these obscure processes how the actions done in a life set up a tendency to a corresponding existence in another life which begins after the former one ends. Though there is no soul to be transmitted, the moral effects of former lives are transmitted to their successors. The essential doctrine of the Buddha, however, is determined by the belief in transmigration. His cry of triumph at the time of his enlightenment is to the effect that the long series of suffering existences through which he has passed has now come to an end, and that he will not be born again. And what he preaches with constant iteration is the misery of this awful succession of births to renewal of suffering, and the infinite blessedness of escaping from this cycle. The disciple, when converted, is to be able to say: "Hell is destroyed for me, and rebirth as an animal or a ghost or in any place of woe. I am converted, I am no longer liable to be reborn in a state of suffering, and am assured of eternal salvation." Now it rests with a man's own acts to end his sufferings. The chain of causation which ends with suffering begins with ignorance. The ignorance which is meant is that of the four noble truths, of the way of salvation. Let a man cease from ignorance, let him accept the Noble Truths and the insight they convey into the cause of suffering, then by ceasing to thirst, or to burn, or in our own language by turning his mind away from all desire, believing that what he does will be effective for his salvation, he sets up a chain of causation in an opposite direction, and having destroyed ignorance he may rest assured that he has destroyed suffering too and is in the right way. The burden he has inherited he will not need to carry any farther, but will, when he dies, lay down for ever. When we look at the fourth Noble Truth, which tells what a man has to do in order to obtain this salvation, we are at first surprised. After the deep earnestness with which the nature of the disease and the cause and cure of the disease have been stated, we expect that stronger practical measures will be asked for than these eight forms of moderation. Christianity speaks of cutting off the right hand, plucking out the right eye, in order to cut off desire: and the Brahmanic method of union with the Deity was, as we have seen, that of the most extreme self-mortification united with contemplation. This Brahmanic method, the _yoga_ by which the devotee sought to escape from all the accidents of being and to make himself one with the great Self, the Buddha had tried for six years; but he had given it up for a year when the hour of his enlightenment struck, and he explicitly condemns for others the path he had found unprofitable for himself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The one extreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading, sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given to mortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoiding these two extremes the Tathagata has gained the knowledge of the Middle Path, which leads to insight, wisdom, calm, to Nirvana." The way, therefore, to escape from the Karma, the moral retribution which works inexorably in one life the result stored up in previous lives, is that of a careful and unintermitted self-discipline, which does not run to extremes, but practices, with perfectly clear purpose and self-possession, the needful virtues mentioned in the fourth of the Noble Truths. What are these? There is to be-- 1. Right belief, without superstition or delusion. 2. Right aspiration, after such things as the thoughtful and earnest man sets store by. 3. Right speech, speech that is friendly and sincere. 4. Right conduct, conduct that is peaceable, honourable, and pure. 5. Right means of livelihood, _i.e._ a pursuit which does not involve the taking or injuring of life. 6. Right endeavour, _i.e._ self-restraint and watchfulness. 7. Right memory, _i.e._ presence of mind, not forgetting at any time what one ought to remember; and 8. Right meditation, _i.e._ earnest occupation with the riddles of life. This is the path; there are four stages of it-- 1. The stage of him who has entered the path. 2. The stage of him who has yet to return once to life. 3. The stage of him who returns not again, but may be born again as a superior being; and 4. The stage of the worthy, holy one, the _Arahat_, who is free from desire for existence, and also from pride and self-righteousness, and who is saved and has obtained holiness, even in this life. An Arahat is not equal to a Buddha; the former is himself saved, but the perfect Buddha is able by his perfect knowledge to save others. Of Buddhas, however, there are not many. One becomes an Arahat by a life of strenuous and untiring discipline. Ten fetters are to be broken by which a man is kept from freedom; self-deception is one of them, trust in sacrifice another, and the list embraces both sensual and intellectual weaknesses. One must watch and be sober; every act, however trivial, is to be done with full self-consciousness and earnestness. One must remember that he is engaged in a great and a hard work, and must resolutely "swim upstream," estimating at its proper value every affection and temptation that would hold him back. The body is to be contemned, and all natural ties; emotion is to be uprooted from the heart so that the proper state of entire calm and undisturbedness may be maintained. Then one is an Arahat, a true Brahman. This manner of life requires withdrawal from the world; the true salvation can only be attained by him who has left his home for the houseless life. But Buddhism has also a general moral code for those who have not taken this step; the keeping of it will not save them directly; from the life they are now leading that is impossible, but it is a beginning; it will make it easier for them to become Arahats and attain salvation in some future existence. For all it is good to be free from desire; as all desire contains in itself a germ of death, there is no approach to salvation except in this direction. Buddhist Morality.--Towards fellow-men Buddhist morality is based on the notion of the equality of all; respect is to be paid to all living beings. The five rules of righteousness which are binding on all followers of the Buddha are: 1. Not to kill any living being. 2. Not to take that which is not given. 3. To refrain from adultery. 4. To speak no untruth. 5. To abstain from all intoxicating liquors. To these are added five more for members of the order, who are also required to refrain from all sexual intercourse, viz.: 1. Not to eat after mid-day. 2. Not to be present at dancing, singing, music, or plays. 3. Not to use wreaths, scents, ointments, or personal ornaments. 4. Not to use a high or a broad bed. 5. To possess no silver or gold. These commandments, like those of the Decalogue, are negative in form; but in the Buddhist scriptures a positive moral ideal is inculcated on all, which is grave and attractive in its character, and is sustained by a strong though quiet enthusiasm. We find here a delicate conscientiousness as to the relations to be cultivated with one's fellow-men; the widest toleration is enjoined, a toleration extending to all beings, to all opinions. Hatred is to be repaid by love, life is to be filled with kindness and compassion. The Dhammapada and the Sutta-nipata deserve to be read by all who care for the unseen riches of the soul. By their simple earnestness, their quaint use of parable and metaphor, and their mingling of the homeliest things with the highest truths, these books take rank among the most impressive of the religious books of the world. We give only a few jewels from this treasury. From the Dhammapada.--Earnestness is the path of immortality (Nirvana), thoughtlessness the path of death. Those who are in earnest do not die, those who are thoughtless are as if dead already. All that we are is the result of what we have thought; it is founded on what we have thought, it is made up of what we have thought. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him. By oneself evil is done, by oneself one suffers; by oneself evil is left undone, by oneself one is purified. Purity and impurity belong to oneself; no one can purify another. From the Sutta-nipata.--To live in a suitable country, to have done good deeds in a former existence, and a thorough study of oneself, this is the highest blessing. As a mother at the risk of her life watches over her own child, her only child, so also let every one cultivate a boundless friendly mind towards all beings. A Bhikku who has turned away from desire and attachment, and is possessed of understanding in this world, has already gone to the immortal place, the unchangeable state of Nirvana. Nirvana.--Our account of the doctrine would appear incomplete if we did not attempt to answer the question, What is Nirvana? It is, as the last extract shows, the state of salvation in Buddhism. As we have seen, it is the condition of the man who has escaped from the series of rebirths, and will never be born again. It is attained even in this life by the Arahat, in whom all desire and restlessness have come to an end. On the other hand, it is said of such an one that he enters Nirvana when he dies, as if it were a state not of this life, but of the period beyond. Thus it has been much debated whether the Buddhist (or rather Indian, for the notion is not peculiar to Buddhism) Nirvana is extinction, annihilation, of which the quenching of desire in this life is the prelude, or if it is a state of negative or quiescent blessedness, on which the saint can enter here and now, but which is only made perfect when he dies. But there are two Nirvanas;--that of entire passionlessness attained in this life, and the consummate Nirvana entered at death. The saint does not need to wait for death for his redemption, nor must he hasten his death in order to enjoy it fully; Buddha, by example and by precept, forbids any such anticipation. Death seals that which was already won, there is no return from the Nirvana of death to any further life. This, however, does not amount to an assertion that the dead Arahat has no life or knowledge in the beyond; he is freed from desire, but whether his consciousness is altogether extinguished, Buddhism does not decide, and regards as a vain speculation. No Gods.--We shall speak afterwards of this view of redemption, which is the key to the nature of the Buddhist religion. We remark here that it is a redemption man achieves by his own efforts, without any outward prop or aid. In this system there is no occasion for any priests or sacrifices, for any prayers, or for any gods. There is no ritual, because there is no object of worship, there is no sin in the sense of offending a higher being. The gods are denied not because of any speculative doubt of their existence, but because in that inner world of moral effort which man has come to feel so supremely real and important, they have no part to play. As all the gods faded away in Indian speculation before Brahma, so Brahma's own turn has come to fade away. The Buddhist speaks of the gods as if they existed, and he makes no attack on the sacrifices; but no living god fills his heart. The Buddha is greater than all the gods; his teaching is for the benefit of gods as well as men. But the Buddha is not an object of worship. If the Buddhist can be said to worship any higher power, it is the moral order which never fails to reward men according to the deeds done in this or former existences. That is for him a real and tremendous, though impersonal power, and in contemplating it he may be said to worship after a fashion. But he has no aid to look for from any power in heaven or earth in working out his salvation. Buddhism is the most autosoteric of all religions; it declares more uncompromisingly than any other, that man must save himself by his own efforts, and that no one can possibly stand in his place or relieve him of any part of his great task. All that any one, even the Buddha, can do for another, is to enlighten him, to open his eyes to the true knowledge, and show him the narrow path on which he must thenceforth walk. 3. The Order.--There were monks before Buddhism. That religion made its appearance when Indian thought was at the stage of growth at which monastic communities may be expected to arise. When religion has ceased to be regarded as the affair of the nation or the tribe, and is cherished as the affair of the individual, when the mind turns from the sacrifices and ritual of public religion to cultivate relations with a power known chiefly in the heart and soul, and when religious duty has thus come to be recognised as a boundless and all-embracing thing, not a service the hands and feet can discharge, but the effort, never ending, still beginning, to make the whole personality with all its acts and aims conform to the ideal, then it is that men who are living for religion seek for such aid as they can give each other, and find it in an order and a discipline. The rules of the Buddhist Samgha or order are extant, and so are the rules of the contemporary Jainist fraternity. The Samgha resembled the Franciscan more than the other great Christian orders. The Bhikku on joining it abandoned his family and property, assumed the yellow robe and other scanty properties of the character, and lived thenceforth by begging, and in strict subjection to the rules, in which every detail of his food, his clothing, his residence, and his daily walk and conversation, were laid down. The two great objects of the society were mutual help in the religious life and the preaching of the doctrine. Under the first head come the frequent meetings of monks and the confessions they make to each other according to a fixed form. There is no vow of obedience; the monk obeys the law, not the human authority. In preaching they are to go one by one, and they are to preach to all. To all who would hear it was the gate open to this salvation. Here the Buddhist neglect of caste comes in. Buddhism makes no general or formal declaration of the equality of all men, nor is there any attack on the Brahman caste or any exaltation of the lower castes. The order drew its recruits at first from the ranks of the Brahmans. But the impelling motive of the new religion was compassion, and genuine compassion is not to be restrained in artificial limits. The salvation preached was fitted for all men. The disease to be cured was one from which all suffer, and the cure was one which all could at least begin to lay hold of. Thus Buddhism was fitted to break through the barriers of caste, and to gather into one religious community men of all castes alike. In the community, it was held, these distinctions disappeared. Not birth but conduct there made the true Brahman. The universalist tendency of the religion also fitted it to spread to other lands. It was not limited by anything in its teaching to the soil of India, nor to the territory of any particular set of gods. So wide indeed is its toleration, that a man may embrace it without giving up the faith in which he lived before. One can add it without incongruity to one's former beliefs and practices. The believer in Shang-ti can be a Buddhist as well as the believer in Brahma.[6] The absence of any hierarchy or centralised organisation enabled it to spread freely, and the very meagreness of its doctrine, and its freedom from ritual, were also in its favour. [Footnote 6: Millions of Buddhists in China and Japan are also adherents of the other religions of these countries.] Buddhism made Popular.--Buddhism proved able to spread over many lands because it was so simple, and in its essence so moral and so broadly human. But, like other faiths which have spread to many lands, it assumed very different forms in different countries, and the later form is often very different from the early simplicity. Even at the outset it was not free from a strong infusion of magic; the Arahat, like the Brahmanic ascetic before him, was believed to obtain influence over the gods by his virtues, and thus a claim to supernatural power is brought in, which agrees but ill with the ethical doctrine. The religion, which at first ignored the gods and bade each man trust to his own efforts for his highest good, became, ere long, what a popular religion at the stage of progress prevailing at that time necessarily was, namely, a worship of superior beings and a method of obtaining benefits from them. The national gods were discarded, but the deification of the founder early furnished a being who could be worshipped. Legend grew luxuriantly round his birth and early career; and he obtained the rank of the greatest of all the gods. Former Buddhas who had lived in former ages still lived as gods; and the divine family, being once founded, admitted of various additions; even a popular deity, such as Indra, could be joined to the growing circle. The chief scenes of the life of the founder became holy places and objects of pilgrimage, where relics were exposed for adoration. The growth of legend and of magic proceeded more rapidly, and went to greater lengths, in Northern than in Southern Buddhism; but in the land of its birth, too, Buddhism proved unable to serve as a working religion without additions and modifications entirely foreign to its true character. The profession of Buddhism was combined even with the savage worship of the non-Aryan tribes; Siva was identified with Buddha and then worshipped instead of him, as also was Vishnu, and the perversion and degradation of the religion prepared for its expulsion from the country of its birth. That expulsion was probably brought about more immediately by the advance of Mohammedanism in India, and took place in the period of the early Middle Ages. We cannot speak here of the strange guise Buddhism has assumed in the north of India, notably in Tibet. The Lamaism of that country, with its perpetual living incarnation of the divine Buddha in a succession of human representatives, its hierarchical church strongly resembling in many of its features the Church of Rome, and the prayer-flags and wheels for the mechanical discharge of religious acts, have long been the wonder of the world. Conclusion.--It is not from what Buddhism is now in any of the countries where it flourishes, and where it has votaries who profess other religions also, that we can judge of what it really is, or estimate its value as a product of the human mind. It is to early Buddhism that we must look for this. What are we to judge of this religion without gods, and based on the assertion that all life is suffering, and that the chief good is altogether to escape from life? It is not true to characterise it as a religion in which there is no joy, and which deliberately refuses to have anything to do with joy. The Arahat, in whom desire is vanquished, and who has no further birth to anticipate, is filled with a deep joy and triumph as of a victor who has conquered every foe; and those who are less advanced in the path yet have their share in this enthusiasm, and are inspired by it to continue the struggle. Still Buddhism is a sad religion. It arrives in India when the Deity there believed in has deserted the world, and tells man he is alone in it. There is no one to help him, no one to assure him that the good cause in a wider sense--a cause extending beyond his own personal life--is destined to succeed; there is no upholder of any moral order beyond that which works itself out in each individual experience. The result is that the believer does not trouble himself about the world, but only about his own personal salvation. This religion is not a social force, it aims not at a Kingdom of God to be built up by the united efforts of multitudes of the faithful, but only at saving individual souls, which in the act of being saved are removed beyond all activity and all contact with the world. Buddhism, therefore, is not a power which makes actively for civilisation. It is a powerful agent for the taming of passion and the prevention of vagrant and lawless desires, it tends, therefore, towards peace. But it offers no stimulus to the realisation of the riches which are given to man in his own nature: it checks rather than fosters enterprise, it favours a dull conformity to rule rather than the free cultivation of various gifts. Its ideal is to empty life of everything active and positive, rather than to concentrate energy on a strong purpose. It does not train the affections to virtuous and harmonious action, but denies to them all action and consigns them to extinction. This condemnation it has incurred by parting with that highest stimulus to human virtue and endeavour, which lies in the belief in a living God. By so doing it ceased to fulfil the office of a religion for men, and though, for historical purposes, we may class it among the religions of the world, a system which leaves its adherents free not to worship at all, or to find satisfaction for their spiritual instincts in the worship of beings whom it regards with indifference, comes short of the notion of religion, and is not properly entitled to that name. BOOKS RECOMMENDED Monier Williams, _Buddhism, in its connection with Brahmanism and Hinduism, and in its contrast with Christianity_, 1889. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_ (S.P.C.K.). Oldenberg's, _Buddha, his Life, his Doctrine and his Order_, 1882 (out of print). (Third German Edition, 1897.) Spence Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, 1860. E. Hardy, _Der Buddhismus_. CHAPTER XXI PERSIA The Aryans who entered India to become its dominant race came from Central Asia, and left behind them there other tribes of Aryan culture. These tribes remained in what is called Iran, in the lands, that is to say, between the Indus, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and the Persian Gulf. It is from this region, a part of which bore in ancient times the name of Ariana, that the word "Aryan" is derived. The languages of this territory are akin to Sanscrit; and there is ample evidence that before the Indian invasion the progenitors of the Indians and those of the Iranians dwelt together there, and enjoyed a common civilisation. If the civilisation was the same the religion also was the same. How the Indo-Iranian religion was developed in India, we have seen. At first a worship of active and militant deities, it became by degrees a religion of a passive type, in which a suffering, acquiescent, and brooding humanity presented to heaven its needs and problems, and received a corresponding answer. The Aryans who remained in Iran retained their active and practical disposition. While by no means wanting in sensitiveness and flexibility of mind, they were less given to speculation and more to a robust morality than their Indian kinsmen. It has to be noted that while the religion of India has not influenced Europe in any manifest degree until the present century, that of Persia has contributed in a marked way to form the world of thought in which we dwell. Sources.--The views generally current about the ancient religion of Persia are derived from late Greek writers, whose accounts will be noticed at the end of this chapter. A truer knowledge is now possible, since the sacred books of the religion are now open to the world. They were only obtained from the Parsis, who keep up their ancient religion on the soil of India, during last century, and the study of them has been very laborious and difficult, and has given rise to great controversies which are not yet settled. These ancient books are furnished with Eastern translations and commentaries. Is the Western scholar to place himself under the guidance of these, which no doubt are part of the historical tradition of the religion, or may he claim that he is himself in as good a position as the Oriental commentator for understanding the original meaning of the texts; and will he best interpret them by comparing them with the Vedas? What is their age; in which of the lands of Iran were they written; was any part of them written by Zoroaster, or is Zoroaster to be regarded as an historical personage at all? On all these questions and on many others, scholars are not yet agreed; and while so much is uncertain about the books, there must also be great uncertainty about the history and the very nature of the religion. In what follows we are guided mainly by the scholars who have taken charge of the volumes connected with Persia in the _Sacred Books of the East_.[1] In the last of these volumes (xxxi.) a new clue is given to the subject, of which we shall gladly avail ourselves. [Footnote 1: Zend-Avesta, _S. B. E._, vols. iv., xxiii., xxxi.] The sacred books of Persia are known by the name of "Zend-Avesta," which is an incorrect expression; we ought to say Avesta and Zend. "Avesta," like the kindred word "Veda," signifies knowledge, and the word "Zend" denotes here not the language of that name, but the "commentary" afterwards added to the original knowledge or text. The commentary is not written in the Zend language, but in Pahlavi or Persian. The Avesta, which is written in the older Zend, the sacred language of Persia, is, like other Bibles, a collection of books written in different ages, and even, it may be, in different lands. The books were brought together into one only at some period after the Christian era. The later legends as to the supernatural communication to Zoroaster of the earlier books need not detain us; we must notice, however, that the preserved books of Persian religion are held to be no more than the scanty ruins of an extensive literature. The Avesta consisted originally of 21 Nosks or books, and most of these were destroyed by Alexander when he invaded the East; only one Nosk was preserved entire. As we have it, the Avesta is a liturgical work, it contains some legends and some ancient hymns, as well as a good deal of law, but its prevailing character is that of a service-book, and it is to this that its partial preservation both at the invasion of Alexander, and at that of the Mohammedans in a later century, is probably due. It consists of three parts. The oldest is the Yasna, a collection of liturgies, which admit and indeed invite comparison with those of early Christianity: along with these are found the Gathas or hymns, the only part of the Avesta composed in verse, and written in an older dialect. The Visperad is a collection of litanies for the sacrifice; and the Vendidad is a code of early law, but contains also various religious legends. Besides these works, which constitute the Avesta proper, there is the Khorda (or small) Avesta containing devotions for various times of the day, for the days of the month, and for the religious year; these are for the use not of the priests alone but of all the faithful, and many of them are still so used. The Contents of the Zend-Avesta are Composite.--In these works the student soon observes that he has before him not one religious system only but several. In one place we find a worship of one god, as if there were no others to be considered; some of the litanies on the other hand contain lengthy and elaborate lists of objects of worship. In some parts the religion is personal and immediate; in others it is priestly. Parsism is often called fire-worship, and the elements of earth and water also obtain extreme sanctity in it, but of this also there is in the oldest books little trace. The variety in the literature no doubt reflects a variety in the religion of Iran. Iran in fact had not one religion but several, and thus the problem is to trace how these successively entered into contact with Mazdeism or Zoroastrianism, which is the religion most native to Iran, and were embodied in it. The different religions belonged to a certain extent to different provinces. We know that Persia, the conqueror of Media, was conquered in turn by the Median religion; we also know that the religion of the Persian kings as read in their inscriptions[2] does not correspond to any of the religious positions held in the Avesta. The Magi, from whom also the religion as a whole derives one of its names, belonged to Media and passed from there to greater power in Iran as a whole. From the Scythians on the north and from Babylonia on the south, ideas and practices were imported; and in these and other ways, forms of religion arose as different from the faith of Zoroaster as later forms of Christianity from the simplicity of Christ, yet looking to him as their founder and the giver of their law. [Footnote 2: _Records of the Past_, i. 107.] Zoroaster.--We begin with the teaching of Zoroaster. Dr. E. Meyer in his _Geschichte des Alterthums_, vol. i., and Mr. Darmesteter in his admirable introduction to the Avesta (_S. B. E._ vol. iv.) both treat Zoroaster as a mythical personage, a figure-head of the official class of the religion, who give currency to their edicts under his name. Weighty authorities may, however, be quoted for the historical reality of Zoroaster, and what appears to us most important of all, the editor of the Gathas, in the _S. B. E._ vol. xxxi., departing from his collaborateur, Mr. Darmesteter, has treated these hymns, which give an account of the founder's acts and experiences when first proclaiming the true doctrine, in such a way as to produce on the mind of the reader the strongest impression of the historical reality of the prophet and of his mission. They introduce us to a religious movement actually in progress in the poet's time, a movement in which a pure and lofty faith is struggling to establish itself against prevailing superstitions. The doctrine placed in the mouth of the reformer is that which is most central in Persian religion; and only by such deep earnestness and devotion as is here ascribed to him, could it have attained that position. We start, then, with Zoroaster and his work; and first of all we ask what was his date, where did he live, and what kind of religion did he find existing in his country? The date of Zoroaster or Zarathustra--the former is the Greek, the latter the old Iranian form of the name, contracted in Persian to Zardusht--can only be fixed very approximately. He stands at the very beginning of the Avesta literature, and the developments in religion to which that literature testifies must have occupied a long period. On the other hand no one proposes to place Zarathustra before the departure of the Indian Aryans from the Indo-Iranian stock. From such vague data he may be assigned perhaps to somewhere about 1400 B.C. As to his province, there is considerable agreement among scholars that his doctrine spread from the east of Iran westwards; and though tradition gives him a birthplace in Media, his mission lay nearer to India, in Bactria. Primitive Religion of Iran.--He did not preach to men unacquainted with religion. Many of the religious ideas and figures of the Vedas occur also in Persia, and by the study of these it is possible to form certain inferences as to the mental history of Persia before Zarathustra. Mithra the sun-god belongs to Persia as well as India. The heaven-god known in India as Varuna grew into the principal deity of Persia. A fire-god, wind- and rain-gods, and the serpent hostile to man, on whom these made war, are common to both countries. The institution of sacrifice, in which the deities are served with offerings and with hymns, is markedly alike in both countries. In both alike sacrifice is at first the affair not of a priesthood but of laymen, especially of princes, and is not confined to temples but is performed in the open air, on a spot judged to be suitable. The most imposing sacrifice is that of the horse, and an offering of constant occurrence is that of the intoxicating liquor, in India Soma, in Persia by a recognised transliteration Homa, which is itself viewed as a cosmic principle of life, and addressed as a deity. And in both countries alike the view of sacrifice prevails in early times, that the gods come to it to take their part in a banquet which their worshippers share with them, and that they are strengthened and encouraged by it. These similarities, and others which might be mentioned, show that the religion of India and that of Persia started from a common stock of ideas and usages. A further circumstance of great importance shows not only the original identity of the two systems, but also perhaps how they came to diverge from each other. Two generic titles for deities occur in India. The first of these--_deva_, is said to signify the bright or shining one, the second--_asura_, the living one. Now these titles are also found in Persia; but the use of the terms is different in the two countries. In India both are at first titles for deity, but by degrees, while "deva" continues to denote the gods who are worshipped, "asura" assumes a less favourable meaning, until at length it comes to stand for a second order of beings, inferior to the devas, and including such powers as are malignant and hostile. In Persia the fortunes of the two words are reversed. _Ahura_ becomes the god _par excellence_, the supreme god; while "deva," the title which in India remained in honour, is in the Avesta that of evil gods who are not to be worshipped. In this some scholars consider that we may hear the watchwords of the conflict which led to the separation of the two religions; there was a schism between the followers of the Ahuras and those of the Devas, which led to the entire separation of the two parties. This is the latest form of the old view which makes Zoroastrianism the outcome of a religious conflict, of a reaction against the gods afterwards worshipped in India. There is no direct evidence of such a conflict, and the difference we have described may be due to the natural development of the Indo-Iranian religion in different sets of circumstances and among different peoples. Zarathustra in the Gathas finds the antithesis fully formed between the good and the evil deities; he appeals to his countrymen on that matter as one which he does not need to teach them, but with which they have long been familiar. In speaking of his date this has to be remembered. We proceed now to describe from the Gathas the work and teaching of Zarathustra. The Gathas are poems written in metres which occur also in the Vedas, and intended, like the Indian hymns, to be used in worship. The account which they furnish of the mission and the teaching of the sage are thus clothed in a poetical dress, and do not narrate bare facts as they occurred, but the facts as interpreted and treated for religious use. They are in the mouth of Zarathustra himself; he writes them for use at sacrifice, and remembering how they are to be rendered, he sometimes puts in the mouth of the celebrants the words, "Zarathustra and we." These words do not prove that the hymns are not by him. As explained by Dr. Mills, the hymns are seen to be very fully charged with meaning and with sentiment. Uncouth and inartistic in expression, and demanding an immense amount of patience and ingenuity to trace their connection of thought, they surprise the reader when once he seizes their meaning, by the depth and spirituality of their contents, and force him to acknowledge that they are a worthy document of the birth of a great religion. The Call of Zarathustra.--The hymns give a vivid picture of that early world in which the prophet lived. It was a world distracted with conflict. On one side there is an agricultural community bent on industry, and, like the Hindus, even at this day, valuing as most sacred the cattle which form their chief substance. On the other hand, there are men who dwell on the outskirts between the tilled land and the wilderness, who are constantly making raids on the farms, driving off and killing the cattle for sacrifice and for food, and ruining the fields by destroying the irrigating works on which their fertility depends. And there is a religious difference as well as a difference in culture between these two sets of people. The agriculturists are worshippers of Ahura; the contemners of the cattle worship beings called in the Gathas "daevas." This schism was not of Zarathustra's making, he found it going on, and being a priest was entitled to come forward and seek to guide others with regard to it. Such is the situation which the hymns present to us. We will try to state the substance of some of those hymns. The naked words of them, even when we are sure of the correctness of the translation, are barely intelligible without lengthy commentary; and on the other hand, no short statement in modern terms can convey the force and solemnity of these struggling utterances. As we are dealing with the original revelation of Zarathustra, the source of the Persian religion, we shall give the story with some degree of detail. The first hymn in the arrangement presented to us in _S. B. E._ deals with what we may term the call of Zarathustra. It sums up in a poetic and dramatic form the religious result of the movement which led him to come forward. The "Soul of the Kine" first speaks; it is the impersonation of the agricultural community, to whom their cattle are most sacred. She raises a complaint to Ahura and Asha (the righteousness which is an attribute of Ahura, and like his other attributes often appears as an independent person) of the insolence and highhanded devastation and robbery she has to suffer. "For whom did ye fashion me," she says; "wherefore was I made?" She appeals to the Immortals for instruction in tillage with a view to security and welfare. Ahura then speaks and asks Asha what guardian has been appointed for the kine to lead and to defend her; and Asha answers that no one, himself free from passion and violence, could be found who was capable of being an adequate guardian. The causes of these evils lie at the roots of the constitution of things, and therefore those seeking success in any enterprise must approach Ahura himself and not any subordinate being. Zarathustra speaks, and confirms the utterances of Asha; it is in Ahura himself that he and the kine place their confidence; to his will they submit themselves; the doubts and questions arising from their outward insecurity, they refer to him. Ahura speaks and answers his own question. It is true that no lord of the kine is to be found, who in himself is quite equal to that position, but he appoints Zarathustra as head to the agricultural community. A chorus speaks, consisting of a company of the faithful supposed to be present, or of the Ameshospends, the personified attributes of Ahura, and praise the Lord for his bounty and for the wisdom he makes known; but asks whom he has endowed with the Good Mind, or, as we might say, the Holy Spirit, to make known to mortals his doctrine. The call of Zarathustra, intimated in the foregoing verse, is overlooked, as if it were impossible that such a one as he could undertake the office. Ahura replies, repeating his commission to Zarathustra, here called also by his family name of Spitama, and promising to establish him and make him successful in his work. The Soul of the Kine speaks, lamenting still that no adequate lord has been assigned her. Zarathustra is a feeble and pusillanimous man, not one of royal state who is able to bring his purpose to effect. The Ameshospends join in the cry for the true lord to appear. Zarathustra then speaks, accepting the mission in an address to Ahura, whom he entreats to send his blessings of peace and happiness, since none but he can give them, and to set up in the minds of the disciples of the cause that joy and that kingdom which, though it first comes inwardly, yet brings with it also all outward blessings. For himself also he prays that the Good Mind and the Sovereign Power (another of the attributes) of the Lord may hasten to come to him and strengthen him for his mission. This poetical rendering of the call of Zarathustra is free both from miraculous embellishment and from undue exaltation of the person of the prophet, and forms a great contrast to later statements in the Avesta, where the prophet is placed in secret conclave with Ahura, asking him questions and receiving detailed replies which at once rank as revelation. In the Gathas, allowing for the theological and poetic form, everything is human and natural. We are strongly reminded of the accounts of the calls of prophets in the Old Testament--there is the same choice by the deity of an apparently weak instrument to accomplish a work urgently called for by the times, the same sense of insufficiency on the part of the prophet, but the same absolute confidence on his part in the power of the deity, and hence the same absolute assurance, once the mission is accepted, that the cause which he has been called to carry forward must succeed. In many of the following Gathas the same parallel is strongly impressed on the mind of the reader. The sense of weakness is expressed again and again--the prophet has no victorious career, but is exposed to much gainsaying, which he feels acutely. Yet he never doubts that his god is with him, and is working for him. To him he commits his doubts and fears, of his goodness he is joyfully assured, and his aid he expects with confidence. He is entirely devoted to Ahura and his cause, and offers himself up with his whole powers to work out the divine will. He will teach, he says, as long as he is able, till he has brought all the living to believe. He is conscious of a divine power working in him. Nothing in himself, he is strong by the divine grace which Ahura sends him: his words have efficacy to keep the fiends at a distance, and to advance in men's minds the divine kingdom; like St. Paul he feels his message to be to some a savour of life unto life, to others a savour of death unto death. The Doctrine.--And what is the message he proclaims? It is a philosophy of the origin of the world, but a philosophy the acceptance of which involves immediate and strenuous action. The distracted condition of the world before him requires to be explained, so that a remedy for it may be found; and Zarathustra prays, when he is about to bring forward his doctrine, that Ahura would help him to explain how the material world arose. The explanation when it appears is not quite new, it has been shaping itself already in the mind of his people, but he sets it forth as a dogma, and draws from it at once all its practical consequences. In the third hymn of the first Gatha he solemnly brings forward his doctrine before the people, and appeals to them, not as a people, but as individuals, each for himself, with a full sense of his responsibility, to consider it, and adopt it, and act upon it. It is the doctrine of dualism, not in the fully developed later form in which two personal potentates divide the universe between them from the first, but as yet in a form more speculative and vague. There are two primeval principles, spirits, things, as is well known--the expression is indefinite--the counterparts of each other, independent in their action, a better and a worse, and Zarathustra calls on his audience to choose between them, and not to choose as do the evildoers. The world, as it is, was made by the joint action of the two principles, and they also fixed the alternative fates of men, for the wicked, Hell--the worst life; and for the holy, Heaven--the best mental state. After the creation was accomplished, the two principles drew off from each other, the evil one making choice of evil and of evil works, and the bounteous spirit choosing righteousness, making his strong seat in heaven, and taking for his own those who do good and who believe in him. The Daevas and their followers are incapable of making a just choice between the good and the evil; they have surrendered themselves from the outset to the "Worst Mind," the demon of fury, and to all evil works. (There are vague suggestions here of a temptation and a fall, but only of the evil spirits and their followers.) From this point onwards the world is filled with a great struggle. On the one side is Ahura, the only god worshipped by name in the Gathas. Ahura is a heaven-god, he is, in fact, the bright heaven, and then the good and beneficent being who dwells in brightness. In the hymns he is losing his definite character and becoming an abstraction, a god of dogmatics rather than of history. He is the good principle personified, and as becomes a god of such transcendent character, he does not act directly, but through his satellites. His attributes personified, do his bidding, aid the saints in spiritual ways, and prepare for the better order of things. On the other hand are the Daevas with the demon of wrath, who propagate everywhere lies and mischief, and heap up vengeance for themselves against the final judgment. For the good there is nothing better than to aid,--for they can aid, in bringing on the renovation, dwelling with Ahura even now, and by his attributes which work in them as well as in him, reinforcing the righteous order, and preparing themselves to dwell where wisdom has her home. In the end the Demon of the Lie will be rendered harmless and delivered up to Righteousness as a captive. Inconsistencies.--As it happens in every such reform, the new teaching is not quite consistent with itself; old views are taken up into the new teaching, although they do not harmonise with it; the spiritual way of looking at things alternates with a more worldly way. The following are some examples of this:--The great doctrine of Heaven and Hell as inner states, as being simply the best and the worst state of mind, is clearly announced; but the traditional view of future abodes of happiness and misery also appears. The Kinvat-bridge is mentioned several times in the Gathas, over which Iran conceived that the individual had to pass after death. If he was righteous the bridge bore him safely over to the sacred mountain, where the good lived again; if he was wicked, he fell off the bridge and found himself in the place of torment. It is another inconsistency that Zarathustra expects, on the one hand, to convert the world by his preaching, while on the other hand his sense of the antagonism between the good and the evil spirits and their followers often hurries him into violent methods. One hymn concludes with a summons to his adherents to fall on the unbelievers with the halberd, and he is constantly predicting their sudden overthrow. Along with this, we may mention that he sought to ally himself with powerful families for the sake of the support they would bring the cause. The name of Vishtaspa, king we know not of what realm, is always associated with the prophet as that of his royal patron; other influential friends are also mentioned. Another point, in which we notice accommodation to existing usage, is that of sacrifice. The Gathas have several noble passages describing the true sacrifice man has to offer to God for his goodness, as consisting simply in the offering of self, in the devotion to the deity of all a man is, and all he can do. At the same time Zarathustra has not a word to say in disparagement of the sacrifice of victims. He prays for guidance in this part of religious duty; he desires to have everything connected with sacrifice done in the best way and with the most effective hymns. Thus the spiritual life is not left to stand alone. There is a personal walk with God, our piety is said to be God's daughter in us, his righteousness is working in us and moulding us for his purposes; both will and deed of the good man are attributed to him, and the processes are described with true insight by which the soul is sanctified and wedded to her task and her true destiny; but at the same time there is an intent looking to that sacred Fire which is an outward representative of deity; there is the offering of victims, even of horses, when the prophet's mind is bent on war (the Homa-offering does not occur, and we may suppose the prophet rejected this service of the deity by intoxication); there is the smiting of the demons with prayer, and imprecations, similar to those in the Psalms, against adversaries of the cause. It is no proof of unspirituality that the welfare of the Kine, with whose wail the call of the prophet began, is steadily kept in view during his mission. The agriculturists are on the side of the righteous being, good and ever-better tillage is a means of pleasing him; it is his will that the kine should be freed from alarms and should prosper; and he may be appealed to to give lessons with a view to that end. The doctrine passes far beyond its first occasion; yet the occasion which called for it is never lost sight of. The Gathas, taken alone, tell us hardly anything of the religion in which Zarathustra's fellow-countrymen believed. They believed undoubtedly in many gods; in those parts of the Avesta which come next to the hymns in time, polytheism is in full force. That Zarathustra only speaks of one god, Ahura (though he also speaks of "the Immortals" generally), may be due to the limited extent and special purpose of the hymns, but it may also be taken as an indication that the prophet did not needlessly interfere with the beliefs of his people: content to preach the doctrine with which he was charged, and which was to him the sum and substance of all religion, he, like several other religious founders, stirred up no strife he could avoid. The doctrine he preached was not unprepared for in the mind of his country, and continued to be the leading feature of Persian religion in subsequent periods. It is a momentous step in religious progress, which the prophet of Iran calls on his countrymen to take. We notice the main features of the advance. 1. Man is Called to Judge between the Gods.--Zarathustra, like Elijah, puts before his people the choice between two worships. Various distinctions between the two cases might be drawn. In the Scripture case Baal is not a bad god, but simply the wrong god for Israel to worship. In the case of our reformer the difference between the two worships is a deeper one. The individual is to choose his god, he is to declare of his own motion that one god is better than others, and that no worship whatever is to be paid to these others. This was a new departure in antiquity; the early world loved to think of many gods, all alike divine and worshipful, each race or clan having its god whom it naturally served, or each part of the earth being portioned out to a divine lord of its own. Neither Greece nor Rome ever thought of making the individual man the arbiter among the unseen beings whom he knew, and requiring him to decide which of them he should consider divine, and which he should disown. In the case before us, moreover, the choice is to be made on moral grounds. Men are called to judge of the character of the beings who are called gods, they are told that there is no necessity to acknowledge those of whom they disapprove, they are emancipated from the fear of hurtful and evil beings. There is war in heaven, and men are encouraged to take part in that war, and to cast off allegiance to such powers as do not make for righteousness. How there came to be such strife among the gods, and how it became necessary that men should judge of it, we have no clear information; we only know that the momentous step was called for and was taken. The belief, however, remains even after the decision that there are unseen evil beings, who had influence in forming the constitution of things, and who have influence still over the government of the world. The position taken up is not monotheism. The good god is not sole creator or sole governor of the world, he is a limited being; from the outset he has only in part got his own way, and he has adversaries in the very constitution of things, whom he cannot get rid of. Persian thought is dualistic; the conception of an Evil Creator and Governor co-ordinate with the good one differentiates it from the thought of India, which always tends to a principle of unity. 2. In the second place, this religion is essentially intolerant and persecuting. Having chosen his side in the great war which divides the universe, man can only prosecute that war with all his force; he must regard the Daevas and their followers as his enemies, and try to weaken and extinguish them. The general feeling of the ancient world about differences in religion was that all religions were equally legitimate, each on its own soil. The Jews, we know, shocked the Greeks and Romans greatly by denying this, and maintaining that there was only one true religion, namely, their own, and that all the others were worships of gods false and vain. But the Persians came before the Jews in this; the Gathas preach persecution, and the insults offered by Persian kings in later times to the religions of Egypt and Greece were no doubt justified by their convictions. In Persia, as in Israel, religion had come to entertain the notion of false gods. And a religion which entertains that notion must be exclusive. Those who have refused to worship beings hitherto deemed gods, on the ground that they ought not to be worshipped and are not truly gods, cannot but desire to bring the worship of such beings entirely to an end, and to make the worship of the true God prevail instead, by rude or by gentle means, as the stage of civilisation may in each case suggest. Growth of Mazdeism.--After the Gathas proper we have other hymns written in the Gathic dialect, from which the history of the religion after its foundation may be to some extent inferred.[3] These show that the Zarathustrian religion was regarded, after the departure of the founder, as a great divine institution, and was worked out on the lines he had laid down. The forms of it became of course more fixed. The god it serves is now called "Ahura Mazda," the "All-Knowing Lord" (the name is afterwards contracted into the Greek Oromazdes, the Persian Hormazd; and the religion is called from it Mazdeism); he is still implored for spiritual blessings both for this and for the future life, and for furtherance in agriculture. There is, however, a tendency to address prayer not only to Ahura himself but to beings connected with him. As if the mind wearied of dwelling on the one supreme, the Bountiful Immortals are associated with him, the parts of his holy creation are invoked, the fire which is most closely identified with him, the stars which are his body, the waters, the earth, all good animals and plants. The kine's soul receives sacrifice, and not only the kine's soul which we have met before, but the souls of "just men and holy women," the Fravashis or spirits not only of the departed but of the living also, the service of which continues and increases henceforward in Persian religion. These are invented deities and have a shadowy character; but gods of more substance, and more historical reality also came into view at this point. Zarathustra becomes a god, the hymns themselves are adored; the Homa-offering reappears, Mithra is often coupled with Ahura, other old gods creep back and are mentioned along with the moral abstractions, which also increase in number; in one passage there are said to be thirty-three objects of worship, a number which also occurs in India. [Footnote 3: Yasna Haptanghaiti, _S. B. E._ xxxi. p. 218, _sqq._, and others following.] Organisation of the Heavenly Beings.--With all this multiplication there is, as we shall see, no compromise of the supreme claims of Ahura. In some of the hymns, all beings, all attributes, all places, and all times of a sacred nature are heaped indiscriminately together, in interminable catalogues. But this apparent confusion is corrected by a remarkable tendency to organisation. The Persian religion ultimately came to have a very simple and very striking theology; and that theology was made up by transforming the abstractions in which the founder dealt, into persons, and arranging them after the pattern of Oriental society. In the later Yasnas (liturgies) a figure rises into view which the Gathas do not mention; that of Angra Mainyu, later Ahriman, the Bad Spirit. In this counterpart of Spenta Mainyu, the Good Spirit (who is not at first identified with Ahura, but proceeds from him), the demons obtain a personal head, and the dualism which appears in all nature and all human society is thus brought to a personal expression. Ahura and Ahriman confront each other as the good power and the evil. Both alike had part in making the world what it is. In every part of the world, and in all that is felt and done they are at strife. Ahura, to quote Mr. Darmesteter, is all light, truth, goodness, and knowledge; Angra Mainyu is all darkness, falsehood, wickedness, and ignorance. Whatever the good spirit makes, the evil spirit mars; he opposes every creation of Ahura's with a plague of his own, it is he who mixed poison with plants, smoke with fire, sin with man, and death with life. The Attributes of Ahura.--Each of these beings has his retinue. That of Ahura was formed first; it consists of his attributes. Even in the hymns the attributes are regarded as persons, inseparable companions of Ahura; appeals are made to one or another of them, according as the worshipper seeks help from one side or the other of the divine being. By a process which frequently occurs in religious thought, they afterwards come to be more formally arranged and defined; there are six of them, and each is charged with a province of the divine economy. They are as follows: Vohu Mano (Bahman) Good Mind; he is the head and the guardian of the living creation of Ahura. Asha Vahista (Ardibehesht), Excellent Holiness; he is the genius of fire. Kshathra Vairya (Shahrevar), Perfect Sovereignty; he is the lord of metals. Spenta Armaiti (Spendarmat) divine piety, conceived as female, the goddess of the earth. Haurvatat (Khordat) health. Ameretat (Amerdat) immortality. The last two are a pair, and have charge conjointly of waters and of trees. Ahura is himself one of these spirits; thus there are seven supreme spirits. Retinue of Ahriman.--Angra Mainyu on his part comes to have a corresponding retinue of six daevas, each being the evil counterpart of one of the good spirits. Evil Mind, Sickness, and Decay are the names of some of them. The whole spiritual world is ranged on the side of the good or of the evil deity. The Izatas (Izeds) or angels consist of gods of immemorial worship in Iran, some of whom are the same as gods worshipped in India; but the title also applies to gods, heavenly and earthly, of later creation, so that the class is a very wide and elastic one. It comprises some beings who have been reduced by the operation of the new ideas from the first to the second rank of deities, such as Verethragna, who corresponds to the Vedic Indra, and Mithra, the sun-god. These now appear in the same rank as gods of the newer style, such as Sraosha, Obedience, and survivals of early superstition, such as the "Curse of the wise," a very powerful Ized. Zarathustra himself belongs to this class of deities, a miscellaneous one indeed. Another class of sacred beings of world-wide extent is that of the Fravashis spoken of above. If the good spirits are many and various, so are the evil. Of these are the great demon-serpent Azhi who plays a great part in Persian mythology, as Vrittra does in Indian. Aeshma, later Asmodeus, may be named; he is one of the Drvants, or storm-fiends. Gahi, an unfaithful goddess, has fallen to a demon of unchastity; the Pairikas (Peris) are female tempters; the Yatu are demons connected with sorcery. The firm organisation of these hosts of spiritual beings, and the sense of a great conflict in which they are all engaged from the greatest to the least of them, preserve Mazdeism from the weakness and absurdity which are apt to creep over religion when the population of the upper and the nether regions is unduly multiplied. The faithful never forget Ahura in favour of the minor deities, nor do they forget that morals and industry are the chief ends of religion, and that in cultivating these they hasten the coming of the kingdom. The following is the formula, the "Praise of Holiness," with which every act of worship begins in the Yasts[4] (liturgies of the Izeds): May Ahura Mazda be rejoiced! Holiness is the best of all good! I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathustra, one who hates the daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura. [Footnote 4: _S. B. E._ vol. xxiii.] Ancient Testimonies to the Persian Religion.--It is at this stage, while it is still in a state of vigour, that we hear of the Persian religion from various quarters in ancient records. The chapters in the latter half of Isaiah, which so vigorously denounce idolatry, hail the approach of Cyrus towards Babylon, and claim unity of religion between him and the Jews (Isaiah xliv. 28 _sq._). He is the shepherd who is to lead Jehovah's people back to their own land, and to cause their temple to be rebuilt. And this claim that the Jewish and the Persian religions were the same, that the Jews and the Persians were alike worshippers of the one true God, while all the surrounding nations were polytheists and idolaters, was admitted on the side of Persia. After his conquest of Babylon, Cyrus at once permitted the exiles to return to their own land. The Persian monarchs of the following century, Darius and Artaxerxes, continued to take a friendly interest in the worship of Jehovah, whom they apparently regarded as a form of their own god, "the God of heaven," Hormazd (Ezra vii. 21). They accordingly took measures for the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusalem, and for the introduction there of the new religious constitution which had been prepared at Babylon. This could not have happened if the religion of the Persian kings had not been a pure service of one god,[5] and the other information we have on the subject shows that the Mazdeism of Persia at this period was a very elevated form of the religion. The inscriptions of Darius do not mention the spread of the worships of Mitra and Anahita, which, however, make their appearance in the later inscriptions of Artaxerxes; in none of them is Ahriman spoken of. This, of course, does not prove that he was not believed in; when the Jewish prophet proclaims that Jehovah makes both light and darkness, that he both wounds and heals, there may be a reference to Persian dualism. Yet Mazdeism was capable of appearing, and did appear to the foreigner, as a lofty worship of a god of light and goodness. The same impression is produced by the descriptions of the Greek writers. Herodotus (i. 131, 132) writes as follows; he is a contemporary of Ezra: "The following statements as to the customs of the Persians is to be relied on. They do not fashion images of the gods, nor build temples, nor altars--they consider it wrong to do so, and count it a proof of folly; their reason for this being, as I think, that they do not believe the gods to be beings of the same nature with men as the Greeks do. They are accustomed to offer sacrifices to Zeus on the summits of mountains; they call the whole circle of heaven Zeus. They sacrifice also to the sun, and the moon, and the earth, and to fire, and to water, and to the winds. These are the ancient parts of their ritual, but they have added the worship of the Queen of heaven, Aphrodite; it was from the Assyrians and the Arabs that they acquired this. The Assyrian name for Aphrodite is Mylitta, the Arabs call her Alilat, the Persians, Anahita.[6] Such being their gods the Persians sacrifice to them on this wise. They have no altar, and do not use fire in sacrifice, nor do they have libations nor flutes, nor wreaths nor barley. He who wishes to sacrifice takes his victim to a clean spot and there calls on the deity, his turban wreathed, as a rule, with myrtle. He does not think of praying for benefits for himself individually in connection with his sacrifice; he prays for the welfare of the Persian people and king; he himself is one of the Persian people. He then cuts up the victim, boils the pieces and spreads them out on the softest grass he can find--if possible, on clover. This done, one of the Magians who has come to assist, sings a theogony,[7] as they call the accompanying hymn; no sacrifice is allowed to be offered without one of the Magi being present. After a short pause the sacrificer takes up the pieces of flesh and does with them whatever he likes." [Footnote 5: These two religions, Kuenen says, were more like each other than any other two religions of antiquity.--_Religion of Israel_, iii. 33.] [Footnote 6: Herodotus says Mitra; but this is a mistake, whether of the father of history or of a transcriber.] [Footnote 7: One of the Yashts in praise of the particular deity.] In other passages Herodotus tells us of the extreme sanctity attributed by the Persians to waters, to fire, and to the sun. He also tells us that they regarded lying as the worst possible offence, and next to it falling into debt, since the debtor is tempted to tell lies. Plutarch writes as follows, quoting from an earlier Greek writer of the third century B.C.: "Zoroaster the Magician,[8] who was 5000 years before the war of Troy, named the good god Oromazes and the other Arimonius ... Oromazes is engendered of the clearest and purest light, Arimonius of deep darkness; and they war one upon another. The former of these created six other gods (here follow the Amshaspands), but the latter produceth as many other in number, of adverse operation to the former.... There will come a time when this Arimonius, who brings into the world plague and famine, shall of necessity be rooted out and utterly destroyed for ever ... then shall men be all in happy estate, they shall need no more food, nor cast any shadow from them; and that god who hath effected all this shall repose himself for a time, and rest in quiet." [Footnote 8: Holland's translation.] The Vendidad: Laws of Parity.--These extracts show the growth of certain ideas which we have not noticed before. The dualism is being worked out more in detail, other gods are coming in, and the doctrine of the sanctity of the elements has made its appearance. That doctrine is the basis of a new set of ideas and practices which we have now to consider, those namely which are contained in the Vendidad, one of the later works of the Persian canon. To pass from the Gathas to the Vendidad is like passing from Isaiah to Leviticus, and the laws of purity of Persian religion bear a strong analogy to those of Judaism. The Vendidad[9] is composed principally of laws and rules designed to direct the faithful in the great task of maintaining their ritual purity. The whole of life is dominated in this work by the ideas of purity and defilement; the great business of life is to avoid impurity, and when it is contracted to remove it in the correct manner as quickly as possible. Purity here is not primarily sanitary or even moral; though such considerations were no doubt indirectly present. Impure is what belongs to the bad spirit, whether because he created it, as he did certain noxious animals, or because he has established a hold on it as he does on men at death. A man is impure, not because he has exposed himself to the infection of disease, not because he has contracted a stain on his conscience, but because he has touched something of which a Daeva has possession, and so has come under the influence of that Daeva. Purification, therefore, and the act of healing consist of exorcisms of various kinds. This notion of purity plays a great part in other old religions also; it is here that we see its original meaning most clearly. Another great feature of the doctrine of purity in the Vendidad is that the elements, fire, earth, and water, are holy, and to defile them in any way is the most grievous of sins. As everything which leaves the body is unclean, a man must not blow up a fire with his breath, and bathing with a view to cleanliness is not to be thought of. The disposal of the dead was a matter of immense difficulty, since corpses, being unclean, could be committed neither to Fire nor to the Earth. They are ordered to be exposed naked on a building constructed for that purpose on high ground, so that birds of prey may devour them; and a great part of the Vendidad is taken up with directions for purification, after a death has taken place, of the persons who were in the house, of the house itself, of those who carried the corpse, and of the road they travelled, etc. [Footnote 9: _S. B. E._ vol. iv.] How this Doctrine Entered Mazdeism.--This system was not in force in the time of Darius and Artaxerxes (when the dead were buried or, as in the case of Croesus, burned) though the ideas were appearing at that period on which it is founded; and it is plain that it has no necessary or vital connection with the religion of Zarathustra. But in later Mazdeism there are many such importations. This religion, in its course from east to west, came in contact with beliefs and usages with which, though foreign to its own nature, it yet came to terms. Mazdeism is not originally a markedly priestly religion; it is thought that it became so when planted in Media. No doubt there were germs in the early Iranian religion of a priestly system. Zarathustra himself was a priest and was favourable to due religious observances. But it is quite contrary to his spirit that life should be governed entirely by ritual law. It was in Media that this came to be the case. The name of Magi, originally perhaps that of a tribe, became in Media the name of the priesthood, and so furnished an additional title for Mazdeism. It is to this stage of the religion that the priestly legislation of the Vendidad, with all its puritanical regulation of life, is to be ascribed. (The practice of exposing the bodies of the dead to be devoured by birds of prey is probably of Scythian origin.) In this period also, remote from the origin of the religion, we find a new view of Zarathustra himself and of his revelation. In the earlier sources Zarathustra composes his hymns in a natural manner; he is not an absolute lawgiver, but depends on princes for the carrying out of his views. In the later works the revelation takes place in a series of private interviews between Ahura and Zarathustra; the prophet puts questions to the god, and the god dictates in reply sentences which are at once promulgated as sacred laws. Mazdeism, like other religions, has its wooden age, its verbal inspiration, and its priestly code. To trace the lines by which the influence of the religion of Persia asserted itself in the wider world would be a large enterprise: only a few indications can be given here. One great service which that religion did to the world was undoubtedly that it had sympathy with the Jews, and enabled Jewish monotheism to take a fresh start on its way to become a religion for mankind. Mazdeism itself had a tinge of universalism; Zarathustra expected his religion to spread beyond his own land, and it did spread over all the provinces of Iran. It never became a world-religion, but it might have done so had it not become swathed and choked in Magism or had any new movement arisen in it to assert the supremacy of its purely human over its artificial elements. But Ahura himself, perhaps, was too abstract and philosophic a god to inspire missionary ardour; it needed a being more firmly rooted in history, a god who had done more to prove the energy and intensity of his nature, and, further, a god more undoubtedly omnipotent than Ahura, to establish a universal rule. The interesting inquiry remains, how far the Jewish religion was modified by its contact with the Persian. The laws of purity in the Jewish priestly code find a close parallel in the Vendidad; but with the Israelites the notion of religious purity existed, and was worked out in considerable detail, as we see from Deuteronomy, before the exile, and therefore long before the period of the Vendidad. The belief in the resurrection, found among the Jews after the exile, and not before it, has been maintained by many to be a loan from Persia, where the belief in future reward and punishment was a settled thing from the time of Zarathustra. But the Jews do not appear to have grasped this belief all at once or fully formed. They arrived at it gradually, many Old Testament scholars affirm, and by spiritual inferences timidly put forth at first, from their own religious consciousness. A belief which the Jewish religion was capable of producing of itself need not, without clearer evidence than we possess, be regarded as borrowed. We are not on much surer ground when we come to ask whether the angels and demons of Judaism are connected with those of Persia. This belief also arises naturally in Judaism, where God came to be thought of as very high and very inaccessible, and intermediate beings were therefore needed. Some of the figures of the Jewish spirit-world are, no doubt, due to Persia; the Ashmodeus of the book of Tobit is a Persian figure. Later Judaism is like Parsism in arranging the heavenly beings in a hierarchy, and assigning to the chief angels special functions in the administration of God's kingdom, and still more so when the upper hierarchy is confronted by a lower one with a great adversary and father of lies at its head. But this takes place long after the Persian contact. The Persian deities had, as a rule, too little legend to enable them to be received in other countries. Ahura does not travel. Anaitis is thought to have passed into Greece, changing her name to Aphrodite, but also to the severer Artemis; but she is perhaps not original in Persia. The Persian god best known in other lands was Mithra, the sun-god and god of wisdom. He was a favourite with the Roman armies in the early empire, and representations of him as a hero in the act of slaying a bull in a cave have been found in many lands. There were also mysteries connected with him, in which the candidates had to pass through a great series of trials and hardships. Persia influenced Europe and the west of Asia at the same period in another way. Manicheism, a system which was one of the three great universal religions of that time, and had a worship and a priesthood and a sacred literature of its own, was founded by a native of Persia. He laboured at a distance from his own country, and the doctrines he propounded came more from Chaldea than from Persia, and consisted of great histories, like those of the Gnostics, of the doings and sufferings of cosmic and other persons; a great struggle between the powers of light and those of darkness was one of its principal features. The worship of this church was spiritual; its morals were in theory of the purest and most ascetic kind, being founded on a principle of dualism in the material world, and requiring much self-denial and long fasts. The higher virtue of the system was not, however, required of the ordinary member. Later Parsism, both in Iran and in India, has shown a disposition to cast off dualism, and to become, both philosophically and practically, a monistic system. BOOKS RECOMMENDED _S. B. E._ vols. iv., xxiii. (Darmesteter); xxxi. (Mills). _The Zendavesta_, vols. v., xviii., xxiv., xxxvii., xlvii. Pahlavi Texts (E. W. West). _The Histories of Antiquity_ of Duncker, Maspero, and Ed. Meyer. Haug's _Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis_. Second Edition, 1878, F. Windischmann, _Zoroastr. Studien_, 1863. Geldner, "Zoroaster," in _Encyclopædia Britannica_; "Zoroastrianism," in _Encyclopædia Bibl._ Mills, _A Study of the Five Zarathustrian Gathas_, 1892-94. Lehmann, in De la Saussaye. Dadhabai Naoroji, _The Parsee Religion_. On Mithraism, _Dieterich Eine Mithras-liturgie._ Cumont, _The Mysteries of Mithra_, 1903. PART V UNIVERSAL RELIGION CHAPTER XXII CHRISTIANITY The writer is aware that in offering a chapter on Christianity at the conclusion of this work, he attempts a difficult task. If treated at all, Christianity must be dealt with in the same way as the other religions, and no assumptions must be made for it which were not made for them. And a view of our own religion written, not from the standpoint of the faith and love we feel towards it but of scientific accuracy, must appear to many pious Christians to be cold and meagre. But, on the other hand, Christianity is the key of the arch we have been building, the consummating member of the development we have sought to trace, and to withhold any estimate of its character would be to leave our work most imperfect. It seems better, therefore, that some hints at least should be offered on this part of the subject. Christianity cannot indeed be dealt with in the same proportion as the other religions; that would far exceed our space. But some views are offered regarding its essential nature, which the writer believes to be so firmly founded in fact that even those who are not Christians cannot deny them, and thus to afford a valid criterion for the comparison of Christianity with other faiths. In the chapter on the religion of Israel we saw how the prophets before and during the exile began to cherish the idea of a new relation between God and man, which would not depend on sacrifice nor be confined to Israel. God, they declared, was preparing a new age, in which he would receive man to more intimate communion than before; and man would be guided in the right path, not by covenants and laws, but by the constant inspiration of a present deity. The new religion would be one which all nations could share. Jerusalem, the seat of the true faith, would attract all eyes; all would turn to her because of the Lord her God. But, alas, instead of growing broader to realise its universal destiny, the religion of Israel grew narrower after the exile, and seemed to forget the prospects thus opened up to it. Judaism, though immeasurably enriched in its inner consciousness by the teaching of the prophets, maintained its earlier semi-heathenish forms of worship, only surrounding them with new stateliness and new significance; and clothed itself in a hard shell of public ritual and personal observance. The Jews separated themselves rigorously from the world, and cultivated an exclusive pride; as if their religion had been given them for themselves alone, and not for mankind. Under the Maccabees they displayed the most heroic courage and tenacity, maintaining their own beliefs and rites amid the flood of Hellenism which at one time almost swept them away. That they carried their nationality unimpaired through this period is one of the most wonderful achievements of the Jewish race. In the succeeding period, however, many signs appeared showing that their religion was losing energy. The rule of the priests and scribes extended more and more over the whole of life, tradition and observance grew more and more extensive, but the moral judgment lost its elasticity. The sense of the divine presence grew faint, and multitudes of spirits filled the air instead, oppressing human life with a sense of vague anxiety. As political independence was lost, the people became less happy and more easily excited. But while formalism held increasing sway over their actions, imagination was free, and surrounded both the past history of Israel and its future triumphs with manifold embellishments. In such a condition was the religion of the Jews when Jesus appeared in Palestine and created a new order of things. Christianity was at first a movement within Judaism. Like all the religions which trace their history to personal founders, it grew from very small beginnings; but its doctrine was of such a nature, that if circumstances favoured, it could not fail to spread beyond Judaism, to men of other lands and other tongues. The doctrine consisted primarily in a declaration that that great religious consummation, the kingdom of God, which the prophets had foretold, which was regarded by the fellow-countrymen of Jesus as a far-off hope, and which had just been heralded by John the Baptist as being immediately at hand, had actually taken place. The perfect state was announced to have arrived, and to be a thing not of the future but of the present. The long-expected intercourse of God and man on new terms of perfect agreement and sympathy, had come into operation; any one who chose could assure himself of the fact. The title by which Jesus described the intimate relationship of man and God which he announced, sufficiently shows its character. God is the Father in heaven; men are his children, and all that men have to do is to realise that this is so, to enter the circle and begin to live with God on such terms. The great God seeks to have every one living with him as his child; and religion is no more, no less, than this communion. Father and child dwell together in perfect love and confidence; no outward regulations are needed for their intercourse, no bargains, no traditions, no ritual, no pilgrimage, no sacrifice. The intercourse can be carried on by any one, anywhere. It is not a matter of apparatus, but a purely moral affair, an affair of love. The Father knows all about the child, is able to give him all he needs, even before he asks it; is willing to forgive his sins when he repents of them; is anxious above all to reinforce his efforts after goodness. The child knows that the Father is always near him, carries every need and wish to him in prayer, even though knowing that he is aware of them beforehand; regards all that happens, either good or ill, as sent by him for the best ends, and seeks in every case to know his will and to submit to it sweetly, and execute it faithfully. Nothing could be simpler, or deeper, or broader. Religion is here presented free from all local or accidental or obscuring elements; religion itself is here revealed. Accepted in this form, it does for man all that it can. The relation between God and man is made purely moral; the link is not that of race, nor does it consist in anything external. The individual--every individual who will pause to hear--is assured that there exists between God and him a natural sympathy, and is urged to allow that sympathy to have its way. It is easy to see what effect such a belief must have. The individual, bidden to seek the principle of union with God not in any external circumstance or arrangement, but in his own heart, becomes conscious of an inner freedom from all artificial restraints. He finds in his own heart the secret of happiness, and is raised above all fears and irritations; and hence the forces of his nature are encouraged to unfold themselves freely. He sees clearly what as a human person he is called to be and to do, and feels a new energy to realise his ideals. As God has come down to him, he is lifted up to God; a divine power has entered his life, which is able to do all things in him and for him. It may be said that what we have described are the effects of religious inspiration generally, and may take place in connection with any faith. But the divine impulse communicated to mankind in Christianity differs from that of any other religion in two important respects. In the first place, the God who here enters into union with man possesses full reality and a character of the utmost energy. It is Jehovah with whom we have to do here, changed, indeed, but still the same; a God of real and irresistible power, on whom speculation has not laid its weakening hand. The union of man with God is not secured by making God abstract and vague, nor is his infinite kindness and forgivingness purchased at the expense of his intensity and awfulness. With Jesus, God is still the power who has actual control over everything that goes on, and who is able to do even what appears to be most impossible. He is a God of strict justice and holiness; though he is so kind, his judgments have not ceased, but are still impending over guilty men and a guilty people. It is he who can cast both soul and body into hell. It is a God of such energy, such zeal, who yet offers himself as the willing benefactor and defender, and the loving guide and helper of the humblest of his human creatures. In the second place, the terms of the union here formed between God and man are such as can be found nowhere else. The deity inspires man not to any particular kind of acts, not to sacrifices, nor to withdrawal from the world, but inspires him simply to realise himself. Man is assured of the sympathy of this great God, and is then left in freedom as to the mode in which he should serve him. No rules are prescribed; human life is not pressed into an artificial mould, as is the case in so many great religions; no preference is accorded to any one pursuit over others. This religion is not a yoke to coerce men and to make them less, but an inspiration capable of entering into every kind of life, and of making men greater and better in whatever occupation. Even religious duties are left to form themselves naturally; all that is insisted on is that the child shall have living and real intercourse with the Father. Prayer is necessary, and so is the practice of good works; the child must keep in sympathy with the Father by doing as he does. Further than this, the forms of the religious life are not prescribed. With regard to morals, it is the same. The moral life is to build itself up freely from within; goodness is not to be a matter of rule, but the spontaneous and happy development of a principle which lives and speaks deep in the centre of the heart. Jesus is not a lawgiver, save in a metaphorical sense: the law which he sets up is nothing more than that which every man, when he turns away from all that is artificial, can find in his own breast. It is one feature of the spontaneity and spirituality of the religion of Jesus, that it has no constitution. Jesus regarded himself as the founder not of a new religion, but only of an inner circle of more devoted believers inside the old religion of his country; he did not therefore feel called to draw up rules for a new faith, and the result of this is that the mechanism of the religion is of later growth. The authority of the founder can be appealed to for a direct and constant intercourse with God as of a child with his father, and for the conduct of men towards each other, which such intercourse with God necessarily implies, but for hardly anything more. Here, as in no other historical religion, man is free. The religion of Jesus, therefore, is one of love alone. The divine nature consists in love, and the impulse which religion communicates, is simply that which proceeds from being loved and loving. And a religion of love finds the way, as no other can, to make man free, to unseal his energies, and to lead him upwards to the best life. The appearance of such a religion forms the most momentous epoch of human history. He who brought it forward must occupy a unique position in the estimation of mankind. It can never be superseded. It is no doubt the case that the doctrine of Jesus was not in all respects new. The ideas of the prophets live again in him; his followers have always found many of the Jewish Psalms to be perfectly suited to their experience. Jesus lived in the faith of Israel, and considered that he had come only to make that faith better understood, and to free it from improper accretions. What was new was his own person. His great work was that he embodied his teaching in a life which expressed it perfectly. It is far short of the truth to say that there was no inconsistency between what he taught and his own conduct. His life is a demonstration, in every detail, of the effects of his religion; all flows with the utmost simplicity, and even as a matter of necessity, out of the truth he taught. What he preached was, in fact, himself; he was himself living in the kingdom of God, to which he called others to come; he knew in his own experience what it was to live as a child with the Father in heaven, and to view all persons, all things, all duties, in the light of that intercourse. All his acts and words flowed from the same spring in his own inner experience. In no other way could his life shape itself than as it did, and he saw with perfect clearness what men must be, and on what terms they must live together when God and they were as Father and children to each other. What he thus knew he lived, as if no laws but those of the kingdom of heaven had any authority for him, and so he presented to the world that living embodiment of the true religion, which has been the main strength of Christianity. Jesus announces a new union of God with man, a union in which he himself is the first to rejoice, but which all may share along with him; and hence his person counts for more in his religion than that of any other religious founder in his, and necessarily becomes an object of faith to all who enter the communion. The doctrine does not produce its specific effect apart from the person of Jesus. Because in him alone they know the truth which brings them peace, his followers regard him, in a way which has no parallel in any other religion, as their Saviour. But this name is given to him by his followers, as it is claimed by himself, for another reason also. Jesus was more than a teacher. He felt a power to be present in him which was able to supply all needs and to comfort all sorrows; he did not shrink from summoning all who were weary and heavy laden to come to him, nor from undertaking to give them rest. Keenly alive to the sufferings of others, and able to perceive even those sufferings of which they were not themselves conscious, he felt it to be his mission to deal with the sadder side of human life; he was a physician sent to the sick, a shepherd seeking the lost sheep. It was among the poor and the sick, and even among the outcasts of society, in whom the sense of need was strongest, that he felt himself most at home and most able to fulfil his calling. Thus the motive of compassion enters strongly into all he said and did: but the compassion is not hopeless in this case as in the similar case of Gautama (see chapter xx.), nor is the cure recommended for the ills of humanity that of withdrawal from mankind or of forgetfulness. Here there is a belief in God. The compassion from which the religion flows is not as in the case of Gautama, that of a preacher who has ceased to trust in any heavenly power; it is announced as existing first of all in the heart of God Himself. God can do all things, and in his yearning pity for his children has sent his representative to assure them of his sympathy and to comfort them in their sorrows. With Jesus therefore no evil is so great as not to admit of a positive cure; he feels the remedy of all human ills to be present in his own heart, and so he appears as the Messiah, not such a Messiah as his countrymen looked for, but as the true Messiah, in whom all human wants are met, and all human hopes fulfilled. The cure which he announces for all ills consists in devotion to the will of the Father in heaven. To give oneself unreservedly to the labour of realising the purposes of the heavenly Father in one's own heart and in the world, is to rise above all cares and sorrows; enthusiasm in the Father's service is the sovereign remedy. To one who believes in the Father, and seeks to live as his child, no despair is possible. To be engaged in his business is at all times the highest happiness, and his kingdom is assuredly coming, though man has still the privilege of working for it,--the kingdom in which all darkness and evil will be put away. We have indicated the chief points which in a scientific comparison of Christianity with other religions appear to constitute its distinctive character; and we have sought to make our statement such as the reasonable adherent of other religions will feel to be warranted. The points are these. Christianity is a religion of freedom, it is a system of inner inspiration more than of external law or system, it is embodied in the living person of its founder, in which alone it can be truly seen; and the founder is one who is living himself in the relation to God to which he calls men to come, and feels himself called and sent to be the Saviour of men. It is impossible in this work to treat Christianity on the same scale as the other religions; but the question of its universalism must necessarily receive attention. Jesus himself did not expressly say that his religion was for all men. It was his immediate aim to bring about the renewal of the faith of his countrymen, and to give it a more spiritual character; and some of his followers considered that he had aimed at nothing more than this. But he formed a circle of disciples and adherents, which afterwards came to be the Christian Church, and he attached no ritual condition whatever to membership in that community. Nay, more; by his repudiation of the Jewish system of tradition he showed that the Jewish laws of ritual purity were not binding upon his disciples, and the further inference could readily be drawn, that one could enter the Kingdom without being a Jew at all. The strong missionary impulse of the infant religion brought it very early in contact with Gentile life, and the question soon arose, whether those who refused to become Jews could yet claim a share in the Messiah. It was the task of the Apostle Paul to work out the theory of the universalism of Christianity, and after some conflict the principle was recognised that in the Church all racial differences disappear; "in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek." This controversy once settled--and a few years sufficed to settle it--the new religion was free to spread in all directions. It spread rapidly; the gospel was very simple and imposed no burdensome conditions, and it soon proved itself to be capable of striking root in any country. The Apostle Paul was the first great theologian of the Church; but his doctrine, as will happen in such a case, does not in all points spring out of the nature of the religion itself. The Pauline theology is an attempt to reconcile the facts of Christianity and especially that great stumbling-block to the Jews, the death of the Messiah, with the requirements of Jewish thought. Instead of seeing in the death of Christ, as the older apostles at first did, a perplexing enigma, St. Paul saw in it the principal manifestation of the compassion of the Saviour, and the great purpose for which he had come into the world. He concentrated attention on Christ's death and made the cross rather than the doctrine of the Messiah the burden of his teaching. To understand Paul we must distinguish between his religion and his theology. His religious position is essentially the same as that of Jesus himself; with him, too, the new religion is that of father and child, and of the consequences which inevitably flow from such a union. But the movement of thought which began at the moment of the crucifixion, the concentration of Christian faith and love on the person of the Saviour, was now complete. The figure of the Crucified with its powerful tragic attraction, and with its deep lessons of conquest by self-surrender, of life by dying, remained from St. Paul onwards, in the centre of the faith. The world of the early centuries was in great need of a religion, and Christianity supplied the place which was vacant. Brought in contact, in the great ocean of the Roman Empire where all currents met, with religions and philosophies of every kind, it proved best suited to the task of supplying an inspiration for life, uniting together different classes of men and schools of thought. But in the wide arena of the Empire it received as well as gave, and in its encounters with strange rites and doctrines it also put on many a strange aspect. It became the heir of the thoughts and aspirations of a hundred empires; all the pious sentiments that flowed together from every quarter of the world helped to enrich its doctrine, and to make it the great reservoir it is of all the tendencies and views, even those most contrary to each other, which are connected with religion. Its institutions are of diverse origin. From the Jews it received its earliest Bible, for the Christians had at first no sacred books but those of the old covenant, and its weekly festival, though the day was changed. Its God was the God of the Old Testament, and its Saviour was the Messiah of Jewish prophecy, so that it was a continuation of the Jewish religion, and the attempts which were made by early Gnostics to dissolve this tie were soon forgotten. From Greece it received much. The world it had to conquer was Greek, and the conquest could only take place by an accommodation to Greek thought and to Greek ways. In the end of chapter xvi. we spoke of the second Greek religion which arose under the influence of philosophy, and found its way wherever Greek culture spread. In this great movement, Christianity found a preparation for its coming in the Greek world, without which its spread must have been much more doubtful. In the Graeco-Roman religion the advances which appear in Christianity are already prefigured. Thought has been busy in building up a great doctrine of God, such a God as human reason can arrive at, a Being infinitely wise and good, who is the first cause and the hidden ground of all things, the sum of all wisdom, beauty, and goodness, and in whom all men alike may trust. Greek thought also found much occupation in the attempt to reach a true account of man's moral nature and destiny. Both in theory and in practice many an attempt was made to build up the ideal life of man, and thus many minds were prepared for a religion which places the riches of the inner life above all others. The Greek philosopher's school was a semi-religious union, the central point of which was, as is the case with Christianity also, not outward sacrifice but mental activity. It is not wonderful therefore if Christian institutions were assimilated to some extent to the Greek schools. It has recently been shown that the celebration of the Eucharist came very early to bear a close resemblance to that of a Greek mystery, and that there is an unbroken line of connection between the discourse of the Greek philosopher and the Christian sermon. In some of the Greek schools pastoral visitation was practised, and the preacher kept up an oversight of the moral conduct of his adherents. While Christianity certainly had vigour enough to shape its own institutions, and may even be seen to be doing so in some of the books of the New Testament, the agreement between Greek and Christian practices amounts to something more than coincidence. It was towards the end of the second century that the alliance between Christianity and the Greek world was finally ratified. Till then belief and practice were determined mainly by custom and tradition; but now these were to give way to definite laws and settled institutions. There came to full development, about the period we have mentioned, a highly-organised system of church government, a canon of sacred books of Christian origin, and a creed in which the beliefs of Christians were drawn together in one statement. It cannot be denied that the elaborate external forms with which the religion of Jesus was thus invested went far to change its spirit also. But this happens to every religion which reaches the stage of organising itself in order to continue in the world and to rule permanently in human thought and in human society. No external forms can adequately express living religious ideas; and yet there must be external forms in order that religious ideas may be perpetuated. The ministers of the new truth inevitably rise in dignity till they grow into a hierarchy. That truth inevitably seeks to establish itself as scientifically true, and with the aid of the ruling philosophical tendency of the day clothes itself in a view of the universe and in a creed. Thus the essence of Christianity came to consist not in loving the Master and following him in faith and love, but in upholding the authority of the Church, receiving her sacraments, and believing various metaphysical and transcendental statements. Here also a hard shell is formed round the spiritual kernel of the religion which, if it is fitted to preserve the latter in rude and stormy times, is also fitted to confuse and also apt to conceal it. In each of the countries to which it came, Christianity adopted what it could of the religion formerly existing there. The old religions of these lands were not all alike, and hence it came to pass that as the language of Rome was transformed in various ways, and passed into the different yet cognate tongues of the Romance nations, so the religion of the Empire, combining with various forms of heathenism, passed into several national religions, the differences of which are at least as conspicuous as their similarity. In Italy Christianity appears to be a system of local deities, each village worshipping its own Madonna or saint. In Holland worship consists almost entirely of preaching. In other countries the ritual and the intellectual elements of religion are blended in varying proportions; and the former heathenism of each land is also to be traced in many a popular observance and belief. So great is the variety of the religions of Europe, not to mention that of the negroes or the Shakers of America, that many have doubted whether they ought all to be considered as branches of one faith, or whether they would not more fitly be regarded as so many national religions which have all alike connected themselves with Christianity. Against this there is to be urged in the first place that as a matter of history they are all undoubtedly offshoots of the religion of Jesus. It may also be urged that wherever the name of Jesus is named, his ideas must to some extent be present, however much they are obscured and prevented from operating by lower modes of view. The Christianity of no country ought to be judged by the attitude of its most ignorant or even of its average adherents; and in every land where Christianity prevails, an influence connected with religion is at work, which makes for the emancipation and elevation of the human person, and for the awakening of the manifold energies of human nature. This, as we saw, is the immediate and native tendency of the religion of Jesus; it opens the prison doors to them that are bound; it communicates by its inner encouragement an energy which makes the infirm forget their weaknesses, it fills the heart with hope and opens up new views of what man can do and can become. It is this that makes it the one truly universal religion. Islam, it is true, has also proved its power to live in many lands, and Buddhism has spread over half of Asia. But Buddhism is not a full religion, it does not tend to action but to passivity, and affords no help to progress. Islam, on the other hand, is a yoke rather than an inspiration; it is inwardly hostile to freedom, and is incapable of aiding in higher moral development. Christianity has a message to which men become always more willing to respond as they rise in the scale of civilisation; it has proved its power to enter into the lives of various nations, and to adapt itself to their circumstances and guide their aspirations without humiliating them. A religion which identifies itself, as Christianity does, with the cause of freedom in every land, and tends to unite all men in one great brotherhood under the loving God who is the Father of all alike, is surely the desire of all nations, and is destined to be the faith of all mankind. A bibliography of the recent study of Christianity would be far too extensive for this book. An excellent statement on the subject will be found at the hands of Professor Sanday in the _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. ii. p. 263, _sqq._ CHAPTER XXIII CONCLUSION It will not be expected that the result of the great movement traced in the chapters of this work can be summed up in a few words. We set out with a definition of our subject which we said could only be fully verified after religion had accomplished its growth and had fully unfolded its nature. We also set out with the assumption that all the religion of the world is one, and that it exhibits a development which is in the main continuous, from the most elementary to the highest stages. We shall not now attempt to justify by argument that definition or that assumption. The history which we have sought to place before the reader must itself be the proof of them. All that can be done in bringing this work to a close is to point out one great line of development, which may be recognised more or less distinctly in the growth of each religion, and may therefore be held to be characteristic of religion as a whole. No doubt the growth of religion, as of other human activities, has many sides and aspects, but perhaps it may be possible to specify the central line of growth in which the explanation of all the subsidiary and parallel forward movements is to be found. It was stated in our first chapter that religion is the expression of human needs with reference to higher beings who are supposed to be capable of fulfilling men's desires, and it was also stated as an inference from this, that the growth of human needs is the cause of religious change and progress. If this is true, then the key to the progress of religion is to be found in the successive emergence in human experience of higher and still higher needs. If we can discover the order in which higher aspirations successively emerge in the growth of humanity, then we shall possess the chief clue to the course of religious advance. Now while there is infinite variety in the needs and desires of men, every land and each nation having ideals all its own, we can yet discern, on a broad view of human progress, an advance from lower to higher needs which is common to the human race, and manifests itself in the history of each nation. Three successive conditions of human life stand out before us as markedly distinct, and as occurring wherever civilisation continues to advance. The first is that in which material needs are all-absorbing; the second that in which freedom from material needs has been to some extent attained, and the highest aspirations are directed to the safety and advancement of the nation in which men find themselves united and secure; and the third is that in which the individual realises his own value apart from the state, and develops a personal ideal which is thenceforward his chief end. To these three stages of human existence three types of religion correspond, and the growth of religion consists in the main in its passage from the lower to the higher of these stages. The religion of the tribe belongs to that stage of man's existence in which his energies are entirely occupied in the struggle against nature and against other tribes. The conditions of his life do not allow his higher faculties to grow, and while he is not without many glimpses and anticipations of higher things, his religion, as a whole, is a mass of childish fancies, and of fixed traditions which he cannot explain, but does not venture to criticise or change. His gods are petty and capricious beings, and his modes of influencing them, though used with zeal and fervour, have little to do with reason or with taste or with morality. It is in this kind of religion that magic of all sorts is at home. The advance from the religion of the tribe to that of the nation was briefly described above (chapter vi.). The leading classes of the state at least having gained some measure of security and leisure, ideas of a nobler order spring up in their minds. The service of the great gods of the state is organised with befitting dignity and splendour; the best minds contribute to it all they can in the way of art, of poetry, of purified legend, of stately ceremonial. Patriotism and religion are one, the offices of worship are upheld by the whole power of the state, and the gods speak with new authority to the spirit of the worshipper. Now it is that great religious systems arise, so powerful, so highly organised, so splendidly adorned, and surrounded with such venerable traditions, that they seem to be destined for eternity. The priesthood becomes a very powerful class, and acquires a personal holiness which marks out its members as different from other men; the sacrifices acquire the character of divine mysteries, every detail of which, even the most trivial, has a sacred meaning; religious books are compiled or written, which by and by are regarded as inspired, and as possessing absolute authority. It is to be observed that the older style of religion is not at once driven out by the growth of the new, but continues to flourish beside it and under its shadow. The tribes of whom the nation is composed still cherish and adore their own special deities. That older worship is often thought to bring blessings which the new worship of the state does not command, and many a piece of ancient magic, many a practice which has no connection with the state religion, still goes on, especially among those who are not cultivated enough to appreciate the nobler faith which has arisen. This, however, does not keep the national faith from growing in riches and consistency; and religion appears, as this growth proceeds, to have attained the highest degree of power and authority at which it can possibly arrive. Commanding as it does all the resources of the nation, enriched by all that can be brought to it of material or intellectual riches, placed in a position of absolute exaltation and inviolableness, to what further conquests can it still look forward? Yet when a national religion appears to be most firmly established, the forces are most certainly at work which must ere long lead to a far-reaching change. While the national worship has been growing up to its highest splendours, the lives of the citizens have also been growing richer and deeper, and the individual soul has become aware of wants and longings which cannot be satisfied in the national temple. The further progress of religion is apt to appear as a revolt against the system which has grown so strong. The individual sets out to seek a consistent intellectual view, and so figures as a sceptic. He aims at a higher moral law than that of the priestly system, and is accused of undermining public morality. He feels a new call to personal goodness, a new need for personal atonement with the ideal holiness which he has learned to apprehend; and as the public ritual does not meet these needs, he seeks for new religious associations and perhaps appears to preach a doctrine contrary to patriotism, as it is subversive of the established religion of his country, and to be wilfully destroying what his countrymen revere, and wilfully breaking through old ties and obligations. Thus the individualist stage of religion succeeds the national. But the individualist stage is also, in part at least, the universal stage. What the thinking mind and the pious heart seeks and cannot find in the national worship, is a religion free as the seeker himself has become free, from all that is unreasonable and artificial, a religion therefore in which every thinking mind and every pious heart can have a share. What is gained by individuals in this direction is capable, therefore, if circumstances favour, of proving an acquisition not only for the individual reformer or his nation, but for all men. But as the rise of national religion does not bring to an end the ruder worships of the tribes, which still go on beside it, so neither does the rise of individualism, even in its purest form, bring to an end the national worship. In the long run this may follow, but it does not take place at once. All three forms of religion go on together; the religion of magic, that of stately public sacrifices and ceremonials, and that of intellectual effort and pious meditation and prayer. Each no doubt influences to some extent the others, and is influenced by them in turn. The movement thus indicated from tribal to national, and from national to individual and to universal religion, is the central development of religion, and all the minor developments which might be traced, as that of sacrifice from rude to spiritual forms, of the functions of the sacred class, of the morality dictated by religion at its various stages, or of the literature connected with piety, may be explained by reference to this one. This movement has taken place in every nation; we have seen something of it in each of our chapters. In some nations it has been early arrested, so that no important contribution has there been brought to the general religion of mankind, in others it has run its full course, and like a great river has arrived at the ocean at last, to mingle its waters with those of other mighty streams. The story of the growth of the world's religion has therefore to be told in a number of parallel narratives, each dealing with the experience of a separate nation. There can scarcely be any general history of the religion of the world, in addition to those special histories. Some epochs, it is true, stand out as having witnessed simultaneous religious movements in many lands, as if the mind of the whole human race had then been passing through the same crisis of thought. The sixth century B.C. is the age of Confucius and of Laotsze in China, of Gautama in India, of Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Unknown Prophet of the Exile, of Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Xenophanes, and also of the rise into prominence of the Greek mysteries. Widely different as the movements are which thus took place contemporaneously in these lands, we may discern in all of them alike the tendency to plant religion in the mind and heart, and to create a deeper union than the old external one, a union based on common intellectual effort and spiritual sympathy. The period immediately before and after the Christian era might also appear to be one in which the mind of the world as a whole made a great step forward. The union of many nations under the sway of Rome, and the universal diffusion of the Greek language as a means of general communication, made men conscious at this time as they had never been before, of the unity of mankind in spite of all differences of race and speech. A philosophy also was popular at this time which was cosmopolitan in its character, and occupied itself with the great problems, which are the same for all, of man's relation to the gods and of his moral duty. If we add to this the combination which took place at Rome and wherever different races met, of various rites and creeds, we see that the age was one singularly disposed to the breaking down of artificial barriers between men, and singularly fitted to promote the growth of a belief in which men of all nations might unite and feel themselves to be brethren. In these two periods we may recognise important steps in that great Education of the Human Race which the Apostle Paul refers to in a bold philosophy of history (Galat. iv.), and which later thinkers have striven to set forth in detail. After the long servitude of mankind to irrational practices and to gods who were no gods, there comes first the period when men recognise that the true God is to be found not merely outside them but within their hearts and minds, and then the period when they find that the true God is the same to all men, that they are all children of the same Father. But while these general movements of the human mind may be acknowledged, the education of the human race proceeds for the most part in nations. As each nation has to elaborate its own art, its own literature, its own system of law, so each nation has to perfect its own religion. Even after a universal faith has appeared, religion does not cease to be a national thing. Each people moulds the universal religion which it has adopted into a special form, continues by means of it the rites and traditions of the past, and expresses through it its own national character and aspirations. Each nation as well as each individual must necessarily have a faith specially its own, arising out of its own character and experience and in great part incommunicable to others. No two nations could possibly exchange religions. But on the other hand every nation contains within itself forms of religion which differ from each other as widely as those of two separate nations. It has been said that no religious belief or usage which has once lived can ever be destroyed; and the proof of this may be witnessed in every nation. Even after that religion has come which has its main seat in the heart and soul, the ruder forms of piety live on, and even at times aggressively assert themselves. If there are classes for whom the struggle against material hardships still continues, no lofty religion can be attained by them any more than by savage tribes. As the conditions of their life forbid the growth of their higher faculties, their religion cannot be one of thought or of refinement, but must be one which promises palpable benefits or an escape from immediate dangers. At a somewhat higher stage is the class of those who, while partly escaped from the struggle against want, have not yet fully realised themselves as thinking and spiritual beings, and to whom the benefits of religion still lie outside, rather than in the inner life. When the benefits of religion are thus conceived, its processes must be of a mechanical nature. Hence the various systems of apparatus for connecting the worshipper with a source of good distant from him in time or space, and for fetching as it were from another region, with certainty and accuracy, needed supplies of grace. The further development of religion in a community so mixed must depend on the progressive education and elevation of the people. As more and more of them are freed first from distracting wants and cares, and then from sordid and materialistic views, their spiritual nature will expand. The need for God himself rather than for his gifts, will arise and increase in their hearts, and they will grow capable of that highest religion which is the life of the soul with God; they will feel its beauty and will drink of the deep springs which it contains, of strength and peace. To attain this true religion the human race has had to travel far and to make many experiments. Many temples were built and fell to ruin before the true temple of the soul was reached in which, as each finds what he as an individual requires, there is also room for all mankind. Even after this highest religion has been made known to men, it has often been obscured and lost, and many a struggle has been needed to vindicate its claims and help it to retain its rightful place. But with growing experience the world becomes more assured that the simplest and broadest religion ever preached upon this earth is also the best and the truest, and that in maintaining Christianity as at first preached, and applying it in every needed direction, lies the hope of the future of mankind. To those who agree in this conclusion the history of the religion of the world, full of errors and of grievous failures as it has been seen to be, cannot appear to have been a vain and purposeless excursion in a land of shadows. Not without a divine call, and not without divine guidance did man set out so early, and persevere so constantly in spite of all his disappointments, in the search for God. INDEX Aesir, 267 Ahura Mazda, 387, 391, 397, 398, 405 Allah, 222 Allat, "The Lady," 165, 173, 219 Amartas, 44 Anaitis, 407 Ancestor-worship, primitive, 33, 40 China, 115 Aryan, 250 India, 338 Angels and demons, Persia, 400, 407 Animals, worship of, 29, 57 in Peru, 86 in Babylonia, 96 in Egypt, 130 how accounted for, 133 in Arabia, 219 in Greece, 277 Animation of Nature in savage thought, 24 Animism, meaning of, 40, 96, 308 in Roman religion, 308 Anthropomorphism, 53 Babylonia, 96 Egypt, 132 Greece, 281 Apocalypse, 213 Arabia, before Mahomet, 218 gods of, 219 Judaism and Christianity in, 223 Art, Phenician, 174 Egyptian, 132 Greece, 280, 292 Aryans, the, 245 description of, 248 in Europe, 256 religion, 250 etymology of names of gods, 250 Ascetics, Brahmanic, 350 Ashera, Canaanite goddess, 172 Ashtoreth, 176 Association, forms of religious, Totem-Clan, 70 nation, 84 Greek mysteries, 298 Greek schools, 303 new form in Israel, 212 new form in Islam, 233 Asuras, 44 Baal, Canaanite god, 171, 189 Babylon and Assyria, religion of, 93 connection with Egypt, 94, 96, 97 connection with China, 93, 98 mythology of, 100 Belief, an essential part of religion, 9, 13 less important than rite in primitive religion, 66 Brahman, etymology of, 339 Brahmanism, 338 Buddhism, 353, _sqq._ in China, 123 _Burnt Njal_, 264 Burton, Captain, _Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca_, 236 Caaba, 220, 236 Cabiri, 177 Canaanites, 170 religion of, 171, 191 Caste, 338 Celts, 257 China, 106 connection with Babylonia, 107 state religion of, 111 Christianity, 411, _sqq._ Civilisation and religion advance together, 15 origin of, 19 Classification of religions, 80 Confucius, 107, 117, _sqq._ Continuity of growth in religion, 6 Curiosity, an element of religion, 12 Daniel, 213 Decalogues, 202 Definition of religion, preliminary, 8 fuller, 13 Degeneration in civilisation, 19 in religion, 38 Deuteronomy, 201 Devas, 44, 396 Development of religion, 8, 51, _sqq._, 430, _sqq._ Domestic worship, origin of, 33 China, 115 Aryans, 251 Iceland, 264 Greece, 275 Rome, 311 Brahmanic, 342 Dualism, 56 Eddas, 266 Egypt, religion of, 126, _sqq._ Elijah and Elisha, 190 Elves, 265 Ephod, 188 Etruria, religion of, 318 Exile of Israel, 202 Ezra, 204 Fairy Tales (German), 262 Fate, 289 Festivals, Greek, 294 Fetish-worship, 35 Fetishism, 38 Fire, 31 Frazer, Mr., 58, 59; _Golden Bough_, 28, 279 Frisia, religion in, 263 Functional deities, Greece, 275 Rome, 308 Funeral practices, 62 Egypt, 149 Icelandic, 264 Greece, 282, 290 India, 332 Persian, 405 Games, Greek, 294 Gautama Buddha, 356 his death, 361 Germans, the ancient, 258 their gods, 259 their gods identified with Roman, 260 working religion of, 260 later religion, 263 Ghosts, 34 Gods, the great, in Babylonia, 98 in Egypt, 137 of the Aryans, 252 German, 259 Icelandic, 266 of Homer, 285 Roman, 311 Indian, 326 Gomme, _Ethnology in Folklore_, 60, 249, 254 Greece, 274 Grimm, German Mythology, 260 Hades, 291 Hammurabi, 93, 95, 202 Hanyfs, 224 Hartmann, Edward von, 46 Heaven, 52 an object of primitive worship, 31, 53 Babylonia, 93 China, 112 Arabia, 219 India, 318, 326, 333 Hegira, 231 Hell, 229, 265, 392 Henotheism, 56 Heroic legends, Babylonian, 100 German, 262 Hesiod, 291 Homer, 283 worship in, 287 Homeric gods, 285 Hymns, Babylonian, 101 Egyptian, 144 Vedic, 328 Persian, 383. See Psalms Iceland, 264 decay of old religion of, 272 Idols, none in primitive religion, 73 Arabia, 219, 220 German? 264 Immortality, China, 115 Egypt, 152 Incas, the religion of, 85-88 India, 324 Individual, the, not considered in primitive religion, 76 Individual religion, Babylonia, 104 Israel, 205 Greece, 300 India, 346 a high stage of religion, 429 the porch to universalism, 430 See Buddhism Indo-Europeans. See Aryans Isaiah xli.-lxvi., 203 Islam, 217. See Mahomet meaning of, 226 spread of, 237 a universal religion, 240 weakness of, 241 Israel, 179 Israel and Canaanites, 184 Prophets, 189 reforms of religion, 200 exile, 202 the return, 204 Istar, 101 Jainism, 362 Japan, 115 Jehovah, 182 Jesus Christ, 413, _sqq._ Jewish religion, 205 spiritual elements of, 209 heathenish elements of, 210 Persian influence on? 215 Jinns, 220 Job, 215 Judaism, 205 _sqq._ Hellenistic period of, 412 at time of Christ, 413 Kathenotheism, 55, 336 Koran, 225, 227, 239 Lang, Andrew, 25, 59; _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, 22 Legge, Dr., 110, 113 Literatures, sacred, 179 Babylonia, 93, 100 Buddhist, 353 China, 108 Eddas, 266 Egypt, 127, 154 Koran, 225, 227, 239 Israel, 179, 207 Sibylline books, 319 Vendidad, 406 Zend-Avesta, 382 Local nature of early religion, 60 Local observances, Aryan, 253 old German, 262 Icelandic, 264 Lockyer, _Dawn of Astronomy_, 94 Magi, 405 Magic, 74 Babylonia, 95 Egypt, 155 Mahomet, 225, _sqq._ preaching, 228 leaves Mecca, 231 at Medina, 232 breach with Judaism and Christianity, 234 domestic, 235 Manicheism, 408 Mannhardt, _Feld- und Waldkulte_, 59, 262 Manu, law of, 344 Massebah, 172 Maya, 349 McLennan, 59 Mecca, 220 becomes capital of Islam, 235 Meyer, E., 247 Mithra, 407 Moloch, 174 Monarchical Pantheon of the Aryans, 253 Monotheism, not primitive, 37, 56 in Egypt? 144 emergence of, in Israel, 196 in India, 348 Morality, in primitive religion, 77 Egyptian religion, 155 Greece, 279 Vedic religion, 335 Brahmanism, 345 of Buddhism, 372 Moslem, meaning of, 226 duties of the, 238 Müller, Mr. Max, 10, 42, 246, 250, 332 his theory of the origin of religion, 43 Mycenæ, 282 Mysteries, the Greek, 298 Mythology, origin of, 51 Babylonia, 100 Egypt, 138 Greece, 280 Icelandic, 267 Indian, 333 National religion, how different from earlier form, 81, 428 Israel, 191 Natural religion, 80 Nature gods, growth of, 51 Nature-worship, the greater, 30, 43 the minor, 32, 42, 57 Nirvana, 361, 373 Omens, 290 Roman, 312 Orientation, of temples, 100 Origin of religion, (1) Primitive revelation, 26 (2) Innate idea, 26 (3) Psychological necessity, 27 Orphism, 302 Other World, the in Egypt, 151 with the Semites, 167 Jewish beliefs about, 214 Arabia, 220 Iceland, 265, 266 Homer, 283 Pantheism, in Egypt, 148 India, 336, 348 Patriarchal society and religion of Aryans, 248 Perkunas, 36 Persia, 381 primitive religion, 385 contact of Jews with, 401, 406 Pfleiderer, Otto, 47 Phenicians, 170 religion of, 176 influence on Greece, 282 Philistines, 170 Philosophy, Greek, 301 Indian, 347 Polytheism, origin of, 53 Indian, 335 Prayer, primitive, 71 Israel, 198, 212 Indian, 339 Persian, 382, 394 Priestly code, 202, 403 Priests, none in the earliest religion, 72 not necessary in early Israel, 187 Roman, 313 Brahmans, 338 Primitive religion, the, 21 difference between it and later forms, 79 Prophets, in Israel, 189 their criticism of the old religion of Israel, 192 Psalms, 210. See Hymns Purity, laws of, Israel, 209 Persia, 404 Rationalism, Greece, 297 India, 350 Reforms, of Israelite religion, 200 of Augustus, 322 Renouf, Le Page, 145 Revealed religion, 80 Réville, M., 25, 31, 42 Resurrection, 214 Retribution, after death, in Egypt, 155 Mahomet, 229 Israel, 214 Rig-veda, the, 325 Ritualism, Brahmanic, 343 Roman, 314 Persian, 403 Jewish, 204, 208 Rome, 305, _sqq._ Rougé, M. de la, 145 Sacred places, 59 Semitic, 165 Canaanite, 184, 200 Arabia, 219 Germany, 261 Sacred seasons, 75 Sacrifice, primitive, generally a meal, 67 in China, 114 Semitic, 164 human (Phenician), 175 human (Israel), 187 human (Icelandic), 265 early Israelite, 183 denounced by O. T. prophets, 193 Jewish, 207 Icelandic, 264 Homeric, 287 Persia, 394 Saussaye, P. D. Chantepie de la, 17 Savage elements in all the great religions, 21 Savages, their religion falls short of the definition, 8 represent the original state of mankind, 19 mental habits of, 23 all have religion, 25 the religion of, described, 29, _sqq._ their beliefs furnish the elements of the great religions, 63 Schrader (Aryans), 247, 252 Semites, 161 religion of, 162 gods of, 164, 173 goddess of, 99, 165, 219 Seraph, 220 Shin-to, 115 Sin, Babylon, 103 Israel, 205 Slavs, 256 Smith, Robertson, 61; _Religion of the Semites_, 58, 70, 162 Spencer, Mr. H., 11, 39 Spirit, the great, 36 Spirits, of dead persons, 33 worship of, the origin of all religion? 38 in Babylonia, 95 in China, 114 in Arabia, 220 in Greece, 275 in Persia, 398 Standing stones, 60 Sun, 30 Sun-gods, Babylonia, 99 Egypt, 140, 148 Phenician, 176 Arabian, 219 Supreme Being, an object of primitive worship? 36 Survival of savage state in the great religions, 21 Synagogue, 212 Syncretism, of gods in Egypt, 148 Taboo, 72 Taoism, 121 Taylor, Dr. I., 247, 248 Temples, not primitive, 72 Babylonia, 99 Egyptian, 128, 130, 136 Phenician and Jewish, 178 Greek, 292 Roman, 318, 323 Teraphim, 188 Teutons, 256. See Germans Thunder, 30, 265, 270 Tiele, Dr. C. P., 15 Totemism, 58, 135, 277 Transmigration, 302, 351, 368 Tree-worship, primitive, 32, 59, 278 Babylonia, 101 Canaanites, 172 Arabia, 219 Greece, 278 Tribal religion, 57, 77, 427 Tylor, Mr., _Primitive Culture_, 10, 20, 25, 29, 39, 62, 63, 68 Under-world, the, Babylonia, 100, 102 Egypt, 140, 142, 152 Unity of all religion, 4 Universal deities of the Aryans, 252 Universalism, in O. T. prophets, 195 in Islam, 240 in Christianity, 419 Urim and Thummim, 188 Vedic hymns, 328 Vedic religion, 324, _sqq._ its gods, 326 is it early or late? 331 Vow, original meaning of, 75 Waitz and Gerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, 29 Wellhausen, J., 163, 218 Wells, sacred, 32, 57, 59 Worship, an essential element of religion, 9 primitive, 66 Chinese, 112 Egyptian, 147 Canaanite, 173 Israelite, 187 Jewish, 207 Roman, 309 See Sacrifice Zeus, etymology of, 250, 286, 296 Zoomorphism, 53 Zoroaster, 384 his call, 388 his doctrine, 391 PRINTED AT THE EDINBURGH PRESS, 9 AND 11 YOUNG STREET. 
38100	----	ANCIENT FAITHS AND MODERN: A Dissertation upon Worships, Legends and Divinities In Central And Western Asia, Europe, And Elsewhere, Before The Christian Era. Showing Their Relations To Religious Customs As They Now Exist. By Thomas Inman, M.D. Author Of "Ancient Faiths Embodied In Ancient Names," Etc., Etc. Consulting Physician To The Royal Infirmary, Liverpool; Lecturer, Successively, On Botany, Medical Jurisprudence, Therapeutics, Materia Medica, And The Principles And Practice Ok Medicine, Etc., In The Liverpool School Ok Medicine. Etc. 1876 TO THOSE WHO THIRST AFTER KNOWLEDGE, AND ARE NOT DETERRED FROM SEEKING IT BY THE FEAR OF IMAGINARY DANGERS, THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED, WITH GREAT RESPECT, By THE AUTHOR PREFACE. Some thirty years ago, after a period of laborious study, I became the House Surgeon of a large Infirmary. In that institution I was enabled to see the practice of seven different doctors, and to compare the results which followed from their various plans of treatment. I soon found that the number of cures was nearly equal amongst them all, and became certain that recovery was little influenced by the medicine given. The conclusion drawn was that the physician could do harm, but that his power for good was limited. This induced me to investigate the laws of health and of disease, with an especial desire to discover some sure ground on which the healing art might safely stand. The inquiry was a long one, and to myself satisfactory. The conclusions to which I came were extremely simple--amounting almost to truisms; and I was surprised that it had required long and sustained labour to find out such very homely truths as those which I seemed to have unearthed. Yet, with this discovery came the assurance that, if I could induce my medical brethren to adopt my views, they would deprive themselves of the means of living. Men, like horses or tigers, monkeys and codfish, can do without doctors. Here and there, it is true, that the art and skill of the physician or surgeon can relieve pain, avert danger from accidents, and ward off death for a time; but, in the generality of cases, doctors are powerless. It is the business of such men, however, to magnify their office to the utmost. They get their money ostensibly by curing the sick; but it is clear, that the shorter the illness the fewer will be the fees, and the more protracted the attendance the larger must be the "honorarium." There is, then, good reason why the medical profession should discourage too close an investigation into truth. But, outside of this fraternity, there are many men desirous of understanding the principles of the healing art Many of these have begun by noticing the style of the doctor's education. They find that he is taught in "halls," "colleges," and "schools," for a certain period of time; and then, at about the age of two-and-twenty, he is examined by some experienced men, and, if considered "competent," he pays certain fees, and is then licensed to practise as physician. As all regular doctors go through this course, it is natural that all should think and act in a common way, and style their doctrines "orthodox." It is equally certain that to such opinion the majority adhere through life. But it has always happened, that many men and women have aspired to the position of medical professors, without going through the usual career; or, having done so, they have struck out a novel plan of practice, which they designate a new method of cure. These have always been opposed by the "orthodox," and the contest is carried on with varying success, until the general public give their verdict on one side or the other. Into the motives which sway the respective combatants we will not enter; our chief desire being to show that each set is upheld by those who are designated "laymen," whose education has not been medical The most intelligent on the heterodox side have been clergymen; and many have been the complaints of "orthodox" doctors, that "the parsons" should patronize, so energetically as they do, medical "dissenters." As the "clerk" takes pleasure in examining the therapeutical doctrines of his physician, so the medical professor frequently inquires closely into his clergyman's theological views and feels himself at liberty to accept or oppose them, as the "clerk" adopts or attacks him and his theory and practice. It would, indeed, be disrespectful in the listener not to pay intelligent heed to the discourses which emanate from the pulpit. I have myself listened to the preaching of hundreds of university graduates, and of men who never took a degree, and have noticed that the same diversity of style exists amongst them, as is to be found in medical men. Some order a certain plan of treatment for a soul, which they assert to be grievously affected, and give no reason for what they say or do. Others give their motives for everything which they affirm, and for the plan which they prescribe for cure. Under the ministry of one of the last I sat for many years. Conspicuous for sound judgment, and for a peculiarly clear oratory, his sermons were to me an intellectual treat. From the exordium, forwards, I followed his words closely, and lost none of his arguments. But I soon became conscious that he never once carried his reasoning to its logical conclusion. Still further, it was manifest that certain things were by him taken for granted; and it was held to be culpable to inquire into the reality of those assumptions. In fine, it was evident, that there was a Bluebeard's closet in the house of God, into which, in the preacher's opinion, it was death to pry! With the idea which was gradually forced upon my mind, that there was a systematic suppression of the truth in the pulpit, I very carefully searched the Bible, with which I have been familiar from infancy, and upon which, it is asserted, all our faith is founded. At this time, too, a casual inquiry into some ancient cognomens, which have descended to us from remote antiquity, induced me to examine into ancient faiths generally. With this became associated an examination of all religions, and their influence upon mankind. I found that in every nation there have been, and still are, good men and bad, gentle and brutal, thoughtful and ignorant. That the best men of Paganism--Buddha, for example--did not lose, by comparison, with the brightest light of Christianity; and that such large cities as London and Paris, have as much vice within them as ancient Rome or modern Calcutta. I found, moreover, that there is a culpable colouring in the accounts given by Christian travellers of Pagan countries. The clerical pen rests invariably and strongly upon the bad points of every heathen cult, and contrasts them with the best elements of Christianity. I do not know that it has ever instituted a fair comparison between corresponding characters in each faith. As an illustration of my meaning, let us regard the stern virtue of the Roman Lucretia, who committed suicide, her body having been forcibly defiled by the embraces of another than her husband, even though the ravisher was a prince. She had heard nothing of the Jewish law or Christian gospel, nevertheless she was far better than the wives of the nobles in the courts of Louis the XIV. and XV., who gladly sold themselves and their daughters to the royal lechers. These, unlike the Italian woman, were instructed both in the law and the gospel; they attended one place or another of Christian worship daily or weekly. Nay, if report be true, "the eldest son of the Church," when he visited the "parc aux cerfs," made each fresh virgin, victim of his passion, duly say her prayers before she assisted him to commit adultery, and herself permitted fornication! We sympathize with Paul and the early Christian fathers in their denunciations of the Romans and Greeks for obscenities practised in honour of their gods; but, at the same time, we feel sure that, had those apostles and teachers lived in the middle ages, they would have denounced, with greater warmth, the murders which were constantly being perpetrated in honour of Jesus. In like manner, we may greatly regret, with the writer of Psalm xiv., that amongst "the children of men, there is none that doeth good; no, not one;" but we must equally bow before the statement of Ezekiel (ch. xxii. 30), that there was no more propriety amongst the so-called "chosen people of God," than amongst the Gentile Canaanites and Babylonians. Again, we feel pain when we find the great ones of the earth--aye, and many small ones too--seeking out for villains, "willing to commit murder for a mede," and lament that lawgivers should secretly encourage lawlessness; but we cannot forget that Jesus of Nazareth is represented, in John vi. 70, to have selected a devil to bring about certain ends--see also John xiii. 26, 27, in which the agency is well marked. Modern divines tell us that war, tumult, hatred, malice, quarrels of all kinds, and murder come from the devil, and are the direct result of our fallen nature; nevertheless, we remember that Jesus is reported to have said--"I came not to send peace, but a sword; I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against the mother," &c. (Matt. x. 34, 35). When we institute comparisons like these, the balance is not uneven. I found, moreover, that the sharply defined line, commonly drawn between Paganism and Christianity, is worthless--the doctrines of the latter being, in many respects, identical with, or deduced from, the former. It seemed necessary, therefore, to ascertain whether, in religion, any other line than the one in vogue in Europe, could be drawn with certainty. The result of my observations showed a wonderful similarity to exist between the clerical and medical profession; and I feel that, if my views about the cure of souls and bodies were generally adopted, there would be no need either for parson or for doctor. Instead of discovering, as I had hoped to do, which of all the rival sects of Christendom is the best one, I found that all were unnecessary, that many are degraded in doctrine and bad in practice; and that, if any must exist, the one which effects the least mischief should be the one selected for general adoption. It required much courage to allow myself to believe that doctors have, taking everything into consideration, done more harm in the world than good, and still more to announce my conviction that Christianity was even more culpable than medicine. The physician, when professing to cure, has too often assisted disease to kill; and he who has had the cure of souls, has invented plans to make believers in his doctrine miserable. The first fills his coffers proportionally to the extent to which he can protract recovery; the second becomes rich in proportion to the success with which he multiplies mental terrors, and then sells repose. The one enfeebles the body, the other cripples the intellect, and aggravates envy, hatred, and malice. Both are equally influential in preventing man from being such as we believe that the Almighty designed him to be. Though we oppose the old plan of medication of body and mind, we are far from asserting that there is no value in an honest doctor, either of divinity or medicine. On the contrary, I have a stronger faith in my own profession, as it has been reformed, than ever I had ere the light of good sense had shone upon it; and I have a far more confident trust in the religion propounded by F. W. Newman, in _Theism_, than in that current amongst Christians in general But in such schemes of physic and faith, very few "ministers" are necessary, shams find no place, and emoluments are small A man who communes with his God requires no priest, mediator, middle-man, or saint--whether virgin, martyr, or both--to intercede for him. Holding such opinions as these, it is not probable that I shall find many followers. I do not seek them. My aim has been to set good sterling stuff before the world, so that any one, whose self-reliance is great, may receive strength. There are many who would rather die with a physician close beside them when they are ill, than live without a doctor; and there are few who would not rather enjoy the fear of hell with the orthodox, than be with heretics free from such terrors--"For sure, the pleasure is as great in being cheated, as to cheat." To all such our writings are _caviare_. Yet, even to them, we would say that we have warrant for our belief in statements, to which the orthodox cannot reasonably object--viz., "If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted?" (Gen. iv. 7); "In every nation, he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him" (Acts x. 35); "He that doeth righteousness, is righteous" (1 John iii. 7). Let me contrast my own views with those generally current amongst us. I believe that God did not make men, any more than the beasts, to damn the largest number of them throughout eternity. I believe that all who aver that they have been selected by the Creator from all the world besides as the only recipients of salvation are wrong, and deceivers of the people. In fine, I believe that God's "tender mercies are over all his works." The common opinion that the Almighty so revels in cruelty, that He makes creatures to torture them, is a horrible one to me--fit only to come from impotent Pagan priests. That Jehovah selected about one million of bad men, out of about four hundred other millions equally bad, solely because their progenitor, Abraham, consented to murder and burn his son, is to me a frightful blasphemy; and, lastly, that God has no tender mercies for nine-tenths of the human race, is to convert our conception of the Author of all good into the conventional "Devil." The comparison may be summed up thus: I believe in God, the Father of all things; the so-called orthodox believe in the God Satan. I do not know anything in all my studies which excited my attention more painfully than the result of the analysis of Jehovah's character, as given in our Bible. Kind to those who are said to please Him, He is a fearful demon to all who are said to oppose Him. How can any reasonable man hold the opinion that the Devil instigated all atrocities of the Syrians, Chaldees, Assyrians, Romans, Turks, Tartars, Saracens, Affghans, Mahometans, and Hindoos, and believe that the good God drowned the whole world, and nearly every single thing that had life; that He ordered the extermination, not only of Midianites and Amalekites, but slaughtered, in one way or another, all the people whom he led out of Egypt--except two--merely because they had a natural fear of war. What was the massacre at Cawnpore to that in Jericho and other Canaanite cities? I say it with sober seriousness--in sorrow, not in anger--as a thinking man, and not as an advocate for, or against, any religious view, that it is an awful thing for any nation to permit a book to circulate, as a sacred one, in which God and the Devil are painted in the same colours. Into this analysis of religion I was led to enter from the observation of a friend, who challenged me to find, in any non-Hebraic or non-Christian country, a faith or practice equal to that current amongst the followers of Moses and Jesus, or to discover any spot in the wide world where there is, or has been, a civilization equal to that which existed in Judea, and the parts inhabited by Christians. In consequence of this defiance, it became more than ever necessary for me to study the nature of the current faith and practice of Christendom, and to inquire how far the latter was dependent upon the former--that is to say, whether the practices of civilization are due to our religion, or have gradually grown up in spite of it. The next point was to pay similar heed to the doctrines and manner of life common amongst those to whom our Bible has been wholly unknown. Many of the conclusions to which I came have already appeared in the second volume of _Ancient Faiths_, under the heads of "Religion," "Theology," &c.; but others came upon me when that book had been completed, and the present supplement is designed with the idea of expressing, still further, the extent of my views, and the evidence upon which they are founded--with special reference to the differential value of Christian and unchristian faith and practice. As was natural, this involved the question constantly before my mind in the preceding volumes--viz., "Is there in reality anything in the Hebrew and the Christian theology essentially different from that promulgated by the leaders of divinity in other countries?" This point has repeatedly been discussed, and amongst the orthodox there is no difficulty in allowing the existence of a strong similarity in all systems of religion; but the value of the fact is supposed to be reduced to ridicule by the monstrous assertion, that Moses and Jesus taught all the world. Amongst the books which came under my notice, whilst prosecuting my search, was a very remarkable one, called _The Modern Buddhist_, now _The Wheel of the Law_, which is an account of the religious thoughts of a Siamese monarch, with a statement of his conversations with Christian missionaries. In this the British churchman and non-conformist can see themselves as others see them; and the Asiatic has quite as great, perhaps even a superior, right to call the European "poor and benighted," as the Christian has to call the Buddhist "a miserable Pagan." Notwithstanding my endeavours to be perfectly "judicial," and to give what I believe to be an impartial account of the subjects which I describe, I have been, by certain critics, accused of special pleading. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to deny the charge, for each reader must judge of my fairness, or otherwise, for himself. But, on the other hand, I retort most strongly, by averring that I have not met, in the whole course of my reading, a religious work by an orthodox divine, which does not "bear false witness against its neighbours." There is in all both a _suppressio veri_ and a _suggestio falsi_, which makes the honest inquirer almost entirely reject their books. In addition to this, there is in them a recklessness of statement and assertion which is unequalled, except in the fierce controversies of ancient doctors. The perfect contempt which certain puny divines, who have endeavoured to throw dirt upon the present Bishop of Natal, show for the laws of evidence, and the systematic way in which they avoid every real point at issue, are marvellous to those who know that such people have had an university education, have studied logic, and profess an unlimited respect for truth. In future years the theological writings, generally, of our time will be as much objurgated by enlightened, earnest, and thoughtful readers, as Protestants of to-day abuse the theology and prurience of Sanchez, Thomas Aquinas, and Peter Dens. In conclusion, I would wish to add, that I am conscious, from the amount of correspondence which I have had on the subject in hand, that there is not only a wide, but a constantly extending dissatisfaction with the current theology taught by the ministers of all denominations--excepting, as a body, the Unitarians, and such individuals as Bishop Colenso, Bishop Hinds, Mr Voysey, and others. The laity are awaking to the fact that priests are strenuously endeavouring to quench the light of reason in the fogs of faith. Unless the Protestantism, of which Great Britain was once so proud, decides to drift into Papism--the only legitimate harbour for those who reject reason for a guide--it must thoroughly reform itself, and ruthlessly reject, as "necessary to salvation," every article of belief which is not only nonsensical or absurd, but which has unquestionably descended from a grovelling Paganism. To this end we hope that our essays will contribute. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER I. A recapitulation. Destruction of an old edifice precedes the building of another on the same site. Chichester Cathedral. Difficulties of reconstruction. Innovators are regarded as enemies. The Old Testament appraised. The Jews and their pretensions. Hebraic idea of Jehovah. The sun and moon. God and goddess. Importance of sexual perfection in a Hebrew male. Women are prizes given to the faithful Jews. Almost everything Jewish came from Pagan sources, except the Sabbath. Inquiry into the New Testament necessarily follows upon an investigation of the Old. Thoughts upon the history of Christianity. Malignancy of its professors. Life of Jesus, by various authors. The ground preoccupied. The plan proposed. In commencing another volume of a series, and one to a great extent independent of the other two, it is advisable to pause and recapitulate the points advanced, and the positions attained. This is the more necessary when the present inquiry is a natural result of a preceding one, and when an attempt is made to collect and arrange the scattered materials into an harmonious and consistent edifice. Our volumes on the subject of "Ancient Faiths in Ancient Names" were, to a great extent, destructive. They struck heavy blows in all directions, wherever a false idol was to be recognized, and they destroyed many a cherished delusion, which was to many as dear as the apple of their eye. But, throughout the whole process of destruction, the idea of the necessity for a reconstruction was present to the mind of the author. It may, indeed, be propounded as an interesting question, whether any iconoclast ever destroys the idols which his fellow-beings cherish, without entertaining the belief that he has something superior to offer in their place. When the fanatic Spaniards upset, fractured, and ground to powder the stone monsters venerated by the Mexicans, they offered to the natives the image of a lovely virgin and her gentle son to replace them; and when the enthusiastic Scotchmen destroyed the marble saints and gaudy figures of the Popish churches throughout their own country, they eagerly set forth the superiority of adoring the invisible creator in spirit and imagination, which afforded scope for the most entrancing mental delineations, and was far superior to reverencing an ugly effigy, which no one with any correct taste could admire. In like manner, when the Mahometan Caliph destroyed the library of Alexandria, he offered to the mourners in its place the book of the Prophet Mahomet, which was, in his eyes, a pearl of so great price as to be equivalent in value to all the world besides. There can be no doubt, however, that the process of destruction is far more easy than the task of reconstruction. The engineer who is called upon to remove a bridge, on account of the badness of its foundation, may admire the extraordinary firmness with which every stone has been dovetailed together, and, with the means at his command, may be unable to construct another having a similar appearance of stability; yet, after all, an arch which is secure and stable is preferable to one which is good only in appearance. A very few years have elapsed since it was found that the tower and spire of the Cathedral at Chichester had been so built that there was imminent danger of the whole falling down. This part of the edifice resembled certain faiths which have been raised with great art to a vast height, with very slender and inadequate material. So long as they were not assailed by any storm, or tested by the changes which time produces, they seemed firm and unshakable; but, when they were really tried, they began to undergo a process similar to that which obtained in the Cathedral named--the admirers of the edifice attempted to prop up the failing tower; with iron and timber they shored up its bulging sides; they erected strong scaffolds to ease the mighty strain upon the crumbling walls; but all in vain--the lovely spire, built upon a foundation as rotten as the Mormon faith, came tumbling down, and the tall emblem pointing to the sky returned once more to earth. Before there could be any reconstruction attempted, it was necessary to procure all the material necessary; and when, with great labour, this was accumulated, a fresh erection was made, which was far stronger than the first, for every stone was duly examined, and solid masonry replaced the ancient rubble. So it has been with many a faith. Christianity has replaced the crumbling Judaism which existed at the beginning of our era, and the Reformed Church has since then, in many countries, replaced the gigantic sham of Popery. But the metaphor is one which we cannot wholly adopt, inasmuch as we believe that no faith of ancient times has ever wholly fallen like the spire and tower of Chichester, nor has any new system of belief the solidity of that new edifice which has replaced the old. The difficulties connected with reconstruction are greatly increased by the propensity which is so common in the human mind to make the best of that which is in actual existence and familiar to the vulgar, rather than to adopt something entirely new. The child who dislikes to go to bed at night equally dislikes to get up in the morning, and we have known elderly people who have systematically preferred an old lumbering stage-coach to a first-class compartment in a railway carriage. In every walk of life an innovator is regarded as an enemy by the majority, and especially by those whose practice or whose theories his discoveries supersede. Yet, great as is the contest which any new truth has to sustain, there is no doubt whatever that the first part of the fight--the preliminaries essential to conquest, are the investigation of the ground to be occupied; the real value of the defences; the superiority of the armour; and the temper, strength, and tenacity of the offensive weapons. The engineer to whom is confided the attack or the defence of a town will abandon or destroy everything which would harbour an enemy or facilitate his operations. The fighting commodore, ere he carries his ship into action, sacrifices readily all the gewgaws of luxury; and in like manner the ecclesiastic ought never to endanger his position by spending his energies in the defence of a useless outwork or a tinsel ornament. Entertaining these views ourselves, our first effort has been to clear the ground, and to remove every object which we consider to be detrimental to the spread of truth. We have demonstrated, as far as such a matter is capable of demonstration, that the Old Testament, which has descended to us from the Jews, is not the mine of truth which it has been supposed by so many to be: that not only it is not a revelation given by God to man, but that it is founded upon ideas of the Almighty which are contradicted by the whole of animate and inanimate nature. We showed, that its composition was wholly of human origin, and that its authors had a very mean and degrading notion of the Lord of Heaven and Earth. We proved, what indeed Colenso and a host of German critics have demonstrated in another fashion, that its historical portions are not to be depended upon; that its stories are of no more real value than so many fairy tales or national legends; that its myths can now be readily traced to Grecian, Babylonian, and Persian sources; that its miracles are as apocryphal as those told of Vishnu, Siva, and other deities; and its prophecies absolutely worthless. We proved, moreover, that the remote antiquity of its authorship has been greatly exaggerated; that the stories of the creation, of the flood, of Abraham, of Jacob, of the descent into, and the exodus from, Egypt, of the career of Moses and the Jews in the desert, of Joshua and his soldiers, of the judges and their clients, are all apocryphal, and were fabricated at a late period of Jewish history, with the design of inspiriting the Hebrews at a period when their depression of spirit from foreign conquest was extreme; that the so-called Mosaic laws were not known until long after the time of David, and that some of the enactments--that about the Jubilee, for example--were never promulgated at all. We showed that the Jewish conception of the Almighty, and of His heavenly host, did not materially differ from the Greek idea of Jupiter and his inferior deities; that the Hebrews regarded Jehovah as having human passions and very human failings--as loving, revengeful, stern, merry, and vacillating--as "everything by turns and nothing long"--as forming a resolution, and then contriving how He might, as it were, overreach Himself. We pointed out that the Jews did, in reality, paint God and the Devil or Satan, as the same individual, being the former to His friends, and the latter to His enemies. Indeed, anyone who compares 2 Sam. xxiv. 1 with 1 Chron. xxi. 1 will see this most clearly demonstrated. We called attention to the apparently utter ignorance of the Jews that certain laws of nature existed, and of their consequent belief that defeat, disease, famine, slaughter, pestilence, and the like, were direct punishments of ceremonial or other guilt; while victory, wealth, virility, and old age were special and decided proofs of the Divine favour. We showed that the Jews were, in general, an abject but a very boastful race, and that their spiritual guides--the so-called prophets--were constantly promising, but always vainly, a striking manifestation of the Almighty's power in favour of the Hebrews when they were in the depths of misery, that histories were fabricated to give colour to these statements, and that these, like modern miracles of saints, were narrated as occurring a long time ago, and in a locality which could not be visited, e.g., in Samaria and Egypt; we showed, moreover, that the race was imitative, and readily adopted the religious ideas and practices of those who conquered them. Still further, we proved that the Jews had no idea whatever of a future state, and were in utter ignorance of heaven or hell; that they regarded the Almighty as punishing crime or rewarding goodness in this world alone, and, consequently, we inferred either--(1) that the conversation said to have been held between Jehovah and certain apocryphal men did not really occur; or (2) that God did not think the existence of a future world a matter of sufficient consequence to communicate to His friends; or (3) that Elohim had not then created either a habitation for the blessed, or a future prison-house for the damned; and we pointed out that the opinions of the Pharisees about angels, spirits, and futurity were not based upon the writings of Moses and the prophets, but upon Persian fantasies. In fine, we showed, that the Hebrews could not sustain the claim they made to be the especial people of God, and that their writings are of no more value, as records of absolute truth, or of Divine revelation, than the books of the Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, Hindoos, Chinese, or the more modern Mahometans. With all this we indicated that there was, throughout the nations known as Shemitic, a general belief in the existence of an Almighty Being, Creator, Director and Governor of the heaven, the earth, and the sea; that He was considered to be One, yet that He was, nevertheless, represented by a multiplicity of names, and as having many and opposite attributes. We also showed, that this sublime conception was very thickly coated with human ideas, often of a debased and grovelling type, and darkened by legends, which were invented by priests with the design of clothing themselves, and those of their order, with a portion of the garments which they had assigned to the Inscrutable. We showed, how the sun and moon, the stars and planets, became interwoven with the idea of a Celestial Being, and how they were described in turn as His ministers, His residence, His army, and sometimes even as Himself. We showed, moreover, that the Almighty was depicted by some as a male, having the attributes and passions of men, by others as a female, or celestial goddess, and by others as androgyne--not exactly a bifrons, like Janus, but masculine and feminine, Elohim, Baalim, Ashtaroth; that in the development of this idea, everything which has reference to the phenomena of mundane creation was closely studied, and introduced into one religious system or another. As a result of this, it followed, that there were some sects and temples consecrated to the adoration of the Creator as masculine, others as feminine, and others as both combined. We showed still farther, that each sect adopted certain emblems, which were intended to represent the distinctive mark of the sex under which it worshipped the Omnipotent, and that the emblems became multiplied as different nations came into contact with each other, learned foreign theology, and advanced in their knowledge of natural history. To such an extent was this symbolism, to which we refer, carried, that the sexual idea of the Creator at last pervaded, to a greater or less degree, all forms of worship, and gradually degraded them deeper and deeper, in consequence of the emblems of the deity being mistaken for the deity itself, much in the same way as the vulgar, amongst the Roman Catholics, regard a statuette or picture of the Virgin, or an Ashantee a particular form of idol fetish. As an example of such development, we pointed out that the Assyrians represented the Godhead as four-fold, consisting of the triple male and the single female element in mundane creation, and that the idea of the trinity in unity, which is a doctrine recognized as far back amongst all nations as history will carry us, was originally founded solely upon the well-known fact that the characteristic of the male is a triad, of which all the parts are really, and in no mysterious manner, "co-eternal together and co-equal." We also showed that the feminine idea of the Creator has, from time immemorial, been associated, in one form or another, with that of a lovely virgin holding a child in her arms, which is generally very young, and mostly receiving food from a maternal bosom, the reason of which we hinted at. We showed that the myths of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarai, Esau and Jacob, were incorporations of the idea that the trinity and the unity, or, to use the very words of the Athanasian creed, "the trinity in unity," were the founders of the race of living beings, and, as such, worthy of worship and honour throughout all ages. This union was spoken of as "the four," and was symbolized as a square or a cross of four points, or a cross of eight points. We showed, still farther, that the male Creator was identified with the sun, and the female with the crescent moon, and also with the earth; and that one of the symbols of this celestial union of the sexes was the sun lying within the moon's crescent. We also demonstrated, that a very large part of Pagan worship consisted in the performance of rites and ceremonies, whose end was the glorification of the deity under one or other of the selected symbols, and that a number of feasts were appointed to be held at certain astronomical periods, in which the assistants were encouraged to indulge in every form of sensuality (Deut. xiv. 26). We pointed out, that the Jewish people were largely tainted by this vicious form of worship prior to the Babylonian captivity, and that a very large portion of their nomenclature was based upon sexual ideas of the Creator. We also showed, that the Jewish writings encouraged certain forms of sensuality in a conspicuous manner; that the condition of the male organ was represented as being of such importance as to be the ground work of the covenant between God and the Hebrews, it being declared (Gen. xvii. 14), as if by the word of the Lord, that no man was to be allowed to live whose organ had not been improved in a definite manner, i.e., by circumcision or excision of the prepuce, and that no man was to be admitted into the congregation of the faithful whose characteristic male organs had in any way been injured or removed. Deuteronomy xxiii. 1 is conclusive upon this point, and there is no ambiguity in the words of the decree. We pointed out, also, that not only was abundance of offspring promised to the faithful as a proof of God's regard to them, but that the laws, said to be delivered by Jehovah to Moses, positively provided (see Deut. xxi. 10-14) the means by which the harems of the wealthy could be stocked in times of war, and by which even the poor might also be indulged, in or about the precincts of the temple, where slave and foreign women were kept for the purpose (Numb. xxxi. 40). We pointed out that the natural result of this licensed debauchery was a great increase in the population, which was so much in excess of the capacity of the land to sustain them, that it was necessary to check the number of adult mouths by conniving at infanticide, as was done in Rajpootana up to a recent period, and is said to be done in China now. It is clear, from the denunciations by the prophets of the vileness of the Jews of Jerusalem, and the impotent laws which were introduced into the so-called Mosaic code, that the Hebrew family was to the full as bad and vile as were the nations around them. We further showed that there was a marked difference in the thoughts, the doctrines, the laws, the knowledge, the writings, and the form of worship amongst the Jews after they had come into contact with the Babylonians, Persians, and Greeks; and we adverted to the fact that the laws of the Persians, and those of him, whom we would designate "the fictitious Moses," were remarkably similar; and we showed that everything in the Old Testament, which is, by the majority of Christians, deemed to be of Divine origin, had been derived from or through one or other of the sources which we have named, and which we call Pagan. From this we deduced the important corollary, either that the so-called revelation of the Old Testament is a sham, a priestly fabrication, and what is known as "a pious fraud," or that it was not made originally to the Hebrews. In neither case can the Jews establish a title to be the "chosen people of God" in any sense of the words. If the Bible is true, the Gentiles have spiritual precedence over the Hebrews, and the Pagans have the _pas_ of the Christians. This deduction enabled us to recognize the importance of an extended inquiry into the faith, religion, and practice of other nations, before we assume ourselves to be in a position to appreciate the claims which one human being, or any body of men, might make to be the representatives of the Almighty, the sole recipients of His commands, and the only medium by which prayers can be forwarded to Him. Again, the history of the past, and a study of the present, enabled us to see that the foundation of a new religion, or the modification of an old one, did not destroy ancient practices, though it transferred priestly power to a new set of men, who, while they introduced new gods and new dogmas, endeavoured to incorporate the older ideas with new, so as to seduce or cheat the vulgar, whom it was not judicious to slaughter, into adopting the new faith. Consequently, we are able to understand how indecent ideas, sexual emblems, and Pagan festivals, with many of the licentious practices associated therewith, have been handed down from a remote idolatry to a modern and comparatively enlightened Christianity. The symbols of the objectionable still remain, but the things symbolized have been altered, and the original ideas suppressed. The male triad is a holy trinity; the monad is no longer the emblem of womankind, but of the so-called Mother of God, or, as the Romanists say, of the _Mater Creatoris_. But with this knowledge comes the very important consideration, how far Christian ideas, which are founded upon Pagan fancies, can be regarded as Divine. This, again, involves the question, how far Jesus, who had not penetration enough to discover the true nature of the writings to which he trusted, can be considered as an incarnation of Divine knowledge, or of unbounded wisdom. Still further, it became clear, after our arguments, that if the stories of the creation of man, the fall of Adam, the life of Noah, of Abraham, of Moses, the tale of Sinai, and the supremacy of Judah, are mythical--if the prophetic writings are as worthless as the oracles of Dodona and of Delphi--then all theories, dogmas, and doctrines founded upon them must be equally valueless. In pursuance of my subject, I pointed out that there was not a nation known to history which had not its god or gods, a sacred priesthood, a set of prophets, either located in one spot, or appearing as independent vaticinators, a number of holy festivals, of hallowed shrines, of mysterious temples, and an inner and recondite arcanum into which the profane were not permitted to enter. I showed that other nations besides the Jews had a sacred ark which was an emblem of a divinity; that the use of sacrifices was common to every nation of antiquity; and that such things had existed in Hindostan from time immemorial. I pointed out, that there was no single precept or order contained in the Jewish Ritual which could not be found amongst all other people, with the sole exception of the Sabbath; and that the respect for this very strange law was due to the ignorance of the Hebrews, who regarded Saturn as the most high amongst the gods--information gained from the Babylonians. Thus, an investigation into the nature and importance of Ancient Faiths becomes a necessary prelude to, or, rather, is unavoidably followed by, an inquiry into the beliefs, doctrines, and practices current in Christendom generally, and in Great Britain particularly. Yet, though I was insensibly driven forwards to complete the task which I began, without having any definite notion of the amount of labour I should have to undergo, I passively resisted for a long time the conclusions to which I was drawn, feeling myself unwilling, almost, indeed, unable, to undertake an examination which might shake my faith in the New Testament as it had been shaken in the Old. Like many others of a thoughtful turn of mind, I could see, without very strong regret, the Jewish writings consigned to their appropriate niche in the library of the world; but I shunned the effort required to take down the books of the Gospels and Epistles and weigh them in the impartial balance of critical truth. Nevertheless, as my work on Ancient Faiths progressed, I became painfully conscious that I must plead guilty to the charge of mental cowardice if I shirked the duty of examining the New, as I had investigated the Old, Testament. But when the resolution to investigate modern faith was at length formed, the difficulties surrounding the subject became apparent. The history of modern faith is, to a great extent, the history of Christianity, and the history of Christianity must start from a history of Jesus and his apostles--Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude, as given in the Epistles and Gospels included in the canon of the New Testament. To cope with any one of these histories as they deserve to be handled would involve the work of a lifetime, and for one man to exhaust the whole seemed to me an impossibility. There was, in addition to this, another consideration which complicated my difficulty still farther, viz., the fact that there were already, written histories of the nature of those alluded to, and that it would be useless to multiply them. It is a thankless task to pursue the current of the Christian religion through the dark scenes which shrouded it, from the time when it was adopted by a few "unlearned and ignorant men," until it emerged as a power able to shake empires--from the period wherein its professors were burned and otherwise tortured to death, to the days when their own Christian successors racked, roasted, and tormented their opponents, with a malignancy and cruelty as great as that which they themselves had execrated when practised upon their predecessors. From the moment that Christianity became a political power, its history resembled that of any tyrant or other ruler, and it is filled with misrepresentation, lying, fraud, the records of fighting and slaughter, of brutal passions, frightful laws, and horrible punishments; in fact, the record of political Christianity is that of a Devil in sheep's clothing. Even Calvin, one of our cherished reformers, burnt another Protestant almost in the same year as the Papists burnt Ridley and Latimer. The English Episcopalians in Scotland, and the Cromwellian Puritans in Ireland, showed more of the ravening wolf in their actions than of the amiable shepherd, who "gently leads" the weak ones of his flock. In fact, the more loud the proclamation of a pure Christianity, the more devilish is the practice of its heralds. When I turned to the consideration of the life of Jesus, it was clear that the ground was already fully occupied. In 1799 a Mr Houston published a work entitled _Ecce Homo; or, a Critical Inquiry into the History of Jesus Christ: being an Analysis of the Gospels_, a second edition of which was made public fourteen years afterwards, and, as a result, its publisher (D. J. Eaton) was prosecuted, and such of the impressions as could be collected were publicly burned in St. George's Fields, London, by the common hangman, whose business it was to strangle truth as well as murderers. This book, which is little known to modern readers, is strictly what it professes to be--a critical inquiry into the history of Jesus Christ, and it may, to a great extent, be considered as the progenitor of more modern treatises. It does not materially differ from the _Ecce Homo_ of to-day, or from the other works which we shall name, except in its style and composition. Having been written when all were in the habit of expressing their views in strong language, and when opponents were abused in terms of coarse invective, the author has expressed himself in a manner calculated to offend rather than to convince, and to stir up anger rather than to encourage thought. Yet his arguments are unanswerable, and his deductions unimpeachable, by those who know the value of evidence and exercise their power of ratiocination. I have been unable to find that any work was written in refutation of the author's views, and the only opposition to it was from the usual agent of the weak-minded, but strong-bodied--persecution. In more recent times, and within a very short period of each other--so short, indeed, that we may say that the books were composed simultaneously in Hindostan, Germany, France, and England--there have appeared _A Voice from the Ganges,_ Strauss' _New Life of Jesus_, Kenan's _Life of Jesus_, The English _Life of Jesus_, by Mr Thomas Scott, of Norwood, a second _Ecce Homo_, from a modern Professor, and _The Prophet of Nazareth_, by Owen Meredith.* In these volumes, the historical value of the Gospel narratives closely and critically examined, and a just appreciation of the character, preaching, and practice of the Prophet of Nazareth are honestly sought after, and, in the opinion of impartial readers, they must be held to have been attained. Throughout the series which we have mentioned nothing that is capable of demonstration, or of approximate proof, is taken for granted. The scholarship of the critical philosopher everywhere overbears the prejudice of the Christian bigot. Since the appearance of these another author has treated upon the same subject, but only cursorily, and as bearing upon other matters, in a work entitled _The Book of God; or, The Apocalypse of Adam Oannes_, which was published anonymously, 1868. * Whilst this sheet was in the printer's hands, a most remarkable book was published anonymously, entitled, _Supernatural Religion_, in two volumes. In it there is a most scholarly account of the origin of the New Testament writings, one which every thoughtful person should peruse. Between the publication of the first _Ecce Homo_ and the second, viz., in 1836, there was printed, for private circulation, a very remarkable work, entitled _Anacalypsis; or, an Attempt to draw aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis_, by Godfrey Higgins. His two volumes are replete with learning, and with deductions more startling than any which had appeared prior to his own time; but the subject matter is so badly arranged, that it is with very great difficulty that the trains of thought which occupied the author's mind can be dis-. covered. His main idea is, that very nearly everything in religion which appears to be mythical or mysterious enfolds certain astronomical facts--such as the precession of equinoxes, the duration of cycles of time--such as are necessary to reproduce exactly a concordance between certain terrestrial and celestial phenomena. With this theory he interweaves an amazing number of facts which seem to favour the opinion enunciated in the book of Ecclesiastes--i.e., that there is nothing new under the sun. He shows that the idea of "incarnations," the birth of a heavenly child from a pure virgin, and a variety of so-called Christian dogmas, have existed in every age of which we have historical accounts. He gives a vivid sketch of the nature of Christianity and its progress from century to century, and he expresses himself respecting its modern developments much in the same strain, though in a far more gentlemanlike style, as did his contemporary, the Rev. R. Taylor, to whom was given, or who assumed for himself, the title of the Devil's chaplain. In the estimation of some of these writers, Jesus, the son of Mary, is quite as mythical a being as Hercules, the son of Alcmena. This view has been more recently adopted by some freethinkers of the present day. The main support on which such individuals rely is the fact that there is no mention of Jesus by any contemporary historian; and that, although there are extant Jewish records of current history, at the time in which Christ is said to have lived, they make no mention of him who is now called the Saviour and of his wonderful history. It is pointed out that the histories of the Gospels came out with marvellous rapidity, from Alexandria, about the end of the first century, at a time when all contemporaries of Jesus were dead. To this work of Higgins it is probable that we shall have repeatedly to refer, for his language is frequently so forcible that it cannot be improved, and, moreover, he very often quotes from books, copies of which I have been unable to obtain. When I found that the ground which I intended to occupy had already been so well and so ably cultivated, it occurred to me that it would be advisable to take a wider flight than was originally contemplated, and, instead of examining the Christian faith alone, to associate with it an account of the faiths of those nations of whom we have some knowledge. By this means it appeared to me, that we should be enabled to see clearly, how far the current belief and practice of Christendom differs from the doctrines and practices of those to whom Christianity could never, by any possibility, have come, and we can examine, incidentally, into the teachings of Jesus, and compare them with that of his predecessor, Sakya Muni, or Buddha. We may also investigate impartially such doctrines as the immaculate conception, and the existence of angels. When treating, however, a subject like the religions of the ancient and modern world, it is difficult to frame the history so as to bring out the salient points, in a manner satisfactory to the reader or to the writer. The latter is tempted to begin, as he believes, at the beginning, and to trace the development of religious thought from its simplest expression up to its highest aspiration. This temptation becomes all the stronger if, in the course of his study, he has investigated the animal and vegetable creations. In those vast kingdoms he sees that the philosopher is able to lead his disciples onwards from the minute monad, or the simplest mass of matter, to the gigantic mastodon, without any very conspicuous flaw or break in continuity; but, on closely observing his method of proceeding, the student finds that links which connect genera or species together are found in countries so wide apart, that no direct communication can be supposed between the one type and the other. Thus the gap between mammals and birds is said to be filled by the "ornithorhynchus paradoxus," an animal living in a vast island, in which scarcely one quadruped mammalian is known to have existed, and where the aboriginal birds form a class peculiar to Australia, and have no resemblance to the creature referred to. Yet, though the temptation is great, and although we feel justified in reasoning from the known to the unknown, and in supplying missing links from analogy, or from our own imagination, still, we consider that it will be our best plan to confine ourselves, as far as possible, to that which is written, and to describe first, the religious ideas and practices of some so-called savages; secondly, the ideas and practices of some ancient races, whose histories, more or less perfect, have come down to us, with a view to ascertain whether there is anything essentially good in modern Christianity, either in faith or practice, which is peculiar to that form of religion, or whether almost the same style of teaching may not be found to have been common in the remote East, at a period some centuries prior to the birth of Jesus. As we have investigated the subjects of Sin, Salvation, Prayer, Inspiration, &c., it is unnecessary to refer to them again. CHAPTER II Travellers' tales not to be trusted. Prejudice perverts facts. The Esquimaux. Cause of reverence for parents. The Red Indian in the presence of immigration is a moral murderer. Inquiry into Indian religion. O. KEE. PA. Indian reverence for phenomena of nature. Ruins of a past civilization in America. Cairns and human sacrifices. Manufactured goods. Bronze in Yucatan. Resemblance between the ancient American people and certain Orientals. Abbé Domenech's travels. Sacrifice at obsequies, idea involved thereby. Scythian proceedings. Mexico and its theology. Two different conceptions of deity. The Unity subdivided by Mexicans, Jews, and Christians. The God of war and the Lord of Hosts. The God of air a deity in Mexico, a devil in Judea or Ephesus. Mexican baptismal regeneration. Resemblances between the Occidental and Oriental people in many curious doctrines. Particulars. Mexican Heaven, Hell, and Limbo. Mexican baptism and prayers. Priests and their duties. A parallel. Romanists and Mexicans. Confession. Expiation. Human sacrifice to obtain pardon of sin. A comparison suggested. Mexican education. Purity of life in the Mexican priestesses. Father Acosta's opinion thereon. Tartary, Rome, and Mexico have something common in culture. Education of youth. Policy of the priesthood. Reflections thereupon. Teocallis or houses of God. Worship. Festivals. Human sacrifice. No sexual deities or rites. Question of credibility--God and the Devil act alike! Aztecs and Europeans compared. Christians have offered human sacrifice from the time of Peter downwards. Transubstantiation is a cannibal doctrine. Christian gods in Mexico as bad as the Aztec deities. History of Peru. The policy of its rulers. Roads and magazines. Nature of its government Governors were instructed in their duties. Civil service examination. Inauguration of youths into honourable manhood. Travelling compulsory in rulers. Postal system--division of the people --local magistrates--law speedy. Code of law. Punishment without torture. Peruvians and inquisitors. Reports required of lands and families. Register of births, &c. Rapidity of communication. Plunder not permitted. Peace the motive for war. The vanquished incorporated with the victors. A paternal government. Peruvian religion. Difference between political institutions and priestcraft. Peruvian sun god. An invisible God recognised. Priests. Eternal life. Heaven and Hell. Temple of the sun magnificent. Golden ornaments. Huge urns of silver. Number of priests. Festivals. Cannibalism not permitted. Fire made from rays of sun and concave mirror, or by friction. Virgins of the sun. Concubines of the Inca. Matrimony. Reflexions. When the philosopher reads over the histories which adventurous travellers, or Christian missionaries, have given of the religions of the savage, or uncivilized, people whom they have visited, he feels painfully conscious that the accounts are not implicitly to be relied upon. In some he recognizes the fact that communications only take place between the one party and the other by signs, which not only may be, but very generally are, misinterpreted on both sides; in others he is able to see, or, at least, he comes to the conclusion, that the untaught barbarians have not a single idea which is not connected with eating and drinking, war, revenge, and love;--that such, indeed, resemble brute beasts, who have no more conception of hell or heaven, God and the soul, than an elephant has of aerostation, or a crow of theology. In other narratives the observer notices, that the individuals who interrogate the savages are themselves enthusiasts of a high order, who ask leading questions, and are content to receive, as a satisfactory answer, anything which can be considered as a reply. By this means very erroneous ideas have crept in amongst ourselves, and writers have built arguments upon a foundation as flimsy as a shifting sand. For example, I have repeatedly heard it alleged that every known tribe, in every part of the world which has yet been visited, has a tradition respecting an universal deluge, and the salvation of their progenitors by a floating vessel; and on this has been founded the hypothesis that all architecture, and even written characters, have an ark for their type. This development has been very ingeniously supported by J. P. Lesley, in _Man's Origin and Destiny_ (Trubner, London, 1868), a work replete with learning, and bold, but somewhat unsound, deductions. This assumed fact has also been used in support of the Biblical story of Noah, his ark, and the universal deluge--a myth so palpably extravagant, that everyone who professes to credit it is compelled to object to some detail, and to lean upon some frail reed, with the hope that he may thus be pardoned for his credulity. Since the above was written, it has been ascertained that the tale of Noah and his deluge is adapted from an Assyrian or Babylonian legend, written apparently with a view to make a story fitting to the sign of the Zodiac called Aquarius, one to the full as fabulous as that of the birth of Bacchus, and the amours of Zeus. In some instances, moreover, and palpably in those cases where the account of the religion of barbarous nations is given by fanatics, such as the Roman Catholic invaders of America, or by such conquerors as Cæsar and others, who have themselves very hazy notions of their own faith, the philosopher feels that the savage is intentionally misrepresented; consequently, in these, as in all other instances, it behoves the philosopher to examine the evidence at his command with critical acumen, rather than accept the statements made by more or less careless observers. Endeavouring, therefore, to avoid these difficulties as far as possible, let us summarize the result of our reading, and record the impressions left upon our mind respecting the faith, ritual, and practice of certain modern and ancient barbarians. Beginning with the vast American continent, we find that the Esquimaux appear to have no conception whatever of a Creator, of a future state, of a mundane theocracy, or of any unseen agency but good or bad "luck." But they, nevertheless, put a certain amount of faith in conjurers--cunning men or women who profess to be able to insure them a good supply of seals or walrus, and protection from Arctic dangers. For such a people as this the wants of the day form the chief, if not the only, object of thought; and they resemble lions or eagles, who are now all but famished in the hunt for food, and now gorged to repletion with the result of their quest. To such a nation, Heaven, as described in the Bible, with its sea of glass, its harpists and singers, would afford no temptation, and, unless it was furnished with abundance of oily food, an Esquimaux would not visit it; nor would the fires and heat of Hell have any terrors for one whose torments on earth are connected with miserable cold. In practice, the Esquimaux are very much what they are made by their neighbours and visitors: they are very decently behaved to those who treat them well, and cruel, barbarous, and revengeful to strangers after they have themselves been worried by invaders. Alternately gluttons and starving they obey the necessities of their existence--they eat to keep themselves warm, and they must be anchorets as rigid as any Theban hermit whilst they are seeking their prey. With a temperature below zero, and winter huts constructed of ice, chastity is almost a necessary virtue, and adultery cannot possibly be frequent. Where everything of value is rare, covetousness is not common; but if the holder of the coveted prize be always alert, it is quite natural that murder shall be attempted, either by the thief or his victim. The reverence of parents here, as elsewhere, is a necessary accompaniment of savage life, and is quite independent of any knowledge of the decalogue. To prevent reiteration of this observation, let us consider for a moment, the chief if not the main cause, of the reverence given to the father, and, more rarely, to the mother in the economy of human life. We see that the Almighty has implanted an instinct in one or both parents, throughout the larger part of the animal creation, to nourish, guide, and teach their young. The duck leads her brood to a pond; the hen keeps her chicks from water, but teaches them to pick up seeds, grubs, and worms; whilst the cock keeps order amongst the family, The weasel teaches its offspring how to attack its prey most advantageously, and the eagle instructs her young ones to fly. In like manner, man is at the head of his own household; he is the first power to which the young ones bow; they know the weight of his arm, and dread his anger, knowing that they will suffer from it when it is stirred up. We all know, as a rule, that a habit contracted in childhood adheres to us throughout life, consequently, the dread of the father which exists in the youth becomes, very generally, filial reverence in the man. But we also know that almost throughout the animal creation, the young and sturdy males will, as they grow up to maturity, fight for supremacy, even with their parents. So long as the latter retain the mastery they are respected; but as soon as age and its accompanying weakness have made them succumb, all filial respect vanishes. If, therefore, a parent, when old, is unable to make himself feared by his prowess, revered for his good sense or knowledge, or beloved for some faculty which makes him pleasing to his family or the tribe, he is neglected, and often sacrificed, so that the young shall have only themselves to provide food for. Even in Christian England, where filial regard is cultivated as an essential part of our religion, we too frequently find that parents are wholly neglected by their adult offspring, as soon as they become, from sickness, age, or other infirmity, useless members of the family. Without having ever heard of a law, or set of laws, given in a desert from Mount Sinai, the Esquimaux are as moral as modern Christians, and more so than the ancient Jews: they certainly have not more gods than one, and do not worship any graven image. Amongst them blasphemy is unknown. Parents are honoured; chastity is general; murder is very rare; theft only exists when strangers come amongst them with valuable matters, such as cutting weapons. Amongst such a primitive people false witness is unknown, and covetousness only exists in the presence of travellers who have well-stocked ships or sledges. But the Esquimaux do not keep a Sabbath of rest every seventh day; how, indeed, could they, when many of their days have a duration of six weeks--according to the Hebrew computation, which measures the day by sunsets. It is clear, then, that what many persons designate Christian virtues do not necessarily depend upon a knowledge of Jehovah, of Jesus, or of both. The North American Indian appears to have been, when first discovered, wholly without any distinct religious faith. It is true that some authors have described him as reverencing his manitou, or great spirit, and speaking of some happy hunting ground to which his soul will pass after death; but I am unable to find any reliable testimony in support of this poetic notion. To me it seems that the Red Indian is nothing more than one of a ferocious tribe of men, who, having to subsist by the chase alone, bestows all his thoughts upon getting meat, and driving off his neighbours from interfering in his lands. To such an one a teeming population is equivalent to a diminution in the supply of game, and this, again, involves starvation. With him, therefore, the murder of his neighbours becomes a matter of necessity, one which may be regarded by him as an absolute virtue, a matter of public policy, and essentially a moral duty; and as he is little superior to a tiger or a cat, he does not scruple to add cruelty to homicide. He who has seen a carnivorous beast seize its living prey, disable, without killing it, and then lie by and watch its victim, rising now and again to give it a shake, or a pat with its claw, can well understand how a Blackfoot Indian might gloat over a dying Delaware, or a Mandan torture an Iroquois when he had the chance, each regarding the other as men consider wasps and hornets. Yet, though without religion, the Indian is not without fear. He is terrified by strange noises, and by weird sights; there is a being whom he dreads; and there is in every tribe a "medicine man," who is supposed to have supernatural power, and to be able to attract good or to banish evil fortune from the chief and his people. Practically, the Red Indian is as superstitious about lucky and unlucky days as was the Hebrew David and the Persian Haman, and, prior to the starting of an expedition, the diviner is consulted, who may, possibly, answer in the words of the Lord (?) of Judah, "let it be when thou hearest the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry trees, then thou shalt bestir thyself, for then shall the Lord go out before thee to smite the host of the Philistines" (2 Sam. v. 24). But though without religion, in the usual acceptation of the word, the Indians were not, when first the white man knew them, wholly without ritual, or what has been designated a sacred ceremony. The celebration to which we refer occurred every year, was conducted by a definite set of actors, and was attended to with wonderful reverence. A full account of such ceremony is given by G. Catlin, in a work entitled, O Kee Pa (Trübner, London, 1867). In it figures a mystic messenger, who comes to demand the initiation of the young men of the tribe who have attained a fighting age; tents are then prepared, and men and women are duly painted and otherwise disguised to represent buffaloes and bugbears, the bad spirit, etc.; the main intention of the whole being to test the courage, strength, and endurance of the young men by frightful tortures, which are too disgusting for description here. At the end of the trial, however, each votary sacrifices a joint of the little finger of one hand to the bad spirit. At this feast-some doll-like effigies are used to mark the "mystery" tent. Amongst barbarians like these are, it will readily be imagined that such virtues as chastity and charity have no existence,--that successful theft ennobles the robber, and that the slaughter of an enemy, either by treachery or in fair fight, is regarded as a proof of courage, much as it was amongst the Spartan Greeks. Polygamy is simply a matter of wealth and arrangement, and women are purchased and treated like slaves. It is the man's business to hunt and fight, it is the woman's duty to make the best or the most of the spoils of the chase. Yet, with this general absence of all religion, there appears to be, here and there, a reverence for certain strange phenomena of nature--such as hot or bubbling fountains, sulphur springs, steaming geysers, and curious rocks, like the celebrated pipe-stone rock in the Sioux territory. From this all pipes ought to be made, there being as much of orthodoxy in such bowls amongst the Indians as there is in an "Agnus Dei" amongst Christian papists. There is, too, a reverence for the dead occasionally to be met with, but it cannot be said to amount to worship. In some instances, but I do not find that the custom is general, a man is interred with his horse, weapons, and medicine bag, as if it was expected that he would live beyond the tomb, and require in his other state of existence that which he wanted in this. What we have said of the North American aborigines applies with equal, if not with greater, force to those of the South. From what the savage redskins are, and have been, during the last two or three centuries, a transition to what they have been in the past is very natural; and, whilst making the step, the philosopher will be reminded of the observation made by some profound observer, to the effect---"go where you will, no matter how savage the nation, you will be sure to find the remains of a previous empire, nation, or civilization." Vast forests, scarcely yet fully explored, cover ancient cities in Ceylon and Central America alike, and men, who toiled to build vast temples, towers, palaces, and fortresses, are replaced by wild animals. In the Bashan of Palestine, primeval houses of stone still stand, where scarcely a resident is to be found, and the present inhabitants are far inferior to the ancient race that built these enduring dwellings. Thus the Abbé Domenech writes (_Seven Years Residence in the Great Deserts of North America_, London, Longman, 1860), vol. I., p. 353--"From Florida to Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, the American soil is strewn with gigantic ruins of temples, tumuli, entrenched camps, fortifications, towers, villages, towers of observation, gardens, wells, artificial meadows, and high roads of the most remote antiquity." Without entering closely into the nature of the antiquities discovered, we may state that they comprise pyramids, cones, obelisks, hills surrounded by a deep vallum, like that adjoining Salisbury, and earthen constructions analogous to that at Avebury. There is evidence that the artificial erections, which were so built as to be visible from an enormous distance, were designed, possibly, as cairns, or memorials of the dead, but also as spots for sacrificial offerings, resembling those called high places in Ancient Palestine, the tumulus over Patroclus, and the Scythian mounds in the Crimea. The altars which have been discovered are made of baked clay or stone, and have the shape of large basins, varying in length from nineteen inches to seventeen yards, but generally about two yards and a-half. Under and around the altars calcined human bones were found, and sometimes a whole skeleton was met with in the tumulus, as if a sacrifice of men attended the funeral rites, as we learn from Homer that it did, before Troy, when Achilles directed the obsequies of his friend Patroclus. Cremation, as well as sepulture, was adopted, and with the dead, ornaments, arms, and other objects, which belonged in life to the departed, were buried; amongst these are to be reckoned trinkets of silver and of brass, as well as of stone and bone. As a proof of the advanced knowledge of the people referred to, I may here quote, from memory, a note from Stevens' _Central America_, to the effect that the bronze tools found in Yucatan, &c., amongst the quarries whence the stone for the ancient temples was procured, are nearly as hard as steel, and that a similar bronze is only known to have existed in some of the ancient tombs and quarries of Egypt, an observation which receives additional value from Domenech's remark, vol. I., p. 364--"These works of art (arms, idols, and medals, found in New Granada tombs) are acknowledged, by the archaeologists of Panama, to possess the characteristics of both Chinese and Egyptian art." Here, again, I would call my readers' attention to the facts, that in very modern times Chinese have migrated to California, Australia, Singapore, and other distant localities, and that Fortune found Egyptian curiosities in _virtù_, shops in China, whilst Egyptologists have discovered Chinese manufactures in Egyptian tombs. The subject of the extent of travel in ancient times does not enter into my present plan; but as I am desirous to make the mind of my readers expansive enough to receive everything which bears upon the history of man upon the earth, I may be allowed to sow seed by the way-side, some of which may blossom as "a garden flower grown wild." Domenech, in p. 408, vol. I., figures a remarkable stone, by many persons supposed to be a hoax or forgery, which was found at the base of one of the largest mounds in North America, situated in Western Virginia. It lay in a sepulchral chamber, thirty-five feet from the surface, was elliptic in shape, two inches and a-half long, two wide, and about half an inch thick, and the material was of a dark colour, and very hard. The following is a copy from Domenech's work, and, without dwelling upon it, we may call attention to the similarity of some of the letters with those known to, or used by the Phoenicians, Ancient Greco-Italians, and Carthaginians. Like the Newton Stone, in Scotland, and some Gnostic gems, it may be said to be learned "gibberish," which "the spirits" can read but no one else. [Illustration: 056] There is, indeed, much more evidence than is generally supposed to connect the ancient mound-builders in America with the inhabitants of the Eastern Hemisphere, particularly in their modes of burial, the nature of their earthworks, and the style of such ornaments and figures as have been found. For example, there is one enclosure described, in the centre of which is erected a mound and pillar, precisely resembling the linga yoni of the East. In addition to these, carved stones have been found, which unite together such Oriental emblems as the sun and moon, the Tau, T and the egg, O which together make the well-known Egyptian symbol A. Again, Domenech figures some male and female human effigies, of whom American savans write that they represent idols of sexual design, similar to those exposed in the _Mysteries of Eleusis_, one of them being a badly finished image of Priapus. Domenech still farther states, on the authority of Cortez, that a form of worship, recalling the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris, was established in America. Respecting the nature of the religion of the mound builders the Abbé writes--"The government of these nations appears to have been theocratic or sacerdotal, like that of the Jews, and the religious administrative and military power was, probably, vested in one and the same person. This is clearly evinced by the taboo, or sacred monuments, being combined with those of a purely military character," p. 366. Without straining doubtful points too far, we may content ourselves with affirming that the researches of Davis and Squire, of Stephens, and of Domenech, show that the mound builders of America raised high places for sacrificial fires; that they built huge piles of earth over dead warriors; and, that during the funeral rites which were observed at the obsequies, they immolated certain human victims. Let us now pause for a moment and consider how much is involved in the practice of making a sacrifice by fire, or otherwise, at the burial of any deceased chieftain or honoured man. With what idea could the living wife join her husband on the funeral pyre in India, or the ancient Tartars have slain the horse, slaves, wives, and chief officers of a defunct king, burying them all in a vast grave, unless they entertained the belief that there was a life beyond the grave? The faith may have been of the crudest form, yet the practice evidenced the belief that those who died, and were buried together, would arise and live at the same time and place, and in the same relative positions which they had during life. If this be granted, it demonstrates that the early dwellers in America had a higher conception of immortality than had the ancient Jews, even although the latter assumed, and pertinaciously persisted in the assertion, that they, and they only of all the nations of the world, were taught of God--a boast to which a vast number of thoughtless Christians give a profound reverence, and most implicit belief. Without speculating upon the probable connexion between the mound-builders and the inhabitants of ancient Mexico, we will endeavour, with the aid of Prescott, and other writers, to ascertain something of the faith professed by Montezuma and his subjects. Derived from two sources, there were two distinct elements in the Mexican religion; one of these was gentle and mild as the teaching of Christ, and the other, ferocious and cruel, like the practice of such of his followers as the sensual Crusaders, the persecuting Popes of Italy, and the brutal, money-grubbing Spaniards. The former gradually dried up, like primitive Christianity, and the harmlessness of the dove was replaced by the ferocity of the wolf. It is in strict accordance with human nature, that virtues are harder to maintain than vices, hence malignancy swelled itself up and became dominant. The priests of the sanguinary class contrived as burdensome a ceremonial as ever existed in Judea, Greece, Spain, or Modern Rome, and they surrounded their deities with conceptions as grotesque as those which are clustered round the Hindoo gods of to-day, the divinities of the Greeks and Romans, and the innumerable virgins, saints, and martys of mediaeval and modern papal Christianity. The power and the inclination to make fetish is certainly not confined to African negroes. The Mexicans recognized a supreme Creator as the God by whom we live, one who was, for them, omnipresent and omniscient--the giver of all good things, "without whom man is as nothing." He was said to be "invisible, incorporeal, a being of absolute perfection and perfect purity," "under whose wings men may find repose and a sure defence." But this deity, though single, was subdivided by the Mexican theologians, much in the same way as Jehovah became separated into an innumerable host of angels, archangels, and devils, and as Zeus was split up into an equally numerous army of gods, goddesses, and demigods. The Mexicans had thirteen major, and about two hundred minor, divinities, to one or other of whom each day was devoted, much in the same way as certain modern Christians believe in one Creator, four persons, three of whom are male and the other female, seven archangels, and some hundreds of saints, virgins, or martyrs, to each of whom one day of the year is consecrated. There are more gods and goddesses in the Papal calendar than in that of Ancient Mexico, Greece, or even Rome. At the head of the celestial army was "the god of war," "the patron of the kingdom," whose temples were more noble in their barbaric majesty than any other, and to whom human beings were sacrificed in abundance. They were the noblest creatures that could be found, and in truth, there were very few other animals to offer in their place. This great Mexican divinity was essentially the same as the _Jehovah Tsebaoth_ of the Hebrew Scriptures; the Lord of Hosts of whom we read in Exod. xv. 3, "The Lord (Jehovah) is a man of war, the Lord (Jehovah) is His name;" and in Ps. xxiv. 8, "Who is this King of glory?--the Lord, strong and mighty; the Lord, mighty in battle;" and again, the same idea appears in verse 10 of the same Psalm; see also 1 Chron. xvii. 24, "The Lord of Hosts is the God of Israel." Indeed, we should weary the reader if we were to quote all the texts to be found in the Old Testament, which prove that the Hebrew Jehovah was as much a god of war as was the chief deity of the Mexicans. Modern civilization may frame the belief that God is not "the author of confusion, but of peace" (1 Cor. xiv. 33); but the Hebrews in the East, and the Mexicans in the West, held a different opinion. Besides the god of war there was a god of the air, who once lived on earth, and taught metallurgy, agriculture, and the art of government. He was essentially a human benefactor, who caused the earth to teem with fruit and flowers, without the trouble of laborious cultivation--his reign was analogous to the golden age of the Greeks and Romans. But he was not wholly satisfactory, and was banished; yet he is to have a second coming, like Elias, and a modern deity of the Eastern world. His portrait is identical, apparently, with the commonly received likeness of Jesus. In Christian mythology (see Eph. ii. 2), "the prince of the power of the air" is regarded as "the adversary," or a devil. No other deities are described in detail by Prescott, but he says that every household had its "penates," or household gods. On turning to Higgins, who quotes entirely from Lord Kingsborough's _Mexican Antiquities_, we find that the Mexicans baptized their children with what they called "water of regeneration." Their king also danced before his god, as David did, to his chaste wife's disgust, and was consecrated and anointed by the high priest with a holy unction as Saul and the son of Jesse were. On one day of the year all the fires in the Mexican kingdom were extinguished and lighted again from one sacred hearth in the temple, which again reminds us of the Vestal Virgins, whose business was to keep up a holy fire in Rome, and of the lamp which was to burn perpetually in the Jewish temple (Exod. xxvii. 20). At the end of October the Mexicans had a feast resembling our "All Souls," or "Saints," day, which was called "the festival of advocates," because each human being had an advocate in the heaven above to plead for him, which again reminds us of Jesus' dictum, that children have guardian angels, who are always in God's presence (Matt, xviii. 10) The same people had a forty-days' fast, in honour of a god who was tempted forty days upon a mountain, and thus resembled the Prophet of Nazareth. He was called the morning star, and thus is to be identified with Lucifer as well as Jesus (Isa. xiv. 12, Rev. xxii. 16), and carried a reed for an emblem (see Eev. xxi. 15). The Mexicans honoured a cross, and the god of air was represented sometimes as nailed to one, and even occasionally between two other individuals.* * As we cannot imagine that the Mexicans were aware of the manner in which modern Christians depict Jesus on the cross, we most, I think, seek for some idea which was common to both the East and West. In Payne Knight's work, so often referred to by us, there is a picture which represents a cock with a lingam instead of a head and beak; on its pediment there is in Greek the words, soteer kosmou, "the saviour of the world." This is also an epithet of Siva, and he is sometimes represented as a phallus. In this he is the Asher or Bel of the Assyrian triad, erected higher than the other two. In Christian history the outsiders are said to be thieves, but it was not so in Mexico. The three crosses are simply emblems of the "trinity." A virgin and child were also adored, as they were in Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, and Hindostan, and as they are in a great part of Europe at the present time. The people believed in vast cycles of years, at the end of each of which there was to be a general destruction of life, and a perfect regeneration, an idea which Higgins has shown to have existed amongst Persians, Romans, and Jews alike. The Mexicans still further believed in a threefold future state--a heaven for the brave, and those who were sacrificed, there being, so far as I can discover, no abstract idea of what we call "virtue"; a hell for the wicked; and a sort of quiet limbo for those who were in no way distinguished. Heaven was located in the sun, and the blessed were permitted to revel amongst lovely clouds and singing birds, enjoying, unharmed, all the charms of nature: a conception which is to the full as poetical, and, probably, quite as near the truth, as that given in "Revelation." When a man died he was burned, and, if rich, his slaves were sacrificed with him, the Mexicans, in this respect, resembling the ancient Scythians, with whom they had much in common. When the ceremony of giving a name to children was gone through, their lips and bosom were sprinkled with water, and the Lord was implored to permit the holy drops to wash away the sin that was given to the child before the foundation of the world, so that the infant might be born anew, or, in modern terms, regenerated (Prescott, ch. 3). Amongst their prayers, or invocations, were the formulas, "Wilt Thou blot us out, O Lord, for ever? Is this punishment intended, not for our reformation, but for our destruction?" again, "Impart to us, out of Thy great mercy, Thy gifts which we are not worthy to receive through our own merits;" "Keep peace with all;" "Bear injuries with humility, God who sees will avenge you;" "He who looks too curiously on a woman commits adultery with eyes." These Mexican maxims so closely resemble those to be found in the Bible, that it is difficult to believe that the Spaniards really told the truth respecting them. The sacerdotal order amongst the Mexicans was a numerous one, well arranged and powerful. The priests used musical choirs in their worship, arranged the calendar, and appointed the time for festivals. They superintended the education of youth, and wrote up the traditions, like the "recorders" of the Jews, Persians, other Orientals, and Christian monks, and looked to the conservancy of the hieroglyphic paintings. There were two high priests, who alone had to undertake the duty of offering human sacrifices, and these were elected by the king and nobles, quite irrespective of previous rank, and, when elected, they were inferior only to the sovereign. When reading this, anyone who is familiar with biblical history will bethink him of Luke iii. 3, "Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests," the plural, not the singular, number being used, and of the dictum of Caiaphas, John xi. 50, "It is expedient for us that one man should die for the people, that the whole nation perish not." We may put what construction we please upon these facts, but, whatever interpretation we may adopt, we must acknowledge that the Hebrews, at the time when our era commences, had two high priests who were concerned in human sacrifice. The priests, in general, were devoted to the service of some particular deity, and, during the time of their attendance, lived in the temple, celibate; but, when not on duty, they resided with their wives and families. Thrice during the day, and once at some period of the night, they were called to prayer, much like all the varieties of Christian monks and nuns. They were frequent in their ablutions, in which habit they may be contrasted with those saintly hermits, who regarded dirt as a divine ordinance, and never washed; and they mortified the flesh by long vigils, fasting, and cruel penance, drawing blood from their bodies by flagellation, or by piercing them with the thorns of the aloe. The resemblance of the Mexican sacerdotalism with Jewish and Christian customs is thus shown to be wonderful and striking, so much so, that the Spaniards started the idea that they had been taught by some stray apostle of Jesus. The great cities of Mexico were divided into districts, each of which was placed under the charge of a sort of parochial clergy, who regulated every act of religion within their precincts, and who administered the rites of confession and absolution. The secrets of the confessional were held inviolable, and penances were imposed, of much the same kind as those enjoined by the Roman Catholic Church upon her votaries. It was a tenet of Mexican faith, that a sin once atoned for, was, if repeated, inexpiable a second time; consequently, confession was only once resorted to, and that late in life; a good plan, upon the whole, for it enabled a man whose days were numbered to get pardon "for good and aye." It was also held that sacerdotal absolution was equivalent to magisterial punishment. The formula of absolution contained this, amongst other things, "O merciful Lord, Thou who knowest the secrets of all hearts, let Thy forgiveness and favour descend, like the pure waters of heaven, to wash away the stains from the soul. Thou knowest that this poor man has sinned, not from his own free will, but from the influence of the sign under which he was born." This idea may well be compared with the current doctrine of the phrenologists, many of whom assert that a man acts according to the configuration of his brain and cranium, and is, therefore, only partially culpable for the commission of certain crimes. After a copious exhortation to the penitent, in which he was enjoined to undergo a variety of mortifications, and to perform minute ceremonies, by way of penance, he was particularly urged to procure, with the smallest possible delay, a slave, who was to be utilized in sacrifice to the Deity; the priest then concluded with inculcating charity to the poor--"Clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, whatever privations it may cost thee, for remember their flesh is like thine." The necessity of sacrifice, as an atonement for sin, forms an essential, though bloody, part of both the Hebrew and the Christian faiths, and history has long taught us that the slaughter of a man, woman, or child, formed, in the estimation of the Ancient Greeks, and other nations, one of the most acceptable of the forms of homage paid by a human being to the Creator. This idea is at the very basis of the Christian theology. It has been held, from the time of the apostle Paul to the present day, that Jehovah would not look favourably upon mankind until He had been propitiated, not by the sacrifice of an ordinary individual, but by the murder, in the crudest of modes, of a being whom He personally begat, for the purpose of killing him when arrived at maturity. In Hebrews x. 12, we find this doctrine very distinctly enunciated, in the words, "this man, after he had offered one sacrifice of sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God," and subsequently, v. 14, "by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified." Again, in Heb. ix. 26, "once in the end of the world hath he appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself;" and in Heb. x. 10, "we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ;" and in ix. 28, "Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many." The philosopher may doubt whether the God whom the Christians have made for their own adoration, is in any way different to that of King Mesha, who offered up his own son in sacrifice, or to the Mexican one, who was contented with the blood of a slave.* * It is doubtful whether any Christian has ever paid real attention to the doctrines which are familiar to his ear, or to the hymns which an most frequently on his tongue. In the usual fashion which is prevalent amongst ministers and hearers, everything which is told by missionaries of heathen deities is taken as true. Thus it has become the general belief that the Mexican theology, which required an annual sacrifice of human beings, whose hearts were cut out, and offered warm, palpitating and full of blood, to a God who was supposed to be present in a sacred stone statue, was beyond measure atrocious. But in what consists the horror, unless in the fact that the sacrifice was seen by the worshippers? In Christendom people are never called upon to see a man killed by nailing him to a cross. If they were condemned to this penance, very little would any of them talk of blood. As it is, the minds of the majority are lulled to sleep by the substitution of words for facts, and texts of Scripture for ideas; and those who are unable to look upon a cut finger without fainting, and would not for worlds go to see a man decapitated, talk in the serenest manner on most sanguinary topics. A reference to a few hymns which are general favourites will illustrate what I mean. In "Rock of Ages," for example, we have the lines-- "Let the water and the blood From thy riven side that flowed, Cleanse from sin and make me pure." Another equally popular hymn begins "From Calv'ry's cross a fountain flows Of water and of blood, More healing than Bethesda's pool, Redeeming Lord, thy precious blood Shall never lose its power..." and again-- "There is a fountain filled with blood, Drawn from Immanuels veins, And sinners plunged beneath that flood Lose all their guilty stains." No congregation of Christian, or any other men, would tolerate for a moment the introduction into divine worship of a bath of blood, into which all those should plunge who desired salvation. Not one would endeavour to wash his sins away in a sanguine stream, drawn from any source whatever. The horror which would be produced by the doctrine that such things are necessary to appease our God, would make every thinking being detest it. Yet, when we only play with the idea, we can talk of such matters with holy complacency. If any Christian wants to test his faith, let me advise him to get a basinful of blood and place it in his bed-room, and say twice a day, when looking on it, that's the stuff which propitiates my God! It would not be long ere he saw the absurdity of his theological tenets, and the coarseness of the hierarchy which invented so frightful an idea of the Omnipotent. For the education of the youth of Mexico a part of the temples was allotted, where the boys and girls of the middle and higher classes were placed at an early period--the girls to be taught by the priestesses, the boys by priests; and from a note in Prescott's corrected edition, 1866, p. 22, we learn that the former were even more generally pure in life than, we have reason to believe, the Egyptian priestesses and Christian nuns proved themselves to be, Father Acosto saying, "In truth, it is very strange to see that this false opinion of religion hath so great force amongst these young men and maidens of Mexico, that they will serve the Devil with so great vigour and austerity, which many of us do not in the service of the most high God, the which is a great shame and confusion." It is curious to notice how the Christian priest considers that chastity may be a snare of the Devil, as well as an ordinance of Jehovah. The boys, in these scholastic parts of the sacred temples, were taught the routine of monastic discipline--to decorate the shrines of the gods with flowers, to feed the sacred fires, and to chant in worship and at festivals. The Abbé Hue, in an account of his travels in Thibet and Tartary, has told us repeatedly of the similarity between the rites, practices, and ceremonies of the Romish Church and those in use amongst the followers of the Great Lama. It is equally marvellous to discover that the Mexican ritual resembles both. The Papalist endeavours to explain this, by the monstrous assumption that both Tartary and Mexico were evangelized by two different Christian Apostles. But it seems to us more probable that the Romanists, who are known to have adopted almost every ancient ceremony, symbol, doctrine, and the like, have unknowingly copied from travelled Orientals, than that the cult of the people of Thibet has travelled into America, as well as into Europe. Into the identity of the Tartars with the Red Indians it is not my intention to enter. The higher Mexicans were taught traditionary lore, the mysteries of hieroglyphics, the principles of government, and such astronomical and scientific knowledge as the priests would, or, probably, could, impart. The girls learned to weave and embroider coverings for the altars of the gods. Great attention was paid to morality, and offences were punished with extreme rigour, even with death itself. Youths were taught to eschew, vice and cleave to virtue, to abstain from wrath, to offer violence or do wrong to no man, and to do good where possible. When of an age to marry, the pupils were dismissed from the convent, and the recommendation of the principal thereof often introduced those whom he regarded as the most competent of the students, to responsible situations in public life. Such was the policy of the Mexican priests, who were thus enabled to mould the mind of the young, and to train it early to the necessity of giving reverence to religion, and especially to its ministers--a reverence which maintained its hold on the warrior long after every other vestige of education had been effaced. In this matter America showed an astuteness equal to that exhibited by Papal hierarchs in Rome. To each of the principal temples, lands were annexed, for the maintenance of the priests, and these glebes were augmented by successive princes, until, under Montezuma, they were of enormous extent, and covered every district of the* empire. The priests took the management of their property into their own hands, and treated their tenants with liberality and indulgence. In addition to this source of income, they had "first fruits," and other offerings, dictated by piety or superstition. The surplus was distributed in alms amongst the poor, a duty strenuously prescribed by their moral code. Thus we find, adds Prescott, whom we are closely, and almost verbatim, following, the same religion inculcating lessons of pure philanthropy and of merciless extermination--an inconsistency not incredible to those familiar with the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the early ages of the Inquisition. In the course of a not very long life, I have heard, upon many occasions, the argument that the persistency of the Roman Catholic Church, in spite of its abominable corruptions, its utter contempt for truth, its outrageous cruelty, its glaring superstition, its intolerable arrogance, and its rapacious covetousness, proves that it is, and must ever be regarded as a divine institution. But this argument loses all its weight when we find that the religion of the Mexicans, which the Spaniards declared to have sprung from the Devil, had the virtues, as well as many vices, of the Roman faith. If one came from Heaven, the other could not have come from Hell. The simple truth seems to be, that crafty and designing men are always able to find dupes, and that red men and black, the haughty Italian and the lively Frenchman, the stolid boor and the polished orator, may all suffer alike from an education which has taught them, in youth, to believe in the reality of a revelation given to a class of human beings who, by its means, assume to be divine. The Mexican temples--_teocallis_, or "houses of God "--were very numerous, indeed there were several hundreds in each of the principal cities of the kingdom; but we need not describe them more minutely than to say that they were truncated pyramids terminating in a level surface, upon which blazed the sacred fire. All religious services were public, as in Roman Catholic countries. There were long processions of priests, and numerous festivals of unusual sacredness, as well as monthly and daily appropriate celebrations of worship, so that it is difficult to conceive how the ordinary business of life was carried on. The sun was an universal object of reverence. At a period not long prior (about 200 years) to the Spanish conquest, human sacrifices were adopted for the first time, and they speedily became common, both as regards repetition and the numbers of victims slaughtered. In some instances the oblations terminated with cannibalism. The burnt offering was roasted, not incinerated, and, like the Paschal lamb, was devoutly devoured. Sexual rites, symbols, or worship, appear to have been very rare, for I can only find one or two doubtful references to them. In this matter the Mexicans were far superior to all the old Shemitic and Egyptian, as well as the Hindoo, races. So far Prescott. Whilst writing the foregoing, it has required some determination not to comment very extensively upon the facts recorded, for they do, indeed, set the thoughtful mind on fire. Amongst the questions which they provoke, the first is, "how far the accounts given to us are to be depended upon?" In answering this query, we readily recognize that our authorities can only have been Spaniards, who were, to a great extent, implacable enemies of the Mexicans, to a great extent ignorant of their language, and bitterly hostile to them in matters of religion. But this recognition leads us to trust the accounts which they give, for, if the invaders had been able to treat the natives as unmitigated savages, they would have had the more excuse for pillaging their sacred stores, temples, and palaces, and exterminating the pagan worshippers. Again, if the picture thus painted were a fancy one, having no real existence save in the mind of the writer, we should be able readily to recognize its counterpart in the Spanish history of the Peruvians, just as we are able to ascertain the identity of the authorship of certain anonymous works by Lord Lytton, by the existence therein of his marked peculiarity of style. The best testimony, however, to the substantial truth of the accounts given of the nature of the Mexican faith, is to be found in various minute episodes of their general history, in the behaviour of the Aztecs with each other, and towards their invaders, and the general customs which are recorded. That the Spanish writers had a real belief in the account of which Prescott has given us so admirable a resume, we may feel assured, for one of them introduced the naïve remark, "that the Devil had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things which God had taught to Christendom." When once we have satisfied ourselves of the truth of the Spanish accounts of the ancient Mexican institutions, we find ourselves in the presence of some very striking religious and political facts. We see before us a nation who had attained to as distinct a conception of the Almighty as we have ourselves; who had discovered a heaven, a hell, and an intermediate place, without the assistance of Jew or Greek, Babylonian or Persian; who had instituted a sacerdotal class, and made provision for their subsistence, without any assistance from Melchizedek or Moses; who had adopted a principle of national education long before such a thing was thought of in England, or in Europe. In fine, the Aztec faith and policy were, at least, as praiseworthy, if not far nearer to perfection, than the faith and policy which obtained in Christian Italy, France, and Spain, during the dark and the middle ages. There is not, indeed, any one point in which the contrast is not favourable to the Aztecs, except in the single point of human sacrifice. Christianity can, apparently, make a heavy accusation against the Aztec religion on this point, and may fairly seem to reproach it for that frequency of human sacrifice, and even cannibalism, which formed, at the time of the Spanish conquest, an essential part of the Mexican faith. Yet, when we dive below the surface, and examine this matter with philosophic care, we readily see that the charge is deprived of much of its weight. Who, for example, can compare the practice of the people of Montezuma with that of Spaniards under the sway of Ferdinand and Isabella, without seeing that in Spain there were human sacrifices, which were conducted with far more cruelty than those in Mexico. We find, in the first place, that the custom of sacrificing human beings was no more an essential part of the Aztec, than it was of the Christian, faith; it was only in existence two hundred years before the Spanish invasion, and many centuries, bloodless of human offerings, had passed away ere the period of what we may term brutality arrived. Just so it was with the religion of Jesus; for centuries it was unstained by blood, and comparatively meek and humble, yet, when its priesthood rose to power, they indulged in human holocausts on a most extended scale. The Spaniards give accounts of thousands of victims offered up at once to the Mexican god of war; but what are these in comparison to the victims of Paris, sacrificed by Papists on the eve and day of St. Bartholomew, and those at Beziers. It may be doubted by the philosopher whether the Christian religion was not, from its very commencement, as intolerant of opposition and as persecuting as it became hereafter. The story of Jesus cursing a fig tree, which did not bear fruit out of its season (Mark xi. 13, 14, 21), shows that even he, whom the Christians take for an example, was quite capable of that pettiness, which visits upon the innocent the vexation felt by one's self. But when we read the story in Acts, v., about Ananias and Sapphira, we see, in all its naked horror, a fearful Christian persecution. The victims were done to death for deceiving an apostle. But why should we be surprised at the followers of "the Son" doing that which "the Father" ordained? Is there any human king who ever promulgated a more bloody order than did Jehovah Sabaoth, the God which, amongst the Hebrews, corresponded to the Mexican god of war, when he commissioned Samuel to say to Saul (1 Sam. xv. 3), "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass!" After such a destruction of the Midianites as is narrated in Numb, xxxi., the fearful slaughter, effected by Crusaders, of Jews, Turks, and heretics is scarcely worth mentioning. There was a teacher who remarked, "he who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone" at the culprit; and surely, when our Bible, which is treasured by so many as the only rule of faith amongst us, details such horrible religious slaughters as are to be found in its pages, and abounds with persecuting precepts, we had better not talk too much about Mexican sacrifice. Was there any Aztec minister so brutal in his religious fury as Samuel was (1 Sam. xv. 33), who hewed Agag into pieces? The Mexican was merciful to his victim; the Hebrew was like a modern Chinese executioner, who kills the criminal by degrees. His cruelty has been emulated in Christian France, and under the reign of two of her kings, we have seen a Ravaillac and Damiens tortured slowly to death, by means too horrible to dwell upon. The writers upon Mexico tell us of a lovely youth, who was educated for a whole year to become a victim, and how, at the end of that time, he was feted, adorned, and even worshipped; how four of the most charming maidens of Mexico were selected as his wives, and how he remained in the enjoyment of the highest honour until the time of his sacrifice arrived, and we feel due horror at the recital. Yet, what is it compared with the accounts we read of miserable men and women racked, in hideous dungeons, by the most horrible tortures which an enlightened Christian ingenuity could devise, and who then, with limbs whose loosened fibres could scarcely sustain their bruised and mangled bodies, were led, or driven at the sword's point, to a stake fixed in the ground, there to be tied and burned, whilst devout Christian multitudes stood around, rejoicing, like demons, over the hellish scene. No one can gloat over the imaginary torments of Hell without being a persecuting devil at heart. Surely the Christians have too much sin amongst themselves to cast a stone at the inhabitants of Mexico. We find a strong offset to the horror of Aztec cruelty in the very Bible, which we regard as the mainstay of our religious world. What, for example, is the essential difference between a Mexican monarch sacrificing one or ten thousand men taken in battle, and Moses commanding the extermination of the inhabitants of Canaan, and only saving, out of Midian, thirty-two thousand virgins, that they might minister to the lust of his Hebrew followers? What, again, are we to say of David's God, who would not turn away his anger from Judah until seven sons of the preceding king had been offered up as victims? And lastly--thought still more awful! what must we say of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, that Jehovah Himself sacrificed His own Son by a cruel death; and not only so, but that He had intercourse with an earthly woman, and had thus a son by her, for the sole purpose of bringing about his murder? Can we object to religious cannibalism in the Aztec, when Jesus of Nazareth is said to have urged his followers to eat his body and to drink his blood; and when hundreds of priests have shed the blood of millions of men, who, disbelieving the power of any man to convert bread and wine into flesh and blood, have refused to profane their lips by a cannibal feast? Having now examined the nature of the Aztec faith, let us, for a while, linger upon the fruits which it produced. Who can read the mournful story of the fall of Mexico without contrasting, in his own mind, the respective characters of the conquerors and the conquered? In every so-called Christian virtue Montezuma proved himself to be superior to the lying, unscrupulous, rapacious and covetous Cortez. Even the greatest fire-eater who ever lived cannot fail to see that the Spaniard would not have been victorious over the Mexican, if the latter had been equally well equipped with arms, armour, and horses, as the former was. We can only tell vaguely what was the condition of Anahuac prior to the invasion of Cortez; but, from the testimony given by Prescott, we believe that there were annual wars between adjoining tribes, who met solely to obtain from their enemies victims for sacrifice, the battles always ending with the day, and never being resumed for conquest, or for the plunder of maidens to be an indulgence of a victor's lust. What the condition of the same country under Christian rule has been, and still is, every reader of modern and contemporary history knows; and he sees, with regret, that Jehovah Sabaoth, Jesus of Nazareth, and the Holy Spirit, with an army of saints, angels, virgins, and martyrs, as well as ancient gods of the Eastern Hemisphere are, if they are to be judged by the acts of their worshippers, as cruel, revengeful, and malignant, as were the deities of the Mexican kingdom. The followers of the cross will appear to be quite as despicable when we contrast them with the Peruvians, as they were when compared with the inhabitants of Anahuac. There is something very fascinating in the history of Peru, as recorded by the Spanish authors, and rendered into the English language by Prescott. There is no account of ancient or modern people extant which has interested me so much as those of the realm of Manco Capac. To hear of a nation, separated by an ocean, we may, indeed, say two, and a vast continent, from the civilized portions of Asia, Europe, and Africa, located in a mountainous tract, where soil and water were scanty, and locomotion was rendered difficult from the configuration of the land; whose country was surrounded by strong natural enemies of all kinds; whose people were unable to use such agents as steel and gunpowder, and who were yet enabled to construct vast cities and temples, to quarry, remove, and use in buildings, fragments of rock thirty-eight feet long, eighteen feet broad, and six feet thick, and to transport these to distances varying from 12 to 45 miles, to form good roads along the mountain tops, for an extent of nearly two thousand miles, necessitating the filling up chasms of enormous depth, and the making of suspension bridges over rivers whose stream was too furious to bridge in the ordinary European fashion, is perfectly astonishing. The far-sighted Incas, to make these roads still more useful, accompanied them by the erection of large residences, like modern European bungalows in India, fit for the reception of a monarch with his army, and by vast magazines of provisions, sufficient to supply the wants of a warlike expedition, or of a population starving from an accidental failure of crops. The Peruvians, moreover, surrounded their chief towns with strong walls, in comparison with which the Cyclopean constructions of the old world seem small, stunted, and almost contemptible. It appears, in addition, that they knew how to form long tunnels, either for the passage of troops, for the benefit of travellers, or for the conveyance of water. All these, I say, are enough to fire the imagination of the dullest reader of history, and to shake the belief that civilization cannot be developed in the midst of what we have been accustomed to call savage life, and can only be brought to a moderate perfection by the influence of the Hebrew and Christian writings. Our wonder is not, however, bounded by the physical results produced by the industrious population of Peru, it is still farther exercised by the descriptions which are given of their wonderful domestic and foreign policy. It would be difficult to conceive, and still more difficult to carry into execution for many generations, a plan of government so eminently fitted to give the greatest happiness to the greatest number, as that which the Incas elaborated. The rulers were specially educated to fulfil their duties in every respect, and were not permitted, as modern princes are, to enter into the ranks of chivalry until they had undergone a public examination, which was conducted by the oldest and the most illustrious chiefs. The trial included tests of every warlike and manly quality. It lasted thirty days, during which time every competitor fared alike, living on the bare ground, and wearing a mean attire. Those who passed the ordeal honourably were admitted formally into the knightly order, the ceremony including an investiture of the youth with sandals put on by the most venerable noble, equivalent to the donning of the _toga virilis_ in Ancient Rome, and having the ear pierced with a golden bodkin by the reigning monarch. To take off the shoe was a ceremony exacted from all those who came into the Inca's presence, to have it put on by a grandee was great honour. That the rulers might understand the condition of the kingdom, they systematically travelled, much in the same way as James V. of Scotland, and the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, are said to have done. The Incas, in addition to their other plans for good government, inaugurated a postal system: divided their peoples into tens, fifties, hundreds, five hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands, much in the same way as the Saxon King Alfred is said to have done, whose plan is, in many respects, conserved to the present day; and the head man of each division was in all respects its ruler, to repress crime, to announce to his superior officer all unusual occurrences, and to report, generally, the actual state of his division to the chief above him. All legal trials, or appeals, were decided in less than five days, and a code was established, which all might readily know, a thing only attained by the French under the first Napoleon, and long desired by England, but in vain. Punishments were never attended with torture, or unnecessary cruelty. In this respect the Peruvians differed from every other civilized nation of which I have yet read. The Chinaman methodically inflicts painful punishments which have only been surpassed by the followers of the "gentle Jesus." The Persians and Turks have, certainly, shown their capacity for giving pain to those who are brought before their ministers of justice, and the Red Indians, during their day, reduced the art of tormenting themselves, but, still more, their prisoners, almost to perfection. The Babylonians had discovered that a death of agony could be accomplished by means of myriads of ants. It was reserved to Christians, eager to uphold the faith promulgated by a God of mercy, to find out the most exquisite of torments. Even Frenchmen, who have for centuries assumed the position of leaders of civilization, were, until the great Revolution beat down their kings and prelates, more ruthlessly cruel than the most fierce redskin. The Inquisition, which arrogated to itself the power to keep the Christian religion pure, was distinguished by the atrocity with which it gave anguish to its victims, and it held its head high until it was put down, we may hope for ever, by fiery republican enthusiasts, whom priestly demons, baulked of their prey, declared to be devils incarnate. More modern hierarchs are obliged to content themselves with making a hell for their enemies--with foretelling a variety of punishments to be inflicted hereafter, which cannot be enforced here. The Incas exacted an annual report of the lands possessed by individuals, with their condition as regards culture; and also of every family. A register of births, marriages, and deaths was regularly kept, so that the government might always know the real condition of the nation, soil, and people. As far as possible, families remained constant to their business, thus forming a sort of trade caste, but not a rigid one. The registers were always submitted to the perusal of the Inca, and, subsequently, kept in the capital. By the arrangement of "posts," and roads, an insurrection or invasion was readily discovered, and it was speedily announced at the capital city. The march of troops to suppress it, under these circumstances, was easy and immediate, for every requisite for war was always at hand. In all circumstances, plundering by the soldiery, whether at home or in an enemy's country, was severely punished, and war was undertaken solely with a view to peace. If a neighbour was turbulent, he was conquered, and absorbed into the old state, and if a province was rebellious, its worst inhabitants were carried away to some other locality, where their power for mischief would be curtailed; a plan which, we are told, was pursued by the Assyrian Shalmaneser (2 Kings xvii. 6), indicated by Sennacherib (2 Kings xviii. 32), and carried out by Nebuzaradan (2 Kings xxv. 11.). In fine, we may repeat, that it would be difficult for a modern philosopher to conceive a better model of a really paternal government than that which, it is asserted, was found by the Spaniards when they invaded the kingdom of the Incas. Of the respective value of Christian Spanish government, and of the so-called Pagan Inca rule, none can doubt, who reads the present by the light of the past. The Peruvians kept up their roads, protected their subjects, respected life, and fostered everything which tended to increase the general happiness and prosperity of the kingdom--all these objects, have been for a long period neglected, and Peru, which was under the Spanish rule, one of the blots on the face of civilization and Christianity, is only just emerging from a long night, under the influence of Republican institutions. Our next step will be to ascertain the religion of the people whose political condition contrasts so favourably with that of every other nation of whom travel and history have informed us. But we may, in the first place, remark, that there is no absolute or necessary connection between the happiness, or otherwise, of a nation and its dominant religion, as Buckle has already shown in his _History of Civilization_. The writer of to-day can find abundant evidence in recent history to illustrate the proposition here advanced. He can point to France, and its condition under a sacerdotal rule, prior to the time of the Revolution, and contrast it with its state since its rulers have tried to make the people prosperous and happy, independently of their religious faith. He can point to Austria and Spain, when they were laid at the feet of the Pope of Rome, and everything was made subservient to the demands of a powerful hierarchy, and to the same states now, when religion is subordinate to the material welfare of the majority. Who, that has read the story of modern Italy, or heard of the atrocities committed under the priest-led Ferdinand of Naples--better known in England by the sobriquet of Bomba; who, that knew anything of his brigand-rearing towns and cities, and has visited them since they have been ruled constitutionally, and with the priestly power curbed by a strong hand, can doubt which set of directors are the best? Christian Rome was never so happy under her Popes as she is now, when the so-called head of the church is subordinate to the chief of the state. But of all priest-ridden countries, one which would never have borne the popish sway as she has done, if her chieftains had been sensible and her people thoughtful, Ireland deserves our commiseration the most. Hibernian hierarchs of the Roman faith designate their country as a land of saints. So, perhaps, it is, if by the word is meant admirers of laziness and filth, who consider that attention to religion justifies murder, and every brutal crime against purse, person, and property. As a rule, admitting of no exceptions, civil government has preceded sacerdotal rule, and a nation is generally in a weakly and fallen condition as soon as its affairs are directed by the priestly class. When first the Aryans invaded Hindostan, the hierarchy was second to the warrior caste; but as the first aggrandized their power, the second lost their supremacy, and under Brahminic rule the foundation was laid for pusillanimous and indolent luxury in the warrior. The power to plan, and the nerve to enforce laws, for the benefit of all classes of the community, is very different to that which is requisite to exalt and enrich the priestly order; and the well-being of a state depends far more upon the exercise of the first than of the second. Whenever, therefore, the executive government is entirely independent of the influence of the hierarchy, or is itself the head of that caste, it can produce good results for the nation, no matter what may be the dogmas of the priesthood, or the nature of the gods which are reverenced. Still following Prescott as our guide, we find that the sun was the great god of the Peruvians, and that the Incas assumed the title of his true children. To that luminary a vast temple was built in Cuzco, more radiant with gold than that of Solomon at Jerusalem. To Cuzco, as to the capital of Judea, the name of Holy City was given, and to it pilgrims resorted from every part of the empire. Blasphemy against the sun was considered as bad as treason against the Inca, and both were punished with death. A province, or city, rebellious against the sun was laid waste, and its people exterminated. When conquest over a new tribe subjugated it to Peru, the people were compelled to worship the sun, temples to whose honour were erected in their territory. To these was attached a body of priests, to instruct the people in the proper form of adoration, which consisted in a rich and stately ceremonial. The divinities of the conquered people were removed to Cuzco and established in one of the temples, where they took order amongst the inferior deities of the Peruvians. But, though the sun was unquestionably worshipped, Prescott observes, ch. iii, "it is a remarkable fact that many, if not most, of the rude tribes inhabiting the vast American continent had attained to the sublime conception of one Great Spirit, the Creator of the universe, who, immaterial in his own nature, ought not to be dishonoured by an attempt at a visible representation, and who, pervading all space, was not to be circumscribed within the walls of any building, however grand or rich." As civilization progressed, we are told that a separate order of men, with a liberal provision for their subsistence, was set apart for religious service, and a minute and magnificent ceremonial contrived, which challenged comparison with that of the most polished nations of Christendom. This was the case with the natives of Quita, Bogota, and others inhabiting the highlands of South America, but especially with the Peruvians, who claimed a divine origin for the founders of their empire, whose laws rested on a divine sanction, and whose domestic institutions and foreign wars were directed to preserve and to propagate their faiths. Religion was the basis of their polity, the condition of their social existence. The government of the Incas was essentially a lay theocracy. The Peruvians believed in the future existence of the soul and the resurrection of the body. They had faith in a Hell, located in the earth's centre, and a Heaven, in which the good would revel in a life of luxury, tranquillity, and ease. The wicked, however, were not to be hopelessly damned and tormented for everlasting, but were to expiate their crimes by ages of wearisome labour. They believed, also, in an evil principle or spirit, called Cupay, to whom, however, they paid no more attention than an ordinary Christian does to the Devil. The great men were entombed after death, and were commonly buried with the chief things which they required on earth. Sometimes a chieftain was buried, not only with his treasures, but with his wives and domestics. Frequently, over the dead, vast mounds were raised, which were honeycombed, subsequently, with cells for the burial of others. Cairns were as common in that part of the New World as they have been in the Old, and the majority of buildings found at the present day in Peru have been connected with funereal pomp. The supreme Being in Peru was named Pachacamac, "he who gives life to the universe," and Viracocha, of which the only translation given is "foam of the sea." To him one temple only was raised, which is said to have been built prior to the accession of the Incas, and largely visited by vast numbers of distant Indians. The sun, as we have noticed, was chiefly venerated, and to him a temple was erected in every city and large village, and to him burnt offerings were made in abundance. The moon was also venerated, being connected with the sun as his wife--and Venus, called by the name of Chasca, "the youth with the long and curling locks"--was also regarded reverentially as the page of the sun. Temples were dedicated to thunder and to lightning as God's ministers, and the rainbow was regarded as an emanation from the great luminary. In addition to these, the elements, the winds, the earth, the air, the great mountains and rivers, were considered as inferior deities, to which were added the gods of the conquered races. The chief temple of the sun was extraordinarily gorgeous. It was constructed of stone, and was so finely executed, that a Spaniard declared that only two edifices in Spain could, in the stone work, be at all compared with it like Italian and other churches, it contained many small chapels and subordinate buildings, and the interior was dazzling with gold. On its western wall the deity was emblazoned as a human face surrounded with rays of light, just as the sun is personified amongst ourselves. The figure was engraved on a massy gold plate, thickly powdered with emeralds and precious stones. This was so situated in front of the great eastern portal, that the rays of the morning sun, falling upon it, lighted up the whole temple with a wondrous sheen; but every part of the inner walls blazed with gold. The roof was, however, "thatch" alone. Adjoining the temple of the sun were fanes of smaller dimensions, for the worship of the moon, stars, thunder, lightning, and the rainbow. "All the plate, ornaments, and utensils of every description appropriated to the uses of religion, were of gold or silver. Twelve immense vases of silver (said to be as high as a good lance, and so large that two men could barely encircle them with outstretched arms) stood on the floor of the great saloon, filled with Indian corn. The censers for the perfumes, the ewers which held the water for sacrifice, the pipes which conducted it through subterraneous channels into the buildings, the reservoir that received it, even the agricultural implements used in the gardens of the temple, were all of the same rich material. The gardens, like those belonging to the royal palaces, sparkled with gold and silver, and various imitations of the vegetable kingdom. Animals, also, were to be found there, amongst which the llama, with its golden fleece, was most conspicuous, executed in the same style, and with a degree of skill which, in this instance, probably did not surpass the excellence of the material" The reader of Prescott will find that he has not adopted this account without carefully estimating the value of his authorities, and I believe that he may be fairly trusted. The various reports, given by Spanish writers, of priests of the grand temple, seem also to have been carefully estimated by the historian, and the number which they amounted to is put down at four thousand at the least. The high priest was second in dignity only to the Inca, and he was generally closely related to this ruler. The monarch appointed this Peruvian pope, who held office for life. He had the appointment of inferior priests, but all must be from the sacred race of Incas. The high priests of the provinces were always of the blood royal. The hierarchy wore no peculiar badge or dress, nor was it the sole depositary of learning, and it had not to superintend education, or to do parochial work. These duties were performed by others of the Inca class, all of whom were holy, though not, so to speak, in "holy orders." The priest's business was to minister in the temple; his science was confined to a knowledge of the fasts and festivals to be observed in connection with religion, for these were very numerous, and demanded separate rituals. The four principal festivals were solar, i.e., at the equinoxes and solstices, that of Midsummer being the grandest, on which occasion every one who could find time and money enough to do so visited the capital city. The feast was preceded by a three days' fast, and no fires were to be lighted during that period. When the day arrived a vast array of people, dressed in their handsomest apparel, crowded the streets and squares, waiting for the rising of the sun. When it appeared shouts of joy, heightened by instrumental music, were raised in swelling tones, until the whole orb had ascended above the horizon, after which a libation was poured of fermented liquor, and all the nobles and the king repaired to the great temple, each individual, except members of the royal family, removing their sandals as they entered. After prayer came sacrifice, animals, grain, flowers, and sweet-scented gums being the prescribed offerings; sometimes a child or lovely maiden was also immolated, generally to commemorate a coronation, the birth of a royal heir, or a great victory. Cannibalism never followed the sacrifice; and it may be added, parenthetically, that when the Incas conquered and annexed man-sacrificing and man-eating tribes, they always abrogated the custom, and with far more decision and firmness than Britain has shown in abolishing self-immolation of Juggernaut pilgrims in her Indian Empire, and the burning of widows with their dead spouses. Some may doubt whether a conqueror ought to interfere with the religious customs of the vanquished, but few would plead for the continuance of such customs as human sacrifice and cannibalism. The animal usually sacrificed by the Peruvians was the llama, and the priest who officiated drew auguries from the appearance of the intestines. To effect the oblation a sacred fire was now kindled by a concave mirror which acted as "a burning glass," precisely as was done by Numa in the days of Ancient Rome. If the sky was clouded, and no rays could be collected, fire was produced by friction. When lighted, the fire was committed to the care of the virgins of the sun, who were bound to keep it up for the ensuing year. After the single sacrifice was completed, great numbers of other animals were slaughtered, and a regular carousal began, attended with music, dancing, and drinking, that lasted for many days, during which period all the lower orders kept holiday. In the distribution of bread and wine at this high festival, the invading Spaniards saw a striking resemblance to the Christian communion, and they recognised a similar likeness in the Peruvian practices of confession and penance. The virgins of the sun were called "the elect," and were young maidens taken from their homes at an early age, and introduced into convents, where they were placed under the care of elderly matrons, who taught them their religious duties, and how to spin and weave, embroider and adorn hangings for the temples, and to frame garments for the Incas. Their work was such, that it was found to be superior to any which the Spaniards had ever seen, or were themselves able to produce. The virgins were separated wholly, not simply, from the world in general, but also from their own relations and friends--none but the king and queen could enter into their convent. The closest attention was paid to the morals of these maidens, and visitors were sent every year to inspect the institutions, and to report on the state of their discipline; a plan similar to which has been repeatedly proposed in Christian England, yet never sanctioned by the parliament! If a virgin was discovered in an intrigue she was buried alive, her lover was strangled, and the town or village to which he belonged was razed to the ground, and sowed with stones, to efface even the memory of its site. These solar attendants were all of royal blood, and were estimated to number fifteen hundred; but to provincial convents the inferior nobility were allowed to send their daughters, and sometimes a peculiarly lovely peasant girl was admitted. The convents were all sumptuously furnished. But, though virgins of the sun, they were brides of the Incas, and we cannot fail, when we read of the vast harem of the Peruvian monarch, to think of the female establishments of the Jewish Solomon, of the Persian Ahasuerus, and that of Louis XV. of Christian France. If at any time the Inca reduced his harem, the superfluous concubines were restored to their homes, swelling with the importance which they had gained by their familiarity with the monarch. Polygamy was permitted. Matrimony was effected by the Inca, or other chief man, joining the hands of the parties. The king usually espoused his own sister, but no other person was allowed to do so. No marriage was valid without the consent of parents. As a general rule, all unions were effected on the same day of the year, and thus the wedding of couples was followed by general rejoicing. The genius of the Peruvian government penetrated into the most private recesses of domestic life, allowing no man to act for himself, even in those personal matters in which none but himself, or his family, could be interested. No Peruvian was too low for the fostering vigilance of the government; none was so high that he was not made to feel his dependence upon it in every act of his life. The government of the Incas was the mildest, but the most searching and beneficent, of despotisms. We now, but with great reluctance, leave our friendly guide, the accomplished Prescott, and ask ourselves, once more, the lessons which we have learned from the departed races of the vast American continent. Can anyone doubt that one of the most conspicuous results obtained is, that Christian rule, and the Christian doctrine, have not proved themselves, in any respect, superior to the Incas' government and their solar religion? Who can read of the civilization, the theology, and the practice of the Peruvians, without believing one of two things--the one, that Jewish ritualism, and the majority of Christian teaching, is of human invention; the other, that the Almighty has revealed His will in the Western as well as in the Eastern Hemisphere? Can any thoughtful man believe that the brutal, covetous, lying Spaniards, who broke, with impunity, every commandment promulgated in those Gospels, to whose authority they professed allegiance, and upon which their faith is founded, were better men, or more favoured by the Lord, "who loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity," than were the gentle Peruvians, who fell before them as lambs and sheep before wolves and tigers? Surely the story of the Incas should make Christians, in all ages, blush for their inferiority to those, amongst whom neither Moses, Samuel, and other so-called prophets, Jesus, nor any of his apostles, preached; and more strongly should it convince us that the wish to do good on a large scale can come otherwise than by the Gospel. If grace, and peace, and love came by the Nazarene alone, how is it--and let us ponder over the question deeply--that all Christian countries have been, and that some are still, conspicuous for the brutality of their political and priestly governments, for the frequency with which they make war, for their ferocity in the destruction of religious enemies, and for the intense hatred evinced against rival sects, by those who call themselves the representatives of the Prince of Peace; whilst, on the other hand, a nation who never heard of the son of Joseph or of Mary, should be conspicuous for the virtues which ought to adorn the soldiers of the cross, but do not? Surely, if the saying be true, "by their fruit ye shall know them," the denizens of the old world must be children of the Devil, who do the work, of their father, whilst certain of the nations of the new world, as it is called, were really children of the light, abounding in love, charity, and goodwill towards all men. To me it is astonishing how thoughtful men, who have read accounts of the Mexicans and the Peruvians, can continue to believe that the Bible is the book of God, written by holy men, whose thoughts and diction were essentially those of the third person in the Trinity. Who can assert that Abraham and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, were taught of God, and that to the Hebrews alone has the Creator revealed His will? Who can see, in the sensual king David, a man after God's heart, and applaud the brutal murder of Agag, the destruction of the priests of Baal, by the orders of Elijah, and the extermination of the Baalites in Israel by Jehu? Compared with such wretches as these the Incas were angels. They had not left to them the bloody legacy which has come to the Christian world by means of the Old Testament: they had not been taught to believe that the Almighty revelled in the blood of human beings: they never had, amongst their sacred songs, verses like the following--"that thy foot may be dipped in the blood of enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same" (Ps. lxviii. 23). Ah, it is time for civilized men to cease their admiration for a book which has produced such frightful fruits, and which has converted millions of human beings into incarnate fiends. The Vedas and the Shasters--the writings of the Buddhists, and those of the Parsees and the Chinese, contain, nowhere, such a justification of wholesale murder, as do the Scriptures of the Jews and of the Christians.* From these have been drawn the power to persecute, and, if possible, to exterminate those who worship God in a different fashion to those in power. Calvin was as bad as Torquemada; and, even at the present time, it is only public opinion that prevents fanatics, like the early New Englanders, from reducing their Christian hate to practical torture. Everywhere the professed followers of Jesus assume the power to torment their opponents, whenever they can do so without breaking the civil law, and there are few pulpits from which the voice of revilement, contumely, and denunciation is not repeatedly heard. The Romans abuse the Anglicans; the Establishment sneers at Dissent; Nonconformists censure all churches; and all libel those whom they call Free Thinkers and Atheists. To find "toleration" in matters of religion, one must seek amongst the Deists, or amongst those who refuse to see in the Bible the revealed will of God to man. * See Matthew x. 34, 85; Luke xii. 49, 51, 52, 53. CHAPTER III. Can civilization grow out of barbarism? Dislike of progress, especially if mental. Rediscovery of ancient knowledge. Advance and retrogression. China and Japan--influence of strangers. Decadence of nations--followed by a rise. The Shemitic and Negro races. Varied religious ideas. The Negro Fetish and Obi. Jewish, Arab, and Christian communication with the dead. Australian idea about white men. Ideas of a soul and futurity amongst the Aryans and Egyptians. Their priesthood. The Aryans Monotheiste. An Aryan hymn. Max Müller and Talboys Wheeler. Aryan conceptions compared with Psalm civ. 1-4. Monotheism of the Egyptians. Shemitic religions. At one period of my life I entertained the idea that civilization never had grown, nor ever could grow, out of barbarism. Perhaps I have not yet wholly abandoned it. The considerations which the question involves are all but infinite. It is doubtful whether we can reduce them into shape without writing an extensive treatise. We will, however, attempt to do so, and present the subject to our readers to the best of our ability. As far as our own personal and historic experience goes, we find that man has no natural propensity to learn beyond that which he has received simply as an animal. With him school is a hateful place, and education is a painful process, even in the midst of the highest civilization we see individuals who cast from them all the luxuries of life, and descend voluntarily to a level scarcely superior to that of the brute creation. But those who take kindly to education, and consent to try and learn everything which the teacher presents to their notice, are bounded by the amount of knowledge possessed by the instructor, who cannot impart to others information in matters of which all are ignorant. It is true that I once read a question propounded by his schoolmaster to one of my sons, which ran--"Enumerate upon paper all the capes, bays, and rivers of England that you don't know by name, and describe the seas which you have never heard of." Without dwelling upon the anecdote farther than to say, that it points out the absurdity of the idea that education of itself advances knowledge, we may pass on to remark, that even in nations, whose intellect is highly cultivated, the propensity to advance in knowledge is singularly small. Throughout the old world an inventor is usually regarded as a visionary, or a lunatic, and flouted by all his contemporaries.* From the time of Aristotle and Hippocrates, scarcely any advance was made in philosophy, and, throughout Europe, the fourteenth century was as barbarous, if not indeed more so, than the first of our era; and to such a dark age there is a strong clerical party in Great Britain which desires us to return. * A man who had travelled much once said to me,--"I will tell you the main difference between a Yankee and an Englishman. If you inform the latter of some new discovery-- or propose the use of some recent invention for his own benefit--he will tell you either that the thing is old, or worthless. On the other hand, if you recount to the former what you have told the latter of, his rejoinder will be, I can improve upon that." This is true, and we are now repeatedly adopting from the United States discoveries of various kinds, which we rejected when offered to us in the first place. Yet, notwithstanding the propensity of cultivated nations to remain quiescent, there do appear, from time to time, individuals who, being discontented with things as they are, endeavour to bring about improvements in the arts, the sciences, and the general conditions of life. The recognition of a want, is an incentive to a thoughtful mind to supply the exigency. Whenever an individual endeavours to attain a definite end, he exercises his mind, not only in what he has been already taught, but what he can observe beyond that; he rakes up, if possible, the experience of others, studies their proceedings, and experiments with a definite object, and ponders upon the affinities, nature, and the like, of every substance which he surmises may be of service to him. When, by these means, he has obtained his purpose, he will repeatedly find that he has done no more than rediscover a something which was known thousands of years before his time. Without a doubt, much of the philosophy, science, art, religion, &c., of the present day, is due to a close observation and an attainment to the knowledge possessed by our predecessors. "Is there any thing whereof it may be said, see this is new?--it hath been already of old time, which was before us" (Eccles. i. 10). If this be true, even though it may only be so to a partial extent, it is clearly more philosophical to believe that some primeval men were created with a considerable amount of knowledge, rather than that all were savage, barely, if at all, superior to monkeys, and that one or more of these, gradually elevated their race, by degrees so slow, as to be imperceptible in less time than many thousand years. This side of the argument receives corroboration when we study the history of such semi-civilized countries as China, and such barbarous regions as those of Africa and Australia. In none of these parts do we see any general propensity to advance. In the first we see a retrogression; there is now no effort to repair ancient roads which have been worn away by centuries of traffic, to restore the old temples, towers, and landmarks, erected when time was younger, or even to keep up the teachings of Confucius. A similar apathy existed amongst the Japanese--yet no sooner do the civilized nations of Europe show the rulers of China and Japan that it is necessary for them to improve, if they desire to retain their power, than they attempt to learn the arts which have enabled their rivals to overcome them. In both cases, the progress is recognized as due to the interference of a nation, superior for the time being, to that whose education has been faulty. Advance, then, in such countries, is clearly due to foreign influence, rather than to an innate propensity to general, mental, scientific, or practical development. But, on the other side, it may be alleged that the African has been in existence from time immemorial--that he has been in contact with the civilization of ancient and modern Egypt--with Christianity--with the ancient Tyrians and Carthaginians--with the Arabs--with the Spaniards, Portuguese, and British, and yet the African tribes remain almost as savage now as when they first were known. Similar remarks apply to the inhabitants of the Andaman Isles, of the vast islands of Borneo, Celebez, Papua, New Guinea, and others. Yet in many places, now considered barbarous, we see the remains of previous empires--and when we are able to find some comparatively authentic history which tells of the overthrow of a powerful kingdom, it is clear that the civilized people have usually been destroyed by the barbarian. The wealth of Rome tempted the hordes from the inhospitable north, just as the gold of Mexico and Peru were the causes of their decadence under the Spaniards, whose people were in themselves scarcely superior to the troops led by Alaric, Genseric, and other so called barbarians. Yet we know, as in the case of Spain herself, that decadence from civilization to comparative barbarism may be due to causes inherent in the people and its governors, wholly independent of foreign conquest. This decadence is due to the bestial propensities of man being allowed to dominate over the intellectual, and the result is the same, whether the animal passions be cultivated by a debased and degrading policy of monarch and priest, or by the indolence of each individual. By developing the train of thought thus indicated, we imagine that the philosophical reader will conclude that amongst men, some race, family, or tribe, has been created with intelligence, as much above the rest of their kind as the elephant is superior to the hippopotamus, and the dog to the cat, and that others are generically as low as is the Australian "dingo" in the canine race. Those once perfect may deteriorate, yet carry with them the power of rising again--whilst those originally low never rise at all, no matter what example may be set them, unless force is used to make them learn. To these we must add a third set, specially to include the American, for we have no evidence whatever that the civilization of the Aztec and Peruvian was anything more than a restoration of the scientific knowledge of a more ancient people, possibly of an Aryan stock. Who that is acquainted with the Shemitic race can fail to see in its people the type of an ancient condition which has decayed, until, like a fallen gentleman, it can only show what once it was, by conserving and exhibiting a few ornaments of no value, save from their age, but whose sons may yet become princes in their paternal domains? Who that studies the negro in Africa, America, and St. Domingo, can fail to see that he is, or, at any rate has hitherto shown himself, almost wholly incapable of development as a philosophic man? And who can read the pages of Prescott without recognizing the fact that some of the ancient inhabitants of America inaugurated--unassisted, as we judge by any example from others--a style of religion and government of which the world has hardly, if at all, seen an equal? Yet it is remarkable, that both the Mexican and Peruvian traced their laws and institutions to strangers who came amongst them, as Oannes did to the Babylonians, and who taught them what arts, religion, and science they themselves had. The subject of centres of human life into which our considerations have drawn us, is by far too vast for discussion here. It involves the study of geology, of anthropology, of glossology, of navigation, of physical geography, of climate, of the laws of reproduction, of the influences of climate over animals, and of diet upon man. Into all these we dare not enter: we shall confine ourselves rather to considering the religious ideas of the lowest of the known races of mankind; and then proceed to those which have been held by what we may call the oscillating people, i.e., those vibrating repeatedly between a state of empire and one of slavery, like the people of Hindostan, Babylon, Judea, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Egypt. When we endeavour to ascertain the religion of the negro, by which term we include all the black native tribes of Africa, we find ourselves almost in the position of a modern chemist seeking for the philosopher's stone. In no single book, and I have read very many, can I find any trustworthy evidence of the negro having any religion at all. It is true that travellers in Abyssinia, and those who are now returned from their successful expedition against Magdala, tell us that in Abyssinia there is a form of religion which is evidently a corrupt form of Christianity, but with this exception, the blacks seem to have no idea of that congeries of fact and fiction, dogma, ritual, and practice, which passes current for religion in more civilized countries. Yet though they have no definite idea of a Creator, and the way in which He works throughout the universe, they have a dread of some unseen power, and, like a number of frightened children, dread the effects of "fetish," and the power of the Obi or Obeah man. When the mind is predisposed to fear, and it is so amongst the lower animals as well as in man, it is astonishing at what contemptible objects one may stand aghast. I can vividly remember being sent, whilst a very young child, with a message from an aunt, at whose home I was staying, to the maid, who was washing in an outhouse, but ere I reached the door of the latter, I was terrified at a head which seemed to be rising from the ground, Such was my horror that I ran away, too proud to scream, yet almost fainting with horror. To me that ancient battered barber's doll was "fetish," and if my friends had determined to cultivate the timidity which I then showed, it is quite possible that to this day I might have a dread not dissimilar to that of the African. As it was, my aunt told me that what had scared me, was only a piece of carved and painted wood, and so put me upon my mettle, that I delivered my message and gave the image a kick in the face; yet my valour was short lived, and during the rest of my sojourn I dared not venture within sight of the bugbear. To all intents and purposes that human head was, in my estimation, the guardian of the garden--its presence made all within its influence under taboo--had I ventured to tell a lie, or to have been naughty, I cannot conceive that any punishment would have been greater than being doomed to sit in the presence of the weird image. Hence I can easily understand the abject terror of the African at "fetish," and his dread of the Obeah man, who asserts that he can direct upon whom he will the power of the unknown god. So great is the fear of this negro magician, and so common is that fear to man in general, that we sometimes find the white man as full of it as the black. I have had, for example, under my own care, an Englishman of good education, who, whilst superintendent of a Jamaica plantation, became so cowed by "Obi," that he was obliged to give up his position and return to England, literally insane upon the subject of "fetish" and "Obeah," and wholly unfitted for any work whatever. The objects to which the name of "fetish" is given are very numerous--a rock, a stone, a tree, a pool, a dried monkey, an alligator, man, or skull--anything will suit the purpose. One which is said to be very popular amongst chieftains is prepared somewhat in the following manner:--The head of a father is removed after death, and so placed, that as the brain decays and softens, it may fall into a receptacle already half filled with palm oil or other grease. The material so formed, consisting to a great extent of the thoughtful organ of the sire, is then supposed to give his spirit to the son, whenever the latter smears himself with it, or takes it as a potent medicinal spell. The head thus placed becomes the royal "fetish," and the king goes to take counsel from it just as ancient priests inquired, or pretended to inquire, from the god or lord of some shrine or oracle. I cannot charge my memory with everything that has been at one time or another regarded as an object of wonder, worship, or "fetish," but I have an indistinct recollection that a musical box has been venerated by Africans, as much as the Ancilia, the Palladium, the Diana which fell down from Jupiter, the Caaba or black stone of Mecca, the ark of the covenant, the brazen serpent, the wood of the true cross, the nails which pierced Jesus, and the handkerchief which was used to wipe the face of the suffering Nazarite, all of which have been sacred amongst civilized nations, and are still adored by some. It would be difficult for a philosopher to draw a distinction between an African "fetish" and a Papal relic. There is no virtue which the Romanist has attributed to old bones, old nails, old shoes, old coats, old houses, old staircases, old bits of wood, old links of chains, old hairs, old statues, &c., that has not been equally attributed by negroes to some absurd fetish in Ashantee, Dahomey, or elsewhere. In some parts of the vast African continent, however, there seems to be an indistinct idea of a life after death, and when a great man dies, or is killed, his wives, and many of his slaves, are sacrificed for his future use, and vast human sacrifices are made annually in his honour, that the departed may hear, from time to time, of the welfare of those whom he has left behind. Feeling indisposed to regard this practice as the offspring of religious faith, I would compare it with the crude conceptions of some of the lowest class in Europe and America, aye, of some cultivated intellects as well, who profess to be able, by means of _media_, to communicate with the dead, or who send messages to their departed relatives by friends that are dying. The most remarkable development of this idea which I have yet met with has recently occurred in France, where a young man attempted to murder a beautiful young woman, to whom he was a total stranger, the reason he assigned being, that he intended to commit suicide immediately after the murder, so that he might enter the future world with a pleasant companion. We can scarcely regard the persons figuring in the following true story as being very much superior to the King of Dahomey. In a well-cared for English village a poor woman was about to die in the full odour of Protestant sanctity. In youth she had lost one leg, and now had disease in the other. To her came an old woman and said,--"I hear thou's goin' to dee Betty, and that thou's goin' to heaven--at least parson says so--when thou's got there, willee tell my owd man that I've just bought that field as he set his heart on." "Oh dear," said the dying woman, "how can I go stumping all about heaven with my legs in the state they're in." "Well, you can tell him at anyrate if you happen to see him go by!" Passing from the African, let us now say a word or two about the Australian. It is, I think, Mitchell, who states, in an account of his travels in that country, that the white men were used in a manner so considerate, in some instances, indeed, so kindly, that he was induced to inquire into the cause. He found that these friendly tribes were in the habit of eating their defunct relatives--being always short of provisions, they used man meat, as do other starving creatures when they devour their like--and they cooked the body much in the same way as we do dead pig. By scalding the carcass, the cuticle and the black layer, called _rete mucosum_, was removed, and the corpse became white. This gave the people the notion that Europeans were their own dead relatives returned from the spirit world. Sir G. Gray also, in his account of an expedition to the north-west coasts of the same vast island, describes how all the people with whom he came into contact believed in the power of sorcery or witchcraft. Without extending our inquiry into the undeveloped religious ideas of other barbarians, we may affirm, from the preceding examples, that there is, even amongst the lowest human beings, some idea of a future state, and of the existence of some unseen power, which may work mischief upon themselves or their friends. Beyond these vague notions the savage who has neither been taught, nor inherited the power or propensity to learn, rarely, if ever, passes. If, then, the surmise to which we gave utterance awhile ago is founded in truth, we may fairly endeavour to ascertain what is the race, or the people, which have been born with a higher religious development, a greater capacity for learning, and a higher appreciation of the value of agriculture and civilization than the rest of the world's inhabitants. We now find ourselves on the threshold of a question which has, for many years past, divided the scientific world, viz., Was there originally one human couple only, or were there many intellectual centres? Into this matter it would be unprofitable to enter, for to give an account of the Chinese, Egyptian, Aryan, American, and Shemitic races, would require many huge volumes. It will, probably, be permitted to me to omit from the inquiry all but Aryans and Egyptians. I select these because I have, in the preceding volumes, descanted largely upon the faith of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Tyrians, and others, and because I believe that these ancients have done very much to modify the faith of Europe. If time and opportunity permitted, I fancy that anyone might make a most interesting analysis of that which Europe owes to the Shemites, Egyptians, and Aryans respectively; but it is beyond our powers at present to go into the whole subject. The volumes which have recently been published about the Ancient Hindoo religion may be counted by dozens, and the writings of Egyptologists are almost equally numerous. We must, therefore, content ourselves with a reference to a few main points. It seems to be an undoubted fact, that both the Egyptians and Aryans recognized the existence of a soul in human beings, and believed that it survived the dissolution of the body in some state, whose position and physical condition were unknown. They held, moreover, that the locality and condition of the spiritual part of man after death depended upon the actions of the individual during life. Both people believed in the influence of prayer, of sacrifices, of a maceration, or torturing of the fleshy body, and they had, moreover, each of them, a priestly race, who regulated festivals, ordained ceremonies, and prescribed everything which those who regarded their spiritual welfare should do. I believe that the Egyptians were, in reality, monotheistic; but my authority for the idea has escaped me. It is certain that the ancient Aryans were so, and I cannot do better than refer my readers to the _History of Sanscrit Literature_, by Max Müller, and the first vol. of the _History of India_, by Talboys Wheeler. Yet, as the first is out of print, and the second a volume of considerable size, it will, perhaps, be judicious if I quote some passages from both. The following hymn, translated by M. M., p. 559 sq., is, to my own ideas, far more grand in conception than any other which I have read, and shows a depth or sublimity of thought that could only be attained by a profoundly intelligent intellect. Moderns might equal it, none could surpass it. Speaking of the beginning, the words run, "Nothing that is, was then; even what is not, did not exist then." The poet then proceeds to deny the existence of the sky, and of the firmament, and yet, unable to bear the idea of an unlimited nothing, he exclaims, "What was it that hid or covered the existing? what was the refuge of what? was water the deep abyss, the chaos which swallowed up everything?" Then his mind, turning away from nature, dwells upon man, and the problem of human life. "There was no death, therefore there was nothing immortal There was no space, no life, and lastly, there was no time--no difference between day and night--no solar torch by which morning might have been told from evening. That One breathed breathless by itself, other than it, nothing since has been. That One breathed and lived; it enjoyed more than mere existence; yet its life was not dependent upon anything else, as our life depends upon the air we breathe. It breathed, breathless. Darkness there was, and all at first was veiled in gloom, profound as ocean without life." Müller then rather describes what the poet means than gives his words; I will, therefore, adopt now, for the rest of the hymn, the metrical version, which he gives at p. 564:-- "The germ that still lay covered in the husk Burst forth, one nature, from the fervent heat. Then first came Love upon it, the new spring Of mind; yea, poets in their hearts discerned, Pondering this bond between created things And uncreated. Comes this spark from earth, Piercing and all-pervading, or from heaven? These seeds were sown, and mighty power arose, Nature below, and Power and Will above. Who knows the secret? who proclaimed it here? Whence, whence this manifold creation sprang? The gods themselves came later into being. Who knows from whence this great creation sprang? He, from whom all this great creation came. Whether His will created or was mute, The Most High seer, that is in highest heaven, He knows it; or, perchance, e'en He knows not" One more hymn is even more distinct in its monotheism, p. 569. "In the beginning there arose the source of golden light. He was the only born Lord of all that is. He established the earth and this sky. Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice? He who gives life. He who gives strength; whose blessing all the bright gods desire; whose shadow is immortality; whose shadow is death.... He who, through His power, is the only King of the breathing and the awakening world. He who governs all--man and beast.... He whose power these snowy mountains, whose power the sea proclaims, with the distant river. He whose these regions are, as it were, His two arms.... He through whom the sky is bright, and the earth firm. He through whom the heaven was 'stablished, nay, the highest heaven. He who measured out the light in the air.... He to whom heaven and earth, standing firm by His will, look up, trembling inwardly. He over whom the rising sun shines forth.... Where-ever the mighty water-clouds went, where they placed the seed, and lit the fire, thence arose He who is the only life of the bright gods.... He who, by His might, looked even over the water-clouds, the clouds which gave strength, and lit the sacrifice. He _who is God above all gods_.... May He not destroy us. He, the creator of the earth; or He, the righteous, who created the heaven. He who also created the bright and mighty waters." In this hymn I have only omitted the repeated question--Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice? Of the high antiquity of these productions no competent scholar entertains a doubt. It is not certain how many years before our era it was composed, but it is considered that it was prior to B. C. 2000, long before the time when the ideal Moses is said to have written, and _à fortiori_ anterior, by at least a thousand years, to the authors of the Book of Psalms. Talboys Wheeler remarks, p. 27--"Having thus sketched generally the individual character of the leading deities of the Aryans as they appear in the Rig Veda, it may be advisable to glance at that conception of One Supreme Being, as in all and above all, which finds full expression in the Vedic hymns. Upon this point the following passages will be found very significant:--'Who has seen the primeval being at the time of His being born? what is that endowed with substance that the unsubstantial sustains? from earth are the breath and blood, but where is the soul--who may repair to the sage to ask this? What is that One alone, who has upheld these six spheres in the form of an unborn?'" Then follows the hymn just quoted from M. Müller. I may add that the so-called gods Indra, Agni, Surya, the Maruts, &c., are only personifications of the abstract powers of nature, the sky, fire, the sun, the winds, &c. These are the same conceptions as are referred to in Ps. civ. 1-4--they are not deities, but ministers. It will probably be said by the orthodox that these descriptions of the creation and the Creator are mere efforts of the human mind, and not the products of "revelation." We grant it at once, and answer, why, then, should the comparatively miserable conceptions of one or more Hebrews, who knew nothing of a soul or a future life till they had learned it from the Chaldeans or the Persians, be regarded differently? Was the Jewish ignorance the result of Divine "inspiration?" Did the Devil give to the heathen the knowledge of Satan's origin and power? If so, why did the Jews, and why do Christians, adopt it? I have already mentioned that the Aryans believed in the efficacy of prayer to their gods: they offered to them, much as we do now, supplications for rain, abundant harvests, prolific cattle, bodily vigour, long life, numerous progeny, &c., just as did, very rarely, the seed of Abraham. We may now make some quotations from the Egyptian Ritual for the Dead (Bunsen's _Egypt_, Vol. V.). "O soul, greatest of things created" (p. 165); "I am the Great God, creating himself" (p. 172); "Oh Lord of the great abode, Chief of the gods" (p. 177). Throughout this invocation, however, the lord of the universe seems to be spoken of as the sun under various titles. There is frequent reference to the danger of the soul falling into the power of some malignant deity, and orthodoxy is secured by addressing every good god by his or her proper title. There is no grand conception anywhere, and the endless repetitions disgust the ordinary reader. I must add that the sun, Osiris, and the male organ, are spoken of as emblematic of each other. If we next turn to the Shemitic religions, we have to contend with the difficulty produced by the paucity of written records, and the doubts which exist about certain epithets that relate to the gods. As far as I can discover, there was an idea of a Supreme Being, whose name was Jeho. Io. Iou., or the like, and Il or El. His ministers were the sun, moon, planets, constellations, and stars. His emblems were the sexual organs, and worship was, to a great degree, licentious. There was no conception of a spiritual life after death, or of a state of future rewards and punishments. Sacrifice was thought much of, but I doubt whether there was anything like what we know as prayer. At any rate, in all those parts of the Bible which seem to be the oldest, there is a singular absence of any formula or command for supplication. Solomon's prayer is comparatively of modern date. Indeed, this vacuity is implied in the expression of one of Jesus' disciples, "Teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples" (Luke xi. 1), thus showing clearly that the practice of prayer was not a Judaic, i.e., Mosaic one.* * As a friend, who has been kind enough to assist me to correct these sheets in their passage through the press, considers that I ought to give some reasons for the assertion made in the text, the following information is appended:-- I. There are, in all, about a score of different words in Hebrew which have been translated, "prayer," "I pray," "praying," &c. These are--(1) ahnah or ahna, (2) begah, (3) ghalah, (4) ghanan, (5) loo, (6) lahgash, (7) na, (8) gathar, (9) pagag, (10) pahlal, (11) tztlah, (12) seeagh, (13) shoal, (14) tephilah. The rest are different forms of the same roots. II. These words do not, except in a few instances, really bear the signification of "prayer" or "intercession," which is given to them in the Authorised English Version of the Bible; as any one may convince himself by consulting Wigram's Hebrew concordance. Thus, No. 1, in three instances, is translated in the A. V. by the interjection "or,(OL)" No. 2, in the A. V. is once used as "praying," but in other parts as "seeking" for persons, "desiring" or "requesting," and "making." No. 8 is translated in various parts of the A. V. "I am weak" "I fell sick," "was not grieved," "a parturient woman crying," "to put one's self to pain," "is grievous," "hath laid," "is my infirmity," and these meanings are far more common than the signification of "prayer." No. 4 is only used twice, and is in one place translated "by showing mercy," and in the other by "making supplication." No. 5 is translated "O that," "peradventure," "would God that," "if," "if haply," "though," and only once "I pray thee." No. 6 is translated "enchantment," "orator," "earrings," "charmed," and once only "prayer," with the marginal reading "secret speech." No. 7 is in one place "now," in another "Oh," "go to," as well as "I pray," and this in the same sense as we should use the words to a child "I wish you would be quiet" No. 8 is generally used in the sense of "intreaty" or "prayer," but it once is found as "earnest," and "multiplying words," as in a Litany. No. 9 is used to signify "he came," "reached," "thou shalt meet," "fall upon," or "kill," "he lighted" on a certain place, "they met together," and in the 53d chapter of Isaiah the same word is used in verse 6, "for the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all," and in verse 12, for "and made intercession for the transgressors!" No. 10 is used almost exclusively for prayer, but it is only found six times in the whole Pentateuch, in one of which it is read "I had no thought" in the A. V. No. 11 is only found twice, once in Ezra and once in Daniel, and signifies "prayer" in both. No. 12 has many interpretations in the A. V., viz., "meditation," "speaking," "talking," "complaining," "declaring," in one instance only is it translated "pray," and that in the apparently important text Ps. lv. 17, "Evening and morning and at noon will I pray." As a substantive the word is rendered as "complaint," "talking, meditation," "babbling," and only once "prayer," and that in Ps. lv. 2, "Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer." No. 13 is generally translated "ask," as we should remark, "well, if he asks me what must I say?" "beg," as "he shall beg in harvest;" "consulted," in the text "he consulted with images," "salute," "to salute him of peace;" "enquired," "Saul enquired of the Lord;" "wished," "and wished in himself to die;" "lent," "I have lent him to the Lord," "so that they lent unto them." No. 14 is used exclusively for prayer, but the word is not to be found in the whole of the Pentateuch. III. There is reason to believe that the most important of these words have come from the Persian, a language allied to the Sanscrit; and if so, it is clear that the idea of prayer was adopted by the Jews after they were patronised by the conquerors of Babylon. Some of the other words are Aramaic, and probably even more modern than the rest. For example, No. 10 is compared by Furst in his Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, to the Sanscrit phal, and No. 8 may also be derived from the Persian, and a Sanscrit root gad, which signifies "to speak to," or "call upon," Anahf No. 1, is Aramaic. I think that it was Mons. Weill, in his remarkable book called Moise et le Talmud, who first drew attention to the influence of the Talmudists upon the Jewish Scriptures. He pointed out that in the Mosaic law there was no idea of prayer, intercession, or pardon; everything was based upon the "lex talionis," an eye was to be paid for with an eye, murder was to be avenged by murder, and ecclesiastical, ceremonial, and other transgressions were to be atoned, i.e., satisfaction was to be given by sacrifice and payments to the priest or tabernacle. But when the Jews, after their contact with the Chaldeans, Medea, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, began to study theology, two sects arose--the Talmudists, who explained away the older Scriptures, interpolated narratives, or simply texts therein, so as to suit their purposes; and the Sadducees, who refused to adopt as matters of faith anything which was not taught by Moses. The first was the strongest sect, and composed the majority in the Sanhedrim. They thus had power over the sacred canon, and could reject manuscripts or adopt them according as the purposes which were aimed at were served. The Talmudic interpolations are supposed to b« recognised chiefly in the more modern parts of the Old Testament, in Ezra, Nehemiah, the second Isaiah and Jeremiah, in the books of Zechariah and Malachi, in the Chronicles, Daniel, in many Psalms, more sparsely in the older histories, but very largely in the Pentateuch. From these considerations, from the absence of any order in the Mosaic law for the priests to offer any supplication, and from, the general absence of prayer from the sacrifices of all nations, we may conclude that "intercession" formed no part in the Jewish religion in the early days of its existence. When working upon this subject I endeavoured to examine the curious Iguvian tables, on which Aufrecht, Eircher, and Newman have bestowed such pains. These are, I believe, the only tables extant which give directions to the old Umbrian, or any other ancient priests, how to conduct public sacrifices and the ensuing feasts. In them there are directions for invocations, but no formula for prayers, unless one can call invocations by that name. I fancy, that in some parts of the tables there are words which may be rendered "speak," or "mutter," or "meditate," or "pray silently." The fact that a Hebrew historian has composed a prayer, and put it into the mouth of King Solomon, rather than into that of a high priest, shows that supplication for the people was not a strictly sacerdotal duty. Even now, with all our liberality of thought, we take our prayers from the Archbishops, and not from the crown. But what we have said points to another important consideration, viz., how far our Authorized Version can be trusted as a foundation upon which to build a theory respecting the use of prayer, when we find that the words given in English do not correspond with the words in the original Hebrew. We have noticed in the text that both John and Jesus taught their disciples to pray; we may now call attention to the idea which the latter had of "prayer." In a parable, which was evidently intended to represent what was common enough in his day, he says, "Two men went up into the temple to pray, the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican; the Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself--God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are," &c (Luke xviii. 10-13). Surely one cannot call a boastful enumeration of one's virtues either "supplication," "prayer," or "entreaty;" but we understand readily that what we should call "meditation" was once included under the name "prayer." This anecdote unquestionably seems to prove that there was nothing like public prayer in the temple ritual. The idea of the Ancients was to obtain what they wanted by costly sacrifice; the idea of the Moderns is to obtain their desires by the expenditure of words only. We know that Pagans used long litanies, and that Christians do so too. In Jezebel's time "0 Baal, hear us" resounded on Mount Carmel in sonorous monotony. We have replaced that heathen chant by another, and our cathedrals reverberate constantly with the musical rogation, "We beseech Thee to hear us, good Lord," uttered more than a score of times. Our orthodoxy consists in our using English instead Phoenician words, and in calling Baal by a word more familiar to us; and as the highest commendation which we can give to others is to imitate them, so we praise the Ancient heathen highly, who thought that they would be heard from their "much speaking." It is ever easier to change our words than our practice. Like the Pharisee, Christians boast that they are not as other men are; but by their proceedings they show that they are like the Jews, of whose paternity Jesus had not an exalted opinion. (See John viii. 44). In further illustration of the absence of a set form of prayer in the temple worship in Jerusalem, and of the independence of all devout solicitors of priestly aid, I may point to Matthew vi. 5 to 8, wherein we find that hypocrites offered their supplications, not only in the temple, but at the corners of the streets. It is just possible that in the former locality there might have been some public worship going on, in which the saintly could join, but certainly there was no such ritual at street corners. But if there had really been divine service in the temple, it follows that those who joined in it would not have been conspicuous, or deserving the name of hypocrites. The fault of these which is mentioned by Jesus is ostentatious public prayer, i.e.9 the doing of that which had not been prescribed by Moses. As I have, in a preceding volume, spoken at some length concerning the morals and manners of ancient races, and shown how, as a rule, their conduct has been the same as that of modern Christians, and as, moreover, the subject has been treated of in an essay by Lecky (_History of European Morals_), I will not pursue this part of my subject further than to remark, that we have scarcely two articles of faith--if, indeed we have more than one--i.e., respect for one day in seven--which we have not received, directly or indirectly, from Pagans. Even our Christianity is but a modified Buddhism, as I shall endeavour, in my next chapter, to show. CHAPTER IV. Christianity and Buddhism. The new and old world. An impartial judge is said to be a partisan. Works on the subject. Sakya Muni's birth, B.c. 620 (about), position in life, original views. Parallels between Brahmin-ism, Buddhism, Hebraism, and Christianity. History of Sakya Muni --that of Jesus corresponds with it marvellously. Sakya receives a commission from an angel--is henceforth a saviour. History of Jesus follows that of Sakya. Siddartha neither dictated nor wrote. A favourite garden. Sakya and the Brahmins. Buddha and Christ equally persecuted. Spread of Buddhism after Siddartha's death. Asoka a royal convert Buddhist missionaries, b.c. 307. Their wonderful successes. Different development of Buddhism and Christianity. Persecution a Christian practice, Buddha tempted by the Devil, and by women, like St Anthony. Buddha's life reduced to writing, at least B.c. 90. Hardy on Buddhist miracles. His remarks criticised. Necessity for miracles is doubtful. Sakya and a future life. Resurrection from the dead. Jesus not the first fruits of them that slept. Paul's argument worthless. Buddhists in advance of Christians. Priestcraft at time of Buddha and Jesus. Both did away with ceremonial. Sakya's doctrine--compared with Christian teaching. Another parallel between Buddha and Jesus. Commandments of Tathâgata (Buddha), or the Great Sramana. Rules for his saintly friends--for outsiders. Definition of terms. The Sra-mana's opinion of miracles--a comparison. The history of Jesus told without miracles. Buddhistic confession--remarks on in modern times. Filial respect. Public confession, murder absolved thereby. Asoka, about B.c. 263, sent out missionaries. Objections made against Buddhism. Ideas respecting God. Salvation. Buddha and Jesus. Nirvana. Heaven and Hell--Christian ideas. Apocalypse. The heaven of John and Mahomet compared with that of Buddha. Prayer not a Buddhist institution--nor originally a Christian one. Nature of prayer. The developments of Buddhism, particulars-- comparison between the Eastern ancient and Western modern practice. Abbé Hue. No sexual element in Buddhism and Christianity at first--it has crept into both in later times. Inquiry into the probable introduction of Buddhism into the West. Asceticism peculiar to Buddhism and Christianity. The Essenes, their faith and practice-- resemblance to Buddhism. John and Jesus probably Essenes. If Jesus was inspired, so was Siddartha. Differences between Sakya and Jesus. Jesus 'believed in an immediate destruction of the world. Idea of préexistence in Jesus and Sakya adopted by their followers. The basis of the two faiths is morality--but an unsound one. Nature of the unsoundness. Morality has a reference to a life on earth only. The decalogue superfluous. Ideas of future rewards and punishments. Dives and Lazarus. The world can exist without a knowledge of a future life. God thought so when He taught the Jews. Dogma versus morality. See how these Christians live! There are a few good men amongst Christians. Supplementary remarks. From the Peruvian and Aztec religious systems in what we designate the New World, a phrase which involves the idea that its existence was for ages wholly unknown to the historians of the Eastern Hemisphere, we turn to another form of faith, which demands even greater attention. Buddhism has, probably, done more to influence the minds of men in Asia than any other religion in any part of the globe, and its history is so remarkable, that it deserves the attention of every philosophical student of mankind. To the Christian it ought to be especially interesting, inasmuch as there is strong reason to believe that the faith current amongst ourselves is to be traced to the teaching of Sakya Muni, whose original name, we may notice, in passing, was no more "Buddha" than "Christ" was the cognomen of the son of Mary. An ingenious author on one occasion wrote a charming essay "upon the art of putting things," and I cannot read any treatise upon Buddhism, written by a Christian, without thinking how completely "the advocate" is to be seen throughout them all Ecclesiastical writers, who are Protestant preachers, endeavour laboriously to prove that the teaching of Sakya Muni could not have been inspired, and was certainly false; whilst other writers, who have no particular leaning towards Jesus, extol the author of Buddhism beyond that of Christianity. Truly, in such a matter it is extremely difficult not to appear as a partisan, however carefully the scales may be held. The very fact of endeavouring "to see ourselves as others see us" involves the necessity of "putting things" in a different light to that which is most common or familiar to us. A bumptious Briton thinks more of his own Islands than a Yankee thinks of them, and one who endeavours to describe "the wheel of the law" as an astute Buddhist would do, and who, at the same time, compares it with the teachings of the son of Mary, must seem to those who, without knowing its nature, despise the former, and yet implicitly believe in the latter, to be a partisan. Acting upon this belief, we shall not scruple to appear as an advocate, for we believe that "an opposition" is as good in religion as in politics, and that it behoves us all to examine every important question in all its bearings. In the following essay I shall not attempt to go into every detail about the life of Sakya Muni, for to do so would weary the reader. Anyone who wishes for such information may be referred to _Le Bouddha et sa Religion_, par J. Barthélemy Saint Hilaire, Paris, 1860, a book which may be fairly designated as exhaustive. The English reader may also consult _The Legends and Theories of the Buddhists_, by Rev. R. Spence Hardy, London, 1866, which, though very prejudiced, is extremely suggestive. Hardy's _Eastern Monachism_ and _Manual of Buddhists_ are about the same. _The Mahawanso_ translated by Tumour, is also a very valuable work of reference. There appears to be little doubt that Sakya Muni was born about 622 years before our era, and that he died when about eighty years of age, i.e.f B.C. 542. He was thus a contemporary of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and other Jewish prophets. Though of royal birth, and of the warrior or kingly caste, he does not appear to have been instructed in general history, if, indeed, any such was in existence in Hindostan at that or any other period; and we cannot find a tittle of evidence that he ever heard of any other religion than Brahminism, the dominant faith, apparently, of the Aryan invaders of India. In that he was taught assiduously, and some of its tenets he most firmly believed. Amongst others, he held that men lived in a future world, in which each one was rewarded or punished according to his doings when in a human form. His teaching was founded upon the belief which the Brahmins inculcated, that all men endure misery in this world for their conduct in a previous state of existence, and that they would once again suffer after death, unless they conducted themselves, in this life, in a manner pleasing to the Almighty. In this creed is clearly involved, if not distinctly enunciated, a full acknowledgment of the existence and power of God, of the certainty of a future life, and a desire to escape from penalties to be inflicted therein by a supreme celestial Judge, for immorality or impropriety committed in the present state. For these points of doctrine Sakya did not contend, he merely laid down a different system to the Brahmins as to the method by which salvation was to be attained, and the penal consequences of a sinful life were to be avoided. We may now, halting here for a moment, examine these matters for ourselves, and inquire in what way such faith differs from our own. The Brahmin taught that man suffers pain, misery, and death for certain crimes committed in a previous state of existence; the Christian teaches that each one suffers for a fault committed by ancestors who lived thousands of years ago. Neither the one nor the other regard pain, sorrow, suffering, and death as the normal accompaniments of life, but both attribute them to the wrath of an offended deity, who can be, in some way, cheated, cajoled, appeased, or propitiated. Both assert that men are debtors to God, and that miseries are "duns" used to make men pay their obligations to heaven. The Brahmin taught that this could be effected by prayer, sacrifice, and sundry ceremonies to be performed by some man who had been specially appointed for the purpose. A due attention to morality was also inculcated, but it was apparently considered as of less importance than ritualistic observances. The Jew, whom so many amongst us believe to have been especially taught by God, propounded a belief essentially similar to that of the Brahmin, with the single exception that he had no faith in a future existence, but thought that sacrifice and offerings, through a priesthood, were necessary to obtain comfort in this life. The Christian teaches that the horrors of eternity can only be escaped by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ (Acts xvi. 30, 31), and by being moral in addition. The "belief" here referred to is somewhat amplified in other parts of the Bible, and notably in John iii. 15-17, 36; vi. 39, 40; ix. 35; xi. 15; and Acts viii. 37; from which we learn that an item in the faith was a firm hold upon the idea that Jesus was the son, the only begotten son, of God. This dogma is still further extended in the "Apostles' Creed," wherein the Christians express, as articles of faith, their belief, that Jesus Christ was the only son of God, conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary, &c. This tenet is somewhat varied in the Nicene Creed, which expresses the Christian belief to be, that the Lord Jesus Christ is the only begotten son of God--begotten of his Father before all worlds--being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made, &c. The fundamental teaching of Sakya was, that man can only escape the tortures of the damned, by a strict propriety of conduct in this world, and a persistent endeavour to renounce and think nothing of the gratifications which make life pleasant. The modern Buddhist adds to this a belief in the absolute divinity of the founder of his faith, not simply that he was a son of God, but a visible embodiment of a portion of the Creative Unity. Brahmins and Buddhists believe in transmigration of souls: the Christian does the like, only, instead of being converted into a beast, he imagines that he will become either an angel or a devil. Within certain limits, we may, therefore, say that the Brahminic, the Jewish, the Buddhist, and the Christian religions are essentially alike, differing only upon minor points, such as the absolute value of morality, of ceremonial, of doctrine, of asceticism, the nature of a hypothetical antecedent, and an equally uncertain future existence, and the best means of escaping the penalties attached, in the second state, to impropriety of conduct in the first. If we deride the Brahmin and the Buddhist for the faith which they entertain, our laugh must necessarily recoil on ourselves, for we have no more unequivocal grounds for our belief than they have for theirs. We point in vain to what we call "Revelation," for they can do the same, and if priority in such matters is good for anything, the Brahminic must take precedence of the Jewish, and the Buddhist of the Christian code. Nor can we call miracles to our exclusive aid, for the religious books of the Hindoo are as full of them as are those of the Jew and Christian, and the stories told in the one can be readily paralleled in impossibility, incapacity, frivolity, and absurdity by the others. We must remember, then, when speaking of the teaching of Sakya, that it was constructed upon the supposed fundamental truths of Brahminism, just as the doctrines of Jesus were built upon those of Judaism. By adopting these, respectively, the two preachers have demonstrated their belief in them, but neither the one nor the other have advanced our knowledge as to the reality of the earliest faith, nor demonstrated the truth of their subsequent assumptions. If we now endeavour, for the sake of comparison, to place the Eastern and the Western points of belief in parallel columns, we shall be better able to see the points of resemblance and of difference than by any other plan. [Illustration: 114] [Illustration: 115] These are only a few of the leading points of resemblance and difference, and might be almost indefinitely multiplied. After this preface, we may proceed to notice that Siddartha--another name for Buddha--was of royal birth, and born in wedlock: his mother was called Maya Devi, and was herself the daughter of a king. His father was of the warrior caste, and, according to ancient usage, Sakya, like Jesus some centuries later, was presented in the temple of the God of his parents, and recognized by a Brahmin, whom we may designate as a predecessor, by some hundreds of years, of the Jewish Simeon (Luke ii 25, seq.)f as having the marks of a great man upon him. As Sakya grew up to man's estate he was found to be peculiarly clever, and soon distanced his masters, as Jesus was and did, when, at twelve years, he went into the temple and astonished the doctors. He was always thoughtful, and frequently remained alone. Once he wandered into a forest, (compare Matthew iv. 1-11), in which he was found lost in thought. When obliged to exhibit his talents, Siddartha was found to have every conceivable excellence, bodily and mental He was, by parental desire, married to a paragon of a wife, who showed her good sense by rejecting the use of a veil. In this Sakya differs from Mary's son, who never married, being, most probably, of the tribe of the Essenes. In later life Siddartha discouraged wedlock and every form of love. But, during all his outward happiness; Siddartha's thoughts ran upon the misery which he saw on every side to be common in the world, and he entertained a hope that he would be able to show man the road to a happy immortality. In these ideas the teacher was encouraged by a god, who appeared to him by night, and told him that the appointed time for the deliverer had come. This comforter also recommended him to leave his wife, his wealth, his father's house, and give up all he had, so as to be able to seek, unencumbered, the way of salvation. Compare here the passage, Mark x. 20-30, wherein Jesus gives the same kind of advice as the angel gave to Sakya Muni. Having become satisfied of his mission from God, he resolutely abandoned everything, and, being really a scion of royalty, he had much to renounce. Siddartha thus became a mendicant, dependent upon others for food and raiment, and resembled that son of Mary, of whom we read that he had not a residence wherein to lay his head (Matt. viii. 20; Luke ix. 58). He was about twenty-nine years of age when he thus became poor for the sake of mankind. Compare what is said of Jesus, Luke iii. 23. Though Siddartha was opposed to the Brahmins, he nevertheless studied their doctrines, as Mary's son did that of the Hebrew theologians, thoroughly, under one of the wisest of them, for many years. Then, leaving this teacher, he went about preaching and doing good. So much were men impressed with his beauty, his piety, and his doctrines, that they flocked in crowds to see him, and he taught them whilst sitting on the brow of Mount Pandava--even kings came to hear him. Compare here what is said of the Nazarene, Matt. iv. 23 to Matt. viii. 1. Sakya was persecuted for a long time by a relative, who ultimately became one of his most ardent disciples. Compare Matt. xvi. 22 and John xxi. 15, et seq. Siddartha's austerities and mortifications of himself, in every conceivable way, were excessive during the next six years, and these have been represented as a combat with the Devil, whose kingdom he destroyed. At the end of this probation, Sakya Muni, finding fasting and pain not profitable for eternal salvation, resumed the ordinary human habits of eating, &c. This disgusted many of his disciples, and "they walked no more with him." He was partly supported by a slave woman, and was content to clothe himself with vestments taken from the dead. Finally, this wonderful son of Maya heard within him a voice, which told him that he was divine, the saviour of the world, and the incarnation of the wisdom of God--Buddha, "the word" itself. Compare John i. 1, et seq. This was confirmed by a miracle, and thus, at the age of thirty-six, and at the foot of a fig tree, Sakya Muni received a divine commission, "and the word was made flesh." But, though thus divinely inspired, the saviour doubted his power to convert mankind, and at the first he only preached his new doctrines to a few. Even in this respect it is marvellous to see how closely the Christian story of Jesus follows that of his predecessor Siddartha. Some opposed Sakya, but these were soon converted by his majesty, and the glory with which he spake the words--"Yes," he said, "I have come to see clearly both immortality and the way to attain it; I am Buddha--I know all--I see all--I have blotted out my faults, and am above all law." Recognizing in Siddartha the teacher of mankind, the common people heard him gladly, and gave him homage, and he, in return, taught them his full doctrine. The Indian saviour then proceeded to the holy city, Benares, and taught there. But though he spoke much, he neither dictated nor wrote--like Jesus, subsequently, he made no provision by which his doctrines might be perpetuated. From Benares he went to other places, some of which were especially dear to him, and thus became sacred. In like manner Bethany was sanctified by Jesus. Amongst others was a garden, given to him, with a mansion, by a wealthy disciple, which a lively fancy might call a Hindoo Gethsemane. In this garden Buddha made many disciples, and in it the first council of his followers was held after his death. Another favourite retreat was a plantation of mango trees, and this, like every other spot that Siddartha is known to have visited, has been adorned by the faithful with ornamental architecture in commemoration of him. As may be supposed, Sakya, when he assailed the Brahmins, was in turn opposed by them with persevering malevolence; the former was outspoken and said what he thought of the priests--he called them hypocrites, cheats, impostors, and the like--and they were apparently conscious that they deserved such titles. Here, again, we notice a singular parallel between the Hindoo saviour and the Jewish one, who followed him after a long interval. Not that there is anything wonderful in the founder of a new faith reviling the ministers of one more ancient--nor in the priests of an established church endeavouring to suppress, by punishments, the professors who interfere with their repose. We know how the Christian fathers abused and lampooned the faith of those whose practices they detested--how Luther and his followers lashed the vices of the Papists, and how these in their turn burned the new preachers--when they had a chance; how the Nonconformists censured the Establishment, and how the Episcopal Church has harried Independents and Presbyterians. But it is strange to find both Sakya and Jesus inaugurating a religion of peace by fierce invectives. We have not particulars respecting the choice of language made use of by the Indian, but we can scarcely imagine that it could be more to the purpose than the vituperation employed by the Hebrew. Jesus says,--"Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves,"--"Ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness" (Matt, xxiii. 15-27). One cannot wonder that the Brahmins and the Pharisees, who were objurgated as hypocrites, should retort upon their accusers, prosecute the one and crucify the other. As Sakya's influence increased, the power of the old priesthood diminished, and there are accounts of many contests between the old dispensers of Brahma's religion and the new saviour, which were held before kings and people. In consequence of these disputes Buddha's life was repeatedly in danger. But though often threatened, Siddartha died peacefully when about eighty years old, beloved by many, respected by more, worshipped as a divinity by his immediate disciples and intimate friends, and venerated by all who had listened to his discourses. There are a great many legends existent, and of very respectable antiquity too, which tell of miracles performed by this very remarkable Indian teacher; but the judicious historian, upon whose authority I am at present relying (St. Hilaire), does not intermingle these with the narrative of Siddartha's life. In this respect he shows greater judgment than the scribes who first compiled the stories of Buddha and of Jesus, both of whom conceived that human beings could not be converted to a new style of belief without thaumaturgy. The account of Sakya Muni and his religion would be incomplete did we not add that he left behind him enthusiastic disciples who were eager and successful in spreading his views. But many years, how many we do not know with absolute certainty, elapsed ere any account was written either of his life or of his teaching. Nor ought we to wonder at this, for until time has been given to mankind, it cannot fairly estimate the value of anything new; and when men do at length form, what they believe to be, a perfect judgment of the importance of the doctrine which has become deeply rooted, they are more eager to promulgate it in the world than to record it by writing in the closet. The new religion certainly spread extensively all over the vast continent of Hindustan, and in the course of about three hundred years, found an enthusiastic and powerful convert in the person of a king called Asoka, who was reigning when the third convocation of Buddhists was called, b.c. 307. This ruler was imbued with a missionary spirit, and under his influence, preachers full of energy went not only throughout India, but into China, Japan, Ceylon, and apparently into every country to which ships, caravans, and the flow of commerce gave them access, including Persia, Babylonia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and the very populous and important emporium Alexandria. We may judge of the fanaticism of these religious envoys by their success, and we may, as is often done by Christian missionaries, test the real value of their doctrine by its endurance, and its adaptability to the religious wants of the human animal. If missionary success is a test of truth in religion, Buddhism must be superior to Christianity. Buddah--for his name is spelled variously--has more followers, according to competent authorities, than Jesus, and if the depth and earnestness shown by the converts to the two men could be weighed in impartial scales, we believe that the preponderance would be in favour of the followers of the Indian saviour. We readily allow that Buddhism has not developed in many matters like Christianity has done. The Buddhism of to-day does not essentially differ from that in the early ages of the faith; the followers of Siddartha have not adopted the doctrines of the nations amongst which they have settled. The Christianity of to-day, on the other hand, is so widely different from that current in the first century of our era, that it has been remarked, with great pungency, that if Jesus revisited us now, he would be denounced as a heretic, and abused as a nonconformist. His followers soon introduced politics into religion, and adopted the fables and the doctrines of the Pagans amongst whom they dwelt, merely changing certain names, and ascribing virtues and miracles to saints, which the heathen attributed to Apollo, Mars, or Venus. Jesus, though a Jew, never sacrificed, nor did his apostles, but his followers thought prudent to filch the practice from the heathen; and, to smooth their difficulty, they profess to turn bread and wine into flesh and blood, and offer it up as an oblation upon their ecclesiastical altar. Jesus knew nothing of purgatory; with him the rich man went direct to hell, and Lazarus to Abraham's bosom. Modern Christians are wiser than their teacher; for he disdained the learning of Egypt, his followers took their purgatory and trinity therefrom. All this shows, that the faith of Christians in their teacher has not been equal to the unbounded trust felt by the Buddhist in his master's wisdom. Buddhism, moreover, has neither taught nor sanctioned any system of persecution. Sakya, it is true, encouraged men to make themselves miserable upon earth that they might attain future immunity from woe, but he never ordered them to use the sword or dragonnades to force other people to do so. The followers of Jesus, on the other hand, have but too often founded their claim to a happy immortality on making other men, whom they called heretics, miserable, as during the period of the crusades against the Saracens, the Albigenses, the Lollards, and the Waldenses. The Christians in many ages seemed to argue thus:--As the painful death of Mary's son saved the world, so I, by torturing a heretic, may save myself. This is an idea of vicarious atonement which, though prevalent for centuries, has never been committed to writing by those who hold it. We do not mean to allege that the opinion referred to cannot be found in history, for it is from such a source that our assertion comes. A belief, such as we refer to, was promulgated amongst the Crusaders, and was fostered by the founders of the Inquisition. Such an idea, too, is embodied in the word--"The time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service" (John xvi. 2). We may, however, trace the idea of persecution in the early Christian Scriptures. Paul, for example, when writing to the Corinthians (1 Epistle v. 3-5) gives such encouragement as he can to those who punish an erring brother Christian, by delivering him over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, and in (1st Tim. i. 20), the same author declares,--"I have delivered Hymenseus and Alexander unto Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme." The idea being, that by thus acting, both the Corinthians and Paul were improving their own ecclesiastical condition. As I may not have another available opportunity for introducing one or two striking parallels between Sakya Muni and Jesus, I may mention here that the former is represented as being tempted by and having conversation with an evil spirit called Mâra, Evil one, Destroyer, Devil, or Papiyan. In one of these confabulations Buddah says,--"I will soon triumph over you--'desires' are your chief soldiers, then come idleness, hunger and thirst, passions, sleepy indolence, fears, doubts, angers, hypocrisy, ambition, the desire to be respected, and to have renown, praise of yourself and blame for others--these are your black allies, the soldiers of the burning demon. Your soldiers subjugate gods and men, but not me, I shall crush them by wisdom, then what will you do?" (Hilaire, p. 61). The sage is then, not unlike the so-called St. Anthony, tempted by lovely woman, thirty-two lovely demons (Apsaras) deploying all their charms. Then follows a third trial, and Mâra says to Siddartha,--"I am the lord of desire, I am the master of the entire world, the gods, the crowd of Dâvanas (spirits), men and beasts have been subjugated by me and are in my power. Like them enter my domains, rise up and speak like them." Buddha replied,--"If you are the lord of desire you are not the lord of light. Look at me, I am the lord of the law, you are powerless, and in your very sight I shall obtain supreme intelligence," (p. 64, op. cit.). The demon makes one more effort, and is again conquered, and then retires, tracing with an arrow these words upon the ground--"My empire has passed away." It may be imagined that the French author whom I quote is a partisan of the Indian sage; far from it, he records such tales with regret, for he sees how strong an influence they must have upon the perfect or imperfect authenticity of the New Testament and the story of Jesus. The similarity of the two histories is heightened by the legend before noticed, that Buddha went to Heaven to convert his mother, whilst Jesus is said to have gone down to Hades to preach to the spirits in prison, with the implied intention of converting them to the faith which he preached. It will doubtless have occurred to anyone reading the preceding pages, if he be but familiar with the New Testament, that either the Christian histories called Gospels have been largely influenced by Buddhist's legends, or that the story of Siddartha has been moulded upon that of Jesus. The subject is one which demands and deserves the greatest attention, for if our religion be traceable to Buddhism, as the later Jewish faith is to the doctrines of Babylonians, Medes, and Persians, we must modify materially our notions of "inspiration" and "revelation." Into this inquiry St. Hilaire goes as far as documentary evidence allows him, and Hardy in _Legends and Theories of the Buddhists_ also enters upon it in an almost impartial manner. From their conclusions there can be no reasonable doubt that the story of the life of Sakya Muni, such as we have described it, certainly existed in writing ninety years before the birth of Jesus; consequently, if the one life seems to be a copy of the other, the gospel writers must be regarded as the plagiarists. In the story of Buddha, we have eliminated the miraculous part, and exhibited him simply as a remarkable man. Nevertheless, in the writings of his followers, miracles in abundance are assigned to him. Whether these existed in the original history Hardy doubts, and his remarks are so apposite that we reproduce them (op. cit. p. xxviii). "Upon the circumstances of this first rehearsal (of the life and doctrine of Siddartha), most important consequences depend. If the miracles ascribed to Buddha can be proved to have been recorded of him at the time of his death, this would go far towards proving that the authority to which he laid claim was his rightful prerogative. They were of too public character to have been ascribed to him then if they had not taken place; so that if it was openly declared by his contemporaries, by those who had lived with him in the same monastery, that he had been repeatedly visited by Sekra and other Deivas; and that he had walked through the air and visited the heavenly world in the presence of many thousands, and those the very persons whom they addressed, we ought to render to him the homage awarded to him by even his most devoted followers. But the legend of the early rehearsal has nothing to support it beyond the assertion of authors who lived at a period long subsequent. The testimony of contemporaneous history presents no record of any event that quadrates with the wonderful powers attributed to the 'rahals,' which would undoubtedly not have been wanting if these events had really taken place." The reader of this extract will now naturally turn his attention to the Christian gospels, and inquire into the time when they were written, and whether the arguments used by Hardy, for disbelieving the miracles of Buddha, do not equally disprove the authenticity of the miracles attributed to Jesus. We can find nowhere, in contemporary history--and there is an adequate account thereof, both Jewish and Roman--any records of the wonders said to have been done in Judea by the son of Mary. Though he was noticed by a certain writer in the Talmud, under the name of Ben Panther, that book contains no account of the marvellous works recorded in the gospels, nor any reference to his miraculous power. The Romans who dwelt in Jerusalem knew nothing of any real miracle, though Herod is reported to have noticed some gossiping accounts of John's successor. We do not find a single reference to any of the wonderful events told in the gospels in any epistle written by those who "companied with Jesus"--except the assertion that he had risen from the dead, to be found in 1 Corinthians xv. and elsewhere--whose value is problematical Still farther, we have tolerably good evidence to show that the Gospels were written at a time when they could not be tested by those people in whose presence the wonders were said to have been wrought. The narrative of John, for example, is, by scholars, supposed to have been written more than a century, probably one hundred and fifty years, after the crucifixion, and the others seem to have been composed for the benefit of those who did not live in, or know Jerusalem and Judea intimately. They resemble, in almost every respect, the stories told of such Roman saints as Francis of Assisi, Bernard, Carlo Borromeo, and Ignatius Loyola, which were always composed long after the death, and out of the presence of every one of those who could deny or controvert them. However much, or little, we may credit the biographies of Buddha and Jesus, we cannot for a moment doubt, that the two individuals were instrumental in founding forms of religion, which, by the aid of missionaries, spread over a vast extent of the habitable globe. Unlike that of Mahomet, the faiths referred to were promulgated by peaceful persuasion rather than by the sword, and by the power of eloquence, example, and precept, rather than by the influence of miracles. If, for the sake of argument, we grant that every specimen of thaumaturgy which his followers attribute to Jesus is correctly reported, we must allow also that his power of making converts by teaching, preaching, and wonder working, was inferior to that of his followers, who taught, preached, and proselytized without performing many, if any miracles. If we assert that miraculous powers are necessary for the establishment and propagation of a new religion, then we must, to be consistent with ourselves, believe in the thaumaturgy of the Buddhists, and the divine mission of Sakya Muni. If, on the other hand, we deny that Siddartha was an incarnate god or saviour, was not divinely inspired, and performed no real miracle, then it is clear that the miracles, which Jesus is said to have achieved, were wholly unnecessary, and not required in any way to upset an old religion, to found a new, or to spread it when established. The philosopher may pause here, with profit to himself, and inquire whether there is, or there are, any new form or forms of religion which has or have sprung up within his own observation, and if so, whether it or they has or have been based upon thaumaturgy--and, if one or more have been so founded, whether one shows evidence of stability. Few can deny that Mormonism is a form of belief which has a considerable number of adherents, a body of earnest missionaries, and a laity whose faith and practice have been sorely tested by hardship. Yet there has not been a single miracle performed by its prophets. It is reported that its founder announced that he would perform one in the sight of all Israel and of the sun, but when the time came he said, that if the spectators believed that he could do what was promised, that was quite enough! Spiritualism, on the other hand, is a new sort of theosophy, ostensibly founded and supported wholly by thaumaturgy; its disciples have induced themselves to believe, against their original ideas, that we are not only surrounded by the spirits of the departed, but that these can be brought into connection with us by means of certain individuals, called mediators or mediums--that these have such power, over the invisible beings hovering in the air, that the souls of the dead may be made to shake the tables of the living, and lift up their sofas to the ceiling. The miracles are believed in by many, but Spiritualism lags far behind the Mormon theology, and probably always will do. We may regard this part of our subject in yet another light. Let us, for example, suppose that the Buddhists and the Christians succeed in persuading each other of the incorrectness of the miraculous element in their respective books, does it therefore follow, that any essential part of the creed of either one or other must be altered? The doctrines of Siddartha would not be valueless even if his followers disbelieved in his power to fly as a bird, or cross a river on the surface of the water--nor would those of Mary's son be proved to be worthless if it were certain that he never marched over a billowy sea, and that he was not really killed by crucifixion. The disciples of Sakya Muni believed in a resurrection of the dead, without having had the advantage of a real or imaginary reappearance of their master after his supposed decease. The Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans, had all an Elysium to which the good folk went. The Red Indian believes in a future life and happy hunting grounds (so we are told), although he has never heard of Judea. The rude Northmen and Danes had also their Valhalla to go to after death, long ere they were Christians. Still farther, it is to be noticed, by the close observer, that the Jews at the time of Jesus, and some of the Greeks about the same period, were divided in their opinions respecting the existence of men in a future state. The Sadducees, holding fast to the books of Moses and the Prophets, denied the existence of a resurrection, of angels or of spirits. The Pharisees, on the other hand, influenced apparently by Babylonian and Persian theology, had faith in all three. That this belief in a future life was not commonly held by the poor folk in Judea, we infer from Mark ix. 10, wherein we are told that Peter, James, and John were "questioning with one another what the rising from the dead should mean." That the Athenians were equally careless about what is now called "heaven and hell," we judge from Acts xvii. 18, wherein we are told that Paul's preaching about "Jesus and the resurrection" was a strange affair, and from the thirty-second verse of the same chapter, wherein it is said that the doctrine of the resurrection of Jesus was received with derision. I am quite aware that it may be objected to these remarks that the doubt about the rising from the dead does not point to a general resurrection, but simply to the return to life of one particular individual. This, however, only removes the difficulty to a short distance, for Greek story tells us of the annual return of Proserpine from the realms of Pluto to the light of day, and Adonis was yearly resuscitated, in mythical narrative. For the Hebrew, the rising from the dead ought not to be a wonderful matter. Was it not told in their Scriptures how, when certain persons were burying a man, the bearers in a fright threw the corpse into the sepulchre of Elijah, whose bones had such efficacy that they revived the dead man, who stood on his feet (2 Kings xiii. 21). We find also, from Mark vi. 16, Luke ix. 9, that Herod had a full belief in the power of John to rise again from the death to which that monarch had consigned him. The sceptic may doubt the ability of the two evangelists to read what was passing through the royal mind when Jesus and his works were brought before its notice, but he cannot doubt that the writer was aware that in Herod's time there was a belief in the resurrection of individuals. Indeed, we find in the verse following that which tells of the Apostle's bewilderment, Mark ix. 11, a question, "why say the scribes that Elias must first come?" To which the reply is that the prophet has come. We are constrained, therefore, to believe that Jesus was not the first who rose from the dead; nay, even he himself commissioned his disciples to "cleanse the lepers, and raise the dead" (Matth. x. 8). What, then, is the value of the arguments that Paul builds upon the assertion that Christ is "the first fruits of them that slept." This being so, we may fairly ask, whence did Mary's son derive the ideas which he promulgated of a resurrection, and of salvation, and why had a sophistical writer like Paul to adopt the clumsy contrivance of asserting that Jesus not only had risen, but that he was the first individual who had done so, to demonstrate that the dead really did return again to life? Paul's argument, indeed, shows how little he knew or had thought upon the subject, for he distinctly preaches a resurrection of the body, not of the soul, a belief adopted into the Apostles' creed. Yet, at the very period when the minds of Christians were thus unformed, the disciples of Buddha, to a man, believed in a future "Nirvana," in which "there should be no more sorrow nor crying, neither should there be any more pain, and where all earthly things should have passed away" (see Rev. xxi. 4). We are not yet in the position to prove that Mary's son and certain of his followers received their inspiration from disciples of Siddartha, but there is certainly a strong presumption in favour of the possibility, much evidence of its probability, and nothing whatever to disprove it. To this, however, we will return by and by. Ere we proceed to examine into the nature of the doctrines of Sakya Muni and of Jesus, we may cast a glance over the condition of the men whom they converted. In both instances, it is not too much to say that they all were "priest-ridden" in the fullest meaning of the term. The residents in Modern India and Papal Rome, until a short time ago, well understood what the term signifies; day by day, and almost hour by hour, there is, or was in these places, some ceremony to be attended, some prayer to be uttered, some confession to be made, some contribution to be given to monastery, church, or priest. Penances are, and were inflicted of the most painful, sometimes of the most disgusting kind. The last I heard of was in Wales, where a man was ordered to lie down at the church door as a mat, upon which the faithful were to wipe their feet. Both in India and Italy, men, women, and children alike are, or were, taught to regard themselves as the servants, and even slaves of the hierarchy, and their money is, or was, alienated from wives and children to swell the coffers of spiritual tyrants. Perpetual terrors of hell are sounded, until those hearers, whose hearts are impressionable, are habitually haunted by imaginary horrors, each one of which has to be bought off by a sort of hush-money paid to the priest, who has invented, adopted, or described them. Such was the condition of England and France prior to the Reformation and the Revolution. So long as men are debased by their guides, and allow themselves, with the docility of a well-trained dog, to be ruled, and so long as tyrannical flamens can wring an ever increasing tax from the people, there is probably nothing more in the breast of each than a vague feeling of dislike, or regret, at the existence of such things, which rarely receives utterance for fear of punishment. But as soon as a man, more bold than his neighbours, raises a standard of revolt, whose success appears to be secure, the bulk of the oppressed first sympathize with, yet fear to join him, then, after watching eagerly the course of events, and admiring the boldness of men more resolute than themselves, they timidly make common cause with the reformer, and, if circumstances favour them, they become enthusiastic. As the news of the mental revolt swells, the people, tired of oppression, rise in their might and sweep away the hierarchy, or compel it to abandon its pretensions. Buddha and Christ were such leaders as we here describe, and such was the course gone through by their followers. The timid Peter denying Jesus, and yet afterwards boldly preaching him up, is an example almost too well known to be quoted. We are now in a position to inquire into the nature of Siddartha's teaching. Premising that his doctrines were collected at least 200 years B. C., the first which we notice is one that he not only inculcated by language but enforced by his abiding example. He taught that the comforts and pleasures of this life act as fetters, to chain man's spirit to earth; that day by day they necessitate the cultivation of propensities and passions more or less bestial in their nature; and that as these strengthen, so the individual who possessed them would be born again, after his death, to some form of misery and woe in which he would have to atone for the human infirmities which he had not conquered. To escape from the possibility of such an event, Sakya counselled his disciples to wean themselves, as far as possible, from every sensual passion; to mortify the body by fasting, so as to make it more readily separable from the inner man; to renounce all comfort except that of doing good; and believing in a state of perfect future salvation. A man, he taught, must abandon everything as valueless compared with the attainment of salvation or _nirvana_; he must be wholly dependent upon others for food and raiment; he must take no thought for the morrow, and live like a bird or lily, laying up no store; for certainly a disciple of Sakya ought not to undertake any trade or other means of gaining a livelihood, lest it should ensnare his spirit and tie it down to the grovelling things of earth. This was the rule for the very faithful, the infirm believers had a more lenient code. If we now turn to the doctrine said to have been taught by Jesus and his disciples, we shall find a close parallel between it and that of the Indian teacher. For example, John says (1 Epis. ii. 15,16) "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world." Paul says (Rom. xii. 2) "Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God." James also says (ch. iv. 4) "Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God; whosoever, therefore, will be a friend of the world, is the enemy of God." Again, we find in Matthew xix., Mark x., and Luke xii., the story of a young man who was possessed of wealth, probably scarcely less than that of Sakya Muni, and whose life had been conscientiously conducted, according to the commandments which he knew, and who having heard of Jesus, came to ask him if there were a more certain way of salvation than the one he was in. To him the reply is,--"If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me." In the verses, moreover, which follow, there is a remark from the same teacher to the effect, that "every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundred fold, and shall inherit everlasting life." Once again, we find an exact counterpart of Buddha's teaching in the sermon on the Mount, which is recorded in Matth. vi. 25-34--"I say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air, for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?... Why take ye thought for raiment, consider the lilies of the field... if God so clothe the grass... shall he not much more clothe you? Therefore take no thought, saying, what shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed?... Take therefore no thought for the morrow... sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Other similar passages might readily be given, but the above suffice to demonstrate the Buddhistic teaching of the prophet of Nazareth. Both start from the idea that death, disease, pain, and misery is the result of sin--and both imagine that sin consists in living and acting upon the natural wants, necessities, and propensities of human kind. Both imagine that to be natural is to be vile, and that salvation is to be attained by resisting every impulse which is common to mankind Man desires to eat when hungry--this is a weakness to be combated; a mother loves her babe--this must not be tolerated; a youth covets a damsel in marriage--this is a snare to draw both down to hell; celibacy must be enforced. The argument runs thus,--If any one enjoys life he is sure to fear death, and will certainly pay for his pleasures; but if any one has the resolution to pass his years on earth in misery like that of hell, he will be glad to die, and fearless of any place of torment; use has bred a habit in him and no torture can come amiss. Some Christian author has ventured to assert "religion never was designed to make our pleasures less," but he was a conspicuous heretic. Buddha's doctrine was founded upon the assertion that life is always short, and that it is not worth a man's while to buy a few years of enjoyment with myriads of years of agony. Jesus preached that the Jews' time was short, for they, and most probably all the world besides, were to be burned up any day within the duration of the generation--what then was the use of laying up stores of grain, of buying fine clothes, and keeping wine to get mellow? Both preachers were equally short sighted and absurd in their teaching, for if their disciples were to live upon alms, and all repented and adopted the doctrine, it is clear that all would starve together, and self immolation by hunger was repugnant to both prophets. If no one made clothes all must go naked, and indecency was forbidden. If no one was to lay up money, there would be no one to pay for work, yet toil was considered to be a duty. If every one was to live from hand to mouth, who would keep a calf until it became a heifer, or a lamb to become a sheep? It is difficult to conceive that two individuals could have worked out such a scheme of salvation independently, and the minuteness of the resemblances induces me to believe that Jesus, possibly without knowing it, first adopted and then promulgated in Judea the doctrines of the Indian sage. Following, again, the lead of St. Hilaire (_Le Bouddha, &c_, 1860, pp. 81, et seq.), we find that Siddartha taught 600 years B. C., that death and all the miseries of mankind were due to the passions, desires, and sins of man; that all this misery would cease in Nirvana (of which we shall speak by and by), and that the means to attain to this salvation is to keep the true faith; to have a correct judgment; to be truthful in all things, and to hold every false thing in abhorrence; always to act and to think with a pure and honest mind; to adopt a religious life, i.e., one that is in no respect worldly, not owing even subsistence to anything which might be tainted with sin; to practise a careful and earnest study of the law; to cultivate a good memory, so that all mistakes in conduct may be remembered if they have occurred, and be avoided in the future; and frequent meditation, i.e., an abstraction of the mind from self consciousness, a thinking of nothing, so as to approximate the soul to Nirvana. These were Buddha's fundamental verities. It is put more shortly thus,--"Practising no evil, advancing in the exercise of every virtue, purifying one's self in mind and will, this is indeed the doctrine of all the Buddhas." _Journal of Royal Asiatic Society_, vol. xix. p. 473. We may once more stop to compare the teaching of Siddartha with that familiar to Christians. Paul says, for example (Rom. v. 12) "As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned;" again, in chap, vi. 23, "the wages of sin is death;" again, in chap. vii. 5, "when we were in the flesh the motions of sins... did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death;" and again, chap. viii. 6, "to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." We may next refer to what some call the fundamental teaching of Jesus, as enunciated in answer to the question of the young man "What shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" Matthew xix., Mark x., "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. Thou shalt do no murder, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, honour thy father and thy mother, and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And when the young man asserted that he had done so, all that he was told to do in addition, was to sell his property, give the proceeds to the poor, and become a follower of Jesus, who had not where to lay his head, and to live upon the charity of other people. I must, however, notice in passing, that the teaching of Jesus is not by any means so uniform as that of Sakya, for we find the former here instructing a young man to do no murder, but at a subsequent period, that of the last supper, Jesus exhorts his disciples, and through them, possibly, the very man to whom he rehearsed the commandments, thus "He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one," (Luke xxii 36). Certainly a direct encouragement to homicide. For the benefit of the Buddhists a short formula of faith has been framed, which is to this effect--"Tathâgata (another name of Sakya Muni), in the proper condition, has explained that our present state is produced by antecedent causes, and the great Sramana, or Ascetic (another cognomen of Siddartha), has told us how to avoid the effects of sin. The effects are pain and actual existence, having for their cause past sins; the cause is the production of suffering: the cessation of these effects is Nirvana, the teaching of Tathâgata, or of the great Sramana, is the way which leads to Nirvana." The Christian formula runs, "As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." To this we may compare a Nepaulese saying, "Arise, leave your possession, take up the law of Buddha, and break asunder the power of death." In addition to the fundamental maxim given on the preceding page, Sakya Muni added many others, amongst them, "Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not lie, thou shalt not get drunk;" others are of lighter consequence--"thou shalt not eat out of due season, thou shalt not watch dances or theatrical representations, or listen to songs or music, thou shalt abstain from all ornamentation of dress, &c., and from perfume; thou shalt not have a large bed, nor ever take gold or silver; thou shalt remain inflexibly chaste." To those who desired to become disciples and personal friends of Buddha, it was ordained that (a) They should only be clothed with rags taken from the cemeteries, or from heaps of refuse, or found on the high road. (b) That there should only be three of these vestments, and that each should be stitched by the wearer, and that they should be covered with a cloak of yellow wool (c) That the food should be as simple as possible--a rule adopted by Christian saints, but not by Bishops. (d) That all should live upon alms and offerings, which should be begged for, in perfect silence, from house to house, and placed in a vessel made of wood--a plan adopted by certain Christian mendicant friars. (e) That only one meal should be taken during the day--a rule to be found in some Christian monasteries. (f) That no aliments, even the most simple, should be taken after noon, the rest of the day after this period should be devoted to teaching and meditation. (g) The faithful should live in the wilderness or forest, and not in towns or villages. Hence Christian hermits lived in the deserts of the Thebaid. (h) They should only shelter themselves under the boughs and leaves of trees. (i) They should sit with the back supported only by the trunk chosen for refuge. (j) They should sleep sitting, and not lying down. (k) They should never change their sitting mat from the place where it was put first. (l) The disciples should unite together, at least upon one night in the month, to meditate amongst the tombs upon the instability of human things. Mendicity, chastity, and asceticism were essential parts of Sakya Muni's practice, and St. Hilaire (op. cit., p. 87) naively remarks that these certainly are not the means for making good citizens, though they may produce good saints. We may notice, in passing, that the pious followers of Sramana (the one who mastered his passions) were very much more proper, in our eyes, than some of the Brahmins, from whom they seceded, inasmuch as the former wore sufficient garments to cover themselves decently, whilst the latter, whom the Greeks called "Gymnosophists," went without any more clothing than the horse or ass. It is also to be noticed that Siddartha provided a sort of code of laws to be observed by those who wished to adopt his method of salvation, without becoming altogether "religious." These consisted in the enforcement of chastity, purity, patience, courage, contemplation, and knowledge--these were, it was asserted, the transcendent virtues which would pass man across the river of death. They would not land him there in life, but whilst these were adopted as the rule of life, the aspirant was in the right way to attain "Nirvana." The charity which Sakya Muni ordained was universal, extending even to what we call the lower animals, and one example is given in which a disciple cast himself into the sea to save a boat's crew in danger of death from a storm, whilst another tells of Buddha giving himself as food to a tigress, who had not sufficient milk for her young ones. Again, the precept against "lying" included false witness, and all that we call "bad language," as well as trifling chat, called "badinage," "wit," and the like. Persons were not only to avoid wrong, but they were to cultivate every good habit, or what we designate each "Christian grace." It was inculcated, that beauty of language, or eloquence, pleasantness of voice, and a due respect to cadence should be studied, so as to make their teaching popular, a precept not much regarded amongst ordinary Christian divines. Beyond other things, humility was inculcated, not that which exists on the lips only, and is apparently compatible with the determined endeavour to exercise unlimited power, which has been conspicuous in the Papacy for a millennium at least, but that which conceals greatness and demonstrates littleness. Thus there is a legend of Buddha refusing, at the request of a king, to exhibit any miracle to convince his opponents, his answer being, "Great king, I do not teach the law to my hearers by saying to them, 'Go, oh you religious men! and before Brahmins and house-holders perform, by means of a supernatural power, miraculous things, which no other men can effect,' but I say to them, in teaching them the law, 'Live, oh ye pious ones, so as to conceal your good works, and to let your sins be seen.'" At this point we pause once more to draw a parallel between Siddartha and Jesus, though, in the delineation of the doctrine of the latter, we shall see a discrepancy which appears to indicate two distinct authorships in the recorded story. We refer, in the first place, to Luke vi, wherein we find, v. 27, et seq., "Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and to him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other" (compare Matt. v. 39, 40). Again, Matt. vi. 3, "When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth," and in v. 6, "When thou prayest, enter into thy closet," &c.; v. 16, "When ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance." Side by side with this we may place the directions given in Matt, x., where we find that Jesus called his disciples unto him, and gave them "power against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of sickness and all manner of disease "--they were, moreover, "to cleanse the lepers and raise the dead," i.e.t the disciples were to perform miracles; but if they, in their wanderings and teachings, should be rejected, despised, or affronted, the apostles were to shake off the dust of their feet against the persecutors, being certain that condign punishment would fall upon the offenders. It is curious that in the histories of the Indian and the Jew, there should be analogous discrepancies between records of their sayings and doings. Siddartha and Jesus are represented, each of them, as declining to perform miracles when asked or expected to do so. Nevertheless, in the same histories we find marvellous accounts of the wonders which they performed. We have seen the clashing reports of Buddha, the following reports of the son of Mary are equally discordant. To make the dissonance more striking, we place the passages in parallel columns. [Illustration: 141] At what time after the death of Jesus the miracles recorded of him were fabricated we can scarcely tell. If, with most critical scholars, we believe that John's Gospel was written by some Neoplatonic Greek, at least a century and a-half after the period alluded to, we must also believe, either that all the legends about the casting out of devils by the son of Mary were invented after the time when "John" lived, or else, which is probable, that the last evangelist gave no credit to them, if they did already exist; and if the good sense and superior knowledge of "John" led him to discredit the tale about the legion of devils, which left one man* to enter into about two thousand pigs, I do not see that other Christians are obliged to believe the legend. From considerations which we advanced in the articles Prophets, Prophecy, &c., in _Ancient Faiths_ (Vol. II., p. 515), and especially in the history of Barcochab, who was supposed to be the Messiah by some Jews in A.D. 131-5, we argued that new matter was certainly introduced into the story of Jesus told by Matthew, Mark, and John, as late as the era of that enthusiastic Hebrew leader. We noticed the doubts that existed in the minds of many early Christians as to whether this redoubtable warrior was not "the man" of whom the prophets spake. We may now still further notice that he professed to perform miracles, which appear to be thoroughly contemptible when weighed against those of the gospels. To our mind it is inconceivable that the followers of Mary's son could have been acquainted with the marvellous works attributed to Jesus in the gospels, and, yet be shaken by such a man as Barcochab. We notice, also, that not one "Epistle" writer refers to them--consequently, we believe that all the wondrous tales told of the prophet of Nazareth, must have been introduced after the time of Hadrian (in whose reign Barcochab was destroyed), and were fabricated by pious Christians, to prove that the Messiah, in whom they believed, was infinitely superior to that warrior whom others had for a time trusted. Both, to be sure, had been killed by the Romans, and thus both might seem upon a par, but if history could be cooked--and there is probably no single history existing which is strictly true--to show that the first performed a hundred times the wonderful works of the second, he would thus become greatly exalted. See especially Matt. xxiv. 24, in confirmation of this view. Be this as it may, there is, I understand, solid foundation for the assertion that the New Testament, such as we have it now, might have been composed, altered, curtailed, added to, remodelled, or otherwise fashioned, at any period between the years a.d. 50 and 300, after which change was difficult, though we cannot say impossible. A corresponding statement is true of the books which record the life and doctrines of Buddha. * In Matthew viii. 30-32, we are told that there were two men who were possessed with the devils which subsequently entered the herd of swine;--in Mark v. 11-13, the spirits are represented as being concentrated in one person, and in Luke viii. 32-33, the tale appears in the same guise as in Mark--only the man is made to call himself "Legion," on account of the multitude of devils living inside him. In cases of this kind one need not be rigidly particular, for it signifies little whether the spirits were one thousand in one man or two thousand in two--the wonder is that spirits could talk--fly away from man to pig, or commit suicide in the bodies of the swine when they might have done the same thing in one or two men. It is clear from the miracle that certain devils change their habits when they take up their habitation in porcine instead of human beings. At this period of our parallel we may profitably examine the New Testament, and ascertain whether we cannot extract from it a tolerably fair account of the life and teaching of Jesus, without including therein a single act of thaumaturgy. We fearlessly assert, not only that we can, but that the miracles are not an essential part of his doctrine. For example, we learn that Jesus was the son of a woman betrothed to a carpenter, who became pregnant ere yet the ceremony of marriage was gone through. Her affianced husband did not make her frailty an excuse for annulling the contract, possibly for a good, and to him a sufficient reason. He married the already fruitful Mary, and her child passed amongst the neighbours as being the son of Joseph. This we learn from Matt. xiii. 55, where we find the people saying, "Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas, and his sisters, are they not all with us?" a statement repeated in similar terms, Mark vi. 3. This short account is important, since it completely destroys the papal doctrine that Mary was "ever virgin," for she bore at least four other sons than her first born, and two daughters. At no period was Jesus regarded either by the family or by the neighbours as illegitimate, nor is there any reason to believe that Joseph looked upon him otherwise than as his own son. Indeed, in Luke ii. 42-48, the carpenter distinctly appears to act as if he recognized Jesus as his own offspring--in verse 48, Mary says, "Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing," asserting as plainly as words could speak, that Joseph had begotten Jesus. It is true that the youth replied, "Wist ye not that I must be about my father's business?" but the story adds the important information, that the couple did not understand the saying. It is clear to us, that if the legend of the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Ghost, after that event had been previously announced to her, and if, as we are told in Matt. i. 20, Joseph had been informed by "the angel of the Lord" that the foetus in Mary's womb was begotten by the Holy Ghost, it would not have been possible for Joseph and his wife to have misunderstood the words of Jesus. The very wonder which they expressed demonstrates the belief of the parents that there was nothing unusual in the conception. The father Joseph knew that he had borne his share in the event, and Mary knew that she had not conversed with any other man; consequently, for her son to indicate another father than Joseph, naturally mystified her. We therefore cannot allow the assertion to pass, that the conception and birth of Jesus was in itself a miracle. But as we shall revert to the subject in a separate chapter, we will say no more about it here. After living and working with his parents for some years, Jesus was attracted by the preaching of his cousin John, whose doctrines were essentially Buddhistic and Essenian. Like the Hindoos, he used water as an emblem of purification, and urged his hearers to repentance and good conduct. What motives urged John to become "the voice of one crying in the wilderness," we have no means of judging, but the gospel narratives tell us that he, like Jesus, believed in the almost immediate destruction of the world. His text was, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Jesus adopted the view, and promulgated it more extensively. His text was the same as that of his cousin, but more expanded. "The kingdom of heaven means glory to the righteous, and everlasting life; misery and everlasting destruction to the wicked. The time is near, hasten to escape from the coming vengeance." The earnestness of Jesus, his acquaintance with the prophets, his self-denial and his constant kindness, endeared him to the common people. The same virtues had a like effect in the case of Buddha. Amongst villagers and poverty-stricken fishermen he soon won his way, and every one had some story to tell of him, which increased in wonder as it passed from mouth to ears, and from these to the tongue of the listeners. Those who know how an ordinary circumstance may gradually become described as miraculous, even in England, can well imagine how the miracles of Jesus and Siddartha were produced. In time Jesus endeavoured to induce the magnates of Jerusalem to adopt his doctrine, and to trust in repentance for salvation rather than in sacrifice, but the enthusiast could not overcome the ritualists, and they at once began to weigh their power against the influence of Jesus upon the multitude. After a time the priests were convinced that supremacy rested with them, and the man who preached a religion of the heart, was sacrificed by the adherents of ceremonial. Such a fight is common, as we see around us. The Evangelicals and the Ritualists of to-day, resemble the followers of Jesus and of Moses. When the latter appeared in the guise of powerful Romanist rulers, they put down the former, but now when the former are the strongest, they endeavour to depress the latter. After the death, or the withdrawal of Jesus from public life--for we have no belief in the legends of his resurrection--considering that his apparent decease was a prolonged fainting fit, for had he been dead blood would not have followed a spear wound as it did--the disciples of Jesus spread his fame largely. Whilst Jesus was with them they clung to him; when he was no more, each man became a preacher, and then Christianity spread until it met with Buddhism in Egypt, and thus became developed in a peculiar direction. Then came the gospels, which made Jesus a second Sakya. Although we can readily conceive that Jesus, like his paltry successor, Joe Smith, the Mormon, captivated the minds of hundreds without performing any supernatural deed, and that his "elders" vastly increased the number of those who believed in him, yet it is clear, that ancient and modern theologians were and are anxious to establish the reality of the thaumaturgy attributed to Jesus, that they may appeal to it to demonstrate that he was the son of God, an incarnation of a portion of the creative mind--"the word," or _logos_, having the same relationship to Jehovah, the "I Am," the Self-Existent One, as Buddha, "the understanding" had to "Brahma," The Supreme One. Accepting this issue for the sake of argument, we affirm once again that, as the miracles of Sakya and of the son of Mary are equally unreliable, or equally true, Buddha was as much a true son of God as Christ was, or that Jesus was no more an incarnation of Jehovah, than Siddartha was of Brahma. Jehovah and Brahma being merely different names for the same great Being. That miracles are not necessary to the spread of a new faith, the history of modern Presbyterianism and Mormonism distinctly proves. For further remarks, we refer the reader to the article Miracle in the preceding volume. We will postpone to a subsequent page what we have to say respecting the asceticism of the Buddhists, and that which was prevalent in the early Christian church. For the present, we resume our account of Sakya Muni's teaching as described by St. Hilaire. Founded upon his doctrine of absolute humility, he established the custom of confession amongst his apostles or disciples, and amongst those who venerated his teaching, though they did not' become his immediate followers. This confession was not that simply auricular one enforced by Ritualists, but it was made twice a month, at the new and the full moon, before the great Sramana and the congregation, in a clear voice. Powerful kings are reported to have followed this practice. It will not require more than a minute's reflection to see that the Buddhistic system of confession was far superior--as regards the end in view--than that which has been adopted by Romanists and Ritualists. Sakya and James (ch. v. 16) advised the practice in question, that the sinner might be humiliated in his own eyes, and deterred from the necessity of having again to acknowledge a fall from virtue before a congregation of the faithful. Popes and Protestant Ritualists, on the contrary, use confession for the purpose of inquiring into the character of every penitent, and the practice is adopted by the sinner, not with the view of repentance, but to wipe out periodically a sin which is habitually renewed. If confessions were made before a congregation, instead of to a priest in a closet, or some other secret spot, there would not then be current so many scandalous stories as there are--too true, alas, in many instances--respecting women who have been debauched under the guise of religion, and priests who have prostituted the ordinances of their church, until they have made them pander to vice, and act as seeds to produce immorality. Though personally Tathâgata preached celibacy, he had not, like some of the so-called saints of Christianity, any feeling of disrespect towards family ties. He always spoke affectionately of his mother, though he never knew her, and the legends say that he endeavoured to convert her in heaven. His command that all his followers should honour their father and mother was repeatedly enforced, that being only second to the duty of learning, venerating, and keeping the law. It even went so high as to include endeavours to teach the parents if they were ignorant. One of the main duties of every teacher appointed by Siddartha, was to go about preaching the law, and exhorting his hearers to learn and to obey it. But no one, on any account, was to introduce the persecuting element. No respect whatever was to be paid to caste, all being alike human before God. Buddha himself is described as a very striking preacher, charming his hearers by his clear and eloquent diction, astonishing them by his supernatural power, sometimes instructing the common folk with ingenious parables, and inciting them to emulation by telling what others had done. He referred to the sins which had been committed in former days by an ancient people, and how severely punished those who had committed them had been, or still were, and he even recorded his own faults, that others might learn to avoid them. He urged all his hearers to cultivate truth and reason, which is certainly not a Christian practice, and not blindly to obey their spiritual guides, as the modern faithful are taught to do. By making the practice of every virtue the sole means for attaining eternal salvation, he practically discouraged vice, but it does not appear that he endeavoured actively to denounce immorality, sin, or sinners. He did not, like many modern persons, "compound for sins they are inclined to, by damning those they have no mind to." It is distinctly declared that it was not necessary for ordinary followers of Buddha to become what is called "religious," or "to enter into religion," as friars, monks, &c. To those who preferred an ordinary mode of life, instructions were given, that they should cultivate charity, purity, patience, courage, contemplation, and knowledge. Indeed, we may assert that the precepts of Jesus, as recorded in Matthew v., vi, and viii, and in Luke iii. 7 to 14, are not essentially different from those propounded by Sakya Muni Neither the one nor the other ordered or even recommended all men to be celibate, all men to become poor, all soldiers to leave their profession--but both urged upon every one who wished for salvation, to be kind, pure, patient, courageous, thoughtful and eager after all knowledge. It would be well if those calling themselves Christians would endeavour more fully to understand that cultivating science is the same as advancing in the knowledge of God. Some of the remarkable parables found in Buddhist books are very probably the original ones of Sakya; they are certainly ingeniously framed to illustrate his doctrine. Nor is there wanting, indeed, one in which there is an episode resembling the story of the thief upon the cross. It is of a lovely courtesan who falls deeply in love with a jeweller, young, and a devoted follower of Buddha, and solicits his company. To every message she sends him, he returns the answer "it is not time for you to see me." At length she commits a crime, and is sentenced to have ears, nose, hands, and feet cut off, and to be carried to the graveyard to die, leaving the cut off members at her ankles. At this period the young man visits her, to see the true nature of those joys which drown men in perdition; then he consoles the poor creature by teaching her the law; his discourse brings calm into her breast, and she dies in professing Buddhism with a certainty that she will rise again amongst the good. We may mention, in passing, that there were female Buddhists as well as males, both being on the same footing. The law, as announced by Sakya, equally concerned and affected the two sexes. Another and very interesting parable tells of a king who came before a Buddhist priest and his assembled hearers, to the number of 350, to confess his crimes, amongst others murder, and his resolution to avoid all faults in future, and Bhagavat (the teacher's name) at once remits, in conformity with the law, the faults of the king, which have thus been expiated before a numerous assembly of the faithful, a remarkable instance of remorse, repentance, confession, and remission of sin--some centuries before Jesus was born. At length a powerful king, Asoka, was converted to the new faith, or came to the throne already a Buddhist, in the year b.c. 263, and reigned thirty-seven years, during which time he devoted himself to spreading the religion of his choice. He sent out a cloud of earnest missionaries who spread themselves over Hindostan, Ceylon, China, Japan, and Thibet. Indeed, they seem to have gone wherever there was means of locomotion, or a knowledge of the existence of a people. As the Greeks were then certainly trading with India, both by land and sea, it would be surprising if the Buddhist missionaries had not accompanied the merchant ships, or the overland convoys to Alexandria. But this subject, it is convenient for the present to postpone. There are two points connected with the teaching of Sakya Muni to which many Christian writers have especially addressed their remarks, apparently with the view of rendering Buddha more or less contemptible, or at least of degrading him far below Jesus of Nazareth. It is asserted that Siddartha did not believe in a god, and that his Nirvana was nothing more than absolute annihilation. To these I am disposed to add, that the Buddhists were not taught to pray, nor did their founder practise the custom. To my own mind, the assertion that Sakya did not believe in God is wholly unsupported. Nay, his whole scheme is built upon the belief that there are powers above which are capable of punishing mankind for their sins. It is true that these "gods" were not called Elohim, nor Jah, nor Jahveh, nor Jehovah, nor Adonai, nor Eliieh (I am), nor Baalim, nor Ashtoreth--yet, for "the son of Suddhodana" (another name for Sakya Muni, for he has almost as many, if not more than the western god), there was a supreme being called Brahma, or some other name representing the same idea as we entertain of the Omnipotent. Still further, in the life of Buddha, quoted by St. Hilaire (p. 9) we find the following as part of the thoughts of the young Siddartha--"The three worlds, the world of the gods, the world of the assours (the benighted ones, or, as we should call them, 'the devils ), and that of men, are all plagued by the occurrence of old age and disease." We do not, for we dare not assert that this opinion is identical with ours; but we are equally indisposed to say that the opinions current amongst ourselves are absolutely true. Men living in future days, and whose minds are educated, will probably declare, "that the Christians of Europe and elsewhere, for nearly two thousand years, had no god but the devil They said he was good, but they painted him as one who rejoiced in pain, lamentation, mourning, and woe." Buddha preached that man suffered from the effects of his sins, and that unless he attained salvation, he would be punished everlastingly. The son of Mary, and all his followers, taught, and Christians still entertain the belief, that man suffers from the sin of a progenitor (assumed to be the parent of all mankind), and that each person will be tortured throughout eternity unless he is able to mollify his maker, who is also his judge. Both teachers had necessarily an idea of a power able to make laws for the conduct of human life, to ordain rewards for good behaviour, and to apportion punishment for offences, and yet who was sufficiently forgiving to cease from requital, "for a consideration," the bribe being invariably a bloody one. Jesus called this power "my Father," Siddartha called him Brahma, the Supreme one. Jesus and his followers have asserted that the power of the son with "the Father" is so great, that the latter will conform to the former, nay, he even asserts his identity with the Supreme in the words "I and my father are one," (John x. 30). See also Acts iv. 12, and 1 Thess. v. 9, in which it is distinctly affirmed that Jesus is the sole means by which man can attain salvation, or, in other words, turn away the wrath of God and change it into love. But Jesus could only rise to the position of equal or prime favourite by a very sanguinary process, as we find from Heb. ix. 22, that there could be no remission of sin without shedding of blood. From the following verses, and from Heb. x. 19, we learn that it is by the sacrifice of himself that Jesus entered into his heavenly powers. Can any one who depicts the gods of savages, of Grecians and others to whom human beings were immolated in hundreds, call such deities "devils," and then assert that the Jehovah, whom he extols as above all gods, is not painted by men in the same colours. Siddartha's god was not a sanguinary one, nor did Buddha always talk of shedding blood, or profess to give his disciples his own flesh to eat, and his blood to them, that they might all drink of it. The way in which this Supreme One, Brahma, was painted at his time was accepted by Sakya as he found it. He no more questioned the accepted truths of Hindooism, than Jesus doubted about the absolute truth of the Hebrew scriptures. But, in his own mind, after he had contemplated deeply on the subject, he believed that the discovery which he had made of the way to Nirvana, universal knowledge, or whatever else Nirvana was, had raised him above Sakra Brahma, Mahesvara, and all the gods of the pantheon. Instead of breaking into expressions respecting the insanity or the blasphemy of such an idea, let us school ourselves into calmness, and turn to our own New Testament and read over Philippians, chap, ii. vv. 5-11, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men, and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross: wherefore God hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father." Still further, I have repeatedly heard Protestant Christian divines assert that Jesus was really "Lord of the world above," and I cannot see any greater insanity or blasphemy in the son of Suddodana believing that he was at least equal with God, than in the son of Mary asserting "I and my Father are one" (John x. 30), and when reproached for making himself thus equal with God, he is reported to have remonstrated with his auditors who accused him of blasphemy because he asserted himself to be the son of God. The creeds of the Anglican and Roman churches repeatedly declare the identity of Jesus with Jehovah, e.g., "equal to the Father as touching his godhead." The natural rejoinder to this representation is the assertion by the Christian that he knows that Jesus of Nazareth really was what he represented himself, and he is sure that Sakya Muni was not; but, on the other hand, the Buddhist may say just the reverse with equal pertinacity. This argument, if such a name it really deserves, is so common amongst all careless religionists, that it deserves a few words in reply. It is based upon the very natural notion, "what I believe, must be true," and to an objector, the only answer is the question, "you don't fancy that I can be wrong, do you?" When two such persons as a Christian and a Mahometan met in days gone by, these were the only arguments used by each, and they were first of all enforced by such revilings as come naturally to the faithful--"hound of a Moslem"--"dog of a Christian," "you are a serpent"--"you are a viper," and the like; from words they came to blows, and the strongest arm was supposed to demonstrate the correctness of the victor's faith. If, instead of taking physical strength as a test of truth, we assume that a numerical preponderance on one side or another proves the correctness of the belief held by the greatest number, we come to the absurd conclusion that what is right to-day may be wrong to-morrow. Babylonians were once far more numerous than Jews, and Jews than Christians, to-day the last exceed vastly both the others. Now, there are more Buddhists in existence than true followers of Jesus, in the next century the proportion may be reversed. Truth does not so fluctuate, and a philosopher who uses his reason will take up a different stand entirely, and affirm that a man cannot become God by meditation, fancy or assertion, nor yet by the consent or vote of millions of his fellow-men, and that the assumption that any individual must be, and is the begotten son of God, is on a par with the folly of the potentates who call themselves brothers of the sun and moon. Such absurdity and blasphemy are very common, nevertheless, and men believe that Jesus is God, because they have elected him to that elevated position by a general vote--or European plebiscite. We now address ourselves to another important statement made by some writers upon the religion of Sakya Muni, to the effect that he taught annihilation to be the end most desirable for good men who have learned and practised the law. This view is held by St. Hilaire, who, in almost every other respect, has shown himself an historian rather favourable to Siddartha than otherwise, and who speaks with some regret of the conclusion which he feels obliged to draw. But he is opposed upon this point by a very great English or German authority, viz., Max Müller, who, in a lecture delivered before the general Meeting of the Association of German Philologists at Kiel, and which is to be found translated in Trubner's _American and Oriental Literary Record_, Oct. 16, 1869, distinctly declares his belief that the nihilism attributed to Buddha's teaching forms no part of his doctrine, and that it is wholly wrong to suppose that Nirvana signified annihilation. When two such earnest inquirers differ, it is instructive to notice the reason why. This is to be found in the fact that the etymological signification of the word does signify "nothingness," or "extinction," but not, as Müller contends, annihilation of the individual, but a complete cessation of all pain and misery. The last quoted author shows that Siddartha used Nirvana as synonymous with Moksha, Nirvritti, and other words, all designating the highest state of spiritual liberty and bliss, but not annihilation. It seems to be perfectly clear that what was meant by Sakya is, that to the good who have embraced the means of salvation preached by him, the future world would be a haven of rest, in which all sorrow, suffering, and sin should be annihilated. But the teacher does not go beyond this, and descant upon the opposite conditions, and promise joys ineffable and full of glory. His followers believe that they will attain to immortality, and that they will be free from all such horrors as life brings with it. But the pleasures which they expect are negative. Before we either pity or despise Siddartha for not giving his followers any idea of what we call Heaven, it would be well to endeavour to discover the true teaching of Jesus of Nazareth upon this point, and the ideas of his followers. We must also say a few words about his ideas of Hell. He clearly believed that there was a place in which those whose lives had been wicked would be punished after death by the devil and his angels--the place was one of outer darkness, where shall be weeping and wailing, and gnashing of teeth (Matt. viii. 12). In Matt. xiii. 42 this place of outer darkness is described as "a furnace of fire," and in Mark ix. 43-44 this fire is described as one that never shall be quenched, and in which there lives a worm. In Luke xvi. 23-24 there is an expression of the belief that the body lives after death in its usual form, and has eyes, a tongue, the power of speech, &c.; yet in Matt. x. 28 the doctrine is inculcated that both body and soul are destroyed in Hell. In Jude 7 and 13 Hell is again described as a place of unquenchable fire, and yet one occupied by the blackness of darkness; whilst in Revelation xix. 20 and xx. 10 we are told that the fire is a lake of burning brimstone. Of the absolute locality of this horrible spot not a word is said. On the other hand, Heaven is described (Matt xiii. 43) as a place where the righteous shall shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of God. In Luke xvi. 22 the pleasure of Heaven is made to consist of a simple repose in the bosom of Abraham; but though we are there led to believe that the blessed can see the torments of the damned, it does not appear that either "the father of the faithful," or the poor beggar Lazarus, take any pleasure in contemplating them, as some few divines of the church of England believe that they will do, when they have arrived at the abode of bliss, and see their enemies in the burning lake. Paul, when writing to the Corinthians, (1 Ep. xv.) gives his idea of the resurrection of the just as one in which each man will be a spiritual edition of his former terrestrial self, but beyond the statement in 1 Thess. iv. 17, that the redeemed will, when in heaven, dwell for ever with the Lord, he expresses no opinion of the occupation of the glorified ones. In John's gospel (xiv. 2) Jesus is reported as saying,--"In my Father's house are many mansions or houses--I go to prepare a place for you," but there is nothing like any account of what is to be done in those abodes. Again, we find, Ps. xvi. 11, in a verse which has been largely adapted to Christianity, an idea of Heaven given thus--"in thy presence is fulness of joy, at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore." What David's pleasures were we may judge from his life, and we may fairly imagine that the writer of the passage had an idea something like that of Mahomet--that there were houris in Heaven for the delectation of the faithful. But in Isaiah lxiv. 4, and I Cor. ii. 9 everything about Heaven is declared to be vague--a something which the eye has not seen, the ear heard, or the heart conceived. In the book called _The Revelation of St. John the Divine_, we have a far more detailed account of what was believed by some about heaven, than in any other, and there is no doubt that to it a large number of Christians appeal, for it is, indeed, almost the only foundation on which they can build. Yet the Apocalypse was for a long time an uncanonical book, and its truth and value were, and still are, doubted by many of the faithful. In the part referred to, heaven is described as a place incalculably rich in gold and precious stones, in music and pleasant odours, and its joys are pour-trayed as consisting in constant contact with the evidences of wealth, and in eternally singing a certain refrain, an hour of which would be a great trial to human ears. To this is added the absence of pain, sorrow, and suffering. The New Jerusalem, described in chapter xxi. is nothing more than a palace similar to that of Aladdin, which is described in _The Arabian Nights?_ fabulously adorned with gems, lighted by other means than a burning sun or a cold moon, cooled or refreshed with a river of clear water, and furnished with trees bearing different kinds of fruit, but all delicious--thus involving the certainty that the singing referred to, must have been suspended whilst the palate was regaled--and having leaves said to be _for the healing of the nations_. The words thus italicised seem to show the indefiniteness of the _idea_, we dare not say of the _knowledge_ of John, for the existence of this new Jerusalem involves the absence of any disease which required healing; and every person who was not already assigned to the brimstone lake, was a resident on the margin of the crystal river. Such discrepancies are common in visionary writings, and ought to make us distrust them; but instead of that, wild theories are founded upon these absurdities, and the builders thence attempt to prove their own superior knowledge. Well, in this new Jerusalem, every man is to be a ruler, for we are told, that in it the servants of the Lamb (chap. xxii. 3 sq.) shall serve him, and see his face, that his name shall be written upon their foreheads, and they shall _reign_ for ever and ever. The word italicised, very naturally recalls to us an earlier passage in the same book (chap, i. 6) wherein the writer expresses the belief that Jesus Christ has made his followers "kings and priests." It is then clear that John had the notion that in heaven every denizen would be a king. But king over whom? or over what? if every one in new Jerusalem is a ruler, what is he a ruler of? It is, to the critic, moderately certain, that all which the words are intended to convey is, that every inhabitant of the New Jerusalem or Heaven will be as rich and happy as a mundane sovereign. This, again, involves the belief that the author of the Apocalypse had an essentially sensual idea of Heaven, and that he pourtrayed it as a man would do, who, pining in misery, suffering from disease, pinched with want, obliged to serve as the slave of wealth, and to contribute much, out of his little, to the king's taxes, saw daily, and envied deeply, the high position and great wealth of a tyrant, with whom, his faith induced him to believe, that he would change places hereafter. That the descriptions of Heaven in Revelation can be considered as reliable, by any thoughtful Christian, I marvel, for they are bound up with an assurance which the lapse of time has fully demonstrated to be false. In chap, xxii., v. 12 and 20, the one who is described as the Lord of the New Jerusalem, the Christian Heaven, asserts that he is coming quickly, and that his reward is with him. Yet in no sense of the words is this true, nor has it ever been so. Tested, then, by every available means, we assert that the Heaven described by Jesus of Nazareth and his immediate followers is quite as vague, indistinct, and unreliable as the Buddhist Nirvana; or, if the affirmative be preferred, we say that the Christian Heaven is quite as uncertain or indefinite a prize for Jesus' disciples as the Nirvana of Sakya. Both teachers seem to have been equally confident of the existence of a Hell, and equally cautious in expressing their ideas about a Heaven. And we, who have had the advantage of many centuries of civilization and thought, dare no more frame or promulgate a scheme of Elysium than the Romans did--we really know nothing whatever about a future state. There is this, however, to be said in favour of Siddartha--he did not, like Mahomet and John, preach a Paradise, in which all the pleasures are worldly, sensuous, or sensual--John promising music and fruit, Mahomet feasting and women. All the Indian's teaching pointed to a future world, in which human passions, frailties, and propensities would find no place, for the purified being would cast off, with his earthly body, every carnal appetite. In fact, there is reason to believe that Buddha's idea was, that after death each essence would become reincorporated with the Great Spirit, of whom his soul had originally formed a part. It is doubtful whether any of us could tell him a more perfect way to the truth about the matter. Yet, although neither Sakya nor Jesus gave any distinct account of Heaven, it is certain that some of their followers have done so, and it is remarkable to see how they have developed their ideas in the same way. Compare, for example, the account given by John, Apocalypse chaps, xxi., xxii., with the following account, which I copy from the _Kusa Iatakya_, a Buddhistic legend of Ceylon, by T. Steele, p. 195. "_Swarga_, or the heaven occupied by Indra, is described as the most splendid the human mind can conceive (Percival's _Land of the Vedas_, p. 160). Its palaces are composed of pure gold, resplendent diamonds, jasper, sapphire, emerald, and other precious stones, whose brilliance exceeds that of a thousand suns! Its streets are of crystal, fringed with gold. The most beautiful and fragrant flowers adorn its forests, whose trees diffuse the sweetest odours. Refreshing breezes, canopies of fleecy clouds, thrones of the most dazzling brightness, birds of the sweetest melodies, and songs of the most delightful harmony, are heard in the enchanting pleasaunces, which are ever fragrant, ever robed in summer green." The author whom I am quoting follows these remarks with lines from Bernard de Morley's hymn, _Jerusalem the Golden_, clearly showing how greatly he has been struck with the parallelism between the Buddhist and Christian idea. So far as I can find, there appears to be a certainty that Sakya Muni did not teach to his followers the necessity for prayer. That Jesus did so teach his disciples is the common belief of Christians. Yet, in the parallel which we are thus drawing, we are perfectly justified in the assertion that the son of Mary did not teach it from his own spontaneous judgment, as John the Evangelist had done before him. Jesus certainly did not originate prayer; indeed, it appears that the subject was forced upon him, and that unless he had been urged to it, he would neither have taught to others the necessity for prayer, nor have dictated the supplication which still passes by his name. The following passage in Luke xi. 1 seems to be decisive upon this point:--"And it came to pass, as he was praying in a certain place, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples." We see, then, in the first place, that Jesus did not hold, as a fundamental doctrine, that prayer was part of the duty of man, but that he took it up as a necessary part of his Jewish education, and adopted it amongst the subjects of his discourses, following the example of John. When we try to penetrate into the mind of Jesus, as shown in "the Lord's Prayer," and ascertain what he regarded as the fittest objects for orison, we find that they are almost exclusively worldly. There is, in the first place, an ascription of praise, or of reverence, then an expression of a desire that the world should become good; that each man should have a daily meal; that all offences should be condoned, and none others committed; and that no harm should happen to any who used the entreaty. Compared with the composition attributed to Solomon, and said to have been uttered by him at the dedication of the temple, that which is said to have been given by Jesus is meagre in the extreme. It does not contain a single supplication for spiritual blessing, or for salvation. In the mind of a philosopher there is a doubt whether the general heathen notion about prayer, or the apparent Buddhist prayerlessness, is to be the most commended. Yet, ere we discuss the point, I must remark that although Buddha does not appear to have taught the duty of prayer to his disciples, they practise it nevertheless, and have long litanies, chantings, and mechanical contrivances quite as efficacious, and not more absurd, than the senseless repetitions which pass current amongst us for supplications to the Most High. Now, if we require from ourselves a distinct answer to the question, what is prayer? we can frame no other than this--"it is the expression of a desire on our part that the Creator will modify the laws of nature in our favour, in favour of others, or in His own favour!" The idea that He will do this is plainly builded upon the supposition that the Creator is like a man, and can be induced to change His mind--that a creature thinks He is harsh or wrong, and must be set right. When put thus clearly, the most obtuse can see that prayer must necessarily be inefficacious, and must always proceed from a selfishness so intense as to cloak the blasphemy from view. If, instead of the above definition, we designate prayer as the uttering of a fervent hope or desire for the benefit of an individual, we can understand that it is quite as useful as any other ejaculation. Nothing is more common than for an angry man to curse with all the energy of exasperation; nothing more common than for a punished hound to yelp, and for a child, when pained, to cry or roar. Still further I will say, from personal experience, that the utterance of cries or groans enables an individual to bear pain with less effect upon his nervous system than would be felt if they were suppressed. Vociferations are as natural, and, to some, as necessary as indulging the appetite for hunger. In like manner, when the mind of man, especially of one only partially educated, is dominated by intense fear, or by any form of anxiety or present suffering, there is an instinctive propensity to seek aid from any source, certain or uncertain, and the enunciation of hopes with an audible voice is as much necessary to some as roaring is to a lion, or bleating to a sheep. In this sense prayer is a comfort--it helps to soothe feelings which, if pent up, would become, probably, too great for endurance; and, knowing this, I would no more deride prayer than I would laugh at a baby who cried for his absent mother. I do not doubt, in the smallest possible degree, that prayer is a comfort under certain circumstances. For example, my child may be seriously ill, and I may do everything which my medical knowledge enables me to do; but day by day drags wearily along, the fever seems to intensify, and it is clear that there is a struggle between the living force, and the agent which interferes with it. As hour after hour passes, and anxiety deepens into fear, I am like a hardy fellow under the lash: at first the stripes are borne with firmness, but as another and another falls, not only does-the pain seem keener, but the mental power which gives courage to bear the cutting agony diminishes, and the pent-up feelings are vented in a roar of anguish, or a groan of despair. Just so in the depth of my misery I may utter a prayer--a wish that in one way or another my torn and lacerated feelings as a father might be healed, and I may expect to receive solace thereby, no matter whether I address Jehovah, Brahma, Ishtar, or the Virgin Mary. To hear the sound of one's own voice, even the task of having to compose an intelligible sentence, relieves, for a time, the poignancy of grief, and thus helps one to bear it more patiently. That supplication thus brings relief I do not for a moment doubt, but that it has any influence in the result I deny. Entertaining this view, I cannot regard prayer as a duty. It seems to me to be a deliberate insult to the Almighty to be constantly urging Him to alter the course of nature--or as we may otherwise put it "to change His mind." To trust that prayer will obviate the necessity for action seems to me the height of folly. If a man uttered the words "Give me this day my daily bread" a hundred times over, and yet never sought to obtain it, we should regard him as a lunatic. Equally silly should we be if, when praying "Defend us in all assaults of our enemies," we did not prepare for battle--or if, after ejaculating "defend us from all perils and dangers of this night," we were to go to bed without seeing that our premises were as secure as forethought could make them. However much the theologian may believe in prayer, he cannot deny that it is less efficacious than action. Now Buddha preached action whilst Christ preached inaction, e.g., "take no thought for the morrow," &c. (Matt. vi. 25-34), consequently we are more disposed to give the palm for correct judgment to the Indian than to the Jew. We must, in the next place, notice that many followers of the son of Suddodana and the son of Mary have both acted, and do still act, upon the belief, not only that prayer is a duty, but that every supplication has positive power in the world above--consequently the more extended the utterances the greater their influence. In point of fact, prayers are spoken of as if they were equivalent to sacrifice, alms-giving, or any other supposed virtue. For this there seems to be some foundation in Acts x. 4, where Cornelius is told that his prayers and his alms have come up before God; in James v. vv. 15, 16, we are told that "the prayer of faith shall save the sick;" and that "the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much." In Revelation v. 8, we are told that the prayers of the saints are kept in golden vials in heaven, and used as odours. In chapter viii. 3, we find they are offered with incense upon the celestial altar, and that the two conjointly come before the presence of God. This being so, there is a desire to accumulate prayers on the creditor side of the heavenly books, just as in the days when sacrifices were trusted in, there was an attempt to increase their influence by augmenting the number of the creatures slaughtered. This propensity to multiply orisons was distinctly rebuked by Jesus, who ordered his followers not to make vain repetitions, for that the custom was heathenish and to be avoided; a prohibition which had been made by Siddartha to his followers some centuries before. To me, I confess, that a life of perpetual prayer without action indicates a belief that God can be "pestered" into doing something that He did not intend; and that it is infinitely worse than a life of action such as Sakya Muni inculcated. I can see no sense in praying for something that I do not want, or that I cannot have without personal exertion. It seems to me sheer nonsense for anyone to pray that he may not grow older, and equally foolish to supplicate that he may live to be a king. In like manner it would be silly in me to petition for power to read Assyrian writing, and yet never study its characters. If, then, by diligent and steady plodding a man can attain his desire, it appears wholly useless in him to pray for it. We may say the same of one who wishes to curb his passions--he can do so to a great extent by assiduous self-control; but he cannot do so any more completely by a lifetime passed in prayer. From this point of view, therefore, we must again side with Siddartha rather than with Jesus. It now remains to us to make some observations upon the developments of Buddhism after the death of Sakya Muni, but we need not linger over them long. His doctrine of self-denial, of patient suffering, of celibacy, of fasting, of preaching and of meditation, gradually produced a system in which asceticism, solitude, and penance were the prevalent duties. Men and women desirous of being saintly and of attaining to eternal happiness, selected some den, cave, or tree in which they could live a life devoted to contemplation, or else they banded themselves into companies where they could practise the Buddhistic virtues in each other's presence, and one could encourage or correct another. Buddhist monkeries and nunneries are almost as common, and certainly more ancient than Roman Catholic monasteries, and they had very nearly the same numerous accessories in worship, which we are familiar with in papal countries. It is almost impossible to read the accounts given by the Abbé Hue, and other Eastern travellers, of Buddhism in China, Thibet, and Japan, without seeing the close resemblance of the Roman Church to that founded by Siddartha. Indeed, the Abbé was sorely tried by what he saw; and it is rumoured that he was punished by some ecclesiastical authority, and his book suppressed. Pure Buddhism, moreover, was, like pure Christianity, a very painful religion in practice, consequently both the one and the other have degenerated, and have gradually become altered much in the same way--both having amalgamated themselves with other systems, and having gradually eliminated those proceedings which are most repulsive to human nature. In both there is now, apparently, the idea that the ascetic life may be lived, as it were, by deputy. In Buddhism, certain men obtain their living by fasting, meditating, macerating their flesh, and praying instead of other people, being, of course, adequately paid for their endurance of privation. In a branch of the Church founded by Jesus the same notion has obtained, and men who have wallowed in filth, starved themselves, and spent their days in a miserable round of penance and prayer, are dignified by the name of Saints, and are supposed to be able to hand over--for a consideration in money--the benefit of their sufferings to people who wish to live comfortably as well as piously. Without burdening this chapter with a dissertation upon the Romish doctrine of works of supererogation, I will quote a few extracts from the Roman Missal, in use in England, to show that works done by another can be made available for the use of any particular individual. On January 16, the day of Saint Marcellus, the people are told to pray "that we may be aided by the merits of blessed Marcellus, Thy martyr and bishop, in whose sufferings we rejoice." On January 29, the day of Saint Francis of Sales, we find in the prayer to be used by the people, "mercifully grant that we may by the aid of his merits, attain unto the joys of life everlasting." Again, on February 8, the day of Saint John of Matha, we find in the prescribed prayer, "mercifully grant that by his merits pleading for us, we may be," &c.--and, lastly, we notice on March 19, on Saint Joseph's day, "vouchsafe, O Lord, that we may be helped by the merits of Thy most holy mother's spouse," &c. The practice of the Buddhists is then essentially followed by the Roman Christians. Pure Buddhism was wholly free from the sexual element so common in other religions of antiquity, and so was the religion of Jesus. Yet in Thibet the first became intermingled therewith and Vajrasatta or Dorjesempa the Thibetan "God above all," is represented in _Schlayintweit's Atlas of Plates_ as a male conjoined with a female; but so ingenious is the contrivance that the many might see the drawings without noticing anything particular, for the trinity and the unity are both hidden from view; and in Europe the latter has introduced St. Foutin and St. Cosmo into her calendar, and has founded her worship of a trinity and a virgin upon the pagan reverence given to the creative organs in both sexes. Veneration for a triune God and his female consort is no more a portion of the teaching of the son of Mary than it was the doctrine of the child of Maya Devi, Buddha's mother. It will probably be quite as difficult for the reader of the preceding pages, as it has been for the writer of them, to avoid putting the question to himself, "Was Jesus of Nazareth a Buddhist disciple?" In answer to this question I reply that we have no direct proof either on one side or the other, but there is much circumstantial evidence to show that he was. We may marshal it thus:-- 1. There is very strong reason for belief that the intercourse between the inhabitants of India and the successors of Alexander was considerable. For example, we find before the time of the Maccabees, b.c. 280, or perhaps somewhat later, that Antiochus, the king of Syria, had 120 elephants--things which had never before been seen in Syria, Palestine, or Egypt, and which took their local name from the Phoenician _aleph_, a bull--the Jews supposing that they were a new kind of cattle. From the accounts given us we infer that these were Indian, and were trained either by Hindoo mahouts or by Greeks taught in Hindustan. Animals of this size may have come by land or by water. In either case we have evidence of traffic. We have already seen that the great missionary effort of Buddhism took place in the time of Asoka about B.C. 307, and it is not likely that the West would be neglected when the Eastern countries received such attention as they did. The Greeks had by this time found their way by sea to India, and thus it is certain that the route was known. There is then presumptive evidence that Buddhism was taught amongst the people frequenting the kingdom of Antiochus the Second, B.C. 261. At this period and subsequently, this king and his subjects came much into contact with the Jews, so that it is equally easy to believe that the Hebrews were found out by the Hindoo missionaries as that the Alexandrian Greeks were. 2. I have been unable to find in the Jewish law, in Grecian story, in the accounts of old Babylonians, Carthaginians, Romans, Egyptians, or in any other history except that of India, testimony which shows that asceticism was an essential part of religion. It is true that we do find fasting to be occasionally mentioned in the Old Testament as a sign of grief or of abasement,* but never as a means of gaining salvation in a future life--whose very existence was unknown to Moses and the Jews. The observation of a period of hunger formed no part of the Mosaic law. On the contrary, ancient European religions, and those of Egypt and Western Asia were associated with feasting and jollification (see Deut. xiv. 26.) The Jews were encouraged to indulge in a plurality of wives; but they were nowhere directed or recommended to live on alms. Again, we find nowhere any orders to the priests or Levites to go about the country expounding or teaching the law. Consequently, when we notice the rise of asceticism, preaching, and celibacy, between the time of Antiochus and that of Jesus, we are justified in the belief that they were introduced from without, and by those of the only religion which inculcated them as articles of faith and practice. * In Lev. xvi. 30; xxiii. 27, 28; and Numb. xxix. 7, there are directions given to the Jews, that on a certain day they are "to afflict their souls," and a threat is added, that "whatsoever soul it be that shall not be afflicted in that self same day, he shall be cut off from amongst his people." There is no specific direction as to the method of afflicting the soul; but it is to be associated with absolute laziness, for whatever soul doeth any work on that day shall be destroyed (Lev. xxiii. 28-31). The law is evidently a very modern one, as we do not find it referred to in the Ancient Jewish records, and the idea of atonement was introduced by the Talmudic Pharisees. 3. The Hebrews always showed during the Old Testament times a great aptitude to adopt the faith of outsiders--and as the Jewish people were in great abasement and misery at the period when it is probable that the Buddhist missionaries came into Syria, they would be prepared for the doctrine that they were suffering for bygone sins. The idea that men in the present were sometimes punished for sins done in the past was a Hebrew as well as a Hindoo idea, else Saul's sons would not have been hanged for their father's misdeeds, or the Amalekites have been slaughtered by Samuel, because their forefathers had some centuries before fought with Israel and been conquered by Moses and Joshua. 4. That after the Persian reign it is certain, that three Jewish sects existed,--the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Sadducees--the last alone being purely Mosaic, and the two first being very like the Buddhists. To strengthen the links of evidence, we may now say a few words about the remarkable sect of the Essenes, premising our belief that it was founded by missionaries of the faith of Sakya Muni, whose doctrines and practice became, subsequently, modified by Mosaism, just as Christianity was considerably remoulded by Talmudism, or, to use an example nearer our own times, as the Christianity preached by European missionaries to the New Zealanders has been altered by the natives, in accordance with their ancient ideas. To them the Old Testament is the Bible, the New Testament is of no value. The Essenes are described by the Rev. Dr Ginsburg, whose authority I follow (_The Essenes_. Longmans, London, 1864), as a Jewish sect of singular piety. They did not sacrifice animals, but endeavoured to make their own minds holy--fit for an acceptable offering to Jehovah. They provided themselves with just enough for the necessities of life, and held such goods as they possessed, e.g., clothes and cloaks, in common. They only allowed themselves to converse on such parts of philosophy as concern God and man. They abhorred slavery, but each served his neighbour. They respected the Sabbath. Their fundamental laws were, to love God, to love virtue, and to love mankind. They affected to despise money, fame, pleasures, professed the most strict chastity, or, rather, continence, and they practised endurance as a duty. They also cultivated simplicity, cheerfulness, modesty, and order. They lived together in the same houses and villages, and sustained the poor, the sick, and the aged. When they earned wages the money was paid to a common stock. They did not marry, or have children; but if any of their body chose to wed, there was nothing in the regulations to prevent their doing so, only they then had to enter another class of the brotherhood. When possible, they worked all day. They were highly respected by those who knew them, and were frequently receiving additions to their number. They seem to have resembled, in their habits and customs, a fraternity of monks of a working, rather than a mendicant, order. Pleasure they regarded as an evil, having a tendency to enchain man to earthly enjoyments, a peculiarly Buddhist tenet. Still further, they considered the use of ointment as defiling, which was certainly not a Hebraic doctrine; but they dressed decently. They prayed devoutly before sunrise; but until the orb had risen they never spoke of worldly matters. They gave thanks, and prayed before and after eating; and ere they entered the refectory bathed in pure water. The food provided was just sufficient to keep them alive. When a person wished to enter the community, he underwent a period of trial, and, if approved, he proceeded to take an oath--"to fear God; to be just towards all men; never to wrong anyone; to detest the wicked, and love the righteous; to keep faith with all men; not to be proud; not to try and outshine his neighbours in any matter; to love truth, and to try and reclaim all liars; never to steal or to cajole; never to conceal anything from the brotherhood, and to be reticent with outsiders." The Essenes reverenced Moses, and so great was their respect for the Sabbath, that they would not ease nature on that day. They bore all tortures with perfect equanimity, and fully believed in a future state of existence, in which the soul, liberated from the body, rejoices, and mounts upwards to a paradise, where there are no storms, no cold, and no intense heat, and where all are constantly refreshed by gentle ocean breezes. Josephus compares this sect with the Pythagoreans; and I think this fact is worth noticing, for there was, in old times, a strong opinion that the founder of that sect brought his peculiar opinions from Hindostan. Pliny, in writing of the Essenes, remarks that their usages differ from those of all other nations--which we may take as a demonstration that they did not copy their constitution from Greeks, Romans, or Jews. Respecting the origin of this sect nothing certain is known, beyond that they were in existence at the time of the Maccabees. Critics decline to see in them any direct relations to the Pythagoreans, and some imagine that the order sprung naturally out of a spiritual reading of the Mosaic law, modified, probably, by Persian or Chaldee notions. It seems to me, however, that the tenets and practice of the Essenes indicate rather a Buddhist than a Mosaic origin, for celibacy is everywhere in the Old Testament spoken of as a misfortune, and abundance of wives as a proof of God's favour; and I imagine that some devout Indian missionary persuaded many pious Jews to listen to his doctrine, but that he was unable to convert them sufficiently to induce them to give up the law of Moses for that of Siddartha. I conceive still further, that John the Evangelist, and, subsequently, Jesus of Nazareth, were perfectly cognizant of the doctrines of the Essenes, if they were not members of the sect, and that there is nothing incredible in the idea that both these preachers were instructed by some Buddhist missionary, although neither was ever induced to give up his belief in the absolute truth of those Jewish writings, which both had been accustomed to regard as absolutely true and sacred. We readily allow that our theory may be called a wild one, but we assert that, in reality, it is far otherwise. Of course a critic may say that John, and his follower, Jesus, were just as likely to have struck out a new theory of salvation as Sakya Muni was; or, if exceedingly orthodox, he may assume that the preaching of Jesus was the pure result of inspiration, not such as was given to the prophets by Jehovah, but emanating from himself as a source of absolute truth. But we demur to both assertions. The profound reverence that Mary's son showed, in the early part of his career, for the law and for the prophets, would have prevented his doing anything to upset the former in so marked a manner as he did, in respect to the Sabbath day and other matters (see Matthew v. 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44), unless there had been some strong influence, from without, brought to bear upon his mind, and to cast it in a different mould to that of Pharisee or Sadducee. Nor can we believe Jesus to have been inspired, unless we extend the same belief to Buddha's teaching, and believe that he also was a fountain of light and righteousness, which we certainly are not disposed to do. Our hypothesis respecting a connection between the teaching of the Indian and the Hebrew, appears to be strengthened when we contemplate the distinction between the doctrines of the Jewish and the Hindoo sage. We have seen how they agree as regards the morality which they inculcate, the celibacy and poverty that they enjoin, the firm belief in preexistent, or original, sin, and in a future state of rewards or punishments. They differ in the veneration paid to antecedent authority. Sakya Muni believed in his own inspiration, and rejected the writings which were reverenced by his parents and Mends. Jesus seems to have believed that he was himself supplemental to Moses and the prophets. He did not want to destroy or to supersede them absolutely, as we learn from Matthew v. 17, and xxiii. 23. He had, apparently, an unbounded confidence in their truth, and, with an assurance in their sanctity, he spoke of their writings as the very words of God, and we shall see that the main, if not the only, points in which Jesus diverges from the Hindoo prophet were the products of the Hebrew's full belief in the sacred truth of the Jewish Scriptures. The son of Mary taught, as the most important part of his doctrine, that the world would shortly come to an end, and that he was sent to show mankind, or, rather, the Jews, how to escape from the terrible catastrophe. I do not think it possible for anyone to read the words attributed to Jesus, and not recognize that this was the turning point upon which everything in his preaching hinged. Sakya Muni spoke of the future misery of all those who did not adopt his method of salvation; Jesus treated of the impending destruction of the whole world, of an immediate judgment of mankind, and of the certain punishment of the majority. That we are not uttering vague assertions we may show by reference to Matt. xxiv. 3, wherein we find certain disciples asking, "What shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?" After a long preamble, telling of troubles and misery, we have the reply of Jesus in vv. 29 et seq.:--"Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken: and then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to another.... Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled." This is substantially, and almost literally, repeated in Mark xiii. 26-30, and in Luke xxi. 32.* * I have heard the words of this preceding quotation handled by a great variety of divines, asserting themselves to be orthodox, and who hold the position of Christian ministers. All, without exception, profess to regard the expressions about the sun being darkened and the stars falling, as figurative or metaphorical, and each, according to his prevalent ideas, or to the pet theory of the day, explain the imagery as having a reference to some emperor, king, queen, general of armies, and I know not what besides. But, to anyone who examines the phraseology closely, it will be seen that the words are to be taken in their most literal sense. Jesus had, as we have shown, a firm belief in the immediate destruction of the world, and upon that theme he descants and dilates. Taking the Mosaic account of creation as strictly true to the letter, Jesus regarded the sun, moon, and stars as apanages of our earth, and very naturally drew the inference, that when the world was burned up, there would be no necessity for the celestial luminaries--the sun would cease to shine, the moon would be dark, and the stars fall from the sky under the influence of the same power that produced the mundane destruction. These defunct bodies would be replaced by a vast apparition, whose glory would exceed that of the ancient rulers of the day and night, and he who now stood on earth as a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief would be seen and recognized as the arbiter of the destinies of every man. The passages referred to in the text bear no other meaning than the one here assigned to them; nor would anyone, however wild "a divine" he might be, ever see, or endeavour to discover, in the words referred to, a hidden meaning, unless the solemn assertion of Jesus of his immediate advent in the clouds of heaven had been such a signal failure as time has proved it to be. We have always protested against those theologians who pronounce passages in the Bible to be metaphorical or literal as it suits the event, and we do so now. Why such men should insist upon it that everything in the Koran and Buddhistic books must be taken au pied de la lettre and that everything in the Bible may be allegorised, is a matter beyond my comprehension. They surely forget the dictum--"with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again" (Matt, vii. 2). In Matthew x. we find Jesus sending out his disciples as missionaries, saying to them (v. 7), "as ye go, preach, saying, the kingdom of heaven is at hand," a doctrine previously proclaimed by John (Matt iii. 2), and based upon some words of Isaiah and the more precise presages in Daniel See also Matt iv. 14-17; Luke ix. 2, and x. 9. We find a yet more important reference in Matt. xi. 14, in which Jesus is reported to have said, when speaking of John, "If ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come." The observation here made plainly refers to an utterance of the Jewish Malachi, who, in his last two chapters, foreshadows the advent of a messenger, who should immediately precede the coming of the Lord to judge the world. There is yet another passage, of almost equal force, in Matt. xvi. 27, 28--"For the Son of man shall come in the glory of the Father with his angels, and then shall he reward every man according to his works. Verily I say unto you, there be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom." In Matt. xix. 28 we read, "Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, that ye which have followed me, in the regeneration, when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel," &c. Again, we see in Matt, xxv., after a parable intended to show the possibility of a sudden occurrence, the words, "Watch, therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." That this belief was due to the Jewish writings we judge from the frequent references made to them; and we may especially notice one which is attributed to Jesus after his resurrection, viz., "all things must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning me." So firmly was the belief of an immediate judgment impressed upon the minds of Christians, that we find Paul affirming respecting it (1 Cor. xv.), "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed... at the last trump" (vv. 31, 52). This is more decidedly enunciated in 1 Thess. iv. 15-17--"For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive, and remain unto the coming of the Lord, shall not prevent them that are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord." Compare with this 2 Peter iii. 1-4, in which there is a repetition of the same leading idea, and with Acts i. 11, and ii. 16-36. From these passages, it is unquestionable that Jesus preached that a destruction of the whole creation was imminent, and we, who have the light of history to guide us, can readily understand the powerful influence of the doctrine. We have read of panics, even in London, where some enthusiast has propounded the statement, that the world was to be destroyed upon a certain day, and can well believe, how a similar assertion would frighten ignorant, and, probably, learned Hebrew men. But, as time advanced, and generation after generation passed away, the original doctrine required to be modified. Yet it has never been quite given up, and to this day, a part of the system of Christianity is, to put faith in a second coming of Jesus, to judge the world. The "second coming" here referred to, frequently passes by the name of the Millennium, and earnest pietists believe that the son of Mary will come in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory, to punish all who do not believe in him; and to elevate the existing, and all other past saints, to be kings and priests in a new Jerusalem, wherein all will enjoy perfect happiness for a thousand years. There is another point in connection between Buddha and Jesus, to which the biblical student should not fail to pay attention. The followers of the former had a perfect belief that each of them had lived in a previous state of existence. Upon this point not a doubt disturbed them. The disciples of the latter, however, had no such ideas, nor when propounded to them, did they apparently understand it. As far as we can judge from the first three Gospels, Jesus did not assert that he had ever existed prior to the time of his birth at Bethlehem. But in the fourth Gospel, written as almost every scholar believes, about A.D. 150, a claim is repeatedly made by Jesus, of having lived for an untold period, in the spirit world in company with the Father. We will not enter here upon the grossness of thought, which is mingled with the better ideas of the writer of John's Gospel--a notion that involves the necessity for a celestial spouse of God; for if the son existed--"begotten by the father before all worlds," it could only be by some union--for the word "son" implies the necessity of a father and a mother--more especially when it is declared, that he was "begotten." Our chief business, however, is not with this point, but with the preëxistence of Jesus. The assertions by which the claim to a preëxistence is recognized, may be found in the well known words in the beginning of John, also in the 10th verse--"The world was made by him." In these parts, the evangelist declares that Jesus was coeval with his father, which no son can be. In chap. iii. 13, we find, "no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven,"--a strange text indeed, which totally ignores the ascension of Enoch and Elijah--or which demonstrates that they lived in heaven before they were born on earth, and which still further makes Jesus say, that he was in heaven at the time when he was talking to Nicodemus! In chap, vi. 62, there is a similar idea, "and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before." In chap. viii. 14 to 23, 38, and 56, a similar idea is propounded; and in v. 58, Jesus is made to assert positively, "before Abraham was, I am." In chap, xvi. 28, again, we read, "I came forth from the Father," and in chap. xvii. 5, we see, "and now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." We do not believe that the son of Mary made these assertions himself, nor did the son of Maya. But Sakya Muni had not long been dead, before his disciples promulgated the doctrine that he was, in reality, a part of the Supreme, who had existed for everlasting, and had been manifested in the flesh to become a teacher; what his followers did for Buddha, it was natural that others should do for Christ. It may be that the latter were stimulated to do so by noticing the former, but it is quite as probable that the idea of glorification came spontaneously to both sets of men. Whichever view of the case we may take, one thing is certain, viz., that both Buddhists and Christians, have, from the death of their respective masters, done everything in their power, century by century, to augment the claims of each, until indeed, individuals are found, who regard Sakya Muni as the Supreme, and Jesus the All in All. The learned historian may trace in the East, the rise of Buddha's influence in some spots, and its decadence in others; and, when he looks nearer home, he may see the gradual fall of Jesus, and the rise of Mary amongst the Papists, whilst amongst the Protestants, the son has been raised even above the Father. Not many months have passed, since a clever preacher and thoughtful man, told me that he was determined to see nothing in the world but Christ--for whatever was done, he felt a certain confidence that it was done by him, and for his glory. We see then, that both Buddhism and Christianity have been founded on the assertion that mankind suffers pain, misery, and death, in consequence of antecedent criminality before "The Great Master"--that men will be punished after death for certain sins committed in this life; and that they can attain to salvation by adopting the precepts and practice laid down by Buddha and by Christ. Those who preach these doctrines are sure of the facts that misery exists, and that man desires to escape it. According, then, to the painting of the one, and the earnest promise of the other, all teachers of the two sects have a strong hold upon the imagination of their followers. I assert, without fear of contradiction from any thoughtful man, that the main inducements held out by our divines to persuade their hearers to embrace Christianity, are an awful painting of the horrors of hell, and an assurance not only of escaping it, but of gaining a place quite different to the Devil's kingdom, provided only that the plan adopted by the theologian is followed to the letter. Neither Buddhists nor Christians seem ever to have studied the laws of nature, or the works of the Supreme, with any largeness of mind or understanding. Had they done so, they would alter their views respecting sin entirely, and they would attribute the miseries of life to their proper cause. It will be interesting to the reader, if we now endeavour to remove from the two religious systems, of which we treat, all those parts, which are to my mind, clearly imaginary; and examine what is left behind. There is nothing beyond a skeleton of morality, pure and simple. But even the morality is not based upon common sense. It is tainted by what every thinker must regard as absurdities. For example, when Siddartha instructed his disciples to become ascetics, and live upon alms, he did recognize the fact, that, if all men adopted his law, they must starve; for not one would have anything to give. In like manner, when Jesus of Nazareth sent off his disciples without any provision for their subsistence; and when he preached, "take no thought for the morrow," he did not appear to take in the idea, that if all the world became converted to his doctrine, all would suffer, and die of hunger. It is, therefore, quite as necessary for a modern philosopher, to correct some of the better parts of the doctrines of the sons of Maya Devi, and Mary, as it is to emendate their worst features. If such an one were to pretend--or to believe, that he was "inspired" to rectify the dispensation of Siddartha and Jesus, as the latter thought himself commissioned to improve upon, or to fulfil the law of Moses--it is probable that he would be regarded as a prophet; but if he should only try to coax men to think, rather than drive them to believe, he would be unheeded by the majority. Nor after all, does it much signify. Sheep are tolerably comfortable whoever the shepherd may be, and if there should be a fight between rivals for the ownership of a flock, the quadrupeds do not care, so long as they are not trained to fight, to fast, or to live on an animal diet. When any one speaks of the morality, pure and simple, inculcated by Sakya Muni and Jesus, it is a fair question to ask whether asceticism is included therein. In other words, is there anything of the nature of absolute goodness in the attempt to make oneself miserable? Or, to vary the question still further--granting, for the sake of argument, that it is intrinsically right in the sight of God to abstain from such of our propensities as induce us to marry, to eat, drink, and sleep heartily, to fight a duel with a rival, to steal, to lie, to covet, and the like,--granting, too, that every such abstinence is entered as "an asset" on the creditor side of the books of Heaven--is it an equally available item to abstain from brotherly love and comfort generally? The logician sees clearly that there is no distinction in kind between controlling one set of animal passions and another, and is forced to allow that if it be a commendable thing to avoid indulging in one carnal appetite, it is still more commendable to endeavour to counteract them all Consequently, by granting the premisses, we find ourselves landed in a difficulty. If universal asceticism were to prevail, it is clear that man would be opposing himself to the manifest designs of the Creator, as shown in the world at large; and we cannot conceive, that direct disobedience to instincts, implanted in us by our Maker, can be anything but an item on the debtor side in the books, which Jewish writers have said that He keeps. Thus we are driven to investigate the very assertions which in the commencement of our inquiry we took for granted, and to ask ourselves, is there really any intrinsic value in morality in the sight of God? Can a most virtuous life command for the individual who has practised it an eternity of bliss? Jesus answers this tolerably distinctly in the words reported in Luke xvii. 10, "When ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which it was our duty to do." But we doubt whether this dictum enunciates sufficiently clearly the abstract value of morality. To ascertain this we must endeavour to read the book of nature on other pages than those which treat of man. There can be no doubt in the mind of a thoughtful observer that man and the lower animals have much in common--that; all have been framed with a purpose, and are ruled by natural laws. Some creatures excel in cunning, some in reason, some in activity, some in sloth--all have certain proclivities. In some, instinct leads them to eat grass, boughs, leaves, and fruits; in others, it teaches them to seek insects or other creatures for their food. All have, more or less, periodically a propensity to propagate;--which is attended in some by a pairing off of male and female, who consort for the purpose of having offspring and assisting each other in rearing them. In others, either where there is naturally an equality of the sexes or a preponderance of males, the latter instinctively fight with each other for a single mate, or for a number of females. Again, in the case of animals actuated by hunger, or by other motives, there are frequent battles, and the conquered is not only killed, but eaten. Or where two or more sets of animals are living, the one on land, the other in the air, we may find that one will rob the other. Nothing, for example, is much more common than for rats and crows to steal eggs, or for tigers to commit murder. Nature, then, being such as we find it, we cannot assert--reasonably--that a young stag when he covets a neighbour's wife and fights her present consort, for property in her, commits a crime against the Almighty,--nor can we say that a fox which steals a goose will be sent to hell. On the other hand, we should never think of commending a hungry lion for abstaining from killing a harmless lamb, nor of declaring that he has done a good action in the sight of heaven. In like manner, a writer in proverbs tells us that "men do not despise a thief if he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry,"--and the general consent of mankind refuses to see the crime of murder in the slaughter of one, out of a miserable boat's crew, who is killed and eaten that the survivors may escape death from hunger. Society, too, is somewhat lenient when two men fight for the love of such a woman as Helen. But we readily recognise the fact that a community, or even a family, would be weakened and disorganized if theft was encouraged, and every pretty female was the cause of close fighting between man and man. Hence we see that, in reality, that which is called "the moral law," is a code which is intended to influence social life in this world, and not the position of human beings in the next. However much we might desire to think the contrary, we are driven to the belief that the moral precepts inculcated on the Jews, the Buddhists, and the Christians, had a human, and, we may add, a political origin. Taking the Bible even as being what many believe it to be--the inspired word of God--we must nevertheless allow that such a code as that book contains in Exodus and elsewhere, existed in Egypt long before the departure of the Jews from that country. Had not murder been prohibited on the Nile bank, Moses would not have run away to escape the penalty for homicide. Because the Mizraim punished killing, were they taught of God? The natural answer to this query when it is addressed to a bibliolater is that the Egyptians were taught by God to punish murder with death through the intervention of their forefather, Ham, who heard the command given by God to Noah, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed," Gen. ix. 6. But if the Egyptians thus knew the law, so the descendants of Shem must have learned it also; and if so, what need was there to repeat it amongst the thunders of Sinai. It is plain from the romantic legend of Joseph and Potiphar's wife: first, that the Hebrew slave feared to commit adultery, as it was a great wickedness and a sin against God, Gen. xxxix. 9; and, secondly, that the Egyptian considered it a crime in anyone to violate the wife of another. But neither Joseph nor Potiphar could by any possibility have heard of the laws enunciated on Sinai. So, if we could inquire farther, we should most assuredly learn that the Mizraim venerated their parents, punished theft, and took means to prevent and to punish perjury. If, then, the Egyptians had, long before they ever heard of a Jew, the same commandments amongst them which were subsequently enunciated in the wilderness, we can only come to the conclusion that the Hebrew writer who told the story of Sinai, gave the god whom he described, a great deal of unnecessary work. Can we for a moment suppose that the Jews when in Egypt had their wives in common?--and if each man had his mate, and each woman her husband, it is almost self-evident that adultery would not be tolerated amongst them. As there were therefore distinct moral laws long before the Exodus, the decalogue was entirely superfluous. The morality inculcated by teachers is nothing more than instructions for mankind how to attain the greatest harmony amongst their fellows. It is very natural for a thoughtless man to assert that one who wilfully disturbs the general comfort of the human family during his life-time, shall be tormented eternally after his death; and, on the other hand, to proclaim that he who does everything in his power to increase the happiness of his fellow-men shall be rewarded in a heaven above, with everlasting music, or other delights; yet we may fairly doubt the averments, for both are founded entirely upon human ideas of right and wrong, justice and injustice. The prevalent idea is, that everything which to some man seems to be wrong on earth, will be righted in another sphere--Even Jesus appears to have adopted this view, for he talks (Luke xvi) of a Dives and Lazarus--the one, a rich man who fared sumptuously every day, and the other a beggar, full of sores, who longed for the crumbs from wealth's table. After the deaths of these two people, we are told that the rich man went to Hell, and the poor one to Heaven, not--apparently--because one was bad and the other good; but simply because misery in the present is sure to be changed into luxury for the future, and _vice versa_. We see this doctrine distinctly enunciated by the imaginary Abraham, in whose bosom Lazarus lay, for he remarks (Luke xvi. 25), "Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and thou art tormented." We nowhere find that his position was a reward to the beggar for virtue or morality. There is also a current doctrine that he whom we call a vile man--one who indulges his brutal desires, shall in another world become more brutalized--meeting with, and being beaten by, powers whose mischievous propensities are superior to his own; whilst, on the other hand, he whom we call a saint, one who endeavours to subdue the affections of the flesh in this world, shall be able to indulge in any desire that he may have, in the next, unlimitedly. In short, each individual makes a Heaven for himself, and a Hell for his neighbours. I have heard, in days gone by, a Southern States lady say she would not go to heaven, willingly, if she knew that she should meet negroes there on terms of equality. In rejoinder to these considerations, the question is put, "Could the world be habitable by men, without the existence amongst them of a belief in a future state, in which rewards and punishments shall be meted out for supposed misdeeds committed in the present?" It is well for us to look the matter in the face boldly, and ask ourselves whether fierce tigers, angry bulls, combative stags, kindred devouring rats, offspring eating alligators, infanticidal birds and pigs have succeeded in extirpating their race? There are herds, without number, of graminivorous animals in Africa, and thousands of carnivorous creatures who could not exist without murdering some of the former; yet the slaughter committed by scores of lions does not annihilate antelopes. In like manner there are many folks who have lived in sundry islands of the Pacific without an idea, so far as we can learn, of an eternity, who sometimes spend their leisure time in fighting with and eating each other, and occasionally unite to kill a shark: each individual lives and dies like any other animal, but the race remains. Even the systematic "hellishness" of persecution indulged in by the followers of Jesus in the middle ages did not extirpate the Jews; and if organized murders, such as were, in days gone by, sanctioned by individuals wielding the sceptre of powerful governments, could not cut off from existence a comparatively feeble race, surely we may conclude that a nation can continue populous even if any individual, in a fit of passion, should rise against his fellow and smite him to the dust. But we need not go to New Zealand, China, and Japan to prove that men can live in a community without an idea of eternity, for we have only to refer to the Jews, the so-called people of God. To them no knowledge of eternal life was given, consequently we infer that Jehovah knew that they would get along in the world very well without it. What Elohim thought was unnecessary, it is not for man to propound as important. When the modern Christian philosopher--and there really are a few who deserve the term--finds that the morality of Jesus did not materially differ from that of Sakya Muni, he endeavours to show that the doctrine of "faith in the son of God" is of more value than simple propriety, and that even the most virtuous life will not enable a man to attain to paradise unless he holds the Catholic faith. When the "Catholic faith," as it is termed, is placed in such a position, we are bound to examine its pretensions, and inquire in what way doctrines or dogmas are better than morality, and whether they are in any way superior to what the orthodox call "irreligion." To my mind the best method of solving the question is an appeal to history. If, as it is contended by the orthodox, the teaching of Christianity is far above that of any other religion, then it must follow that all those who believe in it, or even profess it, must be paragons amongst men as citizens and rulers. To what extent many theologians believe in this axiom may be judged by the frequency with which we hear, from the pulpit, an old anecdote to the effect, that the expression, "see how these Christians love one another," was, in olden time, nearly equal to the most powerful sermon in favour of the religion of Jesus. Without pointing a sneer, by requesting my readers to substitute the word Buddhists for Christians, let me lay the very heavy charge against the leaders of the faith, that the words in question are the heaviest condemnation possible against the supposed value of the doctrines of the son of Mary, as formerly and at present expounded. "See how these Christians love!" Aye, see how they love--read their own histories of the past, and their newspapers in the present; attend their meetings; listen to their speeches; and even follow them into private life. In every position "see how these Christians love one another" is the damning sentence which tells of the real value of the doctrine attributed to the son of Mary. Whilst I write (Jan. 7, 1870), a council, called OEcumenical, consisting of Roman Catholic Christian bishops, summoned to the capital of ancient Italy from all parts of the world, is sitting, and one of the subjects of its deliberation is, whether a certain individual, elected by men to assume the direction of a community of men holding a particular faith in common, shall be regarded, by those who join such branch of the church, as absolutely infallible in every statement of opinion which he makes as a high priest. Men positively have met to clothe, and now have invested, a man with an attribute of God, and millions of Christians will, by those men, be compelled to consider themselves bound by the decision! "See how these Christians love!" they are persecuted by the world at first, then they persecute their oppressors, and massacre each other; educated by Jesus, they gradually encourage ignorance until they reach a superstition as crass as the darkness of a dense fog in a moonless night. They oppose the advancement of knowledge and science, then, by degrees, endeavour to exalt each other, until, by common consent, they deify the chieftain of the order. There is not a known crime of which the leaders of the Christian church, as it is called, have not been guilty, both as men and ecclesiastical rulers. "See how these Christians love!" Yet these very men endeavour to deride, and affect to despise, those whom they call the godless. The latter, taking their stand upon morality and common sense, aver that all affairs between man and his maker ought to be referred to the arbitrement of Heaven. The Christian hierarchs, on the contrary, declare that they are the earthly agents of heaven, and that they, and the secular arm--a very mundane court--can act just as well, perhaps better, than the Supreme Judge. We will not say whether it was a pleasant pastime for the Spanish, and other Inquisitors, to torture individuals who were thought to be inimical to the true faith, inasmuch as we do not know their inmost mind; but we asseverate that all Europe, except those who had the power of persecution, and used it, rejoiced greatly when the enthusiastic armies, of what was designated atheistic France, annihilated the so-called Holy Inquisition. I speak with sober earnestness when I say, that after forty years' experience amongst those who profess Christianity, and those who proclaim, more or less quietly, their disagreement with it, I have noticed more sterling virtue and morality amongst the last than the first. Though I thus express myself, I must also acknowledge my belief in the dictum, "that many men are better than their creeds would make them," and, consequently, that all men are not to be taken as characteristic of their system of belief. I know, personally, many pious, sterling, good Christian people, whom I honour, admire, and, perhaps, would be glad to emulate or to equal; but they deserve the eulogy thus passed on them in consequence of their good sense having ignored the doctrine of faith to a great degree, and having cultivated the practice of good works. They have picked out the best bits of the Bible, and rejected the worst. In my judgment the most praiseworthy Christians whom I know are modified Buddhists, though, probably, not one of them ever heard of Siddartha. I would gladly trace their character, but I forbear, as I think they would be horrified at the thought of my comparing them with those whom they have been taught to regard as followers of a false prophet, or something worse. Let it suffice to say that I honour consistent reasonable Christians everywhere, and that whatever remarks I make which seem to be opposed to this, are directed against those whose doctrines, morality, and conduct, ostensibly built upon the Bible, are irrational and bad. Since the preceding remarks were written, there have appeared three very remarkable works upon Buddhism in addition to those which I have already noticed--and they have the advantage for general readers, of being clothed in an English dress. The first which I will notice, is _Travels of Fah-Hian and Sung-Yun: Buddhist Pilgrims from China to India_ (408 A.D., and 518 a.d.; London, Trübner, 1869, small 8vo. pp. 208.) This work is remarkable as illustrating the fact, that there has been the idea, even in China, of sending men, or of devout persons spontaneously going, to distant places, to endeavour to seek for more perfect religious knowledge, than they believe themselves and their teachers to possess where they are. With such an example before us, we can give more easy credence to the stories told of Pythagoras, of Solon, and Herodotus; how they visited distant countries to learn the way of God and man more perfectly. Nor must we pass by the proof, which the journey of the Chinese travellers affords, that, what may be called missionary zeal is not an apanage of Christianity alone. An account of their travels will be found in the next chapter. The second publication to which we refer, is _Buddhaghosa's Parables_, translated from the Burmese, by Capt. T. Rogers; with an introduction containing _Buddha's Dhammapada_, or _Path of Virtue_, translated from the Pâli, by Max Müller; London, Trubner & Co., 1870, 8vo. pp. 374. This work is of such importance to all students of the Science of Religion, that we shall notice it in a separate essay. The third contribution, is _The Modern Buddhist_, being the views of a Siamese Minister of State, on his own and other religions, translated, with remarks, by Henry Alabaster, interpreter of H. B. M., consulate-general in Siam; London, Triibner & Co., 1870, small 8vo. pp. 91. This has now arrived at a second edition, and is called _The Wheel of the Law_. This last book is, perhaps, the most interesting of the three, inasmuch as it enables us to compare the modern development of the religion of Buddha, and that of Christ. It enables us, moreover, to see ourselves and modern Christian doctrines as others see them, and to discover the essential points at issue, between the followers of the son of Maya Devi, and of Mary. The first point to which we would call attention, is the statement that the Siamese are nowhere excelled in the sincerity of their belief, and the liberality with which they support their religion. "In Bangkok alone, there are more than a hundred monasteries, and ten thousand monks and novices. More than this, every male Siamese, sometime during his life, and generally in the prime of it, takes orders as a monk, and retires for some months or years, to practise abstinence and meditation in a monastery." Against this, or side by side with it, what can Great Britain, or any other Christian country show? We have, it is true, plenty of monasteries in Christendom, and in the majority of western kingdoms, there are colleges and universities for the education of youth, and there is, in some such institutions, a pretence of meditation and of abstinence. Yet the finger of scandal points, and has pointed, for many hundred years, to the disreputable conduct pursued in almost the whole of such Christian institutions; whereas, not even its enemies can find evidence to convict Buddhist ascetics of indulging in sensual gratifications of any kind whatever. We learn, from Mr Alabaster's preface, that the late king of Siam, though "eminent amongst monks for his knowledge of the Buddhist scriptures, boldly preached against the canonicity of those of them, whose relations were opposed to his reason, and his knowledge of modern science." "His powers as a linguist were considerable, and enabled him to use an English library with facility." They are his views--which royal etiquette prevented him from writing, that inspired his prime minister. What have we here? Surely it is an example that British rulers, and especially divines, should follow. Yet with all our boasted skill, science, and powers of thought, our theologians prefer to preach, and to uphold, doctrines which they know to be repugnant, both to reason and to science, rather than abandon that which was propounded when reason and knowledge were almost in their infancy. Certainly, in this respect, the believers in Sakya Muni show themselves more sensible than those in Jesus. Again, let us quote the following paragraph--pointing out the analogy we wish to draw, by using a literary contrivance--and calling attention to the fact, that no Roman Catholic authority in Christian Europe, has yet dared to say, what a Buddhist ruler does. "Our {Siamese \ Papal} literature is not only scanty, but nonsensical, full of stories of {genii \ saints} stealing {women \ relics} and {men \ saints} fighting with {genii \ devils} and {extraordinary persons\ Elijah and Philip} who could fly through the air, and bring dead people to life. And, even those works, which profess to teach anything, generally teach it wrong; so that there is not the least profit, though one studies them from morning to night" (p. 7). The following observation is equally powerful--Chaya. Phya. Praklang--the name of the Siamese author, might, "as a Buddhist, believe in the existence of a God, sublimed above all human qualities and attributes--a perfect God, above love, and hatred, and jealousy, calmly resting in a quiet happiness that nothing could disturb; and of such a God he would speak no disparagement, not from a desire to please Him, or fear to offend Him, but from natural veneration. But he cannot understand a God with the attributes and qualities of men, a God who loves and hates, and shows anger, a Deity, who, whether described to him by Christian Missionaries, or by Mahometans, Brahmins, or Jews, falls below his standard of even an ordinary good man" (p. 25). After the passages which we have quoted, the translator gives many pages of accounts of conversation between missionaries and the Siamese minister, which well repay a perusal. They are too long for quotation entire, but there are three paragraphs that deserve commemoration, as they show us the reasoning powers of the Buddhist in favourable contrast to the bigotry of his would-be instructor. "I said, 'then you consider that even a stone in the bladder is created by God?' He replied, 'Yes, everything, God creates everything.' 'Then,' answered I, if that is so, God creates in man that which will cause his death, and you medical missionaries remove it, and restore his health! Are you not opposing God by so doing? Are you not offending Him in curing those whom He would kill?' When I had said this the missionary became angry, and saying 'I was hard to teach,' left me" (p. 29). Again, when he and Dr Gutzlaff were discussing the story of the creation and "the fall," as taught in the Christian and Jewish Bible, and the Buddhist has clearly the best of the argument, the missionary told him, that if any spoke as the minister had been doing in European countries, he would be put in prison--and Chaya Phya adds, "I invite particular attention to this statement" (p. 34). Thus, not only in other parts of his work, but here also, he points out how that which Christian emissaries say is "a religion of peace on earth and good will to men" is, in reality, one of intolerance and persecution, even on the showing of its own ministers. In the third example to which I refer, Gutzlaff is again talking with Chaya upon the curse of man, and the Siamese speaks thus--"Besides, the Bible says, by belief in Christ, man shall escape the consequences of Eve's sin; yet I cannot see that men do so escape in any degree, but suffer just as others do." The missionary answered, "It is waste of time to converse with evil men, who will not be taught, and so he left me" (p. 35). When men like Gutzlaff, who is really eminent in his way, can be so readily silenced and put to flight by a native of Siam, whose mind is not familiar with the science and logical training of European thinkers, it is by no means surprising that cultivated Englishmen should refuse to believe in the childish stories and foolish doctrines that are promulgated by Christians at home, as being an inspired and infallible revelation from the Almighty. Alas, for our country and her people! they have much to unlearn as well as to learn before they can lay a fair claim to the position which they assume to hold. We may next quote the following, as being useful to missionary societies here. After having described the religion of Papists, Protestants, and Mormons, Chaya says, "All these three sects worship the same God and Christ, why, then, should they blame each other, and charge each other with believing wrongfully, and say to each other, 'You are wrong, and will go to Hell; we are right, and shall go to Heaven?' You make us think that it is one religion which Christians hold, yet how can we join it when each party threatens us with Hell if we agree with another sect, and there is none to decide between them? I beg comparison of this with the teaching of the Lord Buddha, that whoever endeavours to keep the commandments, and is charitable, and walks virtuously, must attain to Heaven" (p. 43). The commandments referred to are-- 1st. Thou shalt not destroy nor cause the destruction of any living thing. 2d. Thou shalt not, either by fraud or violence, obtain or keep that which belongs to another. 3d. Thou shall not lie carnally with any but proper objects for thy lust. 4th. Thou shalt not attempt, either by word or action, to lead others to believe that which is not true. 5th. Thou shalt not become intoxicated. We much fear, that if the commandments which nominal Christians observe are contrasted with those kept by the Buddhists, that the former must be regarded as much lower in the scale of religious civilization than the latter. The Siamese author next discusses the question, "how shall a man select that religion which he can trust to for his future happiness?" His answer is, "He must reflect, and apply his mind to ascertain which comes nearest to truth." Then follow a few very true remarks about the difficulty of shaking off any faith once adopted--about the causes which determine men to change their belief, and, in illustration of the difficulties, the author quotes a sermon by Buddha to those who were in doubt, and desired to select a right religion. "And the Lord Buddha answered, You are right to doubt, for it was a doubtful matter. I say unto all of you, do not believe in what ye have heard, that is, when you have heard anyone say this is especially good or extremely bad; do not reason with yourselves, that if it had not been true it would not have been asserted, and so believe in its truth. Neither have faith in traditions, because they have been handed down for many generations, and in many places. "Do not believe in anything because it is rumoured and spoken of by many; do not think that is a proof of its truth. "Do not believe merely because the written statement of some old sage is produced; do not be sure that the writing has ever been revised by the said sage, or can be relied on. Do not believe in what you have fancied, thinking that, because an idea is extraordinary, it must have been implanted by a Deva, or some wonderful being. "Do not believe in guesses, that is, assuming something at haphazard, as a starting point, and then drawing conclusions from it--reckoning your two and your three and your four before you have fixed your number one. "Do not believe because you think there is an analogy, that is, a suitability in things and occurrences--such as believing that there must be walls of the world because you see water in a basin, or that Mount Meru must exist because you have seen the reflection of trees, or that there must be a creating god because houses and towers have builders. "Do not believe in the truth of that to which you have become attached by habit, as every nation believes in the superiority of its own dress, and ornaments, and language. "Do not believe because your informant appears to be a credible person, as, for instance, when you see anyone having a very sharp appearance, conclude that he must be clever and trustworthy: or, when you see anyone who has powers and abilities beyond what men generally possess, believe in what he tells; or think that a great nobleman is to be believed, as he would not be raised by the king to high station unless he were a good man. "Do not believe merely on the authority of your teachers and masters, or believe and practise merely because they believe and practise. "I tell you all, you must of yourselves know, that 'this is evil, this is punishable, this is censured by wise men, belief in this will bring no advantage to anyone, but will cause sorrow;' and when you know this, then eschew it" (pp. 45-47). Then follows a long account of the examples which Buddha gave to his disciples, examining them by questions, whose answer is obvious; but these, though wonderfully to the point, are too long for quotation, and we must refer our readers to the book itself. Nor do we act thus, reluctantly, for we believe that every honest inquirer will thank us for the introduction. We should rejoice if some of our divines became acquainted with it. They might draw as many valuable texts from the discourses attributed to Buddha, herein described, as they do now from Jesus' sermon on the mount. We may add, in passing, that, in the conversation of Sakya Muni, he says, "it is better to believe in a future life, in which happiness or misery can be felt, for if the heart believes therein, it will abandon sin and act virtuously; and even if there is no resurrection, such a life will bring a good name and the regard of men. But those who believe in extinction at death, will not fail to commit any sin that they may choose, because of their disbelief in a future; and if there should happen to be a future after all, they will be at a disadvantage--they will be like travellers without provisions" (p. 54). The following exposition of modern Buddhist belief well deserves attention. "Buddhists believe that every act, word, or thought, has its consequence, which will appear sooner or later in the present, or in some future state. Evil acts will produce evil consequences, i.e., may cause a man misfortune in this world, or an evil birth in hell, or as an animal in some future existence. Good acts, etc., will produce good consequences; prosperity in this world, or birth in heaven, or in a high position in the world in some future state" (p. 57). We will only add, that if the value of Buddhism, like Christianity, is to be known by its fruits, it is clear, that the former, as practised generally in Siam, is decidedly superior to the latter as practised in Great Britain, America, and Christendom, generally. CHAPTER V. Priority of Buddhism to Christianity. Strange assumptions. When was India first known to Christians? Thomas the Apostle, When Asceticism was introduced into Christianity. Results of inquiry into the introduction of Christianity into India. Tarshish and Ceylon. Peacocks known as the Persian birds to the Greeks, temp. Aristophanes. Indian elephants in army of Darius. Roman traffic with India, b.c. 30. Buddhist missionaries. The gift of tongues. Rise of Asceticism in Western Asia. Essenes again. Collection of Buddhist writings, 450 b.c. Degeneracy of original Faith. Missionaries from China to Hindostan in search of Buddhist works and knowledge. Travels of Fah Hian, their experience and remarks. Quotations from their writings. Footprints of Buddha and Peter. Immaculate conception of Sakya. Old Simeon--a repetition. Wise men from the East. St. Ursula. Three Buddhist councils to compile scriptures. Buddhism lapsed into image-worship and processions. Progress of the pilgrims. Return by sea. Deductions. Developments of Christianity and Asceticism. Observations about travelling. Conclusions. With the usual pertinacity of Englishmen, there are many devout individuals who, on finding that Buddhism and Christianity very closely resemble each other, asseverate, with all the vehemence of an assumed orthodoxy, that the first has proceeded from the second. Nor can the absurdity of attempting to prove that the future must precede the past deter them from declaring that Buddhism was promulgated originally by Christian missionaries from Judea, and then became deteriorated by Brahminical and other fancies! It is really difficult, sometimes, to discover what are the real tenets of the obstinate orthodox to whom we refer; but, so far as we can learn from the character of their opposition, it would appear that they do not deny the existence of such a man as Sakya Muni, to whom his followers gave the name of Buddha. Just in the same way, we may add, as his followers gave the name of Jesus Christ to Ben Panther. Whilst allowing that Siddartha founded a new religion, the orthodox assert that all its bad parts are human, whilst all its good parts consist of doctrines tacked on to the original, after Christianity had been introduced into India, by one or more of Jesus' apostles or disciples. If, for the sake of argument, we accord to such cavillers the position of reasonable beings, and ask them to give us some proof of the assertion, that early Christian people went to Hindostan and preached the gospel there; or even to point out, in history, valid proofs that India was known to a single apostle, we find that they have nothing to say beyond the vaguest gossip. What the testimony is we may find by turning to the article Thomas, in Kitto's _Cyclop�dia of Biblical Literature_, which was written by a learned professor of Gottingen. Therein we see, and the statement is amply vouched by quotation from authorities, that the Apostle in question is said to have preached the gospel in Parthia and in Persia, and to have been buried in Edessa; and that, according to a later tradition, Thomas went to India, and suffered martyrdom there. Then follows a statement that this account has been assailed, &c. Similar traditions are mentioned by Dean Stanley in Smith's "_Dictionary of the Bible_" with the addition that it is now believed that the Thomas of Malabar Christian fame was a Nestorian missionary. Eusebius writes, book v., ch. 10, speaking of Pantaenus, about a.d. 190--"He is said to have displayed such ardour... that he was constituted a herald of the gospel of Christ to the nations of the East, and advanced even as far as India; and the report is, that he there found his own arrival anticipated by some who were acquainted with the gospel of Matthew, to whom Bartholomew, one of the Apostles, had preached, and had left them the gospel of Matthew in the Hebrew, which was also preserved unto this time. Pantænus became finally the head of the Alexandrian school." Such a piece of gossip no historian can trust for a moment. Socrates, in his _Ecclesiastical History_, about a.d. 420, writes, "We must now mention by what means the profession of Christianity was extended in Constantine's reign, for it was in his time that the nations, both of the Indians in the interior, and the Iberians, first embraced the Christian faith. But it may be needful briefly to explain why the expression in the interior is appended. When the apostles went forth by lot amongst the nations, Thomas received the apostleship of the Parthians. Matthew was allotted Ethiopia, and Bartholomew the part of India contiguous to that country; but the interior of India, which was inhabited by many barbarous nations, using different languages, was not enlightened by Christian doctrine before the time of Constantine," about 320 A.D. Then follows a story of a Tynan philosopher, who, with two youths, took ship, and arrived somewhere in India, just after the violation of a treaty between that country and the Romans. Everyone in the ship was killed but the two lads, who, being young, were sent as a present to the Indian king. One became a cupbearer, the other the royal recorder. The king died, freeing the youths, and the queen, left with a young son, made the strangers his tutors, or regents. One, who was the highest, then began to inquire whether, amongst the Roman merchants trafficking with that country, there were any Christians to be found. Having discovered some, he induced them to select a place for worship, and he subsequently built a church, into which he admitted some Indians, after previous instruction. The other youth comes back to Tyre, and then the regent comes to Alexandria, talks to Athanasius, and begs him to send a bishop and clergy to the place he has left, to which no name is given. To the latter youth Frumentius, ordination is given, and he returns to India to preach, to perform miracles, and build oratories, [--Greek--]. The historian, adds Rufinus, assures us that he heard these facts from the former king's cupbearer, Edesius, who was afterwards inducted into the sacred office at Tyre. We may next quote the _Epitome of the Ecclesiastical History of Philostorgius_ (who wrote about A.D. 425), compiled by Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople. Therein we may observe how completely the first contradicts Socrates as before quoted, and may also infer the reason why. In book ii., ch. 6, the words run, "The impious Philostorgius relates, that the Christians in Central India, who were converted to the faith of Christ by the preaching of St. Bartholomew, believe that the son is not of the same substance with the father." He adds that "Theophilus, the Indian who had embraced this opinion, came to them and delivered it to them as a doctrine; and also that these Indians are now called Homeritæ, instead of their old name, Sabæans, which they received from the city of Saba, the chief city of the whole nation." This leads me to doubt very strongly whether the ecclesiastical writers in early days did not group, under the name of India, the southern parts of Arabia, Persia, and Beloochistan. Sozomen, writing about the period of 325 A.D., says, book ii, ch. 24, "We have heard that about this period some of the most distant of the nations that we call Indian, to whom the preaching of Bartholomew was unknown, were converted to Christianity by Frumentius, a priest." Then follows an enlarged edition of the legend told by Socrates, and the words, "it is said that Frumentius discharged his priestly functions so admirably that he became an object of universal admiration." Theodoret, writing about 420 A.D., places the conversion of the Indians about 328 A.D., and gives substantially the same account as the preceding writers whom we have quoted. We will not, however, content ourselves with this short notice, but will first inquire whether, if the accounts of the earlier reporters, Eusebius, Socrates, Clement, and Rufinus, who wrote about a.d. 320, 390, 190, and 370, are not to be trusted, we can believe the stories of Gregory Nazianzen, Ambrose, Jerome, Nicephorus, and Abdias, who wrote about a.d. 380, 380, 400, 815, and 910 respectively. If we believe one set of Christian "fathers," that Thomas the apostle died in Syria, we cannot credit a set of Christian "sons," who affirm that he was martyred in India. But--and the point is an important one--we can see reason why the children should invent an account of which the parents saw not the necessity. About the period of Gregory Nazianzen arose that asceticism which sent Simeon Stylites upon the top of his pillar in a.d. 394, and kept him there for the rest of his life, and that peopled the Thebaid with hermits of the most approved Buddhist order--celibates shunning luxury, and cultivating filthiness of the outer to cleanse the inner man. The way in which the original faith, preached by Jesus and modified by Paul, was distorted during the first few centuries in Egypt can only be rationally accounted for by a spread of Buddhist doctrines by Indian missionaries, or promulgated by Christian merchants, who had travelled to the Indies, and modified their original faith by what they saw and heard from the followers of the great Sramana; and it was natural for the Alexandrian Christians to adopt the modifications referred to, and to stamp the innovations with the assertion that they were apostolic reflections--rays of divine light falling from "the sun of righteousness" upon the mind of the blessed Saint Somebody, Thomas, for this purpose, being a name which answered as well as any other. There is positively no evidence whatever--except some apocryphal Jesuit stories about certain disciples of Jesus, found by Papal missionaries at Malabar--that any disciple of Mary's son ever proceeded to Hindostan to preach the gospel during the first centuries of our era. Those who know the history of the "Decretals," and of Prester John, can readily estimate the value of tales told by Jesuits in India, where there was not at the time anyone to test their veracity. Being myself desirous of ascertaining what evidence really exists--or existed in the times of ancient authors, whose works have come down to us--of the knowledge of India by Europeans in days gone by, I instituted an inquiry, with the determination to be impartial. The results obtained were the following:-- The only reason for believing that Hindostan and Ceylon were known to the Phoenicians is a short passage in the Biblical History of Solomon, in which we are told that after a three years' absence, Hiram's Tyrian sailors returned from Tarshish, bringing what our translators call ivory, apes, and peacocks. The words in the Hebrew original are said by Tennant to be all but identical with those in use in Ceylon at the present date. For a full account of the probable identity of the Tarshish in the passage alluded to and Galle, see Emerson Tennant's _History of Ceylon_. Yet, if we grant that the Tyrian shipmen traded to India, we are bound to confess that the knowledge which they acquired died with them; nor did their successors, the Greeks, know anything distinctly about Hindostan prior to the time of Alexander the Great. In the Biblical story of Esther we are told, i. 1, viii. 9, that a Persian king reigned from India to Ethiopia, the Hebrew word for the former being _Hodoo_, supposed to be a form of _handoo_, or _hindoo_; Pehlevi, _hendo_; Zend, _heando_; Sanscrit, _Sindhu_ (Fürst, s.v.), equivalent to the Greek _Indikee_, or the country of the Indus. We find reason to believe that the India of Artaxerxes was a portion of Hindostan--first, because the Persian monarch had Indian soldiers in his army, and elephants, when he fought with Alexander; and secondly, because the peacock, a bird of Ceylon, was known to the Greeks, in the time of Aristophanes, as "the Persian bird." That the Persians traded with Northern India we infer, from the account which Appian gives us of the advance eastward of Alexander, after his victory at Arbela. But the whole story of the Grecian warrior's advance into the Punjaub and down the Indus, contains, in itself, tolerably clear proof that Hindostan was very little known to the Greeks. Of a subsequent invasion of India by Alexander's successor, Seleucus Nicator; of the mission of Megasthenes to Sandracottus, the grandfather of Asoka, the Buddhist Constantine; of the navigation of the Grecian ship down the Indus, and the subsequent traffic by land and sea between the Greeks and the Hindoos, we need not say more than that Augustus, b.c. 30, regulated the trade to Hindostan, _via_ Alexandria, and that, at the time of Pliny the elder, about A.D. _60_, voyages were being made to India every year, companies of archers being carried on board the vessels to protect them from pirates. We learn also that a twelvemonth did not elapse without a drain upon the Roman Empire of about one million and a-half sterling for India, in exchange for Hindoo wares (book vi., ch. 26). At the period Pliny refers to, and for a long time previously, there can be no pretence that any of Jesus' apostles accompanied traders to Hindostan, for every one of them were employed nearer home. On the other hand, we may inquire into the possibility and the reasonableness of Buddhist missionaries travelling westward in the course of Alexandrian traffic, or of the caravans which, we have grounds for believing, came through Persia to the Roman Empire. On turning to Oriental literature, we find that the often-mentioned King Asokâ adopted Buddhism as the religion of his empire about b.c. 250, and that, in his time, missionaries carried that faith successfully to the uttermost parts of Hindostan--to Burmah, to Ceylon, to Japan, to Thibet, and to China. The envoys carried with them, in some instances, written books, in others, their guide was oral tradition. Wherever they went they bore a biography of Sakya--or Buddha--accounts of miracles that he had performed, and a summary, more or less extended, of his preaching or doctrines. This dispersion of Hindoo envoys was about fifty years later than the mission of the Greek Megasthenes to the court of Asokâ's grandfather, and it is quite as probable that Buddhist preachers went to enlighten what they imagined to be the benighted, and what they knew to be the then defeated Grecians, as that they went over frightful mountains and stormy seas to Thibet, China, and Japan. We may profitably pause for a moment here, to contemplate that which I at one time believed to be the most wonderful of all the miracles recorded in the New Testament, viz., "the gift of tongues." The references to this which we meet with in the epistles of the apostle Paul might lead to the supposition, that some who had this "gift" spoke mere gibberish--something which was not, either in intention or in reality, an utterance in a foreign language; but the story of the original imparting of power to speak in a previously unknown tongue involves the idea, that the disciples had, on the occasion referred to, a faculty given to them, by which they knew the languages used by various nationalities, without the trouble of learning them. Many divines have held that such ability was absolutely necessary to those who had to go forth to teach all nations the doctrines of the gospel I am quite aware that, however earnest I might be to propagate truth, I could not go, with advantage, to preach in Russia, because I know nothing of its language. Doubt in the reality of the miracle recorded in Acts ii. was not born until I found that Buddhist missionaries went out into distant lands, where their own tongue was unknown, and yet made converts. When once I felt dubious as regards the veracity of the historian, I began to notice what the apostles generally did when they went to a new country or town. Their practice seems to have been to have visited synagogues of the Jews living on the spot--and able, if they chose, to be interpreters--or, where there were such establishments, "the schools" were visited, where the students and the masters understood Greek. In the time of Paul the language of the Hellenes was spoken by Romans of high position, much as French was spoken at the court of Frederic the Great of Prussia, and as German is at St. Petersburg. The Apostle seems to have spoken Greek readily, and when he could use that tongue or the Hebrew he was fluent. I have sought in vain for evidence that either Paul or any of the Apostles ever addressed a foreign mob, whose language was neither Greek nor Hebrew. A study of the nineteenth chapter of the Acts will show this--especially, we must notice the end of the tenth verse, where we are told "that all who dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both _Jews and Greeks_." When disturbance occurred in the theatre, Paul was not the orator put forward to appease the people--he probably could not speak their patois. Yet he tells us, 1 Cor. xiv. 18, that he spoke with tongues more than his fellows.* * There is much difference amongst ecclesiastical writers respecting what is called the "gift of tongues." The difficulty arises mainly from the desire to reconcile "the true" with "the absurd." Starting from the point that all "scripture" is written by "inspiration of God," the orthodox are obliged to receive the account narrated in Acts ii. as being literally correct. In plain language, the story runs thus:--The Apostles, twelve in number, were sitting in a room. Whilst there, a noise was heard, and something like fiery tongues, more or less split, appeared, and one settled upon each of the company. These all, at once, began to speak in languages which were strange to all. From the noise made, neighbours had their attention called, and from one mouth to another the tidings of the ranting ran, until it reached the ears of devout men, who, from every nation under heaven, were then assembled in Jerusalem. Whether these foreigners were Hebrews, or whether they, being strangers, had the gift of understanding the reports couched in Aramaic, we do not know. But it is narrated that, in the course of a few minutes--possibly an hour or two--the devout strangers came to listen to the Apostles, either speaking singly or at once. As these foreigners noticed what was said, they recognized words in their own respective dialects, and then the Parthian said to the Mede--the Elamite to the Mesopotamian--the Phrygian to the Pamphyliaji, &c., "What does all this mean?" So to interchange a question involves that the interlocutors, like the Apostles, had suddenly received the gift of speaking, and understanding, other tongues than their own. When the listeners had convinced themselves about the marvel, each began to talk in his own language, and the Jews understood them to say, "What meaneth this?" the Hebrews, like the rest, having also the gift of knowing what was said in a strange language. Some, however, had not this power of interpretation, and remarked, "the fellows are drunk!" For a moment we pause to inquire how many people there were in one room of one house. The Apostles were twelve; then there were, at least three, Parthians, Medes, &c., in all about forty-five more, and in addition, there were "the mockers." To all these Peter preached, and the wonders of the day were crowned by the conversion of three thousand people! It seems, therefore, to be clear, from the account of this extraordinary miracle, that the Apostles then gathered together acquired the power of expressing their thoughts in languages which they had never learned, the judges of the feat being those whose dialects were spoken. If we now proceed in biblical order to examine into the ideas connected with this strange faculty, we find, in Acts x. 44-46, that the circumcised Jews alone were satisfied, in the plenitude of their own ignorance, that Cornelius and his company could "speak with tongues." Again, in Acts xix. 6, we learn that certain Ephesians, after baptism, and imposition of hands, "spake with tongues "--no judge of the fact being quoted. In 1 Cor. xii. 10, we discover that amongst the gifts of the Holy Spirit are "kinds of tongues," and the interpretation thereof which will, probably, remind the lover of Shakespeare of Act iv. Scenes 1 and 3, in "All's well that ends well," wherein there is a nonsensical jargon spoken by one person which another interprets to the satisfaction of the silly Parolles. In vv 28, 30, we see strong indications that the gift of tongues and interpretation may be compared to some things now heard of in spiritualistic or other conjuring séances. This notion of "speaking with other tongues" reaches its climax, apparently, in 1 Cor. xiii. 1, wherein Paul indicates, but does not positively assert, that he can "speak with the tongues of men and angels," a boast which 2 Cor. xii. 4 leads us to take literally. But how any one on earth could test the reality of assertion it is difficult to conceive. In 1 Cor. xiv. we see indications that "speaking with tongues" is little more or less than a sort of hysterical utterance of gibberish, which we may compare to the once celebrated chorus of Lilli-bullero-lero-lero-Lillibullero bullen a la. One may now ask, "Why did people think that it was part of the Christian's privileges or powers to speak with tongues?" The only answer which I can discover is indicated in Acts ii. 18, wherein we find it given as the opinion of Peter, that a certain vaticination in Joel applied to the followers of Jesus. The philosopher may wonder at the ignorance--possibly at the knowledge--which confounded "prophesying" with the utterance of unintelligible rubbish; but the philologist should be led to investigate more strictly the real signification of words, and to inquire into the theories which are traceable to false interpretations. Considerations such as these, which might be multiplied indefinitely, I have come to the belief that the Apostles of Jesus were no better, as regards their knowledge of foreign tongues, than their predecessors, the missionaries sent by Asokâ, or than the modern envoys sent out by a London Society. What renders it probable that Buddhist ascetics found their way, probably amongst the camp followers of Antiochus the Great, and endeavoured to promulgate their doctrines in western Asia, is the fact that a sect sprang up amongst the Jews after the Grecian conquest of Palestine--called "The Essenes," to which we have before referred, amongst whose tenets Buddhism and Judaism were closely mingled The asceticism practised by this sect was, so far as we know, different to anything known at that time in Greece or Western Asia, and as it came into fashion at the same time in Palestine as Indian elephants and Hindoo Mahouts, there is some reason for the belief that it was brought by disciples of Siddartha. Without dwelling upon this again, we return to the well ascertained fact that Buddhism was promulgated most widely in Eastern and Northern Asia about 250 b.c., that a collection of religious books was made about two hundred years prior to that date, and that these were revised again during Asokâ's reign. But, however earnest were the teachers and the taught, the scriptures which they respected were so voluminous and the facilities for multiplying them were so small, that it happened, as it did amongst early Christians, that many a church had no written book of the law. As a consequence of this, one part or another of Sakya's doctrines became exalted unduly in one locality, whilst in another a portion was left out of sight. Stories, also, of miracles became varied, just as we find that they have been by the writers in the New Testament, the tendency being, as in the history of the blind man near Jericho, to exaggerate the wonder--for example, Mark and Luke, chap. x. and xviii, give an account of one man being cured of blindness, whilst Matthew, chap, xx., tells us that there were two. The narrators under such circumstances act as if they thought that it is as easy for a divinity to heal two or two thousand as to cure one, and we who tolerate the practice in a Christian evangelist must not ridicule it in Buddhist disciples. When we contemplate the confusion that existed in the Christian church--the gradual deterioration of the faith taught by Jesus, and more especially by Paul, and the steady absorption of Pagan rites into the worship inaugurated by Peter and the other apostles, we can readily understand that in the course of six or seven hundred years there would be reason in countries distant from the home of Siddartha to deplore the gradual decadence of Buddhism, and a desire amongst the devout for tuition at the fountain-head. In modern times we have read of hierarchs coming from the uttermost parts of the earth to consult the Roman Pontiff upon points of discipline affecting the church, and we therefore see without surprise that, about A.D. 400, six hundred years after it had been planted, the congregation of Buddhists in China had within it men who determined to go to India, and bring back to their fellow-worshippers what they hoped would be a purer doctrine than that which they were accustomed to, and, if possible, to secure authentic books. Pilgrimage, with this object, cannot be regarded as being so absurd as that which has in modern days taken numbers of Christians to Lourdes, in the Pyrenees, or to St. Paray-le-Monial. Ere we describe this Chinese search after truth, let us imagine a Christian from Central Russia determining to seek for enlightenment at Antioch about a.d. 640, and subsequently at the seven churches named in the Apocalypse--and afterwards writing his experience. We should be certain to find him bewailing the fall of Christianity and the rise of Islam. We may indeed affirm that if such a history was now to be discovered undated, we should regard it as having been written before or after the date named, according as "the churches" were described as being the seat of Mahommedism or of Christianity. Still further, if in every place which this traveller visited, he found a general belief in the stories told of Jesus and in the efficacy of his doctrine, we should consider this as proof that the people remained faithful to their early teaching. If, on the other hand, the wanderer found himself proscribed in any locality as a benighted heathen, without knowledge of the way of salvation--he would naturally think that a teacher had given to its inhabitants instruction different from that which was familiar to him. I do not exaggerate when I say that a genuine account of the travels in search of sound Christian doctrine through every part of Europe in the fifth century of our era, would be invaluable as an indication of the tenure of certain doctrines, not only in various localities, but as to the existence or the reverse of dogmas now regarded as of supreme importance. Such a manuscript, which, however, relates to Buddhism and not to Christianity, exists in China, and it has lately been translated into English _Travels of Fah-Hian and Sung-Yun, Buddhist Pilgrims from China to India_, 400 a.d. and 518 a.d., translated from the Chinese by Samuel Bea. (Trübner & Co., London, 1869.) It tells us, in a singularly terse style, how a large portion of China was traversed by these pilgrims;--of the terrible journey over the mountains to the north of Hindustan; of a visit to the birth-place of Siddartha; to Benares, to Calcutta, and to Ceylon;--with an account of the return voyage in a good-sized ship back again to China. Everywhere, with one single exception, they find the law of Buddha prevailing. The place referred to as exceptional is Yopoti, Java, of which it is said: "In this country, heretics and Brahmins flourish; but the law of Buddha is not much known" (p. 168). In every other spot which they visit the Chinese wanderers speak applaudingly of the hold which the religion of Siddartha has upon the people, and the exemplary conduct of the faithful. From the beginning of the journey to the end, the enquirers appear always to have found the same form of faith which had been preached in their own country six hundred years before. The most careful investigator fails to find a shadow of those doctrines in which the teaching of Jesus differs from that of Sakya. There is not any allusion made to an impending dissolution of the world, to baptism, or to any sacrament; every remark relates to the essentials of Buddhism as known in each place where Europeans have been able to peruse the authorized Buddhist scriptures. We may now quote some passages bearing on important points. About the sources of the Indus: "All the priests asked Fah-Hian what he knew as to the time when the law of Buddha began to spread eastward from their country." Hian replied, "On enquiry, men of those lands agreed in saying that, according to an ancient tradition, Shamans from India began to carry the sacred books of Buddha beyond the river, from the time when the image of Maitreya Bodhisatwa was set up." This image was set up three hundred years or so after the Nirvana of Buddha (about B.C. 243--or, according to some estimates, B.C. 177), which corresponds with the time of Pingwang of the Chan family (b.c. 770--the Chinese date of Buddha's Nirvana being different from that which is usually received in India.) Hence it may be said that the diffusion of the great doctrine can be attributed to the influence of this image. For, apart from the power of the divine teacher Mait-reya, who followed in the footsteps of Sakya, who would have been sufficient to cause the knowledge of the three precious ones to be spread so far, that even men on the outskirts of the world acquired that knowledge? We may conclude, therefore, with certainty, that the origin of this diffusion of the law of Buddha was no human work, but sprung from the same cause as the dream of Ming Ti (pp. 23-25). The three precious ones above referred to, are the Buddhist trinity, everywhere acknowledged, Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha--or, as some say, Buddha--the law and the church. The dream of Ming Ti resembles that which we know as the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, and foretells the coming of "the Saviour," one of the names given to Siddartha. The vision of a divine being, 70 feet high, with a body like gold, and his head glorious as the sun--one who is fanciful may here discern a likeness to the individual described in Rev. i. 13, seq.--induced the king to send to India to seek after the law of Fo, or Buddha. Some one speaking of two great towers adorned with all the precious substances, which had been erected at a certain town--the Taxila of the Greeks--to commemorate episodes in the life of Buddha, makes the remark "The kings, ministers, and people of all the surrounding countries vie with each other in making religious offerings at these places, in scattering flowers and burning incense continually" (p. 33). "In the city of Hilo is the Vitiara containing the relic of the skull-bone of Buddha. This Vitiara is entirely covered with plates of gold, and decorated with the seven precious substances (gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, cornelian, coral, and ruby.) The king of the country reverences in a high degree this sacred relic." As this example shows well the Buddhist veneration for memorials of the dead, I will not quote more. It is clear that old bones were regarded with religious awe in Hindostan before they were enshrined in Christendom. In the case above recorded, "extraordinary pains are taken to preserve the relic from theft or substitution, and the king offers flowers and incense in front of it daily, then bends his head to the ground before it in adoration, and departs." In another place Buddha's robe is kept, although we may fairly doubt whether he ever possessed one, but doubtless it is quite as authentic as "the holy coat" of Treves, or the Virgin Mary's milk. There is another relic of Sakya not yet copied by Christian pagans, viz., the shadow of the great teacher--which lives in a cave, and can only be seen by the faithful (p. 45, 46). We commend this to thaumaturgical Gallican divines, such as those who describe how certain it is that Mary of Judea came to show herself at Lourdes, and to talk French. On arriving at the Punjaub the record states, "The law of Buddha is prosperous and flourishing here..." On seeing disciples from China coming among them they were much affected, and spoke thus: "How wonderful to think that men from the ends of the earth should know the character of this religion, and should come thus far to seek the law of Buddha. We received from them all that we required, and were treated according to the provisions of the law" (p. 51,52). "All the kingdoms beyond the sandy deserts are spoken of as belonging to Western India. The kings of all these countries firmly believe in the law of Buddha" (pp. 53, 54). In the following, we may see the prototype of monasteries, "From the time of Buddha's Nirvana, the kings and nobles of all these countries began to erect viharas for the priesthood, and to endow them with lands, gardens, houses, and also men and oxen to cultivate them. The records of these endowments being engraved on sheets of copper, have been handed down from one king to another, so that no one has dared to deprive them of possession, and they continue to this day to enjoy their proper revenues. All the resident priests have chambers, beds, coverlets, food, drink, and clothes provided for them without stint or reserve. Thus it is in all places. The priests, on the other hand, continually employ themselves in reciting their scriptures, in works of benevolence, or in profound meditation" (pp. 55, 56). It is very important that we should notice, although it is unnecessary to dwell upon the fact, that the pilgrims visited the spot whence Buddha went up to heaven to preach his law to his mother Maya, who died when her child was seven days old, and, consequently, long before he became "the Saviour." The son remained with his parent three months (p. 62.) Jesus, it will be remembered, only preached to the spirits in prison during a day and a-half--which, by common consent, passes amongst Christians for three days. I may also notice that there is mentioned (p. 66), an idea that three Buddhas existed before the advent of Sakya Muni, and that the following are their precepts, translated from the Chinese copy of a Buddhist book:--1. The heart carefully avoiding idle dissipation, diligently applying itself to religion, forsaking all lust and consequent disappointment, fixed and immovable, attains Nirvana (rest.) 2. Practising no vice, advancing in the exercise of virtue, and purifying the mind from evil; this is the doctrine of all the Buddhas. 3. To keep one's tongue, to cleanse one's mind, to do no ill--this is the way to purify oneself throughout, and to attain this state of discipline is the doctrine of all the great sages (p. 66). The Buddhists also preserve impressions of Siddartha's feet and show them to pilgrims, just as certain papal priests show the impressions of St. Peter's feet at a church a little outside Rome, on the Appian way. The pilgrims "visit Kapilavastu, now a desert, but once the royal residence of Suddhodana. There are here a congregation of priests and ten families of lay people. In the ruined palace there is a picture of the Prince Apparent and his mother (supposed to be) taken at the time of his miraculous conception. The prince is represented as descending towards his mother riding on a white elephant." This elephant came from the Tusita heaven surrounded by light like the sun, and entered the left side of the mother. As the elephant is the strongest of known terrestrial animals, it certainly represented "The power of the Highest" (see Luke i. 35), and we may draw one of two inferences--either that the sons of Maya and Mary were conceived equally miraculously, or that the story of one is just as true or as incredible as that of the other. Certainly the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was known in India long before it was enunciated by a Christian Pope in Rome. Perhaps, had Pio Nono known that he was copying a Buddhistic story, he would have wavered long before he assimilated his religion to that of Siddartha. At the same locality a tower is raised to mark the spot where the Rishi (Saint or Prophet) Asita calculated the horoscope of Sakya, and declared that he would become a supreme Buddha--a legend which is very similar to that told of old Simeon and the infant Jesus (Luke ii. 25, seq.). The pilgrims were also shown the garden--not a stable--in which Maya brought forth her son, and wherein immediately afterwards the infant walked. Two dragon kings--perhaps wise men from the East--washed the infant's body, and this spot afterwards became a sacred well (p. 88). We must pass by an account of a miracle, to the full as wonderful and quite as incredible as that of Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, who left their bones at Cologne because it has no distinct reference to Buddha. (P. 97)--But I may mention that the Chinese writer states after the end of the story, that a certain violation of the law occurred one hundred years after Sakya's death, and upon this record Mr Beal has the following important note--"This refers to the second great council of the Buddhist church. According to Singhalese authorities (Mahawanso) there were three great convocations or councils--1st, immediately after Buddha's death to compile the authorised scriptures; 2d, to refute certain errors that had crept into the church; 3d, under the great Asokâ," (p. 99). We may doubt the value of the Mahawanso, but at the same time we may express a wish that early Christians had even a tradition of a council to compile authorised scriptures about the son of Mary ere time sufficient had elapsed to allow "the marvellous" to develop itself into "the incredible." In like manner I must omit the description of a procession of images, amongst which that of Buddha is conspicuous; the fête is held at Patna, supposed to be the ancient Palimbothra where Asokâ reigned. It resembles in almost all its details the grand processions of the Papists on certain occasions,--lamps, lights, games, riot, and religious offerings are mingled together for the healthy and for the sick, and wonderful cures are provided as far as possible. To this account is to be appended a very significant, perhaps I might say satirical, note by the translator of the pilgrims' manuscript. "From the whole of this account (of the procession of images), it would seem that the Buddhist worship had already begun to degenerate from its primitive simplicity and severity. Plays and music and concerts, are strictly forbidden by the rules of the order; we can begin to see how Buddhism lapsed into Sivite worship, and sank finally into the horrors of Jaganath" (p. 107). To the thoughtful reader of our christian history, this note upon Buddhist processions of images is painfully pregnant. It reminds us that the followers of Maya's son and Mary's alike lapsed into paganism, and almost by the same stages. We cannot accuse the Hindoos of copying the orgies of the Christian saturnalia or carnival, nor do we think that the Europeans cared to imitate the Hindoos; but what we do believe is that both parties have fallen lower and lower from their pristine purity in consequence of the gradually increasing feeling that the generality of human beings can only be brought under priestly power by an appeal to their animal propensities. Some affirm, with great show of argumentation, that it is man's bestial propensities which lead his race to hell. It may be so, but then, on the other hand, it is certain that ecclesiastics endeavour to chain us to their chariots by pandering to, managing, exciting, or otherwise playing upon those propensities, which man has in common with the sheep, the ox, the tiger, the serpent, and the elephant. Every form of religion, yet promulgated, that appeals to sound sense, thought, and reason, has failed from the want of followers capable of dominating their passions. Than a pure religion based upon thoughts such as Sakya Muni and the son of Mary gave utterance to, nothing seems grander, but such is its nature that it can only be fully embraced by a few. If all are poor, none can live upon alms--if all sell their worldly goods to purchase Heaven, no buyers will be found in the market. The Buddhist and the Christian anchorite may, for a time, live on charity, yet each succeeding generation of ascetics will more and more dislike the plan of winning food by misery. We have seen how kings made grand provision for the comfort of the priestly followers of the son of Maya; and in later times, we have seen how the followers of the son of Mary have, by artfulness, provided many similar homes for themselves. Yet, with all this, there are both Buddhists and Christians who have protested, by their actions, against religious luxury of every kind. Each of my readers may judge of what spirit he is, by asking himself whether he regards such individuals as wise or foolish. The pilgrims pass on to the place where five hundred saints assembled after Sakya's death to arrange the collection of sacred books (p. 118)--thence to the spot where Siddartha bathed, and the Dêva or Angel held out the branch of a tree to assist him in coming out of the water (p. 121)--thence to the spot where Buddha was tempted by three daughters of Maka as courtesans, a more severe temptation than befel the Christian Anthony--and by Mara himself with a vast army; but all uselessly, for Sakya was as impregnable as Jesus. And we find that in the same spot he subsequently underwent mortification, not for forty days only, but for six years. All of these localities are marked by towers, which must, according to ecclesiastical reasoning, demonstrate the truth of the legends. After a very long search--for the purpose of Fah Hian was to seek for copies of the _Vinaya Pitaka_--he found his exertions to find a copy of the sacred work were useless, because, throughout the whole of Northern India, the various masters trusted to tradition only for their knowledge of the precepts, and had no written codes. The pilgrims, however, when they arrived in Middle India, found a copy, "which was that used by the first great assembly of priests convened during Buddha's lifetime" (p. 142); this appears to have been generally regarded as the most correct and complete (p. 144). Fah Hian also obtained "one copy of Precepts, in manuscript, comprising about 7000 gâthas (verses or stanzas). This was the same as that generally used in China. In this place also an imperfect copy of the Abhidharma was obtained, containing 6000 gâthas; also, an abreviated form of Sutras, or Precepts, containing 2500 verses in an abreviated form; also, another expanded Sutra, with 5000 verses, and a second copy of the Abhidharma," according to the school of the Mahâ Sanghihas (the greater vehicle). "On this account Fah Hian abode in the place (Patma, the ancient Palibothra) for the space of three years, engaged in learning to read the Sanscrit books, to converse in that language, and to copy the Precepts. Here his companion, To Ching, remained; but Fah Hian, desiring with his whole heart to spread the knowledge of the Precepts throughout China, returned alone" (p. 146). This pilgrim then goes to the kingdom of Champa, where he stopped two years, to copy out sacred Sutras, and to take impressions of the figures used in worship. Here the law of Buddha was generally respected. He then sailed in a great merchant vessel for Ceylon (p. 148). From this expression we presume that he entered a seaport, and, as such, one likely to have been reached by some Christian missionary, if any had ever visited India, as Paul attained Asia Minor, Italy, &c. All that we learn about it, however, is in a translator's note, which tells us that the place was mentioned by another China man, Hiouen Thsang, who spoke of the number of heretical sects who were mixed together here--Buddhism being here corrupted at an early period by local superstitions. In Ceylon Fah Hian remained two years, and, continuing his search for the sacred books, obtained a copy of the Vinaya Pitaka, of the great Agama, and the miscellaneous Agama (books of elementary doctrine), also a volume of miscellaneous collections from the Pitakas, all of which were hitherto entirely unknown in China. Having obtained these works in the original language (Pali), he forthwith shipped himself on board a great merchant vessel, which carried about 200 men, and started for his native land (p. 166). "After Fah Hian left home, he was five years in arriving at Mid India. He resided there during six years, and was three more ere he arrived again in China. He had successively passed through thirty different countries." In all the countries of India, after passing the sandy desert (of Gobi), the dignified carriage of the priesthood, and the surprising influence of religion (amongst the people), cannot be adequately described... "Having been preserved by Divine power (by the influences of the Three honourable Ones), and brought through all dangers safely, he was induced to commit to writing the record of his travels, desirous that the virtuous of all ages may be informed of them as well as himself" (p. 173). After reading this account, we think that no thoughtful man can reasonably assert that Christianity was taught in India at an early period, was widely adopted, and became the parent of Buddhism. If, in rejoinder, we are told that no writers have asserted that there were Christians in India in olden times, except in Malabar, the answer is, that these were described by those who first met with their successors as totally distinct from the Hindoos, and, consequently, neither Buddhists nor Brahmins. Moreover, we are told that they were regarded by the Holy Inquisition of Europe as heretics, and were, consequently, persecuted by the Christians (see Gibbon's _Roman Empire_, vol. viii, 355). Rosse, in his book of dates (London, 1858), speaks of an Indian embassy to Constantine the Great, a.d. 334, and another sent to Constantius the Second, but received by Julian, A.D. 362. I cannot, however, as yet, find his authority. But Socrates, in his _Ecclesiastical History_, book i, ch. 19, about A.D. 331, speaks of a treaty which had been in existence a short time before, between the Romans and the Indians, but which had been recently violated. He also, in the same chapter, states that there were Christians amongst the Roman merchants in India--no town or locality being given, however, so that we cannot test his assertion--but that they did not then unite to worship. We find also, from the same chapter, that up to that period there were no Christian Indians known. Coupling the foregoing fragments of history together, we may safely assert that India, generally, was Buddhist in A.D. 400, and that, according to Pliny, the Romans, or, rather, the Alexandrians, had been in yearly communication with the country, for at least three centuries, at the time of Constantine. As it appears that there were Roman merchants in India, so we presume that there were Hindoo traders resident in Egypt. The presumption is, that these were Buddhists, and that they were attended, or followed, by missionary Buddhist priests. Absolute proof of this there is none. We now turn to Gibbon's history, and inquire into the period when monastic asceticism first began to prevail in Egypt, the necessary residence of our presumed Hindoo traffickers. We find (see _Decline and Fall_, chapter 37) that Anthony, an Egyptian, and unable to write in Greek, living in the lower parts of Thebais, distributed his patrimony, deserted his family and native home, lived amongst tombs, or in a ruined tower, then in the desert, and then in some lonely spot, near the Red Sea, where he found shade and water. It certainly seems clear that he took the son of Maya, rather than the child of Mary, as his exemplar. At and after this time, the rage for asceticism spread amongst the inhabitants of Eastern Africa as conspicuously as it had done in Oriental Asia at the time of Asoka. It is difficult to read the chapter of Gibbon's history to which we refer, and a history of Buddhism, without regarding Egypt, and her miserable ascetics, in the same light as we look upon the folks of Hindustan and Thibet. If Jesus of Nazareth had dictated such a life, surely his early followers would have been more conspicuous in their habitual mortifications than their later disciples were. The son of man--the child of Mary--"came eating and drinking," and was called "a gluttonous man and a wine bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners" (Luke vii. 34; Matt, xi. 19). Not so the son of Maya. The Apostles of Jesus had power to lead about a wife or a sister, and they did so. Neither Paul nor Peter shunned woman's society, nor did they practise poverty; nay, they worked with their own hands, lest they should have to live on alms (2 Thess. iii. 8), and they collected money for poor saints from the wealthier brethren. There was no asceticism here, nor can we find, in any part of the New Testament, a text upon which a system of austerity can be founded. We might, perhaps, think comparatively little of the parallel which we have drawn between Buddhism, and Christianity, did we not recognize the fact, that almost everyone of the later developments of the latter had, for centuries before, found a place in the former, even including, as we have mentioned, the dogma of the immaculate conception. To the preceding considerations we may add another, which, as Ivanhoe said of himself, "is of lesser renown and lower rank, and assumed into the honourable company less to aid their enterprise than to make up their number." Standing alone it may have small power, but as a link in a chain it is important. We refer to the abundant testimony which we possess of the strength of Grecian influence upon the tenets of Christianity. Without laying any stress upon the fact that the whole of the New Testament extant is written in Greek, we may advert to the current belief amongst thoughtful scholars, that the so-called Gospel of St. John was written by some Alexandrian Greek about 150 A.D., or by one who was imbued with the philosophy of Plato. Sharpe has distinctly shown that the doctrine of the trinity was held in Ancient Egypt, and first adopted, then promulgated, by the Egyptian or Alexandrian divines. The influence of Greek ideas upon Philo Judæus is very conspicuous. We may now turn our attention to one statement about the Athenians, viz., "that they and the strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else than to tell and to hear some new thing," and that they were so particular--in this respect resembling the Ancient Peruvians--in adopting foreign gods, that they had an altar to the Unknown Deity (Acts xvii). To this we must add what Sozomen says of them (_Ecclesiastical History_, book ii. chap. 24)--that the most celebrated philosophers amongst the Greeks took pleasure in exploring unknown cities and regions. Plato, the friend of Socrates, dwelt for a time amongst the Egyptians, in order to acquaint himself with their manners and customs. He likewise sailed to Sicily, to examine its craters.... These craters were likewise explored by Empedocles. Democritus of Coos relates that he visited many cities, and countries, and nations, and that eighty years of his life were spent in travelling in foreign lands. Besides these philosophers, thousands of wise men amongst the Greeks, ancient and modern, habituated themselves to travel. Solon, it is well known, travelled to the court of Croesus, and it is affirmed that Pythagoras visited India. Sozomen makes the above statement to explain how it was that Merope of Tyre, with two young relatives, visited India, the two latter becoming its first two bishops. Nothing is more probable than that Greeks, who had resided for a time in India, on their return, believing that as they had recognized in Hindostan an earnest form of Christianity, differing from the Alexandrian standard only in a few minor points, thought it right to introduce into western religion Buddhist practices--first into Egypt, _via_ Alexandria, and thence into Europe. We certainly cannot prove that they did it, but there is a very good reason for believing so. The doctrines of Jesus emanated, we believe, from some early Asokâ's missionaries; whilst the doctrines of the Alexandrians and the Ascetics, came from subsequent Buddhists, who placed their stamp on Christianity once more. Thus we have been led, by a strict inquiry into every extant testimony known, to believe that the faith taught by Siddartha, was held for at least 250--and most probably, 500 years, before our era. Still further, we have been led to believe, from the extraordinary energy and success of Buddhist missionaries in the three centuries before Christ--a success before which all Christian missionary enterprise pales--that emissaries from Asokâ's colleges of priests, penetrated westward with the Greeks as far as the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and forced some devout Jews to modify their belief. But, though it is probable that the Hindoo teachers introduced the morality inculcated by Sakya Muni, it seems certain that they could not induce their Hebrew disciples to abandon their implicit trust in those writings which they had been induced to think were absolutely inspired or written by direct command of the Almighty--consequently, Christianity must be regarded not as pure Buddhism, but a form of it modified by Jewish traditions. But when those who embraced the religion of Jesus, had learned to distrust the literal truth of the Old Testament, and had the certainty that the prophesies about the immediate destruction of the world were false, they came again into contact with Buddhist teaching, and were content to forego Judaism. They did not, however, give up Jesus as the Saviour. Instead of believing with Sakya, that man suffered for his own sin, they clung to the legend of Adam and Eve, and affirmed that suffering was introduced into the whole world by this very original couple. Instead of Nirvana, their heaven was Ouranos--the sky above them. Instead of an abode where all the senses were at rest, they adopted the idea of a golden city, with a river of crystal running through it; brilliant with jewels, and guarded by gates and walls in which all the good should spend their time in singing and music. The Christians adopted all the Asceticism, dirt, and love of vermin, that the disciples of Sakya, and even Siddartha himself, delighted in--but they nevertheless clung to the idea that the world was sure to be destroyed, and that Jesus would come again. It is indeed, difficult to reconcile the belief, that he who washed his disciples' feet, and praised a woman for cleaning and anointing his own, sanctioned an idea which, throughout centuries, urged religionists to be filthy; yet we must do so if we are orthodox. We have, indeed, similar anomalies now. Devout Christians tell us that this world ought to be made a preparation for another; and that the main joy of heaven will be an indefinite increase of knowledge. Yet these same people affirm, sometimes in distinct terms, that an extension of scientific attainments, and a constant inquiry into the will of God, as expressed in the works of His hands, are snares of the Devil, and so to be avoided by all good people. The Orthodox as a rule believe--though few venture to affirm it, that Jehovah loves the fools the best, and that ignorance is godliness. CHAPTER VI. Estimation of the Bible. The Dhammapada and Hebrew (sacred) books. Certain important dates. Jews were never missionaries. Precepts of Buddha. Contrasts. How to overcome undesirable thoughts. Knowledge beats prayer. Sunday proverbs. New birth. Divines preach brotherly love in the pulpit, and provoke hate when out of it. Buddhist precept is "do as I do," not "do as I say." The narrow way of the Gospel finds an origin in Buddhism. One law broken all law broken--a Buddhist maxim. Sakya taught about a future world. Parallel passages. Effect of Buddhist and Christian teaching. Parallel passages about truth and almsgiving. Ignorance a Buddhist vice and a Christian virtue. _Suppressio veri, suggestio falsi_ in the pulpit Classes in the religious world. Why ignorance is cherished. Ignorance often more profitable than knowledge. Examples. Charlatans live by the fools. Honest doctors and parsons must be poor. Poverty an essential part of Buddhism. Hierarchs are quite unnecessary to the enlightened man. Parallel passages again. Unphilosophical dicta in Buddhism and Bible. Prosperity not a proof of propriety, and misery not always a reward of badness. Lions and lambs. Design in creation. Right and wrong--do they exist before the Creator. False analogies. Persecution a Christian but not a Buddhist practice. Popgun thunders from the Vatican. Age not equivalent to wisdom. Siddartha did not prophesy, and so made no mistake about that which was to follow. More negatives and positives. Another contrast No obscene stories in Buddhist as in Jewish scriptures--no legend of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, of Onan, Judah and Tamar, Zimri, Cozbi, and Phinehas, and a host of others. A good deal of nonsense in all ancient writings. The foolish stories and prophecies of the Bible--if abstracted, little remains. The little might be improved by extracts from Plato, Epictetus, and Buddhist scriptures, and even from those of Confucius. From the earliest times which I can remember, I have heard the English Bible spoken of with the utmost reverence, as the undoubted word of God, as a revelation of the will, ways, and even the thoughts of the Supreme Being. Everything which it contains has been regarded as infallibly true, and the wisdom, goodness, mercy, and justice of its doctrines and laws have been judged to be unimpeachable. From the pulpit of many earnest divines I have heard innumerable sermons whose burden has been praise of, and admiration for, the morality of the Old and New Testaments, the sublimity of the language therein used, and the loftiness of the thoughts embodied. From those same teachers, and from a still greater number of laymen, I have heard the assertion repeatedly made that the Bible must be divinely inspired, because no other set of men, except those who composed its books, could write so powerfully; and depict so graphically, the wants, the woes, the pleasures, the passions, the aspirations, and the doubts of the human mind. By a great majority, if not by the whole of our imperfectly educated ministers and people, the assertion to which we here refer is raised to the position of an argument; and any opponent who ventures to question the truth of the assumption, is challenged to show a book of divinity equal or superior to the Bible. The worthlessness of the argument might be readily shown to any one accustomed to use his reason, by pointing out that the religious books of the Ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Medea, Persians, and Etruscans, are lost to us. We may compare the assertion with that which Englishmen might have made, to the effect that the British breed of horses was superior to any other, for no one could show them a better; yet as soon as our Crusaders became acquainted with the Arabian steed, the value of the assumption was destroyed. Yet such a remark would be wholly inoperative on the mind of every bigot whose judgment of evidence is always bribed by his prejudice. Consequently, to make any serious impression upon the mind of the Bibliolater, it is desirable, if possible, to make copies of the holy images worshipped by other nations, under the name of sacred books, and to place these side by side with that grotesque production, which, for our purposes, may be compared to Diana of the Ephesians--the thing which fell down from Jupiter. Yet even when we do bring from distant countries, to which in our complacency we give the name of "heathen," copies of their deified books, and show their equality with, or superiority to that which we are told was arranged by the disposition of angels (Acts vii. 53)--the scriptures that Paul (2 Tim. iii. 16) affirms were entirely given by inspiration of God [--Greek--], see also 1 Pet. i. 11, 12,--we are met by the assertion, if the equality is allowed, that the Pagan writings have been copied from, or are traceable to, the writers in the Old or in the New Testament. Whenever a thoughtless theologian asserts that such a thing _must_ be so, he is not by any means particular as to the facts upon which he bases his belief. This weakness of his is so conspicuous to the logical observer, that he sometimes feels pity at having to wound a mind so earnest as to be unable to use its reason. He almost regards himself as a man fighting a child or a weak woman. Yet men will, in their power and knowledge, deprive a baby of a bon-bon, which it is sucking eagerly, if they know that it is poisonous, and will lay violent hands upon a tender girl who, in a whirlwind of passion, is about to throw herself before a railway train. After the event both the individuals may learn to thank the roughness which saved them; and I feel sure that many an earnest religionist, who now thinks that the philosophers are treating him cruelly, by trying to deprive him of a cherished faith, will ultimately be grateful for having been induced to cease grovelling in the dust of a coarse antiquity. If we endeavour to ascertain the basis of the belief that everything which is good _must_ have come from the Bible, we find that it exists in the assertion that the Jews were the chosen people of God, selected by Him to receive a record of His past doings and His future desires. Hence it is argued, that all who have not been taught by the Jews, or through their influence, are without God in the world--poor, benighted pagans. To support assumptions so monstrous as this, there is not a tittle of evidence beyond the existence of certain stories in some books, said to contain a truthful record of facts. But although the theologian heaps up protestation upon asseveration until the mass attains an imposing size, the whole is not of more substantial value than a huge bubble blown by an energetic school boy. If millions could be brought to believe that such a hollow sphere was a solid, painted with the most resplendent colours obtained from the celestial mansions, it would not make it other than a film of soap and water filled with air. Yet though the unanimous consent of myriads cannot convert foam into a solid substance, a mass of froth may be treated as if it were something better, so long as all agree not to test its qualities; and any book may in like manner be regarded as of divine origin, so long as everybody determines not to test the reality of the opinion. We can easily imagine that those who have been educated to believe in the absolute density of a bubble, must be greatly distressed when it bursts. Indeed in every mercantile community we see frequent illustrations of this. Designing men weave a plausible story, and by inflated words induce a number of thoughtless people to believe their statements, adopt their promises, and act upon their recommendation. Whilst all seems to be prosperous, every dupe repels with indignation the statement that the whole of his confraternity are deceived. If faith in the stability of a banking house could have upheld it, Overend & Gurnets would never have broken. If then faith, the most complete and child-like trust in the truth of anything,--say particularly in a certain book--will not make it valuable if it be in reality worthless, then all those who wish to feel beneath them the everlasting arms of truth, should inquire into current beliefs rather than take everything for granted. At the time when the wealth, power, and stability of the Bank above referred to were implicitly believed in by the many, and especially trusted by its shareholders, there were, outside of its pale, many individuals who felt sure that the establishment was very shaky, and a few who were aware that it was toppling to its fall. If then, at that time, any customer or proprietor, feeling a doubt about its safety, should have endeavoured to investigate the rumours which were adverse to it; and should have acted as reason dictated, after he had weighed the alleged facts on both sides, he might have came to a safe decision and saved his money. What is true in this case may be applied to the Bible--the Bank upon which so many draw large drafts, and in whose stability they have unbounded confidence. The thoughtless may, and doubtless will, continue to trust it implicitly--the thoughtful will probably consult, not only the Bibliolaters, but those who put no faith whatever in the volume, and judge for themselves. The fear which many men have of biblical inquiry, has for a long period struck me as being inexplicable, inasmuch as it is at variance with the assertion of these very same people, that an examination of the book must prove it to be infallibly true. But investigation into a supposed truth can only end by confirming it fully, and thus making the truth more useful; or by demonstrating that the belief entertained is untenable. It has been the dread--nay the certainty, of the latter result, which has deterred many great minds from investigating the matter. Amongst these the late Professor Faraday was conspicuous, for we learn from a letter in the Athenaeum of Jan. 7, 1870, written by one of his own personal friends, that he--perhaps the most accomplished seeker after physical truth in his time, declined firmly to search into the value of the commonly received notions respecting "the scriptures," as he felt sure that his faith in them would thereby be shaken. Yet he was illogical enough to use them as a basis for his theological teaching. He preached to others from texts in which he had no confidence; and supported his doctrines by quotations from a book which, in his secret heart, he felt was valueless as an exponent of historical truth, or orthodox teaching. Before we proceed to the comparison between the "Dhammapada" and the Bible, it will be judicious to place fairly before the reader the points which we hope to elucidate. We wish to show, by a collation of dates and doctrines, that the two are wholly independent of each other, and as we have elsewhere remarked, that if there has been any relationship between Buddhist and Christian writings, the first have had more than two centuries' precedence over the last. We wish to compare the morality taught by Buddha, with that promulgated in the Old and New Testaments. We desire impartially to examine into the question, whether the claim for inspiration can be allowed in either one case or the other, or in both together--whether, indeed, it is possible to believe the Hebrew scriptures to be dictated by God, without giving a similar confidence to the teachings of Sakya Muni--or, assuming that there is to be found a code of pure morality or ethics which we may suppose to be of universal application, we shall endeavour to ascertain whether the Hebrews and the followers of Mary, or the disciples of the son of Maya Deva, have made the nearest approach to its discovery and establishment. Collaterally we shall examine whether Jesus has a greater claim than Buddha to be the Son of God. The Dhammapada which has recently (Trübner & Co., London, 1870*) been translated by Max Mülller from the Pali, is one of the many books which profess to give, as our Gospels and Epistles do of Christ, the teachings or precepts of Buddha. These were for some two or three centuries traditional only; but about the period, B.C. 300, many, if not most of them, were committed to writing. As far as can be ascertained, the year b.c. 246 was the period of the first Buddhist council under Asok, and shortly after this, Mahuida, a priestly son of Asokâ, went as a missionary to Ceylon; other emissaries went to Burmah, China, Japan, and it is believed elsewhere. The oral promulgation of the Dhammapada would probably begin about b.c. 560--twenty years or thereabouts before the death of Siddartha. If we turn to contemporary history in the west of Asia, we find that at this period Jerusalem was in ruins, and the Jews were captives in Babylonia--no copies of any Hebrew sacred book were known to be in existence (2 Esdras xiv. 21; 2 Maccabees ii. 1-13--see also 1 Maccabees i. 21-23), and, so far as we could learn, India was a country wholly unknown to the Shemitic race. The acquaintanceship between Hindustan and Europe seems to have been made in the time when the Greek monarch, Alexander, overthrew Darius of Persia. Alexander invaded India about b.c. 327, consequently we infer that there was no possibility of Buddha being influenced by western notions in b.c. 560. * _Buddhaghosa's Parables_, translated from Burmese, by Capt T. Rogers; with an introduction, containing Buddha's Dhammapada, or "Path of Virtue," by Max Müller. Trübner & Co., London, 1870. To these considerations we must add the fact that the Jews have never been, from the earliest to the latest times, a missionary nation,--indeed, their laws and precepts forced them to be so peculiarly reserved, that even if they had known about India they would not have sent their emissaries there, inasmuch as the Mosaic law obliged them to present themselves at the Temple at Jerusalem thrice a-year, which was wholly incompatible with distant travel. Moreover, there are many extant histories to show that intelligent westerns went to India for knowledge and religion, and never seemed to think of carrying their own faith thither. The whole course of history points to religion and civilization coming westerly from India or Central Asia. The dates above given will clearly show that Sakya Muni could not have derived his ideas from the teaching of Jesus, or of the Talmudists, neither of whom were in existence when he flourished. Whatever similarity, therefore, we find in the doctrines, &c., of the two, cannot be accounted for by supposing that Christian missionaries carried the New Testament to India. The reverse is far more probable, as we have demonstrated in a preceding chapter. Some inquirers into the history of the sons of Maya Deva and of Mary are so convinced of the priority of the first, and of the close resemblance of the incidents in the lives and in the teaching of the two, that they have found themselves forced, reluctantly, to consider the question--whether Christianity is not Buddhism altered in some respects by Judaism. This point having been elsewhere spoken of, we will not pursue it. But a far more important, and, for many Christians, a more momentous inquiry, is, whether we can speak of the Son of Mary as the offspring of Jehovah, and yet affirm that the child of Maya Deva was nothing but a common man. So deeply have some been moved by this consideration, that I have positively heard the opinion broached, that the Indian sage was the very same as he who subsequently was put to death in Jerusalem. Wild though the allegation is, there is quite as great an amount of probability in it as in the assertion that Jesus went and preached unto those spirits which were sometime disobedient, i.e., in the time of Noah (1 Pet. iii. 19, 20), and were, consequently, then in prison, or that Buddha went to his dead mother, and converted her to his own faith. About supernatural births we shall treat in a succeeding part. Without incumbering our pages with all the precepts of the Dhammapada, we will copy a few in detail to show the reader their style, and then we will only quote those which are most appropriate to our subject. The opening paragraphs singularly resemble those in Bacon's _Novum Organon_, and run thus--"All that we are, is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of him who draws the carriage (lv.)." 2. "All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him" (lvi. et. seq.). 3. "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me--hatred in those who harbour such thoughts will never cease."** 4. "He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me--hatred in those who do not harbour such thoughts will cease." 5. "For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love"--this is an old rule. * The figures refer to the separate precepts, which are given in numerical order. ** With this and the following saying we may compare the words of the Psalms--"Do not I hate those, O Lord, that hate thee? and am I not grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with a perfect hatred; I count them mine enemies" (Ps. cxxxix. 21, 22). The words of David, said to be a man after God's own heart, are equally opposed to the law of love, viz., "Thou hast given me the necks of my enemies, that I might destroy them that hate me" (2 Sam. xxii. 41; Ps. xviii. 40); I shall see my desire on them that hate me" (Ps. cxviii. 7). In Deuteronomy we find, moreover, that indulgence in hatred is attributed to the Almighty, "who repayeth them that hate Him to their face to destroy them: He (God) will not be slack to him that hateth Him, he will repay him to his face" (chap. vii. 10). Hatred of their enemies is, indeed, everywhere encouraged in the Jewish Scriptures, called sacred, and the Hebrew Jehovah is described as one with whom the power to hate and revenge Himself is a favourite luxury. 6. "And some do not know that we must come to an end here; but others know it, and hence their quarrels cease." 7. "He who lives looking for pleasures only, his senses uncontrolled, immoderate in his enjoyments, idle and weak, Mara (the Tempter, the Adversary, or Satan) will certainly overcome him, as the wind throws down a weak tree." 8. "He who lives without looking for pleasures, his senses well controlled, in his enjoyments moderate, faithful and strong, Mara will certainly not overcome him, any more than the wind throws down a rocky mountain." 11. "They who imagine truth in untruth, and see untruth in truth, never arrive at truth, but follow vain desires." 15. "The evildoer mourns in this world, and he mourns in the next, he mourns in both.".... 16. "The virtuous man delights in this world, and he delights in the next; he delights in both." We may pause here, and ask ourselves whether, throughout the whole of the Old Testament, we can find a single passage which so distinctly points to a future state as does this Buddhistic teaching. Yet bibliolaters assert that the effusions of Jewish writers were inspired by God! Mortal men cannot tell what takes place after their bodies have become dissipated into various chemical compounds; consequently, they cannot decide, with certainty, which deserves the greater credit for accuracy--the Dhammapada, or the Hebrew Scriptures; but all those who believe in the teaching of Jesus are bound to acknowledge that the Indian sage was inspired by a power superior to that which is said to have dictated to the Israelite. How profitably, again, might the following observations be enunciated from our pulpits, instead of the vapid and superficial divinity, which disgraces both the utterer and the listener:-- 21. "Reflection is the path of immortality, thoughtlessness the path of death. Those who reflect do not die; those who are thoughtless are as if dead already." 25. "By rousing himself, by reflection, by restraint and control, the wise man may make for himself an island, which no flood can overwhelm." 27. "Follow not after vanity, nor after the enjoyment of love and lust. He who reflects and meditates obtains ample joy" We dare not affirm that the writer of the first epistle of John was familiar with the Dhammapada, but his words (chap. ii, v. 15), "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world," &c., are as purely Buddhistic as if he had known the doctrine of the Indian sage. We doubt whether, in the whole Bible, a parallel passage to the following can be found:-- 36. "Let the wise man guard his thoughts, for they are difficult to perceive, very artful, and they rush wherever they list: thoughts well guarded bring happiness." It is true that in the Psalms, and elsewhere, there is a full recognition of the power of God to know, and even to punish man for, bad thoughts, but there is no precept recommending man to cultivate his mental powers for the pleasure which the task will bring. The following observation is equally to be commended:-- 40. "Knowing that this body is (fragile) like a jar, and making this thought firm like a fortress, one should attack Mâra (the tempter, or Satan, the adversary) with the weapon of knowledge, one should watch him when conquered, and never cease from the fight." A few moments' consideration here, will show the reader that there is a fundamental distinction between the theology of the East and West in reference to the management of "the thoughts of the heart." Jew and Christian teachers alike encourage their disciples to combat evil thoughts by prayer and by fasting, but they never once allude to the value of "knowledge" as a weapon. Yet, of its power, relatively to supplication, none can have a doubt. It it probable that no man or woman can attain to adult age without being aware of the intrusion, into their minds, of thoughts, whose presence greatly distresses the individual, and the worst of these is, that they take so complete a possession, as not to be driven away by any simple wrestling with them. In this emergency the devout Christian has recourse to prayer, which serves to nail the intruder even more closely to his seat. The philosopher, on the other hand, turns his mind to think actively upon some other subject than that which has intruded upon him, and as soon as he has fixed his attention upon the second, the first immediately withdraws. Smarting, for example, under a sense of ridicule from some accident which has happened to himself in a ball-room, or other assembly, a man may retire to his pillow, yet find thereupon no rest. He sees, every minute, the merry faces which laughed when he put the sprig of lavender, that his lovely partner gave him for a keepsake, behind his ear, as if it were a pen, and grinds his teeth with rage or shame. Yet, if he now betakes himself to go through the preparations which ought to be made to enable observers to notice accurately the transit of Venus, and then the means by which they can approximately ascertain the mean distance of the sun from the earth, he will find at once a pleasant refuge from his trouble, and fall asleep whilst extracting a square root. Those young men, and others, who, like the old saints are said to have done, often suffer much from what may be called "presumptuous desires of the flesh," will find the acquisition of knowledge is a powerful agent in subduing the cravings of lust, and hard thinking curbs our passions far more effectually than the scourge of the ascetic, or the prayers of the hermit. Mental activity, although it does not entirely remove it, does much to repress inordinate desire, and we consequently prefer the teaching of the son of Maya to that of any son of Abraham. Of the estimate of a well-regulated mind we have the following:-- 42. "Whatever a hater may do to a hater, or an enemy to an enemy, a wrongly-directed mind will do us greater mischief." 43. "Not a mother, not a father, nor any other relative, will do so much that a well-directed mind will not do us greater service." To this we can find no parallel in the Hebrew scriptures. Some of the following are equal to any of those proverbs attributed to Solomon:-- 76. "If you see an intelligent man who tells you where true treasures are to be found, who shows you what is to be avoided, and who administers reproofs, follow that wise man: it will be better, not worse, for those who follow him." 78. "Do not have evildoers for friends, do not have low people; have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men." 80. "Well-makers lead the water wherever they like, fletchers bend the arrow, carpenters bend a log of wood, wise people fashion themselves." 81. "As a solid rock is not shaken by the wind, wise people falter not amidst blame and praise." 94. "The gods even envy him whose senses have been subdued, like horses well broken in by the driver, who is free from pride and free from frailty." 97. "The man who is free from credulity, but knows the uncreated, who has cut all ties, removed all temptations renounced all desires, he is the greatest of men." A saying which is almost identical with "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth his spirit better than he that taketh a city" (Prov. xvi. 32). Those Christians who believe in works of supererogation, and trust to stores of merit laid up by certain saints, who have lashed their bodies and otherwise injured themselves, may read the following opinion with profit:-- 108. "Whatever a man sacrifices in this world as an offering or as an oblation for a whole year in order to gain merit, the whole of it is not worth a quarter; reverence shown to the righteous is better." Respecting evil, we find the following:-- 116. "If a man would hasten towards the good, he should keep his thought away from evil; if a man does what is good slothfully, his mind delights in evil." 117. "If a man commits a sin, let him not do it again, let him not delight in sin; pain is the outcome of evil." 118. "If a man does what is good let him do it again, let him delight in it; happiness is the outcome of good." 126. "Some people are born again; evil-doers go to Hell, righteous people go to Heaven; those who are free from all worldly desires enter Nirvana." It is therefore clear that Jesus of Nazareth did not inaugurate the idea of a new birth. In precept 133 we have another sentiment parallel with a passage in Proverbs: "Do not speak harshly to anybody; those who are spoken to will answer thee in the same way. Angry speech is painful blows, for blows will touch thee;" or, as our Bible has it, "A soft answer turneth away wrath, but grievous words stir up anger" (Prov. xv. 1). The following is a reproach to a vast number of individuals who are called Christian preachers, and teach doctrines of brotherly love, but act as if religious hatred of dissenters of every class were a duty:-- 159. "Let each man make himself as he teaches others to be; he who is well subdued may subdue others; one's own self is difficult to subdue." 166. "Let no one neglect his own duty for the sake of another's, however great: let a man, after he has discerned his own duty, be always attentive to his duty." The following might have served as the original of the epistles of John:-- 167. "Do not follow the evil law! Do not live on in thoughtlessness! Do not follow false doctrine! Be not a friend of the world." 168. 9. "Rouse thyself! do not be idle, follow the law of virtue--do not follow that of sin. The virtuous lives happily in this world and in the next." 170, 1, 2, 3, & 4. "Look upon the world as a bubble; the foolish are immersed in it, but the wise do not cling to it. He who formerly was reckless, and afterwards became sober, and he whose evil deeds are covered by good deeds, brighten up this world like the moon when freed from clouds." 174. "This world is dark--few only can be here; a few only go to heaven like birds escaped from the net." A statement repeated by Jesus in different words,--"Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matt. vii. 14). There may likewise be a comparison instituted between the following:-- 176. "If a man has transgressed one law, and speaks lies and scoffs at another world, there is no evil he will not do." "Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all" (Jas. ii. 10). I quote this and the next saying to corroborate the assertion that Buddha taught the existence of a future world:-- 177. "The uncharitable do not go to the world of the gods; fools only do not praise liberality; a wise man rejoices in liberality, and through it becomes blessed in the other world." Compare 1 Tim. vi. 17, 18,19, "Charge them that are rich in this world.... that they be--ready to distribute, willing to communicate, laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold on eternal life." See again (306), "He who says what is not, goes to hell; he also who, having done a thing, says I have not done it. After death both are equal, they are men with evil deeds in the next world." 309. "Four things does a reckless man gain who covets his neighbour's wife--a bad reputation, an uncomfortable bed--thirdly, punishment, and, lastly, hell." 310. "There is bad reputation, and the evil way (to hell)." 311. "As a grass blade if badly grasped cuts the arm, badly practised asceticism leads to hell." 178. "Better than sovereignty over the earth, better than going to heaven, better than lordship over all worlds, is the reward of the first step in holiness." "What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" or, "What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matt, xvi. 26). It would be difficult to find any doctrine enunciated in the Bible more simple than the following:-- 183. "Not to commit any sin, to do good, and to purify one's mind, that is the teaching of the Awakened." 184. "The Awakened call patience the highest penance, long-suffering the highest Nirvana, for he is not an anchorite who strikes others, he is not an ascetic who insults others." 185. "Not to blame, not to strike, to live restrained under the law, to be moderate in eating, to sleep and eat alone, and to dwell on the highest thoughts, this is the teaching of the Awakened." Equally difficult would it be to find in the Old Testament such precepts as-- 197. "Let us live happily, then, not hating those who hate us; let us dwell free from hatred among men who hate." "Let us live free from greed among men who are greedy." 200. "Let us live happily though we can call nothing our own." 204. "Health is the greatest of gifts, contentedness the best riches; trust is the best of relatives, Nirvana the highest happiness." The following quotations deserve the close attention of the Christian inquirer, for they not only contain sentiments almost identically the same as those found in the New Testament, but they are couched in the same language, as closely as the circumstances of the case allow. Both enunciate the opinion that it is injudicious to cultivate or even to permit the existence of those affections which we have in common with the lower animals, and that to attain perfection love and hatred must be trampled under foot. We give the Buddhist teaching priority, as it was promulgated first:-- 210. "Let no man ever look for what is pleasant or what is unpleasant. Not to see what is pleasant is pain, and it is pain to see what is unpleasant." 211. "Let, therefore, no man love anything; loss of the beloved is evil. Those who love nothing and hate nothing have no fetters." 212. "From pleasure comes grief, from pleasure comes fear, he who is free from pleasure knows neither grief nor fear." 213-6. "From affection comes grief and fear, from lust comes grief and fear, from love comes grief and fear, from greed comes grief and fear." "He who is free from affection, lust, love, and greed, knows neither grief nor fear." "He that loveth either father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and he that loveth son or daughter better than me is not worthy of me, and he that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me. He that findeth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it" (Matt. x. 37-39). "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever" (1 John ii. 15-17). "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it; for what is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matt, xvi. 24). See also Mark viii. 34, x. 21, and Luke ix. 23-25, in the last verse of which the saying is varied by the words being used "what is a man advantaged if he gain the whole world and lose himself, or be cast away?" We are by habit more familiar with the style in which the Grecians wrote, than with that adopted by Sanscrit authors. But in both sets of writers the main idea is made strikingly apparent--viz., that to love anybody or anything on earth is prejudicial to our spiritual welfare, and that to act piously, it is necessary for the saint to free himself wholly from those instinctive affections which God has implanted in almost every one of his creatures. It is strange that any two ministers could have excogitated so monstrous a proposition, and that both should be called "Divine." The effect of the teaching of Buddha and of Jesus was to draw many from their hearth whose duty, in our estimation, was clearly to remain at home, and endeavour to cherish and support their family. I enter my strong protest as an Englishman, as well as individual Christian, against the idea that a man who believes himself a disciple of the son of Mary must go abroad to teach and preach, or become an ascetic, a hermit, or a monk, and leave his wife and children to be cared for by his friends or the parish. I believe most strongly that our affections are implanted in us by our Maker, just as a mother's love exists alike in the tigress and the eagle, and that any religion which teaches us that we must overcome these propensities, is a false one. It is strange, to say the least of it, that both the son of Maya and of Mary should have promulgated such a doctrine--i.e., that religion is designed to make our pleasures less, and our miseries greater. It is perhaps too much to assert that no other form of faith, besides those which have sprung from Buddha and from Jesus, possesses such a tenet as that to which we refer; but we can safely affirm that we do not know of any in which the natural affections existing between parents and children, husband and wife, brothers and sisters, have not been cultivated as a portion of the duties to be fulfilled by the faithful. It is scarcely necessary to call attention to the resemblance which the doctrine in question bears to that which was promulgated by the Grecian "Stoics"; and the similitude is still farther increased by such a sentence as the following in the Dhammapada:-- 221. "Let a man leave anger, let him forsake pride, let him overcome all bondage! No sufferings befall the man who is not attached to either body or soul, and who calls nothing his own." Once more we see a close resemblance between Buddhism and the Bible in 223. "Let a man overcome anger by love, let him overcome evil by good, let him overcome the greedy by liberality, the liar by truth." "If thine enemy be hungry give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty give him water to drink," (Prov. xxv. 21). But the motive for this recommendation to the Jews is a vindictive one, for he is told that by so doing he will heap coals of fire upon his enemy's head, whilst the Lord will take care to reward the deed to the doer. In the epistle to the Romans this saying of the Proverbs is endorsed, and to it is added "Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good" (Rom. xii. 20, 21). 224. "Speak the truth, do not yield to anger; give, if thou art asked, from the little thou hast--by those steps thou wilt go near the gods." "Let not mercy and truth forsake thee, bind them about thy neck; write them upon the table of thine heart; so shalt thou find favour and good understanding in the sight of God and man" (Prov. iii. 3-4); "Wherefore, putting away lying, let every man speak the truth with his neighbour" (Eph. iv. 25). We scarcely can find, in the Old Testament, a strict parallel with the Buddhist precept, "do not yield to anger," for the Jewish scriptures, without exception, depict their God as giving way habitually to wrath, anger, and revenge--e.g., in Ps. vii. 11, we find it stated that Elohim is angry with the wicked every day. Again, in Isaiah v. 25, we read, "for all this, God's anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still;" Job iv. 9, By God's anger they are consumed; "To pour out upon them my fierce anger," (Zeph. iii. 8). There are, however, a few passages which inculcate upon men the propriety of a command over their temper. In Ps. xxxvii. 8, for example, we read, "Cease from anger, and forsake wrath," and in Proverbs xxvii. 4, "Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous," whilst "the Preacher" says, Eccles. vii. 9, "Anger resteth in the bosom of fools," and in xi. 10, "remove anger or sorrow from thy heart." In the Gospel we have a somewhat divided teaching. For example, we find, from Mark iii. 5, that Jesus himself indulged in anger, when he was vexed at what he thought the hardness of his hearers' hearts; and from his saying, in Matt. v. 22, "Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause, shall be in danger of the judgment," it is clear that the son of Mary approved of anger which had a cause. Again, we find, in Eph. iv. 26, "Be ye angry and sin not, let not the sun go down upon your wrath," as if anger were not a culpable weakness, or passion, if only indulged in during the daylight. Yet, in the thirty-first verse of the same chapter we read, "Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger.... be put away from you," and in Col. iii. 8, the putting away of anger is spoken of as an evidence of being regenerated. Of the duty of almsgiving we find much in the Bible, but we will content ourselves with the following passages:--"Charge them who are rich in this world that they be ready to give, and glad to distribute, laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may attain eternal life" (1 Tim. vi. 17-19). Quoted from the Communion Service in the Prayer-book--"To do good, and to distribute, forget not; for with such sacrifices God is well pleased." "Be merciful after thy power. If thou hast much, give plenteously; if thou hast little, do thy diligence gladly to give of that little, for so gatherest thou thyself a good reward in the day of necessity" (Prayer-book version of certain precepts in Tobit, chap. iv. 8, 9). If our readers will take the trouble to consult the entire chapter in Tobit, they will readily conceive that it was written by a Buddhist sage, instead of an ordinary Jew. Once more we turn to the Dhammapada, and find-- 231, 234. "Beware of bodily anger, and control thy body. Leave the sins of the body, and with thy body practise virtue; control thy tongue; leave the sins of the tongue, and practise virtue with thy tongue; leave the sins of the mind, and practise virtue with thy mind." This reference to the sins of the tongue, and the necessity for its control, recals to our mind the opinion expressed in the epistle of James, "If any one bridleth not his tongue, this man's religion is vain" (chap, i. 26); "The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity," &c.; "the tongue can no man tame," &c. (chap. iii. w. 5-10); and the verse, "I said, I will take heed io my ways, that I sin not with my tongue; I will keep my mouth with a bridle while the wicked is before me" (Ps. xxxix. 1). The next maxim to which I would direct attention is one which should be pondered deeply by all those who desire to become thoroughly civilized. So far as I know, its like cannot be found in any part of the Bible. It runs thus-- 243. "There is a taint worse than all taints, ignorance is the greatest taint." If we search our own scriptures for a parallel passage, we can only find that ignorance is inculcated, and with the express intention of preventing the mind from departing from the old into some new track--see, for example, Dent. xii. 30, where the Jews are enjoined not to inquire after the gods of other nations, lest they should adopt them: again, in Deut. iv. 19, the Hebrews are enjoined not to study or gain any information respecting the sun, moon, and stars, lest they should worship them. But Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles, is even a more conspicuous advocate of ignorance, when he asserts that God hath chosen the foolish things [--Greek--] of the world to confound the wise (1 Cor. i. vv. 19-28). "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding.... oppositions of science falsely so called, which some professing have erred concerning the faith" (1 Tim. vi. 20, 21). Many, indeed, who call themselves civilized Christians, aver that, where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise, a tenet held strongly by Mahometans, Papists, and Ritualists. That the dictum of Paul in the text last quoted has had a a most disastrous effect upon civilization, no one who is conversant with history can fairly deny. Neither can it be shown that any known religion, except Buddhism, has opposed itself to ignorance. In every nation the rulers in general, and the priesthood in particular, have, on the other hand, encouraged indolence of mind, lest the people should learn wisdom and shake off their thraldom. We have seen, in our own times, hierarchs of every denomination oppose the spread of science, not falsely so called, with the avowed intention of endeavouring to bolster up doctrines, dogmas, and assertions, which they feel sure true science will destroy, although the same people declare their tenets indestructible, and founded on truth. Nay, we may go still further, and assert that sciolism in religious matters is fostered by the clergy of all denominations, both by the suppression of what they believe to be genuine, and by the promulgation of what they know to be false. In the place of knowledge they inculcate blind faith. As one not wholly unknown to be an earnest and honest inquirer, I have had extensive correspondence and personal intercourse with many preachers, and with others whose opportunities for learning "the clerical mind" are more extensive than my own, and I may divide the body of religious ministers, and the laity as well, into the following classes:--1, Those who refuse to inquire, examine, and think about religious subjects, except in a certain prescribed way; 2, Those who will investigate into the grounds of their belief, as they would into any doubtful assertion, or into any science; 3, Those who individually abandon the old faith and yet continue to preach it, and profess to adhere to it as strongly as they did at first; 4, Those who venture timidly to insinuate doubts into the minds of others, whilst professing to be orthodox themselves; 5, Those who are too noble to be hypocrites, and boldly affirm that which their advance of knowledge has induced them to adopt as a belief. Yet these very men, distinguished above their fellows for earnestness, for science, for honesty of purpose, a religiously ignorant priesthood persecutes; and Englishmen, who wish to be regarded as peculiarly "enlightened," stand by almost unmoved, or, as happens too frequently, applauding. When we endeavour to ascertain the reason why ignorance is so greatly cherished amongst mankind, we can readily discover it in indolence on the part of one group of men, and cupidity on the part of others. There are many positions in life wherein Sciolism seems to be more profitable than knowledge. We may mention a few. A "solicitor" who has an imperfect acquaintance with the law, may induce his clients to bring cases before various legal courts, in which they are certain to lose their cause and money, but this solicitor gains large fees for his trouble. A physician who does not know how to cure certain diseases may yet treat them for months, pass for a devoted doctor and a clever friend, and receive a large honorarium, which is far beyond his merit, though the patient may think it far too small. The man, on the other hand, who can cure such complaints readily, has to be content with a very slender fee, as his attendance is only required for a few days. The schemers, who live upon the ignorance of dupes, bear the name of legion. We see one of the body as a promoter of all sorts of bubble companies, and as secretary to such societies as banks, trade unions, burial clubs, assurances, &c. Anon he takes the form of an adulterator of provisions, of various drinkables, of cloth, silk, linen, &c. If Sciolism were not common, such charlatans as "spiritualists," "clairvoyants," "mesmerists," and the like, could not thrive as they do, nor quacks of all kinds flourish famously. One medical pretender is indeed reported to have said to a "regular" doctor, who lived in the same street with him, but whose clients were few compared with those of the charlatan--"the reason why you have so small, and I have so large, a number of patients is, that the fools come to me, the knowing ones to you." What is true in the case of other professions is preeminently so in the clerical In religion, such as it is professed in Christendom, Sciolism, or imperfect knowledge, alone is lucrative. Real understanding, diffused amongst the people, would render every hierophant a beggar, and thorough enlightenment amongst the priesthood would force them to allow that such should be their normal position. For example, if every layman, in countries owning the spiritual headship of the Pope of Rome, knew that all the stories of Heaven, Purgatory, Hell, Angels, Saints, Confessors, Hermits, and the like, were absolutely baseless--if he knew that man has no power in the court of the Almighty to influence His will in favour of a congener, and that nothing whatever is known respecting the world beyond the grave--he would not order masses, whether high or low, and a host of other ceremonies, each of which has to be paid for. Or, if each Protestant knew, that every tenet preached to him from the pulpit is founded upon absolute ignorance of the Almighty's operations, that every doctrine, every prayer, and every ritual, is based upon fantastic, half savage, or semicivilized human ideas, he would recognize at once the total uselessness of the parson. "They that are whole need not the physician, but they that are sick." The doctor, knowing this, endeavours, when he has a chance, to induce a client to believe himself ill, and that he and no other man can cure him--or, if he should really be disordered, these ideas will be kept up as long as possible. So it is in "religion," it is only the culprit that wants the Saviour, but when he has a chance, the _soi disant_ saviour tries to persuade those who consult him, that they are sinners, yet that he can make them saints; and having once implanted this belief, he endeavours to sustain it. To doctors and priests such as we here describe, the ignorant credulity of their clients is a source of wealth. So long as there are dupes there will be sharpers, and so long as men are human, there will be, unconsciously very likely to themselves, abundance of both fools and knaves. From what has been already said, our readers will have probably drawn the conclusion that we deny the existence of a thoroughly educated and honest hierarch, who has become wealthy by the exercise of his profession in a perfectly conscientious manner. Exceptional circumstances prevent us saying exactly the same of a doctor, but into these we need not enter, as they have not their counterparts in divinity. Such being our belief, we recognize the fact that poverty and knowledge must, in an earnest priesthood, be ever associated. But the clergy of every denomination are loath to agree to this, and endeavour, by hook or by crook, to acquire the means of living well. Hence Buddha, who was thoroughly honest himself, and did not become a preacher for the sake of emolument or a livelihood, adopted, as part of his plan, a systematic estrangement from every luxury of whatever sort,--or, in other words, the adoption of a poverty as great as exists in the lower animals. He enjoined that the saintly teacher, having food and raiment of the most homely kind, ought therewith to be content. This was Paul's view also--see 1 Tim. vi. 8. In this teaching the son of Mary concurred; like the son of Maya, he "had not where to lay his head," he had not even such a home as a fox or a bird (Matt, viii. 20), and when he sent out his disciples to preach, his direction to them was, "Take nothing for your journey" (Luke ix. 3, see also Matt, vi. 25-28). To sum up our remarks upon this particular command of Buddha to avoid the taint of ignorance, we may frame an axiom in political economy, thus--"Ignorance in the many ensures wealth in a few," or, "A diffusion of sound knowledge amongst the ruled, reduces the power and the emoluments of the rulers, and compels them to work hard if they wish to retain their position." To apply this idea still further, I would add that a thoroughly educated people, each one of whom feels that he must "work out his own salvation" (Phil ii. 12), does not require a priesthood. Consequently hierarchs, whose sole business in this world seems to be to instil terror into young minds, and to make rules for them to break, that priests may be paid for showing how the imaginary results may be escaped, would have no place if men were wise and thoughtful. It is a curious, though a certain fact, that the depth of savagery and the height of civilization alike ignore the necessity of a hierarchy. The first does so because it never thinks of God--the second, because its conceptions of the Almighty are such that it cannot believe Him to be influenced by individuals who assume to be His earthly vicegerents, or are elected to that pretentious situation by their fellow-men. The God of the Bible can only be adored by individuals whose minds are not emancipated wholly from the thraldom of barbarism, and who regard Jehovah as a man, and not a good one either, or, as we have before remarked--a devil. We may once more extract some sentences for comparison, to show, either that no inspiration was necessary to pen the Bible, or that the Dhammapada has equal claims with the Old Testament-- 244. "Life is easy to live for a man who is without shame, a crow hero, a mischief maker, an insulting, bold, and wretched fellow. But life is hard to live for a modest man, who always looks for what is pure, who is disinterested, quiet, spotless, and intelligent. O man, know this, that the unrestrained are in a bad state; take care that greediness and vice do not bring thee to grief for a long time." Compare this with the Psalmist's expression--"I was envious at the foolish when I saw the prosperity of the wicked, for there are no bands in their death, but their strength is firm; they are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men; therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain, violence covereth them as a garment, their eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than heart could wish.... these are the ungodly who prosper in the world, they increase in riches.... Surely thou didst set them in slippery places: thou castedst them down into destruction. How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! they are utterly consumed with terrors" (Ps. lxxiii. 3-19.) "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green tree that groweth in his own soil, yet he passed away, and lo! he was not, yea, I sought him, but he could not be found. Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace. But the transgressors shall be destroyed together, the end of the wicked shall be cut off." "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity, for they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb. Trust in the Lord and do good, so shalt thou dwell in the land, and, verily, thou shalt be fed" (Ps. xxxvii. 35-38--1-3). The class of sentiments is the same in both, only they seem to differ because we are very familiar with the phraseology of the Bible, and the reverse with translations from the Sanskrit. At this point the philosopher may judiciously pause to inquire, whether the sentiments expressed in the preceding biblical quotations are not incorrect, and consequently whether they can be regarded as inspired; and whether the Buddhistic solution of the difficulty, which points to a future state, is not superior to the Jewish one which treats of this world only. Experience abundantly shows that individuals practising what is called "goodness" find it no safeguard against misery, starvation, tortures, and death. Jesus of Nazareth, his disciples, and vast numbers of his followers, have experienced from the dominant party in those states wherein they dwelled contumely, reproach, and hours of lingering torment. Louis the XIV. of France, and the New Englanders of America, alike persecuted "Protestants" and "Quakers." In Spain "the reformers" were successfully opposed by fire and sword, and Papal Italy once extirpated from her midst the disciples of Luther and Calvin. Yet the so-called wrong-doers flourished, and the unfortunate "good people" were run down or dragooned with a sudden and swift destruction. If the dictum of the Psalmist is right, then Admiral Coligny, who was killed in the Bartholomew massacre, at Paris, must have been a bad man put in a slippery place that he might fall, for his destruction came suddenly, in an instant. But all history shows him to have been a worthy fellow, who was punished for his virtues. The observer of nature is driven to believe that the co-existence of powerful and bad men, with feeble, yet good men, is a rule in creation for which no adequate explanation can be found. He sees that in the domain of the air there are hawks and pigeons, eagles and ostriches, cuckoos and hedge-sparrows, that on the land there are tigers and sheep, lions and buffaloes, wolves and deer, that in the water there are perch and minnows, pike and trout, sharks and whales--in other words, there is throughout the world a division of living creatures into those who live by destroying vegetables, and those who subsist by the destruction of animals. The cow, sheep, and deer are quite as ruthless, in their noxiousness to the ornaments of the meadow, as are foxes in a hen-roost to the beauties of the barn-door; both alike mar the graceful features of creation. Yet it is clear that both the graminivora and the carnivora were made to effect this apparent wrong. Still further, we see throughout creation, that in almost every community of animals, the strong ones dominate over the weak, and endeavour, far too frequently, to deprive them of such pleasures as they and their females possess. See, for example, a cock with a bevy of hens: he will allow no other chanticleer to strut besides him on the dunghill of the yard; he will not permit a rival to make love to anyone of his harem, nor to feed upon any dainty morsel, until his wives and himself have had enough. The same may be said of stags, of bulls, of rams, of horses, and many other creatures whose habits are known. The leader of a herd is a despot, and when he is at length conquered by another, those who are ruled have merely changed their masters. Young and weak cocks will never attain to power, and must ever submit to be bullied. We notice, at the same time, that each tyrant must in the end succumb; with age comes infirmity and loss of strength, in the last battle the old is beaten by the young. Just so it is with mankind; in its comparative infancy monarchs rule, and are at length deposed by others. The Babylonians conquered Palestine, the Medes and Persians vanquished the Babylonians, the Greeks subjugated the Persians, the Romans overcame the Greeks, and the Goths destroyed the Roman power; yet under every regime the powerful could torment the weak. The result in every case was brought about by the conqueror being strong and brutal--not by the immorality of the victims. When a philosopher sees such things, he very naturally endeavours to ascertain whether any design can be discovered in the events of the world, and to this end he may be diligent in collecting facts, or he may at once frame some theory, and then cease to think about the matter. "Oh," such an one may say, "all that is wrong here will be righted in another world." Another, who ponders more deeply, may doubt whether it is proper to divide the phenomena of nature into "right" and "wrong." "If," he will say, "I believe with the Jew that God is in the heavens, and does whatsoever He pleases" (Ps. cxv. 3), or that "the Lord hath made all for Himself; yea, even the wicked for the day of evil" (Prov. xvi. 4) I must allow that everything which emanates from the Creator must be right. Speaking individually, I prefer rather to examine into the ways of Providence--i.e., of the Almighty, without framing any theory of right and wrong, than to dogmatize upon what He _must_ intend by this or that. "Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord (Jehovah), or being his counsellor hath taught him?" (Is. xl. 13)--see also the Pauline version of this sentiment, Rom. xi. 33, 34. It is very questionable whether any human analogy will enable us, even approximately, to fathom what are designated "the designs of Providence." Every example that I can at the present remember given by theologians is bad. Take, for example, the most common one which draws a comparison between God and a father, Ps. ciii. 13, "like as a father piti-eth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him;" Prov. iii. 12, "Whom the Lord loveth he correcteth, even as a father the son in whom he delighteth;" Heb. xii. 6, 7, "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth." "If ye be without chastisement, whereof all men (are) partakers, then are ye bastards and not sons." These enunciate the idea that God, being the universal father, treats mankind as a judicious parent treats his offspring, and that as a child cannot at all times know why he is punished until many years have passed over his head, so human beings cannot tell, until they reach another world, why they were punished in this. To assist this assertion the text is quoted "What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter" (John xiii. 7.) If there be any truth in the analogy, it must follow that all who in this world "endure grief, suffering wrongfully" (1 Pet. ii. 19), are children of God, whom he is educating for a better world. If that, again, be so, then--when Christians persecuted Mahometans, Romanists burned Protestants, and Spaniards slaughtered Mexicans and Peruvians--it follows that the vanquished, and not the conquerors, were the elect of the Father. But this deduction directly opposes those promises said to be made to the Jews by Jehovah, viz., that victory should be the reward of their piety. As it is a poor system which declares that two opposite results come from the same cause, we must refuse to believe that both victory and defeat are proofs of a Father's love. I am quite aware that some reader may retort that a kind parent may punish one child at the same time that he rewards another. I grant it at once, but that only demonstrates, if it proves anything, that all creatures must be regarded alike as the offspring of the Creator, and that none are favoured peculiarly on the one hand, or are outcasts on the other. As it is undesirable to mix political up with religious events, I refrain from drawing from history such illustrations as have frequently been supposed to indicate the will of the Almighty. The fall from power of Egypt, Tyre, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Carthage, Rome, Spain, are all supposed to have been caused by some special providential design. In like manner theologians draw certain deductions from the discovery of the New World, and the slaughter of the majority of its aboriginal inhabitants; from the Crusades; from the influx of the Turks into Christendom; and of the Moors into Spain. Some, whose imaginative powers overwhelm their reasoning faculties, see in the wars of recent times that final shaking of the nations, which some _soi-disant_ prophet declares must precede the millennium, and the battle of Armageddon; vaccinators, and interpreters are as abundant and irrepressible now as ever they were. Their fundamental assumption is that God has acted as they would have done in His place. Now He is a sort of Irish landlord, a portion of whose property is overrun with pauper farmers, and He clears them away to make room for more sensible and wealthier tenants, as the Canaanites were removed to give place to the Hebrews. Now, He is represented as a parent, who hearing that a son has engaged in fight and been conquered, merely remarks "serves him right!"--the kind of comfort given to the Jews after they had been harried by the Edomite confederacy, and subsequently by the Chaldeans. Again, the same mighty Jehovah is represented as a Stoic, who remarks, when some mischance happens to those who are said to be his children, "Never mind, accidents will happen--through much tribulation you must enter into my rest, or the kingdom of heaven." I entirely decline to adopt the profession of prophet and interpreter, contenting myself with increasing what knowledge I may have, rather than endeavouring to deduce from it theories whose weakness an hour may demonstrate; nor do I put faith in any one who adopts such a business. For example, let us assume that two savage tribes, having gods of different names and shapes, go to war on the bidding of their priests--one is conquered and the other is victorious. The one attributes his reverse to the anger of his own deity, not to the power of the god of his enemy. The other imagines that he owes success to the influence of his protector and his superiority over his foe's fetish. A civilized on-looker, who believes that all the deities are devils and powerless, attributes victory and defeat to perfectly natural causes, e.g., superiority in weapons, tactics, numbers, or strength. It is clear that neither the deductions of the first nor second men are right; neither has read the mind of his fetish. So it is with the half educated theologians of our own day, who think and talk as glibly of God and Satan, as if they were personal acquaintances, who make no secret either of their deeds or their motives of action. Once more we return to the Dhammapada and find, 248. "O, man, know this, that the unrestrained are in a bad state; take care that greediness and vice do not bring thee to grief for a long time." We do not here seek to find any parallel passage in the bible, but we turn to history, remote and collateral, and compare the priesthood of Buddha with that of Jesus. Does travel tell us of any set of teachers more self-denying than the individuals who devote themselves as religious Buddhists? Can history, on the other hand, tell us of any hierarchy more greedy and vicious than the Christian priesthood in the middle ages, and down to a comparatively recent period? We will not accuse them of vice, but even now is there in the whole world a more grasping set of men than those who have received what they term "holy orders" from the descendants of Jesus or of Peter? I trow not. If, therefore, a doctrine is to be known by its fruits, in one respect at least Buddhism is superior to that which we call Christianity, by which term I do not mean the exceptional practice of a few, but the general habits of the majority of the bishops, priests, &c., of Christendom. Once more let us contrast the doctrine of Buddha with the practice of Christians. He says-- Da. 256, 7. "A man is not a just judge if he carries a matter by violence; no, he who distinguishes both right and wrong, who is learned, and leads others, not by violence, but by law and equity, he who is a guardian of the law and equity, he who is a guardian of the law, and intelligent, he is called just." Our histories tell us of Christians persecuting Christians; Trinitarians endeavouring to extirpate Arians; Franciscans torturing Dominicans; of Jews slaughtered by those whose master said, "Father, forgive them;" we see brutal Spaniards exterminating, under the shadow of the cross, whole nations in the new world who had never harmed them, and in the old world we find Crusaders, under the guise of piety, murdering and robbing the dwellers in Palestine. There is scarcely a large town in Europe which has not witnessed the ferocious violence of Papal, yea, and Protestant, hierarchs. Even in recent times we have seen bishops and their congeners, in our so-called civilized nation, oppose violence, and the popgun thunder of excommunication, to a learned prelate, and to an humble priest. Judged by the standard of Buddha, our divines are unjust and unrighteous. I cannot discover any standard by which they can be regarded as "praiseworthy," except that embodied in the two sayings, "Get what you can, and what you get hold;" "Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." We may say of such persecutors, in the words of the Dhammapada-- 260. "A man is not an elder because his head is grey; his age may be ripe, but he is called old in vain," and many would at once be able, if they tried, to remember the names of some who, in a Christian community, have abandoned their principles, or their learning, as soon as they became bishops or elders of the church. I have no doubt Popes have done so. There is a saying, that however clever a man is, you make a fool of him by placing a mitre upon his head. The following is, perhaps, more curious than our previous quotations, as it tells of the pre-Christian antiquity of a common Romish custom:-- 264. "Not by tonsure does an undisciplined man, who speaks falsehood, become a Sramana; can a man be a Sra-mana who is still held captive by desire and greediness?" The Sramana is a word equivalent to our "priest," literally, "a man who performs hard penances" (see Dhammapada, Note 265, p. cxxxii.). Without copying any other texts from the Dhammapada, we may next inquire what there is to be found in the Bible that is not to be found in the teaching of Buddha. We notice that the element of so-called prophecy is wholly wanting in the sayings of the Indian sage. I cannot remember that either Sakya Muni or any of his followers assumed the power to foretell the future. There is, it is true, a vague threat of future misery to the wicked, which was founded upon the prevalent idea of metempsychosis; but there is no endeavour to pourtray the occurrences that are supposed to be impending over one or more sections of the human race. There is not any attempt to induce individuals to join themselves to the son of Maya, by declarations that the world, and all that it contains, is about to be destroyed, and that all who do not become disciples of the teacher, and shelter themselves under his mantle, will be miserably punished throughout eternity. There is not any Buddhist description in detail, either of Hell, or Heaven, or Nirvana; there is no story of "worms," "fires," "devils," "death," and the like, in the first. The second is not depicted, by the preacher himself, as a sort of palace, made gorgeous with gold and precious stones, resounding in barbaric music, and discordant chants, where animals dwell, and where horses are kept stabled, to go throughout the world with messengers upon their backs (see Zechariah i. 8, 10; vi. 2, 7; Rev. iv. 6, 7; vi. 2, 4, 8). There are no denunciations of vengeance upon heretics, nor is the god of Buddha like the one described by Hebrew writers, who "winks" during times of ignorance upon earth (Acts xvii. 30), who requires to be reminded by prayer of the wants of men (Exod. iii. 7), and who comes down to earth to inquire if matters are according to the accounts which have reached his dwelling-place (Gen. xviii. 21). In Siddartha's teaching there is, as we have seen, an absence of the element of prayer. According to his view, each man is regarded, to a certain extent, as the author of his own destiny. Man, in his opinion, must ever be influenced by the actions of other men--he may, for example either be caressed or tormented, yet, under both circumstances, he is instructed to retain equanimity of mind. He is not to pray for prosperity, nor to supplicate that trials may be removed. He is to face and overcome every trial by his resolute will, and not to waste time in praying not to be led into temptation. Again, in Buddha's writings, and in those of his followers, there is an absence of those obscene tales with which the Old Testament abounds. We seek in vain for counterparts of the story of Lot and his daughters, of Onan, of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar, of Judah and Tamar, David and Bathsheba, Amnon and his sister, Zimri Cozbi and Phinehas, and the like. It is true, that in some Buddhist writings, there is a cosmogony introduced more preposterous than that in the Bible; but there are no parallels to the tales of Noah, of Moses, and of Israel in Egypt, the desert, and Palestine. Indeed, when we remember that Sakya Muni was an Oriental, accustomed to inflated language, we are struck by the plainness of his speech. If we now ask ourselves, as earnest practical Christians--that is, as men, anxious and eager to attain to religious truth, and desirous of teaching only those things which would tend towards sound edification and to a pure morality--what parts of the Bible most offend sense of propriety, we should answer, that they are its untenable cosmogony; its preposterous accounts of the longevity of the men reported as being the earliest formed; the legend of the flood; the origin of the rainbow; the tales of Moses, Pharaoh, the plagues of Egypt, the sojourn in the desert, the capture of Canaan, the miraculous battles, in which each man of Israel put a thousand enemies to flight. We would wholly expunge the fabulous account of Elijah and Elisha; the ravings after vengeance uttered by the prophets; the apocryphal episodes described in the books of Jonah and Daniel, every obscene story, and disgusting speech and writing, whether uttered as a threat against Israel or his enemies. In like manner we would wish to expunge, from the teaching of Jesus, everything relating to the immediate destruction of the world--everything connected with community of goods, the advantages of beggary, and the potency of faith and prayer. We would suppress every miracle, and say nothing of a resurrection of the dead Jesus. We would equally abandon any attempt to describe Heaven or Hell, or any intermediate state. When all these were removed from the Bible, we positively should have very little left, except a certain amount of morality which is sound, and a large portion which is radically bad. To make such an emendated book as perfect as possible, we might, with great advantage, correct it from the teaching of Buddha or from the sayings of Socrates, Plato, Epic-tetus, and even of Confucius; and when all was completed, it would be found that all men, everywhere, have had instinctive notions, more or less definite, of morality, but have allowed their animal passions to overcome their better feelings. Far too many of us know the good, but yet the bad pursue. This investigation would most distinctly disprove the assertion, that God has selected a very small percentage of His creatures for objects of His care, and those who have charity towards all men would greatly rejoice thereat. Individually we cannot bear to eat, however hungry we may be, whilst we see others near us without food--our pleasure is heightened when we divide our luxuries with others; just so we believe it should be in religion--none should rejoice at the idea that he is one of the few that are to be saved, nor should anyone repine, as Jonah did, when he finds that the tender mercies of God are over all his works. To simplify the matter as far as possible, I have drawn up the following parallel between Buddhism and Christianity:-- [Illustration: 263] [Illustration: 264] [Illustration: 265] [Illustration: 266] [Illustration: 267] In the next chapter I propose to examine, as far as authorities will permit, the religion of the Persians--a nation intervening, to a great degree, between the old Aryan and the Shemitic races. CHAPTER VII. The Medo-Persians and Parsees. Artfulness of theologians. They systematically break the ninth commandment. Frauds in orthodoxy. A man may use false weights innocently, but is punished, nevertheless. In theology ignorance does not justify deceit. Case in trade. Professional blindness. A law for punishing adulteration of truth is wanted. Mosaism and Zoroaster. Parsees and Christians. Moses and Zoroaster. The ancient magi. The Persians. Conflicting ideas of God in Bible. The source of the Biblical theology. Cyrus. Inquiry into the authenticity of the Avesta. The book condemned. Account of the Medo-Persian faith from Herodotus. Period of introduction of the Devil to the Bible. Summary. Comparison and contrast. Introduction to next chapter. In every ancient, and, indeed, in every modern, faith which I have yet examined, I have been shocked with the manner in which it has been represented by interested opponents. Whether they are Romanists or Protestants, Evangelicals or Ritualists, Orthodox or Non-conformists, all our divines endeavour to prove their own tenets to be the best, by blazoning everything which is good, and veiling from sight everything which is doubtful. This being so, it is not at all surprising that Christians generally should try to exalt the religion professed by themselves over that propounded by others, whom they designate "heathens." But though it is not strange that very human partisans should act thus, it is marvellous to find that all the ardent disciples of Jesus, without an exception, that I know of, should, in their dealings with mankind, systematically break the ninth of those commandments which they assert were given by God to man, upon Mount Sinai All of them bear false witness against their neighbour, and give incorrect accounts of themselves in addition. They resemble, indeed, those Dutch merchants whom Washington Irving describes, so pleasantly, in his history of New York, who had two sets of weights, a heavy lot by which to purchase, and a light set by which to sell Such traders we call "fraudulent;" and I assert that every so-called orthodox polemic whose books I have read deserves the same epithet. Their fraud is shown by the misrepresentations that they make, both of the creed which they uphold and the one which they oppose. The heterodox and the so-called atheist may be trusted, at least, to tell the truth. In saying this, I do not assert that everyone gives false witness knowingly, any more than I would blame a tradesman for using false scales, or weights, if he could demonstrate that he had purchased them as true, and could show that he had never tampered with them. Yet the law would punish such a man for their use, arguing that he ought to have made inquiry. In one of the large towns of Great Britain, on one occasion, a merchant, believed to be both religious and honest, sold to a broker a cargo of stuff which had no existence, and, when the delivery had to be made, the first destroyed himself, and the second was adjudged to be a culpable bankrupt, because he had taken the existence of the oil for granted, without investigation. Just so it is with ordinary divines; they assume certain statements in their own religious book to be true--they are taught to shut their eyes to the absurdities in the same volume, and to explain away, in one manner or another, everything which militates against common sense. By this plan they contrive to sell, as sterling stuff, something which is made of base material, without knowingly being parties to a fraud. In the same way a shopman may, on the word of the manufacturer, dispose of a piece of goods as wholly silk, although he has a shrewd presumption that the fabric contains a large proportion of cotton. For such individuals we have the proverb, "there are none so blind as those who will not see." But these very theologians of whom we are speaking, when they are dealing with the sacred books, ordinary customs, ritual, and the like, of other people, having a different religion to their own, are exact, in the extreme--every absurdity is exhibited ruthlessly; every legend is ridiculed; every discrepancy is magnified; and everything which betrays ignorance, or want of scientific knowledge, is paraded with inglorious ceremony. On the other hand, everything good which is to be found therein is, if possible, suppressed. A book, which was, for a long time, a standard one amongst our divines, entitled, _Christ and Many Masters_, is particularly open to this charge. In it there is throughout a _suppressio veri_, a _suggestio falsi_, and scarcely a page that does not bear false witness. If there were a law to punish those who adulterate or falsify "truth," our magistrates would be kept extremely busy. As an inquiry into the realities of Buddhism has led us to the belief that the origin of Christianity may be found in the doctrines of the son of Maya, which were adopted with certain Judaic modifications by the sons of Elizabeth and Mary--so it is highly probable that what is called Mosaism has been built upon the teachings of the Persian or Median theology, said to have been founded by Zoroaster. Perhaps it would be difficult to find any modern evidence of the likelihood of this hypothesis more powerful than the fact that at the present day the Jews and the Parsees fraternize almost like brothers. The latter in England, and, I understand, elsewhere, select, when they can, the house of a Hebrew wherein to lodge, rather than that of any man of another nation. To this testimony, such as it is, we must add another which is very telling, viz., that almost every modern orthodox writer who has treated of Zoroaster, has declared that the prophet of Persia drew his inspiration from the lawgiver of Israel The priority of the latter being asserted, and the second place having been given to the former, the matter was supposed to be proved, and the Persian, after having been regarded as a copy of the Hebrew, was consigned to oblivion. There can be little doubt, however, that the teachings of Zoroaster had more life in them than those either of the Jew or the Christian, for the Parsee always and even to the present day, and in every position of life, may lay claim to the title of nature's gentleman, which very few of the disciples of Jesus or of Moses could pretend to until very recently. The morality of these religionists is excellent. In every relation of life they endeavour to be, to do, and to think that which is right--and though there may be black sheep amongst them, the proportion of these to the main body is small In no period of their history, so far as I can learn it, have the Zoroastrians been as brutal as the Christians were so long as they had the power--nor have they ever introduced into their worship figures of men, women, or children with the apparent intention of honouring or adoring them, or the assertion that such things assisted their devotions. Being strictly monotheists, they have not split up the Godhead into three males influenced by a female who is the spouse of one and mother of a second; nor have asserted that the one great Creator is compounded of a father, a son, and a pigeon, with a woman for an intercessor with her celestial consort. Nor do the Parsees build vast temples for the Almighty to dwell in, neither do they reduce any portion of the Omnipotent to the necessity of residing in a bit of bread shut up for many a long day in a box. On the contrary, the modern followers of Zoroaster worship "the father" in spirit and in truth--not with eye service as men-pleasers, but with singleness of heart, fearing God (Col. iii. 22.), thus being, as we are told, the very men whom the Almighty seeketh (John iv. 23, 24). The first resemblance between the Persian and the Jewish lawgiver to which we would call attention, is the mythical nature of both. The Hebrew who believes in Moses can show no other ground for his faith than a number of books which tell of Moses, his genealogy, his acts, his laws, his character, and his death. Yet when an independent inquirer subjects these books, and the accounts which they contain, to a rigid examination, he finds evidence that the writings are fabrications of a period at least a full thousand years after the era of their supposed epoch--probably more; and that all collateral testimony and all internal evidence drawn from the books themselves disprove the actual existence of Moses. To the scholar, the Hebrew lawgiver is as apocryphal or fictitious a being as Hercules, Romulus, and our own king Arthur. Nor is this belief of the critic shaken when he finds that the history of Moses is interwoven with miraculous legends--credit them he cannot; but he may pause before he determines to see in them evidence of fabrication. He cannot fairly deny the existence of Jesus of Nazareth, because many marvellous stories were told of him, nor would a similar cause alone lead him to assert that Francis of Assisi was a mythical individual. But whichever way the careful philosophical inquirer may decide the questions at issue, he will remember that many strange stories are told of the conception, birth, and life of Zoroaster, and that the critic must mete out equal justice, both to the Jew and to the Persian. Again, impartial inquirers find themselves unable to determine, with anything approaching to accuracy, either by internal evidence or contemporary remains--the positive epoch when the tale about Moses was originated. It is true that the Bible seems to afford foundation for a chronology in a few parts, as, for example, in the historical books; but these are so completely contradicted by genealogies in other parts that we cannot trust them. After stripping away every doubtful scrap from Jewish history, all we can find is, that Moses was first talked of, familiarly, after what maybe called the Grecian Captivity of Jerusalem (see _Obadiah, Ancient Faiths, &c._t Vol. ii.), and that he was said to be the author of the ceremonial, moral, and political laws which were framed for the Jewish nation, and which were assiduously taught to the Hebrews after the Babylonish captivity. The followers of Zoroaster are equally ignorant of the real history of their prophet, and are equally unable to demonstrate the claim of the Zend Avesta to be a true account of the teaching of the Persian sage, as are the Jews to prove the antiquity of their laws and nation. Putting on one side all those which may be regarded as modern fancies, the first mention made of the Prophet is in the first Alcibiades of Plato, which we may imagine was written shortly after B.c. 412, in which year that distinguished Greek citizen negociated a treaty between Athens and Persia. Plato, when speaking of the education of the sons of the kings of Persia, says (_Bohn's_ edition, Vol. iv., p. 344), "At fourteen years of age, they who are called the royal preceptors, take the boy under their care. Now these are chosen out from those who are deemed most excellent of the Persians, men in the prime of life, four in number, excelling (severally) in wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude. The first of these instructs the youth in the learning of the Magi, according to Zoroaster, the son of Oromazes--now by this learning is meant the worship of the gods--and likewise in the art of kingly government." But Herodotus, writing about B.c. 450, when giving, in Book i, c. 131, an account of the religion of the Persians, makes not only no mention of Zoroaster, but attributes to that nation a form of worship differing from what is supposed to be pure Zoroastrianism;* but he mentions--and it seems to be a significant fact, that it is not lawful for a Persian to sacrifice unless one of the Magi is present, who sings an ode concerning the original of the gods which, they say, is an incantation. * There is strong constructive evidence, from the nature of the Aryan Mythology, from the pages of the Vedas, from the anthropological resemblances between Persians, Caucasians, Greeks, Latins, Germans, British, and others; from the linguistic alliances between what have been called the Indo- Germanic races; and from a variety of other sources, each small in itself, but strong in the aggregate, for the belief that the origin of the Aryan mythology, or the Vedic religion as it is otherwise called, may be traced to Bactria or to Ancient Persia. Persia is spoken of by Plato as if her people carried the dynasties of their kings far back into eternity. (First Alcibiades, Bohn's edition, vol. iv., p. 343). Herodotus again (Book i., c. 131) tells us that the Persians from the earliest times have sacrificed to the sun and moon, to the earth, fire, water, and the winds, that they sacrifice on high places, have no divine statues, nor do they build temples. Now this is almost entirely a description of the old Aryan religion. The sun, for example, is Surya, Aryama, Mitra, Vivaswat, Martunda, Savitor, Sura, Ravi, Varuna, Indra Yama, Vishnu, and Krishna (Moor's Hindoo Paillhcon, p. 287). The moon is Chandra and Soma, and the origin of these words is to be found in the Persian as well as in the Sanscrit writings (Moor's H. P., p. 284-5). The Earth is Prit'hivi, 11a, Lakshmi, and Vasta. Fire is the powerful Agni. The water is Nara, or Narayana (Moor's JET. P., 74), from which all things came (see Water in Ancient Faiths), and the Winds are Maruts and Vaya. To these deities, individually or collectively, the modern Hindoo offers prayer and praise; and the hymns of the Rig Veda, such as we have them edited by Max Muller and Wilson, are copies probably of the same chants which accompanied the sacrifices of the Ancient Persians. This seems to indicate that the Persian religion was then undergoing some supervision by rulers who had a different faith to that held at a later period. When we next turn to Herodotus, Book L, c. 101, we find that the Magi were one of the six tribes which composed the Medes; and we notice that Phraortes, the son of Deioces, reduced the Persian kingdom under the dominion of the Medes about B.c. 650. If, then, we regard Zoroaster as being the founder of the Magi, we must throw back his epoch considerably further than this date. But even if we accept this conquest as the era of the Parsee prophet, we find that Zoroaster preceded the first public promulgation of the Mosaic law amongst the Jews.* * Time of Zoroaster.--Dr. Hang, who is no mean authority in everything which concerns Zoroastrianism, states in an able resumê of the evidence, that we cannot assign a later date to the prophet than 2300 years before Christ. He quotes from Diogenes Laertius who affirms that Xanthos of Lydia, b.c. 600-450, states, that Zoroaster lived 6000 years before Xerxes invaded Greece; from Pliny who, on the authority of Aristotle, says that the teacher preceded Plato by 6000 years; from Hermippus of Smyrna, who studied Magism B.c. 250, and averred that the founder of that sect lived 5000 years before the Trojan war; and from Pliny, to show the general belief of ancient Greek authors that Zoroaster lived many thousand years before Moses. Dr. Haug says (I am quoting from "A Lecture on an Original Speech of Zoroaster, with Remarks on his Age, by Dr Haug" London: Triibner & Co., 1865), that the traditional books of the Parsees say Zerdosht (another form of the more familiar Greek name) lived 300 years before Alexander invaded Persia. Our author adds that Hermippus, in 250 b.c., speaks of two millions of verses of Zoroastrian origin, and infers that these would require 1000 years for their growth. He then points out the relationship between the Iranian and the Yedic religion, and Zoroaster's antagonism to the latter, and argues that this must have happened ere the Aryans invaded the Punjaub, 2000 years B.c. Dr. Haug then inquires into the probable source whence the Greeks drew their ideas respecting the antiquity of Zerdosht, and argues, with great show of reason, that they consulted the chronology of the Babylonian priests. He shows that a trustworthy record was kept which went back to 2284 b.c., this he concludes, from data given by Berosus, was the year when Babylon was conquered by the Medes;--and from Synkellos he shows that the founder of the dynasty of the eight Median tyrants over Babylon was called Zoroaster. But this word, Zarathustra, in the original, signifies a high priest, and to distinguish him from other hierarchs the prophet is called Zarathustra Spitama, in the Zend Avesta--hence this king is supposed not to be the prophet him» self, but a descendant from him, and a priest in the order which was founded by the original Zerdosht. This again points to the fact that the Babylonians could only know anything about the founder of Magism from the Medes themselves, and they might, from want of any accurate chronology, assign to Zoroaster any date they liked--just as, with many a semi-civilized nation 'a long time may be converted into ten, a hundred, a thousand, or a million years.' Haug does not endeavour to assign any particular date to the era of Zoroaster beyond expressing the opinion that he might have lived one or two hundred years before the Median conquest of Babylon, and that this occurrence was probably one of the results of the ferment which his doctrines caused. "He preached, like Moses, war and destruction to all idolaters and wicked men, and said that he was commissioned by God to spread the religion of Ahura Mazda. Daring his life-time, and shortly after his death, his followers seem to have engaged in incessant wars with their religious antagonists, the Vedic Indians, which struggle is well known in the Sanscrit writings as that between the Asuras (Ahura) and Devas (the Hindu gods). But afterwards they spread westward and invaded the countries of other idol worshippers in order to uproot idolatry, and establish everywhere the good Mazdayan religion. They really appear to have changed the order of things in Babylon when they conquered it, and spread a new creed, for they are spoken of by Berosus as tyrants." Zoroaster was the first prophet of truth who appeared in the world, and kindled a fire which thousands of years could not entirely extinguish." When Moses was first talked about we know not, but at the time of Samuel, David, and Josiah he was unknown. We have no reason to believe that the Hebrews ever came into contact with, or ever heard of the Persians, until after the Babylonish conquest, followed by that of Cyrus; consequently, if the Jewish law first propounded contained nothing akin to the doctrines and laws of Zoroaster, and subsequent publications did so, we should naturally conclude that the last were copied. It is unnecessary to tell the student of biblical history that the Jews were for many years under the dominion of the Persians and Medes, and that Nehemiah, one of their great men, after the Babylonian captivity, was a personal, though humble, friend, of the king of Persia--i.e., if we take his account of himself for true. Of the fact of there being two distinct doctrines respecting the Almighty in the Old Testament no scholar has a doubt. In the one, God is represented as the sole Being who rules and influences the world: whatsoever was done He was regarded as the doer of it. He had no powerful enemy who could thwart His will, no adversary who could withstand Him successfully. In the other the existence of two rival powers is distinctly recognised--Jehovah and Satan--the Aryan Mara, the tempter, who plot and counterplot against each other, and even condescend to personal wrangling. The most conspicuous example which we can give of these two doctrines is to be found in 2 Sam. xxiv. 1, in which we are told that Jehovah moved David to number Israel, whereas in 1 Chron. xxi. 1, evidently written by a modern scribe, we find that Satan, the adversary, was he who incited the king to perform this deed. We see the duality of persons conspicuously put forward in the first and second chapters of Job, in which Satan is represented as being at large, not being even under the surveillance of Jehovah. See also 1 Kings xxii. 20-23, wherein we find Jehovah at a loss how to bring about a certain result, and assisted out of a dilemma by a lying spirit--who can do what the Lord could not effect! We may say that the story is a fiction, but no Hebrew dare have spoken thus of Jehovah had he ever heard of Moses and his laws. As we cannot imagine that a revelation from God to the Hebrews would be thus changeable, we can come to no other conclusion than that the Jewish writings were of human origin, and their first doctrines modified by those of other nations to whom the Hebrews were subjects or enslaved. To this consideration we may add, that when the Israelites came in contact with the Medes and Persians, they were merely a 'posse' of slaves, a crowd of prisoners removed from their own land without a shadow of power, or any influence, and only anxious to induce those who had conquered their late masters, the Babylonians, to have pity on their misery, and restore them to beggared Jerusalem. The idea of the Hebrews gaining friends by endeavouring to induce the Persian Magi to change their faith and embrace that of the poor and probably despised Jew is preposterous. On the other hand, there would be every possible inducement for the Hebrews to study the faith of that people whose God had given them victory over the Chaldeans. See in corroboration of this Ps. cxxxvii., especially the two last verses. We may regard the question before us in yet another light, If we are to allow that the words of Isaiah are correct, which describe Cyrus as God's shepherd (ch. xliv. 28), and as anointed by Jehovah Himself, we cannot conceive that the religion which he professed was opposed to that entertained by the Hebrew prophet. As it is morally impossible that Cyrus and his hierarchy were taught their religion by any Jew, it follows that the Persian faith can lay the same claim to inspiration as the Hebrew, if the latter were not indeed almost identical with it. If, then, we insist upon the latter being "a true revelation," we must concede the same to the former, or if we pronounce the Persian religion to be of human invention, we must pass a similar verdict upon the Jewish. When we are upon the horns of such a great dilemma we may well pause. It is indeed almost impossible for orthodox divines to make a selection which prong of the fork is the worst. If we elect to say our belief is, that the primitive teaching of the Hebrew was God-given and a true revelation, we cannot put faith in those scriptures which tell us of a devil who fights with Jehovah, and is generally victorious. If, on the other hand, we hold that the Christian notions of the Creator and Satan are true, we must regard the Zoroastrian teaching as inspired; and the early Jewish writings as unworthy of credit--of human invention and heterodox. Theologians will probably elect to remain in a state of uncertainty on this subject. Philosophers, on the contrary, will escape from it at once by asserting their conviction that both the Hebrew and the Magian religion are wholly of human invention.* * When commencing this chapter, it was my intention to amplify what I have already said in Vol. II. respecting the Magian religion, by giving an analysis of the celebrated Zend Avesta, a translation of which into French, by Anquetil du Perron, I had recently procured for the purpose. As I was aware that Dr Haug, a learned scholar, believed the original to be trust-worthy, I read the translation in good faith, but I soon began to doubt whether the book was what it professed to be, for to my mind it bore internal evidence of having been fabricated at a comparatively recent period by some one who was familiar both with the Aryan and the Mosaic, if not the Christian, doctrines and literature. I felt that I should not be acting honestly unless I took such steps as lay in my power to satisfy myself upon this point The essay was therefore laid aside for a considerable time, until, indeed, every available source of information had been searched. After my inquiry was over the text was resumed as above. But in the middle, or perhaps we might say upon the threshold of our inquiry, we must pause to examine into the amount of confidence which can be given to those under whose guidance we are invited to place ourselves. Such investigations are too frequently omitted. Those who have faith in the Bible usually decline to search into the grounds of their belief, and, in like manner, those who have always heard the author of the Zend Avesta quoted as trustworthy are apt to take everything which it may say as correct. To avoid this error, I have consulted all the volumes of the transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of London, and have found therein sufficient to throw the gravest doubts upon the great antiquity of the Parsee religion. It will be an useful task if I attempt to classify the evidence on each side, and to draw an inference therefrom. Our knowledge respecting the Magian religion which the Bactrian* prophet founded, is built, with the exception of the notices in Greek and Latin authors, already quoted, upon the work known as the Avesta. This is written in a language called Zand,** and there are within it parts, which are written in another tongue, to which the name of Pahlavi has been given, and from these the sacred books of the Parsees have been translated into French by Anquetil du Perron, into German by Spiegel, and into English by Haug. All these writers assume that the language referred to is Ancient Persian, and closely allied to the Sanscrit, and Haug especially endeavours to demonstrate that the Avesta, and the origin of the religion of the Parsees, must be as old as the time of the Vedas, inasmuch as the same sort of legends, the same names, and, to a certain extent, the same genii, are to be found in both. There is not absolute identity, however, for those which are spoken of as good by the Vedas are treated as bad in the Avesta. Viewed from this point, Haug assigns to the Zand volumes an age of about four thousand years, and he supports his belief by a reference to the length of time which would be required to make up the two million verses attributed to Zoroaster by some Greek author. In the conclusion that both the Zand and the Pahlavi are very ancient Persian tongues, it is stated that the majority of German and French critics agree. * Zoroaster is said by many early writers to have been a king in Bactria.--Smith's Dictionary, s.v. ** The word "Zend" is more familiar to many than the form "Zand;" but I have adopted the latter, as also the spelling of Pahlavi, from an essay by Mr Romer, with an introduction by Professor Wilson, in Vol. IV., Royal Asiatic Society's Journal. But on the other hand, such orientalists as Sir William Jones, Colonel Vans Kennedy, Mr Thomas, and Mr Romer, and indeed all British oriental scholars, regard both the Zand and the Pahlavi as bastard languages, never spoken, and wholly fabricated by a comparatively modern priesthood, for the express purpose of making the holy books which they wrote comprehensible only by themselves. Such scholars show that the Zand and Pahlavi are built upon a Sanscrit, Arabic, and modern Persian model, and that the Parsee Pahlavi is very different to the Pehlevi of the Sassanian coins, and, in Vol. IV., Transactions of Royal Asiatic Society, Mr Romer supports this conclusion by a number of passages in the various languages referred to. It is also asserted that many words in the Avesta have been borrowed from the Arabic, and others from the Sanscrit tongues, possibly, also, from the Greek. Being unable, from my comparative ignorance of Eastern language, to form a decided opinion on independent grounds, all that I can say is, that it does really seem to be proved that the religious books of the Par-sees are not so ancient as they have been by many supposed to be. The question which next arises for our consideration is, whether such volumes represent the tenets of an ancient faith, or whether they are the fabrication of men who have, possibly in the wreck of an old worship, brought about by war or other calamity, endeavoured to create a new religion out of the relics of one or more old ones. In favour of the antiquity of the Avesta are the facts that the great god, Ahura Mazdao, seems to be almost identical with the Aura Mazda of the Persepolitan inscription of Darius. But in proof of its untruthfulness as a representative of pure Persian tradition, we find the book introducing Devs and Ahuras,--the counterpart of the Devas and Asuras of the Vedas, only reversing their character--we also see Indra mentioned as a devil, whilst Siva and Mitra are introduced as Sharva and Miltra. (Haug's _Essays on the Parsee_, Bombay, p. 230, 1862). If, therefore, we allow that there is some of the old Zoroastrian doctrine to be found in the Avesta, we must equally grant that such teaching has been modified by hatred of a rival faith. Yet herein is another question, viz., Was the antagonism between the doctrines of the Avesta and of the Vedas contemporary with the origin of the two systems, or was the teaching of the Avesta the result of its author's coming into hostile conflict with Vedic teachers, as they possibly might have done after Alexander had opened a highway for intercourse between Persia and Hindostan? On weighing the subject as impartially as I can, it seems to me that the Avesta contains a great deal of the Ancient Persian faith, but that it will be the safest plan for us to describe what is known of the Persian and Median faith from other sources, rather than take our information mainly from this doubtful source. Herodotus tells us of his own knowledge (B. i, c. 131, seq.), that the Persians, about b.c. 450, did not erect statues, temples, or altars--that they sacrificed on lofty hills to high heaven, the sun, moon, fire, water, and the winds, and that this had been a custom from time immemorial Sacrifice was attended by a priest or magus, and prayer and praise were offered, not for themselves alone, but for all the Persians, and especially for the king. In about the year 521 B.c., Darius, king of the Medes, caused be made, in three languages, upon a rock at Behistun, an inscription of considerable length. The one which is in the Persian tongue has been translated by Rawlinson (_Royal Asiatic Society Journal_, vol 10). In it, the king acknowledges Auramazda as his god, and speaks of him as the Jews did of Jehovah. This epithet is explained by two Sanscrit roots (Op cit., vol. x., p. 68), and may be paraphrased as "The Lord or giver of life," "The great Creator," or "The Eternal," and the king in a doubtful passage refers to "the evil one" (?), who by lies deceived the rulers of certain states, inducing them to rebel, and then left them to be conquered by the Ormazd-governed Darius. In the Babylonian copy "lies" are as it were personified. Whilst in the Scythian version, translated by Mr Norris (Op cit. vol. xv., p. 144), we find the account run thus: "These are the provinces which became rebellious, 'the god of lies' made them rebel that they would subvert the state, afterwards Ormaza delivered them into my hand." The "lies," or the god of lies, we very naturally associate with the being whom we call in our time the devil, who is spoken of (John viii. 44) as a liar, and the father of falsehood, who was so from the beginning [--Greek--], and consequently regarded as coeval with the "father of light." We next turn to such evidence as is given us in the book of Job. We select this ancient writing in consequence of the strong internal evidence there is, that it was written by some one about the period of the Achaemenian dynasty living in Persia (see Rawlinson in _Journal of B. A. Soc_., vol. 1, new series, p. 230). In Job we find two distinct powers spoken of, the one being the Good God, and the other Satan the opposer. The last is regularly described as if he had the power to cause war, devastation, tempest, disease, and death, for ch. ii., v. 6, lets us infer that he might have killed Job had he been so minded and God allowed the bargain, and in verse 19 of the same chapter we find him killing all the sons and daughters of the patriarch. Job clearly recognised the necessity of sacrifice for purification, for sanctification, and he seems not to have offered this upon any altar, in any temple, or with the intervention of any priest. It is clear that Job had never heard of Moses or the writings assigned to him. The persecuted patriarch and his friends all believe that punishment in this life is the result of offences committed against the Good God, but all seem to be singularly free from the idea that Satan is the cause of Job's sufferings either directly or indirectly. There is throughout the book no reference made to a preceding or a succeeding condition of man, such as obtained amongst the Brahmins, and it is doubtful whether the Persians believed in heaven or hell. When man died he was supposed to perish. Hence we conclude that the doctrine of the resurrection was not prevalent at the time the story was written, and in the country where the writer of the book of Job resided. Equally unknown to that author, whoever he was, were the ideas about angels, ministers of God, or disembodied spirits. These were of Babylonian origin. We must now, to carry on the thread of the argument, recal to mind the fact that Babylon was taken by the Medes and Persians, that the rulers of the united people often made that city their residence, that Herodotus tells us (B. 1, c. 135) that "the Persians are of all nations most ready to adopt foreign customs," and I may notice, in passing, that the same authority states that the two nations were scrupulously truthful, ceremoniously cleanly, and intolerant to leprosy. It is well known, moreover, that even after the commencement of our era Babylon was the chief seat of Babbinic and Talmudic lore. When we examine into the religion of the Babylonians we find that they believed in the existence of angels--minis-, ters of the Supreme--intelligences,--unseen by man, yet powerful to act in his favour, or against him. If we rightly interpret many of the engraved gems which were executed by the Chaldees, we can only come to the conclusion that they believed in a Devil, a Typhon, or spirit of destruction. We next must call attention to the fact that the Jews were conquered by the Babylonians, and enslaved in Mesopotamia for very many years--that they were subsequently emancipated by the Medo-Persians, and that the latter, whom from the inscription of Darius we believe to have been devout, permitted and even encouraged the Israelites to entertain the faith which they then held, and even assisted them to rebuild their temple. This permission, and the friendliness of Nehemiah with the Median monarch, seem to show a great similarity, if not an identity, between the Persian and the Jewish creeds. If, then, we could frame any definite idea of the tenets held by the Jews before they came into contact with the Babylonians, and those which they professed afterwards, we might form a conception of what they got from the Chaldees, the Medes, and the Persians respectively. Without going very deeply into the matter, we may say that Hebrew scholars generally allow that the ideas of Satan--a power opposed to that of God, and of angels or spirits, were introduced between the captivity and the period when the scriptures were translated into Greek, and that the notion of a future life and the resurrection of the dead, was developed after the time of the Septuagint, about b.c. 277. From the preceding considerations we draw the inference that the idea of the resurrection of the dead, of a future state of existence, in which each will be punished or rewarded for what had been done by him in his mortal condition, was not a portion of the original Median, Persian, Babylonian, or Jewish religion. A mass of circumstantial evidence has led me to believe that the idea of a Heaven for the good and a Hell for the bad, came from those who professed what we will call the Vedic or the Buddhist faith. If, in reply to this, it is alleged that it may have come from the Greeks directly, the rejoinder is simply this--that the Grecians, as Aryan colonists, brought with them only a rude notion of a futurity, which they were the medium of improving, when, through the influence of their arts and arms, they opened a highway to India both by sea and land. Those who could import into their armies such huge beasts as elephants, could far more readily import a new article of faith, if it pleased the priests. If our reasoning is sound, we cannot, I think, regard the Avesta as a trustworthy exposition of the ancient teaching of Zoroaster. On the other hand, we must, in my opinion, consider it as a book fabricated to serve a particular purpose. In this respect it resembles our own Bible, which was composed for the glorification of the Hebrews when smarting under a series of ignominious defeats and enslavements; and then enlarged, contracted, or altered, to suit emergencies. The following table will assist the reader to compare or contrast the religion of the Medo-Persians with that of the Hebrews in some matters:-- [Illustration: 285] [Illustration: 286] The Hebrews first worshipped a calf, and then a box; they believed that their God taught them to build a tabernacle first, then a temple, and to It is not the practice of the Perform altars for sacrifice. The Hebrews sians to erect statues, or temples, also believed that Elohim had one or or altars, and they charge with folly more human forms--see Gen. xviii. 1, those that do. They do not think 2, and the following chap. xix. 1--see the gods have human forms, also Gen. xxxii. 1 and 24-80, also Josh. v. 13, 14, 15, Jud. ii. 1-5. The anthropomorphism of the Jewish Scriptures has already been referred to in Vol. I. of Ancient Faiths. The Persians are accustomed to ascend the highest parts of the mountains, and offer sacrifice to Jupiter, calling the whole circle of the heavens by that name. The Persians sacrificed to the son and moon, to the earth, fire, water, and the winds. Amongst the Persians, sacrifices were attended by invocations and prayers, and were always offered up by a priest. The Persians, next to bravery in battle, considered the greatest proof of manliness was to be able to exhibit many children. Whoever has the leprosy or scrofula is not permitted to stay within a town, nor have communication with other Persians; and it is supposed that the infliction is caused by some offence against the deity (sun god). Herodotus, book I., chaps. 131,138. The eldest son of the Persian king was instructed during youth in the learning of the Magi according to Zoroaster the son of Oromazes--by this learning is meant the worship of the gods--and likewise in the art of kingly government. Plato, in Alcibiades. The Hebrews sacrificed on high places for a long period. Sacrifice in an enclosed place seems to have been adopted from the Phoenicians by David and Solomon, but not to have been popular for some centuries. The Jewish people sacrificed to sun, moon, and some planets--had a sacred fire in the temple, and regarded clouds and wind as the ministers of God. The God that answered by fire was the one adopted by Elyah. The so-called orthodox Jews only acknowledged one God, and subsequently one devil. The Jews neither offered invocation nor prayer at their sacrifices, and prophets and kings offered victims without priestly assistance. In later times every sacrifice was offered by a priest. The Hebrews regarded a large family as a gift from Jehovah. The Hebrews had the same practice; and, as we learn in the book of Job, and Deuter. xxviii, notably in the 27th verse, they deemed that botch, scab, itch, and emerods were punishments sent by Jehovah. The royal families of Judah received no instruction, either in political matters or in religion, and were allowed to grow up and do much as they liked in regard to worship. The only power which influenced them was that assumed by some man who professed to be divinely inspired. In a chapter of ancient faiths and notice an allegation which has that Parseeism or Zoroastriamsm has been borrowed from Jews and Christians. To this we wholly demur. Nowhere in the Avesta do we find a reference to the imminent destruction of the world, the resurrection of a dead man, his subjugating all the powers of evil, and reigning for a thousand years with his followers as kings and saints. Nowhere in the Avesta do we discover such immoral notions of God as prevailed amongst the ancient Jewish writers. Take these away from Judaism and Christianity, and then the two resemble the religions which are held everywhere by the thoughtful and the good. If there has really been any copying at all, we do not see the imitators in Central Asia but on the shores of the Mediterranean. The Jews copied from Tyre, Babylon, and Greece--Christians have taken as models Egyptians, Grecians, Romans, and even barbarians, and they have denied a once pure faith by covering it over with the ordures of heathenism. Yet we talk of others imitating us! I propose now to examine at some length into such of the developments as have taken place in certain religious systems, for by so doing we shall be better able to judge what are those doctrines which Christians hold, in common with what they call Pagan nations, and how far those matters which are regarded as fundamental points of doctrine are in reality trustworthy. We must ever bear in mind that if we find the same set of ideas entertained amongst peoples who by no possibility can have had any communication with each other, it is only rational to believe that each race possesses those notions in virtue of their being human. Or, if desirous of avoiding this admission, the orthodox declares that every asserted fact is a copy of a precedent one, then we ask them to reconcile the legend of Hercules being begotten by Jupiter, and Jesus by the Holy Ghost, for unquestionably the story of Alcmena's son preceded that told of Mary's. In the following chapter I shall avoid as far as possible any reference to the tales told of the conception of Jesus, for no man, however subtle he may be, can prove that the Son of Man had a certain mundane individual called Joseph for a father; all that I desire to show is, that in every nation whose history has come down to us there have been persons whose mothers have declared themselves to have been pure virgins until adopted by some god as a temporal and temporary spouse, or who, being wives, have asserted that a son who has distinguished himself in the world has been of divine procreation--an affirmation, be it observed, that can only be made in case the spouse has been manifestly unfaithful, or by some fulsome historian desirous of exalting his hero to celestial rank. There is scarcely a barbaric dynasty known, indeed, which does not claim an origin from some heavenly father, mother, or both. There have been many hierarchs who, having felt conscious of the absurdity of making, by miraculous agency, all wonderful beings come from woman only, have consequently invented legends in which men have produced offspring without a consort. Some may be disposed to deride these tales, who can readily credit the stories of virgin mothers; but in reality there is no difference between the two sets of legends, in probability, wherever "miracles" are assumed. It would have been quite as easy for the writer of Genesis to have made Isaac come from old Abraham's bosom as from the womb of his hoary-headed wife. But the Jewish writers have never proved themselves as subtle as the Hindoos and Greeks. Instead of asserting that a man, without a woman's assistance, has borne a son--a matter capable of proof--they have declared that a woman has conceived, without the assistance of a man; an asseveration for which there cannot be any proof whatever, no not even physical, for accoucheurs know that many a female conceives by her lover's instrumentality, and bears a child, at whose birth, or rather when parturition is imminent, that part which is called "the Hymen," and is the Mosaical test of virginity, is not only unbroken, but so small in aperture, and strong in flesh, as to require operative or surgical interference before the child can come into the world. According to Mosaism these must be regarded as absolutely virgin mothers. CHAPTER VIII. Supernatural generation. What is meant by the term. Examples. Children given by the gods. Anecdote. Frequency of god-begotten children in Ancient Greece. Their general fate. The stories not credited by the grandfathers of children, nor apparently by the mothers. The babies, how treated. Foundlings and Hospitals. Antiope. Leucothöe. Divinely conceived persons not necessarily great or good. Babylonian idea that a god came down to enjoy human women. Tale from Herodotus. Jehovah as a man. Grecian idea attached to the expression Son of God. Homer. Hebrew ideas. Roman notions. Romulus, son of Mars and a Vestal Augustus, son of Apollo. Modern ideas respecting Incubi. Prevalence of the belief. Its suppression. Causes of its origin. Bible made to pander to priestly lust. Dictionnaire Infernal. History of incubi therefrom. Stories. Strange idea that the Gods who made men out of nothing cannot as easily make babies. Divine Androgynes. Strange stories of single gods having offspring. Narayana and the Spirit of God of Genesis. Chaos. Hindoo mythos of Brahma. Birth from churning a dead man's left arm, and again his right. Ayonyesvara, his strange history. Similar ones referred to. History of Carticeya. Christian parallels. Immaculate conception a Hindoo myth. The dove in India and Christendom. Agni and cloven fiery tongues. Penance and its powers. Miraculous conception by means' of a dove. Other myths from various sources. It is a question which should, in my opinion, be asked by every individual in a rational community, whether it is advisable to continue, as a matter of faith, a doctrine which must be repudiated, as a matter of fact. To this we may join, as a rider, can anyone who puts his credence in a legend because it is old, claim to be superior to those who originally invented the tale, in the darkness of antiquity? When moderns smile at the stories told by the classic Varro, how certain mares in Lusitania were impregnated by the wind on a certain mountain, without any access to a horse, and at the credence given to similar accounts by Virgil, Pliny, and even the Christian bishop Augustine; and by some old Scotch authority how a young woman became a mother through the intervention of the ashes of the dead: and when they pity the benighted Greeks who gave to Hercules, Jupiter for a father; and to Mars, Juno for a mother, without intercourse with her celestial spouse, it behoves them to inquire whether each may not be addressed in the sentence, "Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur"--i.e., change but the name of the believers from Greeks and Romans to modern Christians, and it will be found that Popes, priests, and peoples believe as firmly now in supernatural generation as the most crass pagan of which history treats. Our classical reading tells us abundance of marvellous stories--how Jupiter seduced Danae in the form of a golden shower, and yet had a common son by her, who was not an aureous coin; how Leda received Zeus as a swan, and bore therefrom a couple of eggs; how Europa was tempted by him as a bull, and yet did not bear a calf; and how Callisto, a maiden of Diana, was debauched by the same god under the guise of her mistress, and yet that from two maidens a boy was formed. Of the amours of Apollo with a dozen and a half damsels, and of the very numerous disguises which he assumed, we find abundant details in our classical dictionaries. Mars, though not so frequently adopted by human females as a lover, had many children of whom he was the putative father. Jupiter had Bacchus and Minerva without Juno's aid, and Juno retaliated by bearing Ares without conversation with her consort. We deride these tales, and yet think, that because we laugh at a hundred such we shall be pardoned for believing one. How little we are justified in acting thus a few philosophical considerations will demonstrate. There are few things in mythology that are more curious than the subject of the miraculous formation of certain individuals. Some of these have been regarded as the offspring of a celestial father and a mother of earthly mould; others again, as for example �neas, were said to be the result of a union between a heavenly mother and a terrestrial father--e.g., �neas was the son of Anchises, a handsome man, and Venus, goddess of beauty and love. Some, though these are few, are said to be children of a virgin or deserted wife, who has produced them without any extraneous assistance,* and others are declared to be descended from a father whom no consort could ever claim. One individual, indeed, called Orion, is represented as having been wholly independent of both father and mother, and the result of a strange form of development, the like of which Darwin never dreamed of as he came from a bladder into which three gods had micturated. His name, we are gravely assured, came _ab urinâ_. * The following is a good case in corroboration of what is said in the text. In the _Dictionnaire Infernal_, to which more particular reference will be made shortly, there is, s. v. Fécondité, a report of a trial before the Parliament of Grenoble, in which the question was, whether a certain infant could be declared legitimate which was born after the husband had been absent from his wife four full years. The wife asserted that the baby was the offspring of a dream, in which she had a vivid idea that her wandering spouse had returned to love and duty. Midwives and physicians were consulted, and reported on the subject. As a result, the Parliament ordained that the infant should be adjudged legitimate, and that its mother should be regarded as a true and honourable wife. The judgment bears date 13th February 1537. The quaint ideas associated in mythology with the supernatural generation here referred to have been various. In some instances they have been wholly poetical, as when we are told that "the Supreme" by his union with law and order (Themis) produced "Justice," "the Hours," "Good Laws," and "Peace" (Hesiod Theogony, 900), and as when Europa is said to have tempted Jupiter to leave Phoenicia, and travel westward to Crete as the first step towards the colonization of an unknown continent. In other instances, the ideas have been framed upon the very natural belief that anyone--whether existent in story only, or in reality--who has greatly surpassed his fellows, must have had a large element of the Deity in his constitution. In other instances, the notion has been associated with the once prevalent belief, that the Creator had a sex, to which we shall refer by and by; and in other cases, the fancy has clearly been mingled with the fact, that many an unmarried woman has attributed to some god, a pregnancy, or baby, which has been due, in reality, to a very mortal man. Here we may notice that the fecundity which damsels of old were wont to refer to a god or some inferior, but yet beneficent, deity, more modern christian girls have associated with a demon. Jupiter and Apollo being replaced by a special class of imps who were named "incubi," and of the particulars of whose embraces the strangest stories are told. This small truth seems to be sufficient to demonstrate that the Greeks were not familiar with the being to whom we give the name of "Satan" and the "Devil," and that their belief coincided in one respect with that of the older Jews, who considered that whatever occurrence happened in the world, whether apparently for good or evil, was done by Jehovah, or as the Hellenic damsels reported by Jupiter, Apollo, or Mars. Here, too, I may be permitted to introduce a remark suggested by a narrative, told to me by a lady of high British rank. She had been brought up in a foreign country under the eye of a sensible and pious, we may add prudish, mother, who endeavoured to shield her daughter from all contact with external vicious influences, and to prevent her ears or her mind from ever coming to the knowledge of those matters which are associated with love, marriage, and offspring. When the young lady naturally inquired of mamma where the infants sprang from which came into the world and grew up around her, she was told, "from God," and she was referred to Psalm cxxvii. 3, which declares that "children are an heritage of the Lord, and the fruit of the womb is His reward." After having attained adult age, and being wholly imbued with this belief, she, on one occasion, expressed her opinion that Mademoiselle--who had recently been confined--must have been a peculiarly virtuous maiden, to have received so great a present as a baby from the beneficent Creator. This speech fell like a bombshell amongst a mixed company, but she knew not why. It was not until her marriage some time subsequently, that she learned that infants were said to come from God or the Devil according to circumstances, but that in reality they were always due to men and women. The anecdote given above, naturally enables us to call attention to the remarkable fact that though the Grecian poets repeatedly spoke of maidens being fertilized by a divinity, yet Greek fathers never paid any heed to the power of that god, whom their daughters asserted to have operated upon their femininity; but always treated the earthly love of the alleged celestial spouse, as if the latter was wholly powerless to punish the hard-hearted parent, who had no scruples to turn his daughter from his door, so that she might hide her shame in distant lands. In those classic times, procreation by a god upon a human being was the attempted cover for bastardy. Moreover, even the woman herself, to whom Jupiter or Apollo was alleged to have descended from heaven to honour, felt herself so much injured by the visit, that she either tried to destroy the resulting offspring with her own hands, or exposed it upon a mountain to the tender mercies of dogs and vultures. Much in the same way many a modern maiden places her shame-covered infant in the turn-table of a foundling institution. Antiope, for example, the daughter of a king of Thebes, was, according to her version, beloved by Jupiter, who visited her in the form of a satyr and implanted twins. When she discovered the coming event, which casts its shadow before, she left the paternal mansion, to avoid her father's anger, and fled to a mountain, on which she left her hapless offspring. They were found by shepherds and brought up. The story of fair Leucothöe is still more to the point. She was sufficiently beautiful to attract Apollo, who seduced her under the form of her own mother--not a very likely story it is true, but the two lived happily together until a rival told the loved one's father of the amour. The incensed paterfamilias ordered his daughter to be buried alive, and yet the god who could change her body after death into the frankincense tree, and himself into a matronly looking woman and yet retain his sex, could not prevent his earthly spouse from dying a cruel death. In other words, Orchamus, the parent of the damsel, wholly disbelieved in the existence of a divine "spark," and felt assured that his daughter had disgraced herself with a man far below her in earthly rank. From these, and a number of other Grecian anecdotes, we can draw no other conclusions than that the sires in those days were as jealous of the honour of their daughters as we are of our own now; that when that honour was in danger of being tarnished, a god was alleged by the damsel to be the offender; that the story was not believed; and that the daughter fled, was punished, or was pardoned, according to the sternness or credulity of the parents. The idea that individuals who were the sons or daughters of a god, must necessarily be great and good, does not appear to have prevailed amongst the ancient Greeks. Nay, we may even doubt whether any of them really believed that Jupiter, Apollo, or Neptune, could, or had ever become incarnate, for the sole purpose of impregnating a human female. That such an idea, however, prevailed amongst the Babylonians we learn from Herodotus, who informs us, book i. c. 181, that Belus comes into a chamber at the summit of a sacred tower to meet therein a native woman, chosen by the god from the whole nation; and in the succeeding chapter he indicates that a similar occurrence takes place in Egyptian Thebes, and in Lycian Patarae. Yet even whilst writing the tales, the historian expresses his own incredulity of their value, and we may well suppose that the thoughtful generally, would only give such credence to the statements of the temple priests, as was given to certain Christian stories by a philosopher, who said he believed them because they were impossible. Even if the common people credited the assertion that "The Supreme" did elect a woman with whom to converse, we must not despise them too lightly, for we are distinctly told in our own scriptures that Jehovah appeared as a man, and as such, ate, drank, and talked with Abraham (Gen. ch. xviii.); that Elohim was in the habit of conversing face to face with Moses (Exod. xxxiii. 11); and that the same God wrestled with Jacob as a man, and could not prevail against the patriarch until he had lamed him. We must also notice that myriads of Christians have believed, and many still do so, that He in a certain form had commerce with a Hebrew maiden (Luke i. 34, 35), and had by her a begotten son. When civilization spread over Greece, there seems to have been a change of expression--which being at the first wholly metaphorical, subsequently became realistic. Thus, any man peculiarly characteristic amongst his fellows for strength, knowledge, or power, was designated "a son of God." Thus, as Grote remarks (12 vol. edition), vol. ii. p. 132, note 1. "Even Aristotle ascribed to Homer a divine parentage; a damsel of the isle of Ios, pregnant by some god, was carried off by pirates to Smyrna at the time of the Ionic emigration, and there gave birth to the poet" (Aristotle ap. Plutarch Vit. Homer, p. 1059). Plato, also by some, called "the divine," was said by Seusippus to be a son of Apollo (_Smith's Dictionary_, 8. v.) The Hebrews had a similar metaphorical expression, and gave to everything supereminently good, an epithet which we may paraphrase as "divine." Some few writers used the title, "sons of God," as for example, Job i. 6, and xxxviii. 7, and Hosea i. 10; an epithet adopted by John i. 12, Rom. viii. 14, 19, Phil ii. 15, 1 John iii 1, 2, as if the same were applicable to all who are virtuous and good to an especial degree. The Hebrews even seem to have adopted the belief that Elohim, like the Grecian Zeus, had many children, could, and did really, associate with human beings, for we can in no other way reasonably interpret the strange narrative in Genesis vi, wherein we are told that the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, who became the sires of mighty men of great renown. Amongst the Romans, similar ideas to those which we find amongst the Greeks prevailed. For example, Romulus was said to be the son of Mars and a Vestal virgin; but so little did her relatives believe in the possibility of the occurrence, or the divine nature of the maiden's offspring, that the mother was buried alive, and the twins which she bare were exposed, much in the same way as modern "foundlings" are. In this case, as in many others, it is probable that little notice would have been taken of such supernatural generation had the mother been of low origin--but when a god inveigles a king's daughter from her duty, both the one and the other must be punished; the one in her person, the other in his child. Yet these very writers who told of the punishment of the Vestal Hia for her intrigue with Mars, took advantage of the story, and spread a report that Romulus, the offspring of the two, was, after his death, taken up to heaven to dwell there as a god. At a subsequent period, Augustus Caesar announced, on his mother's authority, that he was the son of Apollo, and claimed to be treated as a veritable scion of that venerable deity. The account of the conception and birth of Servius Tullius is curious from its circumstantiality. Ovid tells us, _Fasti_, vi., 625-659, Bonn's translation: "Vulcan was the father of Tullius; Ocrisia was his mother, a woman of Corniculum, remarkable for her beauty. Her, Tanaquil, having duly performed the sacred rites, ordered, in company with herself, to pour some wine on the decorated altar. Here amongst the ashes, either was, or seemed to be, a form of obscene shape; but such it really was. Being ordered to do so, the captive (Ocrisia was a slave), submits to its embraces; conceived by her, Servius had the origin of his birth from heaven. His father afforded a proof, at the time when he touched his head with the gleaming fire, and a flame rising to a point, blazed upon his locks." In some earlier lines, the poet tells us that the goddess, Fortune, was enamoured of this same Roman king, and visited him nightly--much as Venus came to converse with Anchises. In this story, we have an unusual ingredient, inasmuch as there is a witness to that which we may call the immaculate conception, and after birth, a proof of the child's divine origin! Of course there are many irreverent people who declare that the story is untrue--that it is far more likely that the real father was Tarquin, who, finding his consort's beautiful servant to be with child, contrived a plan by which she would escape the vindictiveness of the mistress--one which, if devotionally inclined, she was bound to give credence to. Nor can devout Christians altogether range themselves amongst the unbelievers in the miracle, for the founder of their religion was borne by a woman of low condition, and is said to have been begotten by an overshadowing spirit. He assumed to be a king; but the son of Ocrisia became one in reality, and instituted games in honour of his divine progenitor. For some more modern poetical fictions of the same nature, we may refer our readers to Scott's _Lady of the Lake_, where, in the account of the Highland seer, Brian, they will find a parallel to the story promulgated by Alexander the false prophet, respecting his birth, described by Lucian. The same ideas, with which we are all of us so familiar in Christendom, that they form a portion of the creeds which the orthodox weekly rehearse, have obtained in far Ceylon. Thus, for example, we read in a Buddhistic legend (_Kusa Iatakaya_, translated by T. Steele, Trübner, London, 1871, small 8vo., pp. 260):-- "As Sakra*, with his thousand eyes gazed over every land, The hapless queen, with heart distraught, he saw dejected stand; His godlike eye revealed to him that to her blessed womb Two radiant gods illustrious from Heaven's high town should come. Then entering first the Bodisat's blest skyey palace fair, And next unto another god's, did Sakra straight repair: Benign he said:--Go to the world of men, that distant scene, And there be born from out the womb of yon delightful queen. The saying of the king of gods unto their hearts they took; Then bathed they in his feet's bright rays that shone as shines a brook: 'Let us be so conceived,' they said, when they the order heard, 'Within the womb of yonder queen, even as the Lord declared.'" --Stanzas 129-131. * Indra, "The Supreme." But the two children do not appear as twins, like Romulus and Remus, for we find in stanza 155-- "Now when the darling little child, the wisdom-gifted one, Began to lift his tiny foot, and learn to walk alone, Another god from Heaven's high town flashed down the sky serene, And was conceived within the womb of that delightful queen." I may notice in passing, that the lady was married, but had always been barren with her husband. In the instances to which we have referred above, there has been no very marked departure from the ordinary course of nature. In all, an union between a father and mother has occurred--in all, the relation between each to the offspring has been maintained, and the ordinary progress of gestation observed. The main discrepancies which are to be noticed are, that a divine is substituted for a human father, or, as in the case of �neas, the sire has been a man, and the mother a "celestial." But after birth, instead of the child being cared for by its parents, it very frequently happens that a goat, wolf, or other animal, performs the mother's duty as a nurse. The reader whose antiquarian lore is considerable, will probably remember that Christians in Italy, France, and I dare not say in how many other Catholic countries, were implicit believers in the idea that spirits from the invisible world could assume a human form, and under that, have intercourse with youths of either sex. The literature upon this subject was at one time very great, but such pains have been taken to destroy it, in order that so great a blot upon the infallibility of Papal rulers should no longer be found, that there are few books to which I can refer inquirers. The first time I met with the subject was in a Latin treatise by Cardan, a.d. 1444-1524,* being commentaries upon Hippocrates. In this, many chapters are devoted to the possibility of intercourse between women and embodied spirits. The Mediaeval virgins, unlike the Greeks, always attributed their pregnancy to demons and not to gods, although on some occasions maidens were foolish enough, like those of ancient Babylon, to believe that they were embraced, by a divine being or angel. Into this matter the Italian doctor enters folly, and endeavours to establish some distinction how a woman could distinguish an "incubus" from a human being, and if she became pregnant and brought forth, how the devil's offspring could be told from an ordinary baby. The particulars which are given to the learned in Latin, will not bear to be reproduced in the vernacular, suffice it to say, that they are such as would be given by silly women more or less conscious of having been guilty of impropriety, and who were goaded by sanctimonious but ribald divines to enter into every detail of the devil's doings and the females' sensations. * It is more than thirty years since I read the book in question, and I have long ago parted with it. As I am unable now to lay my hands upon a copy I am not sure whether the author was Facio Cardan, who flourished at the period given in the text, or the more celebrated Jerome Cardan who lived A.D. 1601-1576. Before saying more of the "incubi," we may bestow a passing glance upon the foundation of the idea of their existence. In mediaeval times, a large portion of the New Testament was taken to be literally true, and the people were instructed to believe that the devil went about like a roaring lion seeking whom he could devour. The papal priests encouraged the idea, for by frightening the ignorant, they induced them to purchase sacerdotal insurance by paying for masses to protect themselves from the snares of Satan. For hierarchs who were obliged to live without wives, it was easy in the first place to imbue the mind of a superstitious maiden with a horror of Apollyon's power, and then to take advantage of her fears by personifying the fiend. In this manner the bible suggested the sin to the priest and made the maiden passive. It would not be profitable to write a catalogue in detail of the authorities upon which I found these statements. I will rather give a short resume of an article upon "Incubi," which is to be found in a most curious book entitled _Dictionnaire Infernal ou Bibliothèque universelle sur les êtres, les personnages, les livres, les faits et les choses qui tiennent aux apparitions, à la magie, au commerce de Venfer, aux divinations, aux sciences secrètes,... aux erreurs et aux préjugés,... généralment à toutes les croyances mer-veilleuses, surprenantes mystérieuses et surnaturelles.--Par M. Colin de Plancy. Deuxième édition entièrement réfondue _; Paris, 1826. The book is rare, but most interesting to the philosopher who concerns himself about matters of "faith," for it shows, clearly, that there is no depth of human degradation into which people who are guided by blind trust in some fellow mortal, unchecked by the exercise of reason, will not enter, and there reside permanently, until stirred up by those whom they assert on the first blush to be "infidels." After a few preliminary remarks, we are told that the French incubi did not attack virgins, but in the next paragraph is an account of a maiden who was seduced by a demon in the form of her betrothed. This was in Sardinia. An English fiend acted in a similar way, and from the congress followed a frightful disease of which the poor girl died in three days. This story is told by Thomas Walsingham, b. A.D. 1410. A Scotch lass is the next victim reported, and to her the unclean spirit came nightly under the guise of a fine young man. She became pregnant, and avowed all. The parents then kept watch, and saw the devil near her in a monstrous unhuman form. He would not go away till a priest came, then the incubus made a frightful noise, burned the furniture, and went off upwards, carrying the roof with him. Three days after a queer form was born, more horrible than had ever been seen, so bad indeed, that the midwives strangled it. For the credulous, what fact could be more strongly attested than this? The reporter is Hector Boetius, b. 1470. The next tale, having a locale in Bonn, occurred at a time when priests married and had a family. The daughter of one who was closely watched and locked up when left by herself, was found out by a demon, who took upon him the form of a fine young man. Such an occurrence was thought nothing uncommon then, inasmuch as Paul had told the Corinthians that Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light (2 Cor. xi. 14). The poor victim became enceinte and confessed the whole to her father, who, fearing the devil, and anxious not to make a scandal, sent the daughter away from home. The impudent fiend came to remonstrate, and killed the wretched sire with a blow of his fist.--Quoted from _Cæsarii Heistere mirac_., lib. iii., c. 8. The next case occurs at Schinin, wherein we are told (Hauppius _Biblioth portai, pract._, p. 454) that a woman produced a baby without head or feet, with a mouth in the chest near to the left shoulder, and an ear near the right one; instead of fingers it had webs like frog's feet, it was liver coloured, and shaky as jelly, it cried when the mother wanted to wash it, but somebody stifled and then buried it. The mother, however, wanted it be exhumed and burned, for it was the offspring of a fiend who had counterfeited her husband. The thing was taken up and given to the hangman for cremation, but he could neither burn it nor the rags which enwrapped it until the day after the feast of Ascension. The following story is laid near Nantes:--Therein a young girl baulked of her lover, mutters something like a modern order to him to go to the foul fiend, and remarks to herself that a demon would be a better friend. She is betrayed in the usual manner, and finds, when too late, that she is embracing a hairy incubus which has a long tail. She exclaims fearfully. The "affreet" blows in her face and leaves her. She is found frightfully disfigured, and is brought to bed seven days after of a black cat. The remaining histories are of a similar nature, all alike showing how completely the so-called Christian people of Modern Europe believed that disembodied spirits could assume human form with such completeness as to be the father of offspring. We may fairly compare these tales with that told by heathen Greeks about Jupiter and Alcmena, but when we place them side by side, the ancients show a far superior fancy in their fables than do the comparative moderns. I find from _Reville's History of the Devil_, p. 54 (London: Williams & Norgate, 1871), that so late as a.d. 1756, at Landshut, in Bavaria, a young girl of thirteen years of age, was convicted of impure intercourse with the devil, and put to death. It is a pity that no account of the trial is appended. Talboys Wheeler, in his _History of India_, vol. IL, p. 515, indicates that there is to this day, in India, a belief in _incubi_. Speaking of Paisacha marriages, in which a woman is united to a man without her knowledge or consent, he remarks:--"The origin of the name is somewhat curious. The Paisachas were evil spirits or ghosts (see "_Lilith" and "Satyr" Ancient Faiths_, vol. ii.) who were supposed to haunt the earth.... If, therefore, a damsel found herself likely to become a mother without her being able to furnish a satisfactory reason for her maternity, she would naturally plead that she had been victimized by a Paisach.... In modern times, however, the belief is still very general throughout the rural districts of India, that wives, as well as maidens, may be occasionally victimized by such ghostly admirers." Every mythologist who has invented such stories as that of Jupiter and Alcmena, and every woman who has ever attributed her pregnancy to a divine being, call him what she may, seems completely to ignore the idea that a god who deserves the name, does not require human aid to produce a man or woman. Surely every profound thinker would say to himself, The Supreme, who could by a word create full-grown creatures "in the beginning," has not lost the power now; surely He, who could make Adam out of dust, and Eve out of a bone of man, can produce in later days similar images of the godhead, as we are told in Genesis i. 26, without accoupling with a descendant of the rib. The mythological idea, therefore, of a divine child coming from a celestial father and a terrestrial mother, has nothing profound therein, for it is essentially a bungling contrivance of some stupid man. On the other hand, such a notion could only be entertained where a grovelling or anthropomorphic idea has prevailed, or is cherished amongst a credulous people. To put the subject into the fewest words possible, a god has never--so far as thoughtful men can judge--been said to be the father in the flesh of a human being, except by frail women, or vain, foolish, or designing men. We are fortified in this conclusion by the method in which nations or sects who have each their own favourite "son of God," treat each other. None endeavour to prove that the mother of their own hero had no commerce with man, for that is impossible--all, on the other hand, ridicule the idea of there being a child without a human father, and insist that no woman's word countervails the laws of nature. But this argument is only used against opposing religionists--it has no weight against their own divine leader. The cases which we have described are wholly different from those mythological stories, in which the union of the sexes is absolutely or relatively ignored. They differ also from those in which the Creator is represented as androgynous, or being originally without sex, becomes, by an effort of will, a bisexual being, so as to bring about the creation of man and of the world. For example, when we find in the Orphic Hymns (Cory's _Ancient Fragments_, pp. 290, seq.), "Zeus is male, Immortal Zeus is female," it is clear that there was in the writer an idea of an union of the sexes being necessary to creation. But when we find Chaos alone being the progenitor of Erebus and Black Night, from which again were born Ether and Bay, and Earth the parent of Heaven and the Sea (Hesiod, Theogony, 116-130), there is a total absence of a sexual notion. This idea, however, appears in the subsequent lines which represent Earth wedding with Heaven. The same sexual notion, appears in another fragment from _Aristophanes_, (Cory, A. R, p. 293), which tells us that "Night with the black wings first produced an aerial egg, which in its time gave rise to love, whence sprung all creation." Yet the egg necessarily presupposes a being which formed it, and another that fructified it, so that the mythos is not wholly free from the intermixture of the sexual element. When mythologists have been peculiarly anxious to shake off the somewhat grotesque doctrine that the celestial Creator must be independent of any other power, in the genesis of the world and heaven, there has been a great variety of attempts to show how this has been brought about. In one curious Hindoo legend, Vishnu is represented sleeping on the bosom of Devi, at the bottom of the ocean which covered the world. Suddenly a lotus sprung from his navel, and grew till it reached the surface of the flood. From this wonderful flower Brahma sprang, and, seeing nothing but water, imagined himself the first-born of all creatures. But ere he felt sure, he descended the stalk and found Vishnu at its root; and then the two contested their respective claims, but Mahadeva interposed, and, by a curious contrivance, stopped the quarrel, demonstrating that before either came into existence there reigned an everlasting lingam. Another myth closely resembles one which is indicated in the Hebrew Scriptures, viz., that Narayana, or the spirit of God, a self-existent entity, moved over the waters, and made them bring forth all things living. This Narayana is identical with the _yomer elohim_--"the spirit of God" of the Hebrew Genesis i. 2; the [--Greek--]--the spirit of God, or Holy Ghost of the Greeks. It is the same as the breezes of thick air which hovered over chaos in the legend assigned to Sanchoniathon (Cory's Fragments, p. 1), and produced the slimy matter from which all beings sprung. Narayana is again the same as the Night of the Orphic fragment which hovered with her black wings over immensity--the same as the _chakemah_, or "wisdom" of Proverbs viii.; the Greek _sophia_ and the _logos_--"the word" of John i. 1. The Buddha--or Brahma of the Hindoo. From this mysterious source matter was formed into shape and all creatures sprang into life. Another Indian mythos (Moor's _Hindoo Pantheon_, p. 78), attributes even more than this to Brahma. He is said to have produced four beings who proved refractory, and grieved their maker. To comfort him, Siva issued from a fold in his forehead--then strengthened by Siva, he produced Bhrigu and the seven Rishis, and after that, Narada, from his thigh, Kardama from his shadow, and Dacsha from the forefinger of his right hand. He had, apparently, without a consort, sixty daughters, and from these last proceeded all things divine, human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. This is not altogether dissimilar from the Hebrew idea of Jehovah creating all things except woman from the dust,* and forming her mysteriously from a rib of the only existing man. We may also compare it with the birth of Minerva from Jupiter's brain, and Bacchus from his thigh. But the Greek myth differs from the Hindoo, inasmuch as the deities referred to were originally conceived by human women, and did not grow from The Thunderer's body like branches from a tree. * In Mythology, things ever repeat themselves, with very little alteration. For example, Mahadeva is represented as fighting with Dacsha, and producing heroes from the dost by striking the ground with his hair. (See Moor's H. P., p. 107). There is amongst the Hindoos a goddess called Prit'hvi, who is said to personify the Earth; she had many names which we need not describe, and she was also furnished with a consort, whose birth is thus described (Moor, H. P., p. 111.)--"Vena being an impious and tyrannical prince, was cursed by the Brahmans, and, in consequence, died without issue. To remedy this, his left arm was opened, and churned with a stick till it produced a son, who, proving as wicked as his father, was set aside; and the right arm* was in like manner churned, which also produced a boy, who proved to be a form of Vishnu, under the name of Prit'hu." We may add that Prit'hvi treated him badly, and he had to beat and tear her before she would be comfortable with him. Hence the necessity for ploughing and digging before crops of cereals, &c., will abound. We can understand the last part of the legend better than the first. In the Vedic Mythology, we may say generally, that the means of producing offspring are curiously numerous; for example, we find in Goldstucker's _Sanscrit and English Dictionary_, page 20, under the word _angiras_--a statement that an individual bearing this cognomen, is named in the Vaidik legends, as one of the 'Prajâpatis', or progenitors of mankind, engendered, according to some, by Manu; according to others, by Brahma himself, either with the female half of his body, _or from his mouth, or from the space "between his eyebrows._" * As these legends generally are based upon something which Europeans would designate a vile pun, I turned to the Sanscrit Lexicon (Monier Williams), first to ascertain the names of "the arm;" and, secondly, if there were any words allied to it, however remotely, which had a certain meaning. Amongst others, I find that _buja_ signifies "an arm," and _bhaga_ is a name of Siva--one of whose epithets, _bhagan- dara_ = "rending the vulva." _Dosha_ also means "the arm" and "night." Another word having the same meaning, is _praveshta_, and this not only signifies the arm, but one "who covers over." We can then, I think, see why the device of the churning, referred to in the text, made a process available for the production of a child. The legend is a clumsy one, but not more so than that in Exodus xxxiii. 23, wherein we are told that Jehovah showed to Moses "His back parts,"--Vulgate, _posteriora mea_--inasmuch as no one could see His face and live! A still more curious story is related in the same dictionary, p. 451, under the word _ayonijeswara_. This appellative is one belonging to a sacred place of pilgrimage sacred to _Ayonija_, whose miraculous birth was thus brought about. A very learned Muni, though making a commendable use of the proper nasal way of reading sacred scripture in his own person, yet associated with individuals who did not give the orthodox twang.* The good man remained, in consequence of this, in a sonless condition, but the legend does not condescend to explain why toleration of tones in religious ceremony should make a husband infertile and his wife barren. At any rate, the Muni, named Vidyananda, feeling the punishment a great one, travelled, apparently alone, from one holy place to another without being nearer paternity. At length he met with a _yogin_ or male anchoret, hermit, devotee, or saint, corresponding to the _yoginis_, who are represented by Moor (H. P., p. 235) as being sometimes very lovely and alluring; and he, taking pity upon the Muni, gave him a wonderful fruit, which, he informed him, if eaten by his wife, would have the effect of procuring for Vidyananda the birth of a son. But the Muni, like many another character in mythological and fairy tales, seems suddenly to have lost his sense of hope deferred and a certain prospect of relief, for instead of hurrying home he sought repose under a tree on a river's brink, and whilst there ate the fruit himself. He at once became pregnant. When the new state of things was evident, he confessed all that had happened to the Yogin, and the latter, by means of his supernatural power, introduced a stick into the body of Yidyânanda, and relieved him of the infant. The creature was a beautiful boy, radiant like the disc of the sun, and endowed with divine lustre, and on account of the mode in which he was born his father called him _Ayonija_, which signifies, "not born from the womb." The account then goes on to state that this miraculous infant became a wonderfully good, learned, pious, religious, and fanatic man; that the god, delighted with his piety, gave him sons and grandsons, and after his death received him into his heaven. Any persons coming now to bake at the spot where these favours from Siva were granted, and duly performing the various duties of a pious pilgrim, are rewarded, according to their piety, &c., with progeny, worldly happiness, freedom from transmigration, and eternal bliss. * This reminds me of an anecdote which I once read of a devout Scotch mother, who, on hearing her son read the Bible in an ordinary tone of voice, cuffed him violently because he presumed to read that Holy Book without the customary religious drawl. Under the word _Ayonija_, Goldstucker gives the following examples of individuals "not born from the _yoni_" viz.:--"_Drona_, the son of Bharadwâja, who was born in a bucket" "_Suyya_, whose origin was unknown." "_Draupadi_, who at a sacrifice of her father Drupada, arose out of the sacrificial ground." "_Sita_, who sprang into existence in the same manner as Draupadi" The same is also an epithet of Vishnu or Krishna. These stories pale in interest before that of the origin of Carticeya (see Moor's H. P., p. 51, 89), and I give an account of this legend, foolish though many conceive it to be, for everything which is connected with a Hindoo mythos is remarkable, whenever it is found to be antecedently parallel with Christian surroundings of a somewhat similar narrative. We notice, for example, in the following tale, that the Indian idea of the power of "penance" and "asceticism," is, that these doings or actions are so great, that by their means alone man may compel the Creator to do things against His design, whilst in the Papal tales of certain monks and nuns, we find the doctrine asserted that by preeminent fastings, scourgings and prayers, people have acquired the power to sell salvation to their fellow men, in a manner different to that which is appointed. Again, the god when forced to obey the power of the devotee, is represented as inventing a method by which he could, as it were, cheat himself, just as Jehovah or Elohim is said to have contrived a plan by which He could circumvent Himself for the vow which He had made to destroy all the men upon the earth by a flood of water. Again, as the arrogance of the ascetic threatened to destroy the world and the heaven, a deliverer or a saviour was promised, who should be begotten by an incarnate god upon a goddess equally incarnate, and save mankind from a terrible devil This is a counterpart of the Papal theory, which makes it appear that a portion of the godhead became incorporated with a dove, and had union with a woman, herself an immaculate manifestation of another portion of "The Supreme." Yet still more striking than this, is the part which the dove plays in the Indian mythos of the birth of the Hindoo Saviour. In almost every mediaeval painting or etching of the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary, the dove takes the position of the divine father of Jesus. Nay, so distinct is the idea intended to be conveyed in one instance, that a dove, surrounded by a galaxy of angelic heads, darts a ray from his body on high, into the very part of the virgin, proper to receive it. The design of the artist is still farther heightened by the _vesica piscis_, the emblem of woman being marked upon the appropriate part of the dress, and a figure of an infant within it, points unmistakeably to the belief that the Holy Ghost, like a dove, absolutely begot the Jewish saviour as he did the Hindoo deliverer of gods and men. (_See Ancient Faiths_, vol IL, p. 648, fig. 48). But the parallel may even be carried farther, for in the Indian history it is Agni, the embodiment of fire or the fire or sun god, who becomes the dove; whilst in the Christian history, fire is one of the manifestations of the Holy Ghost (Acts ii. 3). We conclude this from the fact, that all devout churchmen believe that the Holy Ghost descended upon the day of Pentecost with the sound of a rushing mighty wind, as a multitude of cloven fiery tongues, which again suggests to the recollection of those familiar with the Vedic story, that the Maruts--rushing, mighty, stormy winds--were frequent attendants upon Agni For example, in one of the Hymns (p. 39) of the Rig Veda Sanhita (translated by Max Müller), the burden or chorus of every verse is, "with the Maruts come hither, O Agni." Here, however, the parallel between the two myths ceases, for in the Indian tale the saviour has no earthly mother. We may really affirm that he has no mother at all, being the offspring of the father alone, whilst in the Christian history, the deliverer is represented as having no human sire. The one story is just as likely to be true as the other, or just as unlikely. As a reasonable being I cannot believe the one without crediting the other, or reject only one of the two. With this preface, we may proceed to relate the legend as recorded by Moor. A certain devil or Daitya--for it must be remarked that the Hindoos regard the devil as being composed of many individualities, much in the same way as Christians do--was extremely ambitious and oppressive, as Satan is said to have been in heaven.* To force Brahma to promise him any boon he should require, the ascetic went through the following penances, persisting in each for a hundred years. (1) He stood on one foot, holding the other, and both hands upwards, and fixed his eyes on the sun. (2) He stood on one great toe. (3) He lived upon water alone. (4) He lived on air. (5) He immersed himself in water. (6) He buried himself in the earth, and yet continued as before in incessant adoration. (7) He then did the same in fire. (8) Then he stood upon his head with his feet upwards. (9) He then stood upon one hand. (10) He hung by his hands from a tree. (11) He hung on a tree with his head downwards. * I call attention to these parallels, for they compel as either to accept the Hindoo stories as true, because they coincide with that which Christians regard as "revealed truth," or they oblige as to distrust our current ideas as to the inspired verity of some biblical stories, founded as they are upon the same, or a similar, basis to those of the Brahmins. The Hindoo tale being founded in the Sinpurana, there can be no reasonable doubt that its fabrication preceded that of the Hebrew or Christian mythos. The effect of these austerities alarmed all the gods, and they went to Brahma for consolation. He answered that though he was bound to grant the boon desired by a man who became powerful by his austerities, he would devise a method of rendering it inoffensive to the heavenly host. Tarika, the name borne by the Daitya, asked for the gift of unrivalled strength, and that no hand should slay him except a son of Mahadeva. This being acquired, he plundered all the minor gods--the sun, dreading him, gave no heat; and the moon, in terror, remained always at the full--in short, the devil, Tarika, usurped the entire management of the universe. Nareda--the personification of Reason--Wisdom, the Logos, or "word," now prophesied that the destined deliverer, or saviour of the world, would come from the union of Mahadeva and Parvati. But the first was indisposed to marry, and only consented to do so after being mollified by ardent devotions and great austerities enacted by the second. To the horror, however, of the discomfited world, Parvati was barren; and the gods deputed Agni to try to produce the son whom all so earnestly desired. He took the form of "a dove," and arrived in the presence of Mahadeva just as he had risen from the arms of Parvati, and received from him, in a manner not easy or necessary to describe minutely, the germ of Carticeya; but, unable to retain it, the bird let it fall from his bill into the Ganges. On the banks of this river arose, therefrom, a boy, beautiful as the moon, and bright as the sun. This was "The Saviour" promised by the prophet. When he attained to manhood, he fought the devil in a terrific combat which lasted ten whole days; but Carticeya came off the conqueror, and delivered the world. I may notice in passing that as Carticeya is represented to be the son of his father, Mahadeva alone--so Ganesa, who was born after the marriage above referred to, is said to be solely the son of his mother, Parvati; Mahadeva not having anything to do with him. It is still farther stated in the _Sin purana_ that the husband was jealous, and displeased at this assumption of independent power by his spouse, punished her in the person of this mysterious son (Moor, H. P., page 171-2). There is another Hindoo story in which a father alone becomes the progenitor of twins--and it is remarkable, not only for this, but for the dread which a deity is said to feel from the austerities of a man. Wheeler (_History of India_, vol. i, p. 78; Williams' _Sanscrit Lexicon, s. v. Kripa_), regards this tale as Brahmanical, and, accepting his authority, we can see that the asceticism which is introduced into the story is intended to exalt the claims of that section of the priesthood who torture themselves. It runs thus:--Saradvat, by the magnitude of his penances, frightened Indra, who sent a celestial nymph to tempt him. He resisted all her wiles, and refused all commerce with her; but his excited imagination produced one of its common effects, and from that which was "spilled upon the ground" a boy and girl arose, Drona and Kripa. In Wheeler's sketch of the story, two such miraculous events occur, for a precisely similar occurrence took place with a certain Raja--and the males sprung from this supernatural form of generation, Drona and Drupada, became cronies, and were educated together. In Wheeler's account Kripa becomes the wife of Drona, and not his twin sister. She is represented to have been born from a Brahmin named Gautama, in the same fashion as Drona was. Certes, the scribes who wrote the gospels, and doubled wonders to make them more miraculous, are far behind the Hindoos in the unblushing effrontery of their conceptions. A story somewhat analogous to that of the origin of Carticeya--Drona and Drupada, is to be found in Grecian mythology. Therein we read (see Lempriere's _Classical Dictionary, 8.V_., Minerva), that Jupiter promised to his daughter, Minerva, that she should never be married--since that was her especial desire. But, unfortunately, the Thunderer had not a good memory, and was unable to foresee the future; he therefore promised to Vulcan that he would--in return for a perfect suit of armour--give him whatsoever boon he asked. The distorted god, being a great admirer of the personification of wisdom, demanded Minerva in marriage. Zeus then granted his petition and gave Minerva to him for a bride, so that "arts and arms" should thenceforth be wedded together. But the goddess disliked Vulcan, just as much as science and philosophy shun war and physical weapons. Jupiter then privately counselled his daughter to submit, apparently, but to contend, actually, whenever her husband should endeavour to caress her. This advice the goddess very artfully and determinately carried out. But Vulcan's impetuosity was extreme, and the contest between the spouses was prolonged. Though the promised wife was in the end victorious, and retained her virginity, the scene of the strife, like many another battle-field, required cleansing. The material employed by the goddess in the process was thrown down to earth, and from this stuff sprung Ericthonius, as the son of Vulcan alone, who, on attaining man's estate, became the fourth king of Athens. A somewhat similar story is told of Jupiter (Arnobius, _adv. Gentes_, B. v.), who is represented as enamoured of Themis, who, when lying on the rock Agdus, in Phrygia, and there surprised by the god, resisted his desires, as Minerva had done those of Vulcan, and with a somewhat similar result. But in this instance, that which the author calls in another passage of his work, the _vis Lucilii_, fell upon the hard rock. This conceived, and, after ten months, the stony soil brought forth a son, called, from his maternal parent, Agdistis. His character, and even his appearance, were frightful and rugged in the extreme. His strength, recklessness, and audacity frightened all the gods. In their dilemma, Bacchus offered to give his aid, and proceeded first to make the man drunk by substituting wine for the water of the fountain from which he habitually drank. Then, by a curious contrivance, he made the fierce hunter emasculate himself. The earth swallows up the sanguinary ruins of his manhood, and in their place comes up a pomegranate tree in full bearing. This being seen by Nana, a king's daughter, she plucks some of the fruit, and lays it in her bosom. By this she becomes pregnant, and, her story being disbelieved, her father attempts to starve her. But the mother of the gods sustains her with apples (see Canticles ii. 5), and berries, or other food. Her baby, when born, is exposed as being illegitimate, but found by a goatherd and brought up--becoming the all but deified Atys. In this legend, we see one son born without a human mother, and a second without any other father than Rimmon, or a pomegranate.* * Agdus, Agdistis, &c--I am frequently tempted, after reading a story like the preceding, to search in the Sanscrit lexicon to ascertain if there can be any esoteric signification in the legend that can be explained by that ancient language. Arnobius opens the story with a statement of the remote antiquity of the tale, and how it is connected with the Great Mother. He then tells of a wild district in Phrygia, called Agdus. Stoaes taken from it, as Themis had enjoined, were used by Deucalion and Pyrrha to repeople the world which had been destroyed by a flood. The great mother was fashioned amongst the rest, and animated by the deity; then follows the story given in the text. Now, in the Sanscrit, Agadha signifies a "hole or chasm," and such things have from the earliest times typified the Celestial Mother. Agdistis I take to be a Greek form of Agasti--son both of Mitra and Varuna by Urvasi, said to have been born in a water-jar, to have swallowed the ocean, and compelled the Vindhya mountains to prostrate themselves before him, &c. (Monier Williams' Sanskrit English Lexicon, pp. 4, 6). Themis may be a corruption of Dhamas--the moon, an epithet of Vishnu, Yama, and Brahma; also the Supreme Spirit (M. W. op. cit., p. 448). Deucalion seems readily to be resolved into the dyu or div--holy, and Kalam, semen virile (M. W., p. 211). Pyrrha may apparently be derived from bdra--an opening or aperture (M. W.); also bhdra--bearing, carrying, cherishing, supporting (M. W., p. 700). Atys, described as of surpassing beauty, may fairly be associated with atisi and atisaya--to surpass, excel, exceed; and pre-eminence, superiority (M. W., op. cit., p. 15). Liber, again, who is clever enough to outwit and conquer Agdistis, may, without too strong a stretch of imagination, come from Idbha-- obtaining, gaining, getting; capture, conquest; the rootword is labh--to seize, to take hold of, gain, recover, regain, fcc. (M. W., p. 861, 2). Nana, the mother of Atys the beautiful, has probably come from nanda--happiness, pleasure, joy, felicity, delight (M. W., op. cit. p. 467). In the previous volumes I have referred to the pomegranate-- Hebrew, Rimmon--as an emblem. In the legend which makes Nana conceive by eating this fruit, there are, I fancy, two ideas--one, that the pomegranate is filled with seeds and pulp of a red colour; the other, that in the Greek its name is rota, or roa, which has a close resemblance in sound with reo--to flow or gush. Of the word Midas--the name of him who sought to bring about the union of the opposite sexes by marrying his daughter Nana to Attis or Atys, the most appropriate etymon which I can find in the Sanscrit is in the root math, which signifies to strike fire by rubbing wood together, to churn or produce by churning. If we allow that there is truth in these derivations, we can then see how completely Arnobius has been deceived by taking the legend au pied de la lettre. He sees nothing but the exoteric side of the fable; the more instructed philosopher sees in it nothing beyond an attempt to weave a story to account for ordinary men and women existing. The Earth, from her deep womb produces stones which become male and female (compare Psalm cxxzix. 15--"When I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth." But mycologists were not always content with giving precedence in creation to the "Great Mother," consequently the "Father of all" comes upon the scene from no one knows where. Refusing to share with him her supremacy, he, like the Hindoo Mahadeva, becomes a father in spite of her. Like his parent, the son becomes raging mad, like an elephant or a horse in spring. He is tamed by castration, but the parts he loses still bear a fructifying power, and once more, a maiden--type of the celestial virgin, has offspring. Without going further into the tale, the story teller endeavours again to introduce marriage, but on the threshold arrests himself, apparently under the idea that the wedded state takes away the pleasure of freedom from fine young men. Beyond this point it would be unprofitable to go, since few of us can realize Greek ideas on certain matters. The origin of Venus is told by Hesiod in such a manner as to lead his readers to believe that, not only was she the daughter of a father alone, but of that particular part of his body which has been deified as a Trinity. After speaking (_Theogmy_, 170-200), of the cruelty of Ouranos, and how his wife inspirited Cronos to punish his father by means of a sickle made of white iron extracted from her body (t.&, the earth), we read--"Then came vast Heaven, Ouranos, bringing Night with him, and eager for love, brooded around Earth (_Ge_) and lay stretched, I wot, on all sides; but his son from out his ambush grasped at him with his left hand, whilst in his right he took the huge sickle, long and jagged-toothed, and hastily mowed off the genitals of his sire, and threw them, to be carried away, behind him. These fell into the sea, and kept drifting a long time up and down the deep, and all around kept rising a white foam from the immortal flesh; and in it a maiden was nourished. First, she drew nigh divine Cythera, and thence came next to wave-washed Cyprus. Then forth stepped an awful, beauteous goddess; and beneath her delicate feet the verdure throve around; her, gods and men name Aphrodite the foam-sprung goddess," &c. (Bonn's Translation, p. 11,12). Still further, we find in the Grecian mythology that Minerva was the offspring of Jupiter without a mother being in the case--unless we put faith in the tale, that the god impregnated Metis, or wisdom, and afterwards ate her up. In this case the goddess ought, however, to have emerged from the abdomen, and not from the head of her father. Vulcan, moreover, is said to have been the son of Juno alone, "who in this wished to imitate Jupiter, who had produced Minerva from his brains"--a mythos which does not tally with the statement that Zeus ordered Vulcan to cleave his head open, not the part corresponding to the yoni The tales certainly lack that evidence which the philosopher is bound to seek for; but for those orthodox believers who are bound to credit every extraordinary event which is recorded in the books of the faithful, no testimony is required. Those who feel assured that a serpent, ox, donkey, tree, bush, and other things have spoken rationally, can readily extend their trust and assure themselves that a female has had a child without a male, and _vice versa_--especially when the individuals were divine. As we have before remarked, there is nothing in the mythological stories which we have just recounted that is either more or less miraculous than conception, &c., by a virgin without the intervention of a human spouse. There is, whenever a miraculous agency is presumed, no greater difficulty in believing that children may be produced without mothers, than that they should be formed without the intervention of a father. Ere a tree can rise in the soil of a field, a germ, seed, or cutting is as necessary as the existence of a moist mould, or other ground. There being then no greater probability that a crop will spring from a moist plain without seed, than that an abundant harvest will come from dry seed alone, we are necessarily thrown back upon testimony, when we are asked to believe in the paternity of man and the maternity of woman without any association of the one with the other. The mythologists who conceived, or who recorded the fabulous history of Orion, evidently had some idea in their minds of the necessity of two elements in the formation and growth of a child, when they told the tale of the generation of that giant; and the myth connected with this individual is so curiously like one recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures, that it deserves full notice. In Genesis the narrative informs us that there was an old couple, both beyond the age at which there is any probability of either party performing the part necessary for the production of offspring (Gen. xviii. 12), both were desirous of having at least one son, but though they had been long united in marriage, their aspirations had been vain. To this couple, or rather to the husband, Jehovah is said to have appeared with two companions (Gen. xviii. 1, 2), and as the man was hospitably disposed, he ordered his wife to make some cakes, whilst he went to fetch and kill a calf for his servant to dress and cook. The visitors then partook, alone, of the good cheer, and when they had made the repast they promised the husband that his long cherished desire should be fulfilled, and that he should have a son. There does not, however, appear to be anything supernatural in the generation of the infant, except the mere facts that the father had been effete for some time, and the mother had always been barren even when young, so that conception was more surely miraculous by reason of her advanced age. The probability of pregnancy at Sarah's time of life was certainly small, but she was reminded that nothing was too hard for Jehovah to effect. Had not He already made man out of dust and woman out of man? and surely after that it was easy to cause a man and woman to act their respective parts. The reader must specially bear in mind this observation of the Lord's when he reads the Greek story following. (See Ovid's _Fasti_, book 5). "Jupiter, his brother Neptune, and Mercury, were on their travels; the day was far spent and evening approached. They were spied by a venerable man, an humble farmer, who stood in the doorway of his small abode. He accosts them with the words, 'long is the road and but little of the day remains, my door too is ever open to the stranger,' and so earnest is his look of entreaty, that the gods accept his invitation." Jupiter and the others, however, conceal their divine nature, and eat and drink like common men. But after a draught of wine, Neptune inadvertently names Jupiter, and the poor man who has thus entertained angels unawares, is frightened at their presence. After a few moments of natural embarrassment, he goes to his field and kills his only ox--the drawer of his plough--then he cuts up the animal, roasts it well, produces his best wine, and lays the feast, when ready, before his august guests. Then Jove, delighted with his hospitality and piety, says to the farmer, 'If thy inclination leads thee to desire anything, wish for it, and thou shalt receive it.' To which the old man answers, 'I once had a dear wife, known as the choice of my early youth, yet she is now gone from me and an urn contains her ashes. To her I vowed, calling upon you my lord gods as witnesses to the oath, that I would never wed me more. I swore and will keep my word. She and I longed for a son, yet none came to bless our declining years. I yearn for one now, but will not endeavour to procure one, I wish to be a father, yet refuse to be a husband or enact his part.' To deities like Jupiter, such a request was by no means a difficult one to grant, the gods could as readily form a boy as they could fabricate Pandora--a lovely woman--and send her to Prometheus, with all the ills which flesh is heir to, confined in an ark, chest, or coffer. Yet the process of what may be designated conception was a strange one. The three simply relieved themselves of the wine which they had drunk, using the skin of the slaughtered ox instead of a more commodious vessel. The man was then ordered to bury the whole in the ground, and wait according to the time of life. The gestation of the earth was completed in ten months, and at the end of that period the venerable farmer possessed a fine lad who grew up and became famous. If, now, we substitute for the Grecian name, Hyrieus, the Hebrew title Abraham; if for Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury, we read, Jehovah and two angels; if for the phrase, "they were on their travels," we read, "they were going down to Sodom to see if it was as bad a place as it was reported to be" (see Gen. xviii. 21); if for the ox which was roasted, we place, "a calf tender and good," we see a wonderful resemblance between the stories of the conception of Orion and Isaac. But there is this difference that in the Hebrew tale the divine gift is brought about by a transient restoration of power to Abraham and Sarah; whilst in the Grecian mythos, the old man is faithful to the memory of a beloved spouse, and refuses to renew with another the pleasure which he had in her company. We conceive that the exigency of the Jewish account, made it necessary that the son of Abraham should be of his father begotten, as well as a child of promise; whereas no one can call Orion the son of any one, although he was as surely a child of promise granted by the gods, as Isaac was, who was given by Elohim (or the gods) of the Hebrews. We may enter now, for a short time, into a speculation whether the Grecian story was borrowed from the Hebrew or the contrary. We are disposed to believe that the tale was adopted by the Jews after they became acquainted with the Greeks. The following are our reasons:--The conception of a godhead composed of three persons, is foreign to the Hebrew thoughts of the Almighty. Still further was it from Jewish belief to think, that Jehovah would come down upon earth to acquire information, and when there, eat and drink and talk like any ordinary man. Amongst the Israelites it was generally held that no one could see the face of God and live, On the other hand, the Greeks were familiar with tales which told of gods coming down to earth in the guise of men. As an illustration of this, we may point to Acts xiv. 11-13, wherein we find that the people of Lycaonia imagined that the gods Jupiter and Mercurius had come down to them in the likeness of men, and prepared to sacrifice to them. Yet after all, Paul had simply cured a single paralytic. On the other hand, the Jews regarded as rank blasphemy, and a crime worthy of death, that Jesus should assert himself to be a son of God, even although the miracles alleged in support of the assertion were as stupendous as they were numerous. Still, further, we cannot imagine that the degrading story of Jehovah's feasting with Abraham could have been composed, except when the Jews were no better than an untaught and grossly superstitious race. We have already, in _Ancient Faiths, &c._, expressed our opinion that the Israelites were at the very lowest period of their history at the time when Isaiah began his exhortations. There had been a confederacy between the men of Edom, of Moab, Gebal, Amnion, Amalek, Tyre, Philistia, and Assyria, the Ismaélites and the Hagarenes, which had attacked Jerusalem and Judea, and captured all the inhabitants, many of whom they sold to the Grecians (see Joel iii. 5-7). At, and shortly after this time, the Jews were in a condition of abject misery (see Isaiah i. 4-9), and capable of believing any story told to them, and would just as easily credit the mythology which the Grecian captives told, or their Grecian masters taught, as their successors do those which at a subsequent period filled the Hebrew Scriptures. Whilst then, on the one hand, there is a probability of the Hebrews having borrowed the fable from Hellenistic sources, there is, on the other, the strongest objection to the supposition that the Greeks should have borrowed from the Jews. Everything which the latter say of themselves, indicates that they were exclusive to an inordinate degree, refusing to have intercourse on equal terms with any of their neighbours, that they never sought to make their history, laws, and customs, known to Gentiles, and especially those outside of Judea, and that their writings never assumed a Grecian dress until the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, who ordered the Septuagint translation to be made about B.c. 285, with the direct view of making the Hebrew Scriptures known to the Greeks. Moreover, we know from everything which was said of the Jews by the Gentiles, that the latter treated the former with contempt and contumely, and would no more dream of imitating any of their writings, &c., than we should care to adopt the myths of Abyssinian negroes as an integral part of Christianity. It will now be profitable if we examine the story of Sanchoniathon and the statements of the Orphic Hymns. We have, in the course of this chapter and elsewhere, so» often referred to the Grecian story of the Creation as given by Sanchoniathon and in the Orphic hymns, that I think my readers are entitled to receive some further account of them; so I reproduce passages which bear upon supernatural generation, and especially that of the world and its inhabitants--my main authority being _Ancient Fragments, &c._, by J. P. Cory (London, 1832). Of Sanchoniathon we know little; our information may be summed up by saying that he is mentioned eulogistically by Eusebius (a.d. 270-338), an historian whose veracity cannot be entirely depended on. He says that Sanchoniathon had, ere his time, been translated by a certain writer called Philon Byblius, and it seems that Porphyry is credited with having copied a great part of this translation into Greek from the Phoenician. Nothing, however, is actually known of the historian in question, except from Eusebius (_Smith's Dictionary_, p. 308, vol.III., s. v., Philon.) We may then assume, according to our inclination, either that the story is really a compendium of Tyrian legendary lore, or simply a representation of what the Greeks imagined. The way, however, in which the generation of beings is described, well deserves attention from its similarity, and its contrasts with the biblical story. First, there was a breeze of thick air and Chaos. These united and produced Pothos. This again united with the wind, and Mot was the result, also called Ilus; from this sprung the seed of Creation. And there were certain animals without sensation, from which intelligent animals were produced.* After this follows a quantity of stuff that is traceable to Hesiod, and a part of which may be considered a paraphrase of Genesis. Then mention is made of Elioun, called Hypsistus (the most High), and his wife Beruth--as being the contemporaries of others; but no indication is given from whence they came. These produced Ouranos (Heaven) and Ge (Earth). Their father was killed by wild beasts! Then Ouranos married Ge, and had offspring by her. But he had other women, and Ge was jealous. Ouranos, however, came to her when he listed and attempted to kill her children. He had a son, Cronus, who drove him from his kingdom. This son turns out to be the original being called Ilus, and he contrived to emasculate his father, and from the blood which flowed sprang rivers and fountains. The remainder of this story scarcely deserves notice. * The author of the tale evidently had something in common with our modern Darwin. Ere we turn our attention to the compositions known as the Orphic Hymns, it will be interesting to inquire whether the preceding account of Creation had a Phoenician origin, or may more fairly be traced to an Indian source flowing through a Greek channel After a diligent search in the Hebrew Lexicon--and it is to be noticed that the Hebrew is all but identical with the Tyrian and Carthaginian, I cannot find any words or roots from which the proper names in the opening paragraph of Sanchoniathon can by any ingenuity be derived. Nor can I discover in the Greek anything which explains the esoteric signification of the story. But, on reference to the Sanscrit, there is a curious identity apparent between the second verse in Genesis and a Hindoo idea. The former runs:--"The earth was without form and void (_tohu ve bohu_), and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters." The Indian interpretation of the myth is this:--"Air in motion, _vahu_, ruffled the inexplicable, or empty space, _ka, has_, or _Icha, Icham_, a word also signifying 'nothing.' Thence proceeded the earth, _Ua, or Mot_ (Sans); _Math_ (Sans) making fire by rubbing sticks (coitus?) _Mada, mdda, and moda_, pleasure, delight, gladness=love, Eros." This is almost the same idea that Hesiod propounds. In the Orphic Hymns we find much more clearly than in any other writing amongst the ancient Greeks the early Hellenic notion of the generation of the worlds and of mankind. Respecting the value of the fragments there may be some difference of opinion. The curious and doubtful may be referred to _Smith's Dictionary_ (s.v. Orpheus); for me it will be sufficient to state that both Aristophanes and Plato refer to the presumed author as a religious teacher and a preacher against murder, and Euripides frequently mentions him. This will place Orpheus at least before b.c. 480. If, however, we consider him as identical with the oft-sung husband of Eurydice, we must place him B.c. 650 (Smith, s.v.). In quoting from Cory's translation, I shall not scruple to make the sense of more importance than literality: "Zeus is the first--he, the thunderer, is the last; he is the head and the middle, he fabricated all things. Zeus is male; he, the immortal, is also female; he founded the earth and the starry heaven; he is the breath of all things, the rushing of indefatigable fire. Zeus is the root of the sea, the sun and moon, the king, the author of universal life; one power, one demon, the mighty prince of all things; one kingly frame, in which this universe revolves--fire and water, earth and ether, night and day, and Metis (counsel); the primeval father and all delightful Eros (love). All these things are united in the vast body of Zeus. Would you behold his head and his fair face? It is the resplendent heaven, round which his golden locks of glittering stars are beautifully exalted in the air. On each side are the two golden taurine horns, the risings and settings, the tracks of the celestial gods: his eyes are the sun and opposing moon; his unfallacious mind the royal incorruptible Ether." The next fragment has been filched by the author of _Sanchoniathon_, and we must not quote it. After a recapitulation about Chaos, Cronos, Ether, and Eros, he proceeds:--"I have sung the illustrious father of night existing from eternity, whom men call Phanes, for he first appeared. I have sung the birth of powerful Brimo (Hecate), and the unhallowed deeds of the earth-born giants who showered down from heaven their blood--the lamentable seed of generation, from whence sprung the race of mortals who inhabit the boundless earth for ever." "Chaos was generated first, and then the wide-bosomed Earth--the ever stable seat of all the Immortals that inhabit the snowy peaks of Olympus and the dark dim Tartarus in the depths of the broad-wayed earth, and Eros--the fairest of the immortal gods, that relaxes the strength of all, both gods and men, and subjugates the mind and the sage will in their breasts. From Chaos were generated Erebus and black Night; and from Night again were generated Ether and day, whom she brought forth, having conceived from the embrace of Erebus; and Earth first produced the starry heaven, equal to herself, that it might inclose all things around herself." The preceding is given by Hesiod (900 B.c.). The following is the version given by Aristophanes:--"First were Chaos and Night, and black Erebus and vast Tartarus; and there was neither Earth nor Air nor Heaven: but in the boundless bosoms of Erebus, Night with her black wings first produced an aerial egg, from which at the completed time sprang forth the lovely Eros, glittering with golden wings upon his back like the swift whirlwinds. But embracing the dark-winged Chaos in the vast Tartarus he begot our race (the birds). The race of the Immortals was not till Eros mingled all things together; but when the elements were mixed one with another, Heaven was produced, and Ocean and Earth and the imperishable race of all the blessed gods." "Maia, supreme of gods, Immortal Night, tell me, &c." The next invocation is to the double-natured Protogonus--the bull coming from the egg, the renowned light, the ineffable strength, Priapus the king, &c.--"Metis (wisdom) bearing the seed of the gods, whom the blessed inhabitants of Olympus call Phanes Protogonus." "Metis the first father and all-delightful Eros." Again, in allusion to Phanes,-- "Therefore the first god bears with himself the heads of animals--many and single--of a bull, of a serpent, and of a fierce lion, and they sprung from the primeval egg in which the animal is seminally contained." "The theologist places around him the heads of a ram, a bull, a lion, and a dragon, and assigns him first both the male and female sex." "Female and Father is the mighty god Ericapeus; to him also the wings are first given." The Japanese account of the creation is of sufficient interest to be noticed here. I quote it from a translation of the _Annals of the Emperors of Japan_, by Mons. Titsingh, assisted by interpreters of the Dutch Factory at Nagasaki, and rendered into French, after being duly compared with the original by M. J. Klapworth--(printed for the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland; London, 1834). In the account of the seven generations of the heavenly bodies, we are told that "anciently the heaven and the earth were not distinct, nor was the female principle then separated from the male. The chaos, having the form of an egg, moved about like the waves of an agitated sea. The germs of everything were there, and these ultimately divided, the pure and transparent ones going upward to form heaven, whilst the dull and opaque ones coagulated and formed the earth. Between the two a divine being sprang up; he was followed by two others in succession." All these were pure males, and engendered without consorts. After them came a male and a female deity, but they had no intercourse with each other. These and three other divine couples, who followed them, reproduced their like by mutual contemplation. The last couple directed the "celestial spear made of a red precious stone"--said by Japanese commentators to be the phallus--into the world below, and stirred it up to the bottom. On withdrawing the lance some drops fell from it and produced an island, upon which the celestial couple descended. Each one then began to walk in opposite directions around the isle, and when they met the feminine spirit sang joyously--"I am delighted to find so handsome a young man." But this vexed the male spirit, who, being a man, asserted that he ought to have been allowed to speak the first. So they parted once more on their solitary walk; and when they met the second time, the woman waited to be spoken to. Then followed a conversation somewhat too coarse for repetition, which was followed by corporeal union. From the intercourse of these divine beings all creation sprang. But, after a time, the partners reflected that there was still wanting a governor for the world which they had engendered. So they again accoupled, and produced a daughter so lovely, that her parents thought her too good for earth; gave her the name of "the precious wisdom of the heavenly sun," and sent her to heaven, there to assume the universal government of all things. The parents once again united, and produced the moon, who was sent to heaven to assist her sister. A terrible fellow was then born from them, who represents the Devil, or those tempests which seem to oppose the beneficent action of the sun upon the soil. The parents returned to heaven, and there are constant contentions between the brother and sister. The former is described as being furious under attempts at control; generally, he was quiet, and always had tears in his eyes (dew and rain), but sometimes, when provoked, he broke every thing, uprooted trees, and set the mountain forests on fire. We need not pursue the story further than to say that the celestial beings created a terrestrial couple, whose children bear considerable resemblance to the Greek Jupiter, Apollo, Neptune, and others, and from them came the first Emperors of Japan. In the matter of evidence upon such a point as the conception of a man without a woman, or a woman without a man, it is clear that unsupported assertion is wholly valueless. For example, I may for a time absent myself from general society, and return to it again after a certain interval, having with me a child, whom I assert to be my very own, produced by my own inherent power, just as a tree produces a leaf which grows, matures, and falls. I may frame a romantic account of a dream, in which I was told that if I planted myself in the central bed of a certain garden, and contrived an apparatus for daily watering my buried legs, that a child would sprout from my right side, who should be to me as a daughter. Yet, however ingenious my tale, there is not any one possessing sound sense and knowledge who would believe me. In like manner, if a woman should tell a story analogous, though not identical, she is certain to be discredited; even the assertion of the existence of a divine father would not, if the woman were unmated, save her character from a stain. We may next refer to the legend of Prometheus, inasmuch as in many points it resembles the Hebrew mythos so greatly, that we must imagine they both have a common origin, or that the one is a copy--though an indifferent one, of the other. Prometheus, or forethought, was represented to be the first who made an ordinary man--he formed him of clay, and then animated him with fire from heaven. The Jewish tale asserts that it was Jehovah who made the first man. That man was first formed like a statue out of clay or dust, and had no life until breath was infused into his nostrils. In both stories man alone is formed first. In the Grecian fable Prometheus does not make a consort for his man; nay, he refuses to receive one for himself when the gods send to him Pandora--a paragon of loveliness. Instead of this he gives the damsel to Epimetheus--or after-thought--who takes her carelessly, and finds that even a charming woman is not a guarantee against cares and woes. Some accounts, however, say that Prometheus made both man and woman out of clay. The discrepancy does not signify much, for we see the same in Genesis, wherein we are told in one place that man and woman were made together, whilst in another the story runs that Adam preceded Eve, and that, instead of being formed of dust or clay, the latter was formed of bone. We may now refer to the story of Apollonius Tyaneus, whose history has interest for us, inasmuch as it illustrates three important points, upon which much stress has been, and may still be, laid by inquiring minds. The most conspicuous is the propensity of historians, or, to speak more correctly, of a biographer, to record wonderful things about an extraordinary man; next the ridicule cast upon the tale by those who have circulated stories equally improbable, and the indication that travel to Hindostan was apparently common, prior to and during his time. In sketching the life of the philosopher, I quote something from _Le Dictionnaire Infernal_, and the rest from Smith's _Biographical Dictionary_. The philosopher in question was born about 4 years B.C. His history was written by Philostratus, about 100 years after the hero's death, and is ostensibly founded upon memoirs left by his secretary, Damis, an Assyrian, who accompanied Apollonius during his travels, and recorded his discourses and prophecies, and acted much as Luke did with Paul. Amongst the proofs which Damis gives of his veracity, he tells us that when he and his master traversed the Caucasus, they saw the chains which bound Prometheus, still fixed to the rocks. This bit of verification is now derided, but in my school-days I recollect having an account put into my hands, written by some author, stating that the remains of the ark were still to be seen upon Mount Ararat.* * On the day before this was written there appeared in _The Telegraph_ a paragraph, to the effect that an Assyrian slab had been translated by Mr. Smith of the British Museum. The record is said to give an account of "the deluge," and it tallies nearly with that given by Berosus, recorded in my second volume. It adds, however, that the ark was at that period in existence, and its wood and bitumen used as amulets. Singularly enough, the tale is supposed to confirm the bible legend, the writer of the paragraph never dreaming that it more certainly confirms the Babylonian or Assyrian origin of the book of Genesis. The other parts of this slab, which were wanting, have more recently been found. But there is no necessity for me to change the wording of the note. There was also current a "Joe Miller" about some old woman, who would not believe in flying-fish, which her sailor-boy had seen, but who readily believed his tale of hooking up a chariot wheel on an anchor fluke from the bottom of the Red Sea! Dr. Smith, or Mr. Jowett, the author of the article, very judiciously says--"We have purposely omitted the wonders with which Philostratus has garnished his narrative.... _Many of these are curiously coincident with the Christian miracles_--(the italics are our own). The proclamation of the birth of Apollonius to his mother by Proteus, and the incarnation of Proteus himself; the chorus of swans which sung for joy on the occasion, the casting out of devils, the raising the dead and healing the sick, the sudden disappearances and reappearances of Apollonius; his adventures in the cave of Trophonius, and the sacred voice which called him at his death--to which may be added his claim as a teacher, having authority to reform the world--cannot fail to suggest the parallel passages in the Gospel history." We learn, moreover, that the biographer was high in favour with Alexander Severus, and that Eusebius of Caesarea naively allows the truth of Philostratus' narrative in the main, with the exception of what is miraculous. None of the authors quoted seem to think of the adage--"Change but the names, and the same classes of wonders are a matter of faith to you." Surely it is as easy to credit the strange deeds of Proteus as those of Gabriel. Whether we choose to adopt the hypothesis that Apollonius was a rival of Jesus, that the Nazarene and Tyanean were independent of each other, that the evangelists took a hint from Damis, or Philostratus imitated Luke in more ways than one, we have still the fact that two different biographers, giving a history of the life of two contemporary individuals, assert that the birth of their respective heroes was announced by a divine being, who himself brought about the conception of the infant that, on arriving at maturity, was held to be divine. In writing thus, it will be distinctly understood that we draw no comparison between Jesus and Apollonius, but only between the authors who have undertaken their respective biography. Leaving this curious point, the next noteworthy one is that Philostratus records, that the Tyanean went through Assyria, Babylonia, and Bactria, to India, "where he met Jarchus, the chief of the Brahmins, and disputed with Indian gymnosophists _already versed in Alexandrian philosophy_." I have placed these last words in italics, to call attention to the apparent belief of the historian, that prior to his day there had been extensive religious communication between India and Greece--a point on which I have much insisted in a previous chapter. The Tyanean is said to have been five years upon his eastern journey. We have no idea where the Nazarene was during his youth and before he began his public career, and we cannot help regarding the omission to notice this part of his life as being blameworthy in the evangelists. Those who knew so much of Jesus at his conception, and about his birth and infancy, could surely, if they would, have informed us of his adult years. Nor, _à propos_ to this short account of the biography of Apollonius, by Damis and Philostratus, must we omit to notice the conceits of those who have assumed that the Tyanean was set up as a counterfoil to, or an imitator of, Jesus of Nazareth; for, just as the Christians may, with some show of reason, affirm that the miracles recorded in their writings have been filched by others; so may the Buddhist, with still greater plausibility, declare that the greatest part of the life of the Nazarene, as given in the Gospels, has been copied almost verbatim from the biographers or evangelists of the Indian saga For myself, I consider that the miraculous parts of the history of all the three conspicuous men which have been named are equally true or--false. The idea of attributing to the Supreme God the birth, or, rather, the procreation, of an extraordinary man, seems, so far as we can judge, to have existed in the Western Hemisphere as well as in the Eastern. For example, in an interesting book, entitled _New Tracks in North America_, by W. A. Bell, M.A., M.B., Cantab; London, 1869, we find the following legend respecting Montezuma, the most popular ruler of the ancient Mexicans. The legend is intended to explain the occurrence of vast ruins amongst the Pima Indians, of which other history is silent, and runs thus: "Long ago a woman of exquisite beauty ruled over the valleys and the region south of them. Many suitors came from far to woo her, and brought presents innumerable of corn, skins, and cattle to lay at her feet. Her virtue and determination to continue unmarried remained alike unshaken, and her store of worldly possessions so greatly increased, that, when drought and desolation came upon her land, she fed her people out of her great abundance, and did not miss it, there was so much left. One night, as she lay asleep, her garment was blown from off her breast, and a dew drop from the Great Spirit fell upon her bosom, entered her blood, and caused her to conceive. In time she bore a child, who was none other than Montezuma, who built the large 'Casas,' and all the other ruins which are scattered through the land" (vol. i. p. 199). It is allowable for the reader to doubt whether there ever was a Mexican Queen whose renown was spread far and wide, who preferred celibacy to marriage, and who, being rich, was not plundered by the chiefs whose alliance was rejected. We may equally doubt the efficacy of a drop of water, even though it came from the Great Celestial Spirit; but, notwithstanding every objection which the most sceptical can advance, the legend is quite as probable as those current amongst the ancient Greeks, the religious Hindoos, and a large portion of modern Christians. A miracle, always improbable, is not necessarily true because it is said to have occurred in the old world, or indubitably false because it is reported to have happened in the new. Nor can one who regards faith as superior to reason, refuse to believe or to question the truth of any supernatural story simply because he was not told it during his childhood or youth. When the philosophical inquirer finds that in every country, with whose literature we are familiar, there are, not only abundance of tales about supernatural generation before the world was formed, but from the earliest periods of history to our own day, he may well pause and inquire into the intrinsic value of a religion or a faith that is founded mainly, if not wholly, upon the assertion that a certain person was the son of the Supreme Creator, and being so, has the qualities of his sire as well as those of his human mother. The orthodox in Britain do not believe in Cristna, Krishna, or Vishnu, because the Hindoo sacred books declare that he has appeared repeatedly as an incarnation of the Creator--nor do they credit the tales told of the supernatural generation of Bacchus or Hercules--yet, when they are asked what stronger evidence they have for the truth of their own story, they are unable to give more than affirmations, strong, perhaps, but not more so than those of ancient Hellenic priests. It is out of my province, now, to enter into every thing connected with the doctrine held by those who are known as Trinitarians. My main endeavour in this part of my subject is to clear the way for "reconstruction." It is my desire to give to those who have not the leisure, or, perhaps, the inclination, to wade through the dull tomes of theological, mythological, and similar books, an account of what is and has been entertained as religious belief by others, with whom, or with whose opinions, they have not come in contact. I have no special wish to prove that my opinions are right and the prevailing ones wrong; my chief aim is to give data by which others may form a judgment for themselves. With this view I have systematically endeavoured to satisfy myself of the trustworthiness of the witnesses whom I call upon to testify to facts; to my knowledge, nothing has been suppressed which seems to me to bear upon my subject, nor is aught set down in malice. In my next chapter I shall institute an inquiry into another important doctrine, held by Christians from their first existence until the present day, namely, the Existence and Ministration of Angels. Since the chapter was originally written, Dr. Kalisch has published an essay upon the same subject in the second part of his commentary upon Leviticus. I shall probably take the liberty of quoting from his pages; but, as we treat the matter from different points of view, I do not feel called upon to suppress my own work because he has preceded me. It gives me pleasure to feel and to know that fellow-workers in the same toilsome task, not only may help each other, but rejoice in the opportunity of so doing. CHAPTER IX. Angels. The ideas associated therewith. Why winged. Wishing- caps. Jehovah and His Angels made to walk by the historian. The belief in Angels incompatible with that of an omnipresent and omniscient God. Pictorial representations. Absurd conceptions of angelic wings. Angela want birds' tails. Men have tried to fly. Difference between birds and men. Arms and wings. A writer at fault about this world is not to be trusted in his accounts of another. Bats and similar mammals. The Devil better winged than Michael--Yet Satan, a roaring lion, goes about as a bull with bat's wings. Angels and beetles. Harmony in creation. Strange idea of spirits. Spiritualism. Varieties of angelic forms. Not the products of lunacy. Angels and demigods. Egyptian ideas. Assyrian notions. Christian fancies. Birds and Men united in human celestialism. Persian Angels. Mithra winged. Angels in Persia twelve in number. Job, the work of a Persian Jew. Angels referred to therein. Darius had a consecrated table. Babylonian belief. Daniel. Greece and Rome. Gods, Demigods, Angels, and Saints. Christian demigods. Angels' duties. Book-keeping, clerks of wind and weather;--police-agents. The inventor of Heaven admired centralization. Babylonian tutelary Angels. Christian ones. Christian saintly imagery. The bleeding heart of Mary. A funny Chaldean goddess to match. Popish saints have an aureole, but no wings. Francis of Assisi could make stigmata but could not change his arms into pinions. Babylonian and Papal emblems identical Development of Angels amongst the Jews in Babylon. Angelic mythology founded upon Astronomy and Astrology. Planets are Archangels. Angels and Devils mentioned on bowls found in Mesopotamia by Layard. The probable meaning of their names. Hebrews adopted Chaldee beliefs: evidence. Juvenal. Jews and Chaldeans. Sadducees and Pharisees. Sadducees and our Reformers compared. A legal anecdote. Angels in Ancient Italy. Our angelic forms are of Etruscan origin. Some such beings had three pairs of wings. Etruscans had guardian angels for infants and children. Angels carry various matters. Angels of marriage. Angels for heirs of salvation. Etruscan angel of marriage. Jewish match-maker. Raphael. Description of an Etruscan painting in tomb of Tarquin. The angel of death. The Greek theology. The Greeks taught the Jews. The Jews never taught other nations. Greeks had a supreme god and a host of inferior deities. War in heaven. Titans--giants. Children of the sons of God and daughters of men. Greek origin of Christian and Miltonian angelic mythology. The begotten Son of God (Hercules born to Jupiter by Alcmena). Restores the kingdom to his father. Greek ideas of demons. Hebrew and Christian ideas of good and bad spirits. The recording angel. Demigods and archangels. Greek deities not winged except Mercury. Some minor gods have pinions.--Pegasus has wings. Hymen, the angel of the covenant of marriage. Genius loci and cherubim. Alcmena and Mary. Jupiter and "the power of the Highest" Roman mythology. Romans adopted the Etruscan form of angels. Christians adopted it from Romans. The Christian crozier is the Etruscan and Roman _lituus_, or "divining staff." Rome and London both avid of religious novelty. Instability in religion a proof of infidelity in the old. Hence a desire for infallibility, to crush doubt. Angelic mythology of the Bible. Christians use words in parrot fashion. Words ought not to stand for ideas. Prayer-cylinder in Thibet. Contradictions. Figures and metaphors are theologian cities of refuge. Prophet who says that he converses with an angel- -is he to be credited? A spirit without flesh and bones, cannot move his tongue to utter words. Drunkards see "blue devils"--they are unreal If the appearance of a man in a dream is an illusion, his words are so too. Absurd ideas about phantoms. Notice of the deeds of a few Hebrew angels. A resume of their history. Inspiration did not reveal angels. Human fancy did. Conspiracy in Heaven! The Genesis of Hell. What sort of a place it is supposed to be. God made the Devil, so man must multiply his imps! Lucifer taught Elohim! Old Testament less knowing than the New. The Devil not a fallen angel. The book of Enoch. Deductions drawn. There is scarcely a single article in our current belief which does not prove, on examination, to have descended to us from Pagan sources, or to be identical with heathen beliefs older than the Hebrew. The idea of a personal God dwelling in some locality, vaguely described as "Heaven," in which He reigns, and rules, like a modern emperor, has been found to exist in almost every nation whose language we know, and whose history has descended to us. Human weakness makes it so. Such a ruler has been called Brahma, Siva, Vishnu, Mahadeva, Bel or Baal, Melech or Moloch, Ormazd, Elohim, Jah, Jehovah, Jupiter, Yahu, God, and a variety of other names; but He has always been hailed as king, and lord of all creation, having a throne beside which attend a number of servitors, standing before and around him, all ready to do his bidding and to go wherever they are sent. As a potentate rules on earth over provinces far distant from the central government, so the heavenly monarch was, and is yet, supposed to have "viceroys," "lieutenants," or "vicars," who have authority delegated to them, and exercise it under his superintendence. A scheme such as we have described does not seem to have existed from the first amongst the Jews; for, when men of reasoning powers conceived the idea of a Creator, He was regarded as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. It became gradually interwoven with theology; for when men of limited capacity thought of such a vast empire as the universe, they, under the influence of a grovelling anthropomorphism, recognized, as they imagined, the necessity of furnishing it with a system of acquiring intelligence, and promulgating decrees which should be far superior to any postal plan devised by human kings. Amongst the Kaffirs, men with missives race against time, and by means of relays, messages are sent to vast distances in a comparatively short period. By means of horses, skilfully engaged beforehand, an ancient Persian tyrant could make his commands known all over his vast empire in the course of a few days, and moderns, by means of railways and the electric wire, can forward information at a still more rapid rate. Yet, to old theologians, and even to observant men of the present day, all these means of communication between God and his subjects seemed to be slow. We may, for example, notice a fly buzzing round the head of the running Kaffir, or the ears of the fleetest of Persian steeds, and a swallow on the wing outstrips a railway express. The velocity of the carrier-pigeon has long been known. All these were, therefore, regarded as swift-winged creatures, and fit for message bearers. As then, it was observed, that of all beings who could move, the bird is the swiftest in its movement from place to place, it was very natural that dogmatists should represent the messengers of the great king with powerful pinions, like those of the eagle or the albatross. In this manner the addition of wings to any mythological character sufficed to show that he who bore them was a celestial being; one who stood before the supreme ruler, and received from him delegated power--either as vicar, viceroy, or messenger. Thus the Greeks depicted Mercury with wings on his legs and elsewhere, and the Hebrews gave large pinions to their seraphim--sometimes as many as six being used by each (Isa. vi. 2.) The Etruscans pictured their angels with two wings only, and we have followed, implicitly, their lead. But the Hindoos did not in early times adopt ideas such as this. They noticed the speed of the sunbeam, the velocity of the hurricane, and the rapidity of thought; and since they saw many birds borne away by the wind, they imagined that celestial messengers must travel in a corresponding fashion. For one who rode upon the clouds of the typhoon, pinions were useless. I have in my possession a plate,* in which the celestial attendants on the god are all wingless, but have sex. The name given to the attendants referred to is "Apsaras," who are described as having been produced in myriads when the ocean was churned. They are said to reside between the waters above the firmament and those below it, and are represented as being of consummate beauty and elegance of form, their business being to attend upon the gods and give them pleasure, by singing, music, dancing, and in every possible way. They are sometimes represented as being of both sexes, all having the power to change their gender. Generally, they are described as females, and take the business of Venus in the Greek heaven, and of the Houris in that provided by Mahomet and his followers. The Hindoos have in their theology an abode of bliss, in which the pleasures are wholly sensual. In this they do not differ from the Christians, except that the latter only expect to indulge in music and a sanctified vengeance. * Plate x., vol. 1, "Recherches sur l'origine, &c., des Arts de la Grèce," D'Harcanville, London, 1785. The author states that the plate is copied from Le Voyage de Niebuhr, T. 1, Tab. vi. With great ingenuity the Hebrews conceived that the will of God must be equivalent to His wish--that His wish must be the same as a command, and, consequently, that He could send His messenger from one spot to another in an instant; or, if He chose, He could go Himself and communicate personally, as He did with Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, and Joshua. For such a Being even light would be too slow (see Psalm xviii. 10; civ. 3, 4). From a similar thought arose the stories which have found their way into our fairy mythology of "wishing caps" which would enable the bearer to pass in an instant of time, and wholly invisibly, from one part of the world to another. In oriental countries, a carpet or a coat was the carrying agent, whilst amongst the more clumsy story-tellers of Europe, a pair of boots was furnished, whose wearer could cover twenty miles at a stride. In the plenitude of our prejudice we may smile at the caprice which invented the "wishing cap;" but if we reflect calmly upon the matter, we discover more depth of thought in this than has been shown in the formation of tales in which winged angels are introduced. The contrast will readily be recognized if we take a scene from "Fortunatus," and another from the Old Testament The former, by putting on a cap, could transport himself in a moment from Formosa to Great Britain. Whereas we learn, from Genesis xviii, that three angelic men took "a walk" from somewhere to Sodom, that they might see what sort of a place it really was. The hero in the fairy tale was not fatigued; the angels of the Hebrew mythology were glad to wash their feet, and to eat and drink, so as to recruit their energies (v. 8; Ps. lxxviii. 25.) A mythical tale like this demonstrates incontestably the mean condition of the story-teller, who does not furnish Jehovah even with a mule or ass, but makes Him go afoot. We must, therefore, regard the theological contrivance which furnished angels with wings, as being a clumsy one; indicating superficiality, rather than profound thought, and emanating from human infirmity rather than divine inspiration or direct revelation. We shall see this more distinctly if we inquire into the ideas necessarily associated with wings. The theologians who have furnished their ideal messengers with wings show, in the first place, that they have the idea of an air upon which the sails can strike--of muscular structures to move the pinions, and of the necessity for food to enable the motive power to be kept up. The idea of a winged angel, therefore, necessarily implies a belief in the presence of a solid material body moving through an aeriform fluid, resembling the atmosphere just above the earth's surface. That there really was this belief associated with celestial messengers we find in the Jewish scriptures, wherein it is stated, as if it were a common occurrence, that angels came to talk familiarly with men; as, for example, Gen. xviii, xix., xxxii.; and Judges i., where we are told that an angel came from Gilgal to Bochim, to deliver a statement, to the Hebrews, such as a silly girl at Lourdes asserted the Virgin Mary had come from Heaven to make to her; see also Judges xiii., and the book of Tobit. That angels were, moreover, supposed to possess thews and sinews, we find from Gen. xxxii. 24-30, wherein we are told that some celestial being wrestled with Jacob, but could not prevail against him. In a previous chapter, although it is only in a dream, Jacob saw them mount and descend a ladder as if their wings--if they then had them--were useless. We shall not now be far from the truth, if we affirm that winged messengers, envoys, or angels, can only be supposed to exist by individuals whose god is nothing more than a man without universal power and knowledge. To any one who believes God to be omnipresent, the idea of His having ambassadors, or vicars upon earth, is blasphemous. The comparative coarseness of those minds which fabricated the notion of winged men, as celestial messengers, will be the more certainly recognised, if we examine into the pictorial conception which they have permitted, and still allow, to pass, for the embodiment of their idea. Let me, for example, invite the reader to cast his mental eye over the winged men-like bulls, &c., of Assyria and Babylonia; the winged genii of the ancient Egyptians; the winged soul and angel of Death of the Etruscans; the angels of ancient and modern Christian painters; and the pinioned heads which came from the walls to listen to the music of Saint Cecilia--according to Papal legends--and then to try to discover the locality of the muscular organs which are necessary to give movement to the wings. Everybody who has ever carved, at his dinner-table, a grouse, partridge, pheasant, duck, or other fowl, must be aware of the enormous mass of flesh which is associated with the wings. If we bare the breast and remove the pinion bones from any bird which flies--(it is necessary to make this proviso, for such as the dodo, the aptéryx, the ostrich, emu, and others, have wings which are only rudimentary, and not used for flight)--we find but a very meagre body remaining behind. Hence we see the necessity of furnishing an imaginary angel which has wings with muscles that will enable the pinions to be used; but in no pictorial representation of an angelic messenger do we ever find the ordinary figure of a man departed from, or any provision made for muscles to move the feathered organs. And we must notice, in passing, that it is monstrous to suppose that a man must become, in part, a bird ere he can be useful to a god! Again, we recognize in the conventional form of angels a total absence of knowledge of natural history, of gravity, of force, &c. Let us, for example, imagine for a moment that the metaphorical wings are real ones used in flight. We see directly that they will only raise the individual perpendicularly into the air. The angelic human creature, even if his wings were--as they ought to do--to replace his arms, would still lack a tail, to use as a rudder to direct his flight. It is clear, then, that no one has seen an angel, and that those who have pretended to have done so, were deeply ignorant men. To make our observations upon this point somewhat more comprehensible, we may just refer to the fact that many individuals, misled apparently by the mass of ideal celestial men--or angels--which are to be seen in almost every cathedral or parish church in Europe, have conceived the idea that they could fly, if only they could contrive the necessary apparatus to append to their arms, legs, or both; in other words, many men have fancied that they could do better for themselves than nature has done for them. But a few minutes' calm thought would teach any one familiar with the composition of forces, that an attempt at the imitation of a bird's flight must be a failure in man. Let me show this by a simple observation: A bird extends its wings, and by a strong stroke towards its own body, rises into the air, though neither solid nor rigid, both wings and air have apparently been so. In imitation of this bird, we will now suppose that a man places himself, with arms outspread, like the letter T between two uprights, forming something like the letter U. The individual would then be represented thus [J]--unlike the bird, his _point d' appui_ would be solid, and his arms would be far more unyielding than feathers. Yet not one athlete in a million could spring upwards, so as to stand upon the summit of the U. Man's "pectoral muscles"--as physiologists call the mass of flesh below the collar bone and above the nipple--are intended to move the arm; the bird's pectoral muscles are intended to move the body. Cut off a man's arms and pectorals--the counterpart of the bird's wings and fleshy breast--and he has barely lost a tenth part of his weight; on the other hand, cut off the corresponding parts of a bird, i.e.t the pinions and the muscles which move them, and not a tenth part of the original weight is left behind. Speaking coarsely, we may then affirm that man's body is relatively about a hundred times heavier--air being the standard--than that of a bird, and his pectoral muscles, relatively to his body, a hundred times less in bulk. Consequently, even if a human being could, by muscular action, develop the bulk of his "pectorals," so that they should be relatively to the rest of his frame, equal to those of a bird, still his bulk would be so much more solid than that of the bird's bones, flesh, and feathers, that his power of flight would be a hundred times less. A man, with the exception of his lungs, is in health, solid or fluid, in every part of him; a bird's bones, on the contrary, are everywhere permeated by air cavities, which make them as light as pith or cotton wool. A pound of lead and a pound of feathers are certainly equal in weight, yet, if both are allowed to drop from a balloon, the first will reach the ground a long time before the second. In like manner, by contrivance, I could with my breath sustain an ounce of eiderdown in the air, although I am quite powerless to sustain, by like means, the same quantity of solid meat. I say nothing of the relative position of the shoulder-joint in man and birds--although the point is physiologically important. Again, we may assert that the originators of the angelic mythology were absolutely ignorant of that which is called comparative anatomy. We have already expressed our belief that no one has a right to expect that people will believe in the reality of a man's knowledge respecting the unseen world, so long as he is palpably at fault in his notions respecting the visible creation. Consequently we assert that one who is careless as regards actual phenomena and ignorant of common truths, cannot be trusted in metaphorical, mythological, or divine lore. A comparatively small amount of observation proves to us that amongst the highest classes of animal life, the wing is the counterpart of the arm or of the fore-leg. In the creature called the "flying squirrel," there is no pinion as there is in the "condor,"--there is simply an unusual development of skin which unites the fore and hind limbs much in the same way as the web unites together the toes of the goose or duck. In the bat, which, though a mammal, is allied, as regards its power of flight, to the birds, we find that the fore-leg is developed so as to make a bony frame on which a thin skin may be stretched, which is still farther strengthened by being attached to the hind leg. In the ordinary bird, the skin which we see in the bat and flying squirrel is replaced by feathers, which are longer, broader, and lighter than a fold of skin. The ordinary method, therefore, in which angelic beings are depicted does not associate them with the highest classes of animal life. Our modern artists are much more skilful in depicting Satan than in pourtraying Raphael, Gabriel, or Michael. Our last remarks would be comparatively unimportant, were it not that the close observation which the moderns have given, to every thing connected with natural history, has shown us that there is a harmony throughout creation. No animals have noses on their backs, nor eyes in their hind legs. No insect--so far as I can remember--has a thick neck; nor has any mammal or bird a thin one, like the wasp, bee, or fly. As we imagine that it is proper to extend our knowledge rather by the lights which we have already attained, than by silly or hap-hazard guessing, so we think that it is better to investigate the subject of angelic forms by comparative anatomy, than by the dreams of divines, who probably have never studied any other subject than the best means of gaining influence over their fellow-mortals. We assert that there is not in all the creation, known to man, any creature with arms and legs--or their equivalents, legs and wings, or fore-legs and hind legs--which has, in addition, wings upon arms, legs, head, or back. In such a combination there is something monstrous. I confess that I could, if satisfactory evidence were given, credit the occurrence of a devil with a tail--of a centaur with a horse's body and a human head--but I could not possibly believe that Satan went about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he could devour in the dress of a bull with bat-like wings, as well as horns and hoofs; or that an angel of God approaches us in a form nearer to the scarabseus of Egypt than to the human form divine. Yet when we say that a pictorial angel approaches nearer to a beetle that revels in filth, than to an etherial essence which ought to be very close upon perfection, we are still far from precision. Ladybirds, cockchafers, and others of the class allied to the scarabseus that was almost deified in Egypt, have six legs, two wings, and two wing cases--ten means of locomotion in all. Butterflies, moths, and the like, have six legs and two wings. Consequently, if there be any design in creation, and angels have been created, they can only be regarded as the connecting link between the highest and the lowest classes of animal life. If then, there be such a thing as harmony of design in Creation--if the Creator be not the author of confusion (1 Cor. xiv. 33)--if matter be material, and imponderable forces cannot be weighed or made otherwise recognisable by the senses, except by their effects--if the Almighty be omnipresent and omniscient, it is absolutely impossible for a thoughtful mind to believe in the existence of angels in any shape--whether material, immaterial, or essential. But this consideration forces us still further, and we feel compelled to ask ourselves, whether, with our minds constituted as they are, we can believe in, or understand any thing wholly immaterial? Whether we can imagine the existence, for, example, of "force" without matter?--a shape which is formless?--a form visible to the eye, yet wholly immaterial? It seems to me to be desirable, at the present day, to call attention to this point in a particular manner, inasmuch as there are vast numbers, both in Europe and America, who believe in what is called Spiritualism, and are, in reality, as greatly the dupes of charlatans as were the disciples of Alexander the false prophet, whose history we gave in vol. II. The jargon of these pretenders is based upon the assertion in the Bible that there are spirits--the accounts of certain of these returning to the earth which they have quitted, or conversing with human beings in dreams, or in reality. But both they and their victims fail to see that a spirit, being without a material existence, cannot put matter into motion--it cannot produce the waves in the ether that cause those impressions on eye and ear which give the idea of sight and sound. We may best give our reader a glimpse of our meaning, if we compare a spirit to a picture projected on a sheet by a magic lantern. It is true that we can see it--yet we know that it is powerless to hear, to speak, to move; it cannot of itself even vanish. Yet there are many onlookers who, by a ventriloquist, can be made to believe that the picture speaks. After prolonged observation, I believe that spirits, angels, demons, &c., have no reality except in the delusions of individuals whose diseased brains induce them to believe that they see apparitions and hear them speak. To this matter we shall probably return by and by. We may now revert to a subject which we mentioned incidentally a few pages back--viz., the ideas which induced priestly inventors to depict the angels of their imagination in a particular form. Those who are familiar with the Bible, and not with any other book, and who decline to examine into the ways of God in the universe generally, will naturally reply to our strictures that the angels of the Jews were described in a particular fashion, because they were seen "in the visions of Elohim" (Ezek. i. 1; Dan. x. 5, 6; and Rev. i. 10-20). But this observation involves the idea that the angels which have appeared are so various in shape, that an individual who had seen and described one, could not enable another man to recognize a similar messenger when seen under another form. In Genesis xviii, xix., xxxii., and Judges xiii, angels assume the form of men; in Isaiah vi. they have six wings--one pair being used to cover the face, another to cover the feet, and another to fly with. To this it may be objected that what Isaiah described were seraphim; yet verse 6 shows that one of these, at least, was a messenger or envoy. In Ezekiel i. we find an apparent description of angels, or an envoy, which is so involved that it is most difficult to understand it. In Daniel x. an archangel is described as a brilliant man whose body was like the beryl--_tarshish_--a stone of a sea-green colour probably; or, possibly, a topaz, "whose eyes were like lightning, and whose arms and feet were like polished brass, and whose loins were girded with fine gold"--as if to conceal his sex--a characteristic which we find, from Matt. xxii. 30, angels do not possess. The writer's description must, therefore, be classed with that of afreets, genii, and the like, in the _Arabian Nights_ tales. In Zechariah, again, we find an angel or envoys described (ch. i.)--(a), "as a man riding upon a red horse," having behind him "red horses, speckled and white" (v. 8); (6), as "four horns" (vv. 18,19); (c), as "four carpenters" (w. 20, 21.) Again, in chap, v., we find an angel in "a flying roll;" another in "an ephah;" another in a big piece of lead, and another in a woman, and still another in two beings of the same nature. We can readily understand that some who are unacquainted with lunatics, would describe these portraitures as the result of insanity or hallucination; but those who are more conversant with persons of unsound mind will doubt whether any ordinary insane persons ever see or describe things which they have never met with. One or two, certainly, have wonderful flights of imagination, but these have been highly educated men of extensive reading, &c. In mania, when visions are seen, some person or other whose description has been read by the lunatic, or who has really been observed, appears--or something which the individual has seen depicted, or otherwise been told of, presents itself, or there is a strange jumble of reality and possibility--just as in dreams, comical, grotesque, or horrible combinations are common, and cause us no surprise. There is, however, too much consistency in the method in which angels are depicted, to enable us to believe that their form was decided by any lunatic or dreamer. We scarcely can form an idea whether the Egyptians had a definite belief in angels, as the word is understood by moderns. With them, as it was with the Greeks, it is most probable that all beings which Jews and Christians alike would call angels, were designated "gods" or "demigods." Be this as it may, we find that the Mizraim had deities who wore wings. A round disc, apparently intended to represent the sun, two erected serpents to support it, and a long broad pinion on each side of the body, was symbolic of "the Supreme." The same may be said to be true of Assyria and Persia--only that in the symbolism of the two last, the serpents did not, generally, appear. In plate 30a, of Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians, 2d series_, a human figure is represented as winged, and before him is a five-rayed star. In plate 35 of the same book, Isis is represented as a nude woman, winged; the position of one pinion being such that it serves to conceal the body from the waist almost to the knees. In plate 36, "Athor" is depicted as being attended by a human-headed bird. On the other hand, in plate 39, where the gods are instructing the king in the use of the bow, the former are bird-headed men without wings. Whilst in plate 44, the soul of a dying man is represented as a human-headed bird with wings, arms, and legs. In plates 52, 53 of the same work, we notice specimens of winged serpents. In plate 63, Isis again appears as a wing bearer, and in this figure we find, as we ought to do, that the feathers of the pinions are attached to the arms of the goddess. In Assyria, we may gather from the sculptures which have been preserved, that there was not any idea of angels being essentially different to gods. Indeed, it is very difficult wherever there is a polytheism in any form, to understand the distinction between a god and an angel Even in the religion which passes current as "the Christian," which acknowledges three gods as "coeternal together and coequal," we are distinctly told that one of the three "proceeds" from the father and the son (_Athanasian Creed_). The New Testament, again, repeatedly informs us that the son was "sent" into this world by his father to effect a special purpose--e.g.t "God sent his only begotten son into the world, that we might live through him" (1 John iv. 9; see also John iii. 16, 17; Matt. xxi. 37; Mark xii. 4; John v. 38; vi. 29; vii. 28, 29; and compare with John i. 33 and Mal.iii. 1-3). If, therefore, we regard the bearer of a message or an order from the supreme king as an "angel," Jesus of Nazareth was certainly one, inasmuch as he said that he was sent hither by the father of all; and the Holy Ghost was another, for we find John (xv. 26) stating that Jesus would send him to the earth--an assertion repeated in chap, xvi. 7--whilst in the fourteenth chapter of the same book we observe that the father was to send this comforter, who was to abide in this world for ever (v. 16). Indeed, the presumed identification of Jesus with the promised Messiah, "the prince" of Dan. ix. 25, shows the belief that he was one who was as much appointed to do a certain duty as was that "angel of death" which went out to destroy the Assyrian army (2 Kin. xix. 35). With such indicated reservation, we notice that the angel which the gods sent to watch over various Assyrian kings is depicted almost invariably with wings. Now he is an archer, standing in a disc representing the sun, having wings below him; now he stands in front of the circle, the pinions and sometimes his body terminating in feathers resembling a bird's expanded tail. Then, again, the minor divinities bear wings, some of them no less than four (Bonomi's _Nineveh_, 2d ed. p. 157). It would be superfluous to linger over a description of the winged bulls with human heads, and the winged men with eagle or hawks' faces, which are so familiar to us in consequence of the researches of Layard and others. All alike bear testimony to the connection, in human celestialism, between birds and men. Nor can we reasonably doubt, that the idea intended to be conveyed by the inventor of the Assyrian composition which we refer to was, that the being, thus symbolized, was famous for strength like the bull; for rapidity of movement, like the eagle; and for wisdom, like a man. There is to be found amongst the relics of the ancient Persians a symbol of an angel who was supposed specially to guard the king. This somewhat resembles that used at Nineveh. There are, however, many forms of it. For example, we find in Hyde's _De Religione veterum Persarum_ (Table 6) a figure of a Persepolitan king, above whom, in the air, and quite distinct from the sun, stands a venerable man fully draped, standing upon what seems to be a large pine cone reversed, which is surrounded by clouds instead of being furnished with wings. The man thus depicted extends the forefinger of one hand to the sun, whilst with the other he holds a ring. In Table 6 Mithra is represented as winged, after the modern fashion of angels. Hyde assures us, in chapter twelve, that twelve angels were recognized by the ancient Persians, in addition to those who presided over the months and days. One of these appears to be the same as the Greek Rhadamanthus, who sat as supreme judge in the invisible world, and apportioned to the dead their rewards or punishments. A second was equivalent to Neptune and ruled the sea, but he had also under his charge everything which related to generation, or production generally. The third was much the same as the more modern Lares and Penates, and superintended dwelling-houses and families. The fourth had a somewhat similar and subordinate office. The fifth was named after the stars, and had his kingdom in the south heavens. The sixth the learned author does not describe. The seventh really seems to be a sort of duplicate angel, called Haruts and Maruts, who were two naughty ones that rebelled, and are, according to some, imprisoned still in Babylon, being hung up by the heels. The eighth, Hyde is himself doubtful about, and does not describe. The ninth is the same as the German "storm-king." The tenth may fairly be styled the "angel of the victualling department." The eleventh is the giver of life, the opponent of Azrael, the minister of death; and the twelfth angel is one which we may call either by the name of "conscience" or "judgment" for he it is who approves or reprobates the works of man. Though I quote from Hyde, I am somewhat doubtful of the value of his authority. He relies to a considerable extent upon the work known as the "Zend Avesta," and supposed to represent the tenets of Zoroaster and his followers. This book is, as I have mentioned, generally believed to be a genuine relic of antiquity by Continental scholars, though it is mistrusted by British orientalists, who regard it as a modern production founded upon Aryanism, Christianity, and Maho-metanism. In my judgment, my compatriots are right; and if it be proper to trust such a man as Sir H. Rawlinson in the matter of the "Avesta," one may be pardoned for believing with him that the book of Job was written by a Persian Jew, or translated by a Hebrew from a work in the time of Darius, or some other of the Ach�menidæ. In Job angels are only once mentioned--viz., in chap. iv. 18, and then they are spoken of in such a way, that we are doubtful whether or not to regard the verse simply as a poetic metaphor. The idea which runs through the part of the chapter in which the passage occurs is this: "Job, you are suffering; the innocent do not perish; the righteous are not cut off; you have been very proper; man has nothing to say against you; but you are not right in accusing God of injustice; you doubtless have done some wrong, for even God's servants are not wholly trusted; they sometimes misbehave unknowingly, and his own angels are called perverse by him (Job iv. 18); you cannot expect to be better than they, and it is no shame to you to be in the same category as they are." But it must be allowed that the words of the story--"There was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them; and the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it"--do really intimate a full belief in good angels and bad, who were not so much angels, messengers, or envoys, as subordinate powers resembling the barons of ancient England, the Paladins of Charlemagne, or the kings created by Buonaparte; amongst whom all were, so to speak, "good angels," except Bernadotte, of Sweden, who rebelled against the imperial thraldom, and became to his late master a modern satan. In whichever way we regard the subject of angels, amongst the Persians there is little doubt that the Iranian conception of God was wholly anthropomorphic, and that the Medians and their magi, as well as their Persian neighbours, acknowledged a "father of lies," who was antagonistic to the deity.* * Quintus Curtius informs us (_Life of Alexander the Great_, b. v. a ii.) that Darius had in Babylon a consecrated table, from which he used to eat; that Alexander began to be ashamed of his sacrilege in treading upon it--(it had been placed as a footstool for his imperial chair)--the sacrilege being against the gods presiding over hospitality, carved upon the table. These may be regarded as angels or otherwise, according to fancy. Our knowledge of the angelic mythology of Babylonia is comparatively slight. The main thing which shrouds the subject in darkness is the difficulty which exists to distinguish between god, gods, and angels. If we could put any confidence in the book of Daniel, we should recognize therefrom that his "Nebuchadnezzar" most distinctly believed in the existence of angels, for in chap. iii. 25 he believes that he sees the son of God (_bar elohim_), and in verse 28 of the same chap. he remarks that "God hath sent his angel (_malachah_), and delivered his servants that trusted in him." Again, in the fourth chapter, in which he recounts a dream, he declares that he saw "a watcher and a holy one" (_geer and kadesk_) come down from heaven with a message to him. But Daniel is not an adequate authority upon ancient Babylonian beliefs. We are, in the absence of direct testimony upon this subject» driven to such evidence as is drawn from sculptured or other remains in ruins and on gems, and to cuneiform and other writings. George Rawlinson sums up his account thus--(_Ancient Monarchies_, vol. I, ch. vii., pp. 138, 9): "Various deities, whom it was not considered at all necessary to trace to a single stock, divided the allegiance of the people, and even of the kings, who regarded with equal respect, and glorified with exalted epithets, some fifteen or sixteen personages. Next to these principal gods were a far more numerous assemblage of inferior or secondary divinities, less often mentioned, and regarded as less worthy of honour, but still recognized generally through the country. Finally, the Pantheon contained a host of mere local gods or genii, every town and almost every village in Babylonia being under the protection of its own particular divinity." The passage above quoted, which represents very fairly our existent knowledge, suggests to the thoughtful mind a comparison with other religions. In Greece there were many great gods and goddesses, and other divinities of less renown. In Rome there were gods for almost everything. But what these nations called "gods" the Hebrews called "angels," as we shall see shortly. In Christendom angels and gods have, as a general rule, been deposed, and "saints" have taken their places. Not only has every town a cathedral which is dedicated to some particular name--said to have been borne by a holy man or woman, whose aid in heaven is thus secured by his votaries upon earth--but every church in every parish, and every chapel in every church is set apart to a particular "saint." Still farther, every trade and every position in life has its tutelary patron in heaven, and secondary gods are as common in Papal districts as they were in the land of the Chaldeans. The philosopher cannot find a valid distinction between Ishtar, Venus, and Mary, Dionysus and Denis, and a host of other gods, saints, or angels. Assuming that the minor gods of Greece and Rome, and those essences generally called "angels" are substantially the same order of beings, we find that the Babylonians had a great number of celestial envoys, viceroys, or messengers who ruled over the land and sea, the sky and storms, the thunder and the rain, crops, men, war, buildings--everything, indeed, was superintended by some one on behalf of the Supreme Ruler. We might pause here to speculate upon the question whether there is any difference in kind between such a kingdom as Babylonia or Russia and the heaven believed in by the ancient Jews and the modern Christians. In all there is an autocratic sovereign who has a prime minister and secretaries of state, who keep his books and perform his will according to his bidding; under these again there are private clerks, who superintend wind and weather, rain and hail, snow and frost; governors of provinces, mayors, or prefects of cities; police, and so large a host of subordinates, that nothing, great or small, can be done which escapes the notice of one of the imperial envoys or ministers. The inventor of heaven, such as we know it, was certainly an admirer of 'centralization'. Those who desire to see the description of the unseen world modified are those who are opposed to an absolute monarchy, and who see in everything, everybody, and in all the world a proof of the presence of a supreme, omniscient, omnipresent, Creator, Ruler, or Governor. Without going into an account of the Chaldean mythology, we may say that there is strong reason to believe, both from the nomenclature which has survived, and from such gems as are preserved from destruction, that every Babylonian, whether bond or free, was called after some deity, who was supposed ever afterwards to be his tutelary angel In modern times Roman Catholics hold a similar belief, and each parent imagines that by making selection, for his offspring, of the name of a particular saint, the latter can be induced to take the child under its special care. The learned in papal mythology know that every saint is depicted in such a manner that none shall be mistaken. To such an extent indeed is pictorial contrivance carried, that the art of recognising a particular saint demands a special study. It is all but certain that the same custom prevailed in Babylon; but, as all the professors which taught the means of identification have passed away, we can only guess at the name or nature of the angel. Let us imagine, for example, what an archaeologist could make of the figure of Mary--of the bleeding or burning heart, two thousand years after all history of the mother of Jesus has passed away, like that of Ishtar has done. A curious figure, called heart-shaped, but really not so, is found placed on the central part of a woman's breast; from it flames appear to arise and blood to drop, and through it is a dagger, and this mass of imagery is put outside the body, and the dress is held open to enable any one to see it. Without a key to the enigma, this is a mystery; but when the key is given, and the inquirer hears the explanation, he finds it so absurd that it is difficult to believe it. In like manner, when I see upon a Babylonian gem, copied as a vignette on the title-page of Landseer's _Sabean Researches_, a woman who has a beard, a necklace, two small breasts, from each of which she squeezes apparently a river of milk; over whose breastbone there is one large globe and two small ones, placed perpendicularly; who has a spider waist, and wears a skirt covered with pistol-shaped ornaments, I, not knowing whether the Chaldeans adored "our lady of the flowing bosom," cannot frame an idea as to the name of the saint, angel, virgin, or martyr which is depicted, or what may have been her peculiar duties, who she was, and what trade she patronised. Whatever idea the Papal Church entertains respecting her canonised saints, one thing is remarkable, viz., that they are not portrayed as having wings. Each has an aureole of some sort round his or her head--a painter's contrivance for saying "This individual, who seems like a man or woman, is not a common but a divine creature." Francis of Assisi is, in addition, depicted with stigmata, or marks on his hands, feet, and side, which, though they resemble those made with nails in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, were doubtless, in the case of the "saint," made with the strong caustic called "spirit of salt" or other escharotic. We might speculate upon the state of mind which sees in the assumption of "stigmata" a greater evidence of faith than would be offered by the conversion of the arms into the pinions of Michael the archangel; but, as it is so much easier for even the most potent saint to make breaches in his skin, than to persuade feathers to grow on his arms, we do not think the task worthy of our care. The Babylonians in this respect were predecessors of papal pagans. It is a rare thing to find on any of their gems a winged angel or genius. One such is depicted on the frontispiece of Landseer's _Sabean Researches_, which is birdlike both as regards the head and pinions; and four other winged creatures are given in Lajard's _Culte de Venus_. In two the figures are human headed, and combined with the body of a quadruped. At a later period of Babylonian mythology "grotesques" were introduced, apparently from Egypt. It is not to be lightly passed by, that the symbol which represented the presence of the deity--which, if we may adopt a phrase, we should call "the angel of his presence" (see Exod. xxxiii. 14,15; Isa, lxiii. 9), is almost identical in the Chaldean and the papal religions, viz., a circle containing a cross, an emblem as common in our churchyards as in the capital of Nebuchadnezzar. The resemblance between papal and Chaldean emblems and doctrines have repeatedly attracted the attention of theologians; and I am not far wrong in asserting that Protestants generally have identified "the woman" of Revelation xvii., spoken of as "Mystery, Babylon the Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth," with Rome under the popes. For myself I do not care to express any opinion on the point, beyond a general dissent from the popular estimation of the dictum and its interpretation. At the same time I must declare that every year, over which my inquiries have extended, has imbued me more and more with wonder at the similarity between the ancient Babylonian and the modern papal religion. The two resemble children of the same parents, only that one is older than the other; and it requires but little penetration in an observer to trace in both, the lineaments of a grovelling superstition, united with a base priestly cunning. In our own estimation the strongest evidence in favour of a belief in angels, of every degree, amongst the Chaldeans and Babylonians is the enormous development of angelic mythology amongst the Jews, who lived in the city of Nebuchadnezzar, and in those who migrated thence into Palestine subsequent to the period of the captivity. From indications, which are necessarily imperfect, we have formed the opinion that the Babylonians were astronomical students of great proficiency, from a very remote antiquity; that many of these professors turned their attention to what is called judicial astrology--i.e., they attempted to judge of future events by certain phenomena occurring in the heavens, and especially in the relationship between different planets and the various constellations. As the planets wander through the sky, naturally they were regarded as the messengers of El--"the Supreme," who sent them to investigate the condition of groups of stars, many of which formed a sort of community that was unvisited by the Great King, for months together, and, in many instances, not at all.As the heliacal rising of one star seemed generally to be followed by good weather, and the corresponding rise of another intimated the reverse, it was natural that one should be regarded as an angel of happiness, the other as a harbinger of misery or death. So strongly rooted is this belief amongst some, that it even "holds its own" in educated England. The astronomer Royal is often asked to cast a nativity; and a living merchant of Liverpool does so yet, having confidence that his deductions suffice to prove their value. The formula is "_Astra regunt homines, sed regit astra Deus_"--"The stars rule men, but God rules the stars." A guardian star, then, that is to say, the particular planet or other conspicuous celestial body which was "in the ascendant" at the period of the birth of each individual, was regarded in the same light as Christians esteem protective angels and Romanists estimate patron saints. There can be, we think, little doubt that the seven archangels are the seven planets known to the ancients, each of which had a day dedicated to it, and who thus originated the week of seven days. These amongst the Phoenicians were called the Cabeiri, or the powerful ones. In the conclusion at which we have arrived we are greatly strengthened by the discovery in Babylonian ruins of certain bowls; facsimiles and descriptions of which are given in Layard's Nineveh and Babylon, pp. 510-526. The inscriptions which have been translated appear to be forms of exorcism, or amulets, by which evil spirits are to be driven away; and reference is made in these writings to the devil, for example, under the name _shida_; and to Satan under the cognomen _Satanah_, evidently the same as the Satanas habitually used in the New Testament; also to Nirich, probably from a root like the Hebrew _narag_, "a noise maker or screamer." This creature, as I think, is the same as the "Satyr" of Isaiah xiii. 21, and xxxiv. 14, and represents or personifies those unseen but howling maniacs who wandered about at night (see _Lilith and Satyr_ in my second volume). Another demon is called _Zachiah_, a cognomen which I cannot satisfactorily explain unless it is allied to _Zachar,_ and indicates the power which, as the French would say, "can tie a knot in the needle" (nouer l'aiguilette) or "a levin brand." Another of the devils is called "Abitur of the Mountain," whose name resembling, as it does, the Jewish _Abiathar_, is more likely to belong to the good than the bad angels. Lilith is another demon still feared by the Jews, who employ charms against her to this day. She is supposed to be a sort of spiritual vampyre, and to suck the life out of infants and young people. These names of angels occur in the first inscription given by Layard; in the second we find Satan, associated with idolatry, curses, vows, whisperings, witchcraft, and _Zevatta_--a concealer, rider, or enchanter from root like this and answering to the fairy which steals away. "It was between the night and day When the fairy king has power, That I sank down in a sinful fray, And 'twixt life and death was snatcht away To the joyless Elfin bower." --Lady of the Lake, canto iv., stanza xv. Another is named _Nidra_, which I take to signify vows made by supposed sorcerers. This demon is associated in the same line with _Zevatta_ above described. _Patiki_ is another bad influence, probably now, "a sword," for the charm has reference to freedom from captivity. Another devil is called _Isarta_, which I take to be a leader of banditti or marauders, from the Assyrian word (Furst's lexicon s.v. _asar_), "a leader, head or commander," and a word from a root like _ta_, "to drive," "to push forward," "to sweep away." We should call such an one "the demon of destruction." In this same inscription two good angels are named, Batiel or Bethiail, probably a variant of Bethuel, "the residence of El," and Katuel or Kathuail, the executioner or sword of El, from _katal_, to kill; compare this with the expression, "Or if I bring a sword upon that land, and say, sword, go through that land, so that I put off man and beast from it" (Ezek. xiv. 17). In addition to these two angels another is mentioned who has eleven names, not one of which is written in full--e.g. SS. BB. CCC. In a third inscription a devil is named "Abdi," which may be derived from the root _abad_, and be regarded as the same as the New Testament Abaddon (Rev. ix. 10)--the king of the slaughterers, bucaneers, rovers, &c. We can fancy that Negroes who are captured and sold in droves to foreigners, might imagine that Abdi was the devil which ruled the African slave drivers and Christian purchasers. This demon is associated with Levatta,--with tribulations, the machinations of the Assyrians, misery, treachery, rebellion; Nidra, with sorrows generally; and _Shoq_, which I take to be from a root like _shuq, or shaqaq_--i.e., "enemies thirsting for booty, rangers, bands of robbers." Compare--"And the spoilers came out of the camp of the Philistines in three companies" (1 Sam. xiii. 17). See also--He "delivered them into the hand of the spoilers" (Jud. ii. 14; 2 Kin. xvii. 20). Amongst the devils must, I think, also be classed _Asdarta_, which is clearly the same as the goddess Astarte, and she is closely associated with "the machinations of the Assyrians." The good angels of this inscription are Barakiel, Ramiel, Raamiel, Nahabiel, and Sharmiel, over whose names we will not now linger, except to notice that the devils have names compounded with _jah_, whilst the good ones are derived from EL. In the fifth inscription, amongst the bad things are mentioned evil spirits, both male and female, the evil eye, sorcery, and enchantments both from men and women, along with Nidra and Levatta. The good angels are called Babnaa, Ninikia, and Umanel, which I take to be intended for Wu, _banahel_=El builds, or "the strong one who establishes us;" _nachaghel_. El is powerful, or the Angel of Strength; and amanel, or "the fostering angel." In some fragments the names of good angels found have been Nadkiel, Ramiel, Damael, Hachael, and Sharmiel, which we shall probably notice again subsequently. We do not lay any particular stress upon the fact of the bowls, on which these inscriptions were found, having been dug up amongst Babylonian ruins; nor do we care to prove either that they were of Jewish or Chaldean origin. What we here desire to show is, that there existed in Babylon a full belief in the existence of evil and good influences which were invisible; that some individuals had, or were thought to possess, supernatural powers for harm, which could be counteracted by those who placed themselves under the protection of potencies supposed to be holier, wiser, or stronger than the evil genii From the method in which everything connected with witchcraft, magic, astrology, and the like, is spoken of in the Old Testament, and from the fact that slaves are much more likely to imitate their masters than conquerors to become pupils of the vanquished, we conclude that it was not the Hebrews who taught the Chaldees, but that the contrary was the case. In the view thus enunciated we are confirmed by the manner in which old Jewish writers spoke of the nation that enslaved them--e.g., "Babylon, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency" (Isa. xiii. 19); "All of them princes to look at after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea."... And "she (Jerusalem) doted upon them, and sent messengers unto them into Chaldea; and... she was polluted with them, and her mind was alienated from (or by) them" (Ezek. xxiii. 15-17); "It is a mighty nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language thou knowest not" (Jerem. v. 15)--Jeremiah knew more about the people than Isaiah (see Isa. xxiii. 13). Habakkuk, again, speaking of the same people, says (chap, i. 6-10)--"The Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty nation... terrible and dreadful:... they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them." Such being the estimation of the Babylonians by Hebrew prophets, it is morally certain that the Jews would regard them with respect, admire, study, and copy them. To what extent the imitation went it is difficult to say. When, therefore, we find that the descendants of Abraham, a patriarch whom a veneration for the ancient Babylonians induced the Israelite mythologists to represent as being a Chaldee; and those who were taught on the banks of the Euphrates, were spoken of in Rome about the time of our era, and shortly afterwards, as being almost synonymous epithets for sorcerers, astrologers, charmers, &c., we must conclude that the Mesopotamian was the master, the Palestinian the pupil. That the two were regarded as relatives we infer from Juvenal (sat. vi. 544-552)--"For a small piece of money the Jews sell whatever dreams you may choose, but an Armenian or Commagenian soothsayer promises a tender love;... but her (i.e., the lady who consults such folk) confidence in Chaldeans will be the greater." But, ere we leave this portion of our Essay, we must notice one other piece of evidence of considerable value which is drawn from the New Testament. We find, for example, in Acts xxiii. 8, "The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit, but the Pharisees confess both." If we inquire into the origin of these sects--and we shall be greatly assisted in doing so by two very elaborate articles by the erudite Dr. Ginsburg, in Kitto's _Cyclopaedia of Biblical Knowledge_--we shall see reason to believe that the Sadducees were a sect who considered that they were not bound to believe any tenet as necessary unless they could find it distinctly enunciated in the Pentateuch. They resolutely declined, therefore, to accept as revelation such stories as had been adopted by the Hebrews from Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and possibly from the Romans. We might institute a comparison between the Sadducees and those whom we know as "reformers." The first acknowledged the authority of Moses alone, such as they found it in "the five books;" the second acknowledged the authority of Jesus and his apostles, such as they found it in the New Testament: the first rejected the commentaries of Rabbis; the second those of "the fathers." Both appealed to antiquity, and both traced to what we may designate paganism, heathenism, or foreign sources generally, a large portion of the current faith which they saw around them. The Sadducees regarded the doctrine of seraphic interference, and all the angelic mythology common in their time, as the fond fancy of those who desired to harmonize Judaism with Gentilism. The Reformers, in their turn, rejected all the fables of Papal anchorites, &c.; denied the power of any martyr to influence the condition of the living after their death; and generally opposed the saintly, as the Sadducees opposed the angelic, hierarchy. Individuals who sympathize with Luther, Calvin, and those of a similar way of thinking, may readily understand the Sadducees, whereas, those of what is called the "High Church," will give their interest to the Pharisees, who upheld the then mediaeval customs, &c. It is probable that some will say, that Jesus of Nazareth, being the son of God, a deity incarnate, and consequently familiar with everything which goes on in the court of heaven; having adopted the angelic mythology; having conversed familiarly with the devil; having sent, at least, two thousand devils out of one man into a herd of swine; having gone down to hell, wherever that may be; and having preached to the spirits imprisoned there, whoever they may be or have been; having, still further, had an angel to comfort him; having had a conference with Moses and Elijah on a certain hill; having asserted that he had only to pray to his father to obtain the assistance of twelve legions of angels; and having also told us that every child has an angel who stands before the face of God--seeing these things, I say, one can imagine persons asseverating that all our current notions of angels, which are built upon the New Testament, must be true. To this we rejoin, that these assertions beg the question. The philosopher affirms that the idea of angels is incompatible with that of an omnipresent God--that the belief of Jesus in an angelic mythology proves him to have had an anthropomorphic notion of "the Supreme," and, as a consequence, it follows that Jesus was nothing more than a Jew, although very superior to the generality of his countrymen, having possibly been taught by some Buddhist.* The bigot, on the other hand, can only scream out the formularies which the so-called orthodox provide for him. Johanna Southcote once made some folks believe that she was pregnant with a Messiah, and she had most enthusiastic followers; but neither argument nor rhetoric sufficed to beget the promised baby and, in like manner, no amount of declamation can convert an assumption into a fact. But of this truth most of our theologians appear to be ignorant, and, like the heathen with their litanies, they think that they will obtain their will by "much speaking." * It will be noticed by the reader, that the remarks in the text have reference to the supernatural stories which were interwoven into the biography of Jesus by those whom we call Evangelists. The bibliolaters must, however, stand or fall by the many legendary tales which pass current for truth. If Jesus, as an ordinary Jew, believed in angels--just as our king, James I., believed in the existence of modern witches --we cannot use his evidence to prove the existence of angels and devils, any more than the Christian laws against witchcraft demonstrate that old women and men sold their souls and bodies to Satan. If, on the other hand, we allow that the spiritual mythology of the New Testament is due to Pharasaic influence, all the testimony propounded in favour of the assertion, that Jesus was, in reality, "a son of Jehovah," crumbles away. When summoned, a long time ago, to give evidence in a court of justice, the question was put to me--"Now, doctor, you have heard the symptoms from which the deceased suffered; do you believe that they were produced by arsenic?" Being doubtful about the propriety of the query in a court of law so prudish as ours is, I remained silent, and in an instant the judge, Baron Alderson, said--"I won't allow that question to be put or answered; you want the witness to take the place of the jury, and it shall not be done. You may ask the doctor, if you will, what are the symptoms produced by arsenic, when taken in a poisonous dose, and then it is the business of the jury to compare those, with such as have already been sworn to as occurring in the man before he died." This anecdote is frequently in my mind when I am composing an essay like the present. If I wish to convince the jury who reads my papers of the truth of a particular conclusion to which I have arrived, it is not enough for me to express my own opinions. I may assert, in the matter in question, that I am a skilled witness, and have closely investigated the subject, but it is open to any one to doubt my industry and to distrust my judgment; consequently, it is necessary for me to adduce evidence, as well as to draw deductions therefrom. The hypothesis which I have formed, after a pretty extensive reading, is, that the belief in the mythology of angels which is current amongst Christians at the present time, and which is based upon a series of pretended revelations, said to have been made exclusively to Jews of ancient times, is, in reality, founded upon fancies of pagan priests or poets; and, as a corollary, I infer, either that our celestial mythology must be given up to oblivion, as being heathenish, or that we must abandon those claims to an exclusive inspiration which have been made for, and accorded by many to, the Bible. I have already described the ideas associated with angels in some ancient peoples, and I now propose to examine those of other nations with whom the Jews and Christians, directly or indirectly, came in contact. The reader of ancient Roman history cannot doubt that the city on the Tiber was indebted to the Etruscans for all, or nearly all, of its early knowledge. It is probable that the original gods and goddesses of Rome were those of their northern neighbours, and everything which the Romans knew of augury was due to the priests of Etruria; consequently it is not unprofitable to inquire, as far as we can, whether these had any idea of beings such as we call angels. As we have not many available written remains of the remarkable people to whom we refer, we are obliged to be satisfied with pictorial and other relics which have survived until our days. Some of the scenes depicted on urns, vases, and walls, in tombs and elsewhere, are sufficiently explanatory of the subjects which the artist has desired to pourtray; others, on the contrary, can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Paying no attention to the latter, we may safely affirm, that the Etruscans had ideas upon the subject of angels very similar to our own. The form which their artists gave to them is precisely that which is current at the present day, except that, unlike the Christian, the Etruscan angels were of different sexes. Sometimes both males and females were draped from the neck to the feet, in other drawings they were partially or wholly nude. In the vast majority of cases each one possessed two wings that were attached to the back, behind the arms, precisely as they are in modern pictures; but in one very remarkable instance (plate 7, _Description de quelques Vases Etrusques_, par H. D. de Luynes--folio, Paris, 1840) the beings to whom we refer had each three pairs of pinions, the one attached to the shoulder blades, a second to the loins, and a third to the calves of the legs. These creatures correspond to our demons or imps of Satan, or the devils of the New Testament which were sent into a herd of swine. Some of the winged Etruscan demons must be regarded as "angels of death," for they are represented as hovering in the air over individuals, such as Cassandra and Polynices, who are about to be sacrificed. One angel, who, as usual, Diaitized bv is spoken of by the Christian describer thereof as a goddess, is designated "Cunina." Her business was to look after and take charge of infants in their cradle. A being such as this, by whatever name we may designate her, cannot fail to remind us of the expression in the New Testament--"Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my father which is in heaven" (Matt, xviii. 10). In another Etruscan painting we find two angelic beings, fully draped, carrying a nude corpse apparently to the future or invisible state. These naturally remind us of the passage in Rev. xx. 1--"I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand." In some Etruscan paintings we have scenes which are supposed to indicate the preparation of a bride for the wedding ceremony. In these there are diminutive angels introduced, which are sometimes hovering in the air and sometimes seated on the edge of the bath; these are by the learned supposed to represent Cupid, Eros, Hymen, or Love, and they indicate the devout feeling, that an angel watches over those who contract marriage in an orthodox manner.* * Whether the Romans obtained all their inferior deities from the Etruscans, or whether the priests of the Eternal City in ancient times improved upon the mythology which came to them from their predecessors, just as the priests of modern Rome have expanded, without improving, the Christianised paganism which came to them, is a matter difficult to decide. But it is certain that the old Romans multiplied their "gods," as the modern ones have multiplied their "saints." Amongst the former were many curious deities, who presided at the wedding of young people, some at the public ceremony, and others at the private rites. "PRema" was the angel of quietness, whose business it was to see "ne subacta virgo se ultra modum commovens semen a vulva ejiceret." "Subigus" was another angel or demigod, whose duty it was to see that the consummation should take place in an appropriate manner--lovingly, pleasantly, and peacefully. There was another--Pertunda--of whom Augustine (Civ. Dei, vol. 9) remarks--"Si adest dea Prema ut subacta se non commoveat quum prematur, dea Pertunda quid ea facit?" In modern times the Papal saints, Cosmo, Damian, Foutin, and sundry others, have had the special duty assigned to them to make the husband fit for his marital duties. That the absence of such a spirit was looked upon as unlucky we gather from an expression in Propertius (b. v. el. 3) in which a wife, whose husband has been obliged to leave her, and go to a distant war, when bewailing her destiny, amongst other references says--"I wedded without a god to accompany me." This calls to memory the statement in Hebrews i. 14, wherein, after speaking of angels, the writer asks--"Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?"--a sentence which implies the idea that those who are not heirs of salvation have not angels which minister for them. The doctrine was certainly not exclusively Christian. Of this any one may assure himself by referring to Eccles. v. 6--"Neither say thou before the angel that it was an error; wherefore... should God destroy the works of thine hands?" Again, we find an angel seated between two young folk of opposite sexes, and archaeologists tell us that the winged creature thus figured is a nuptial god--one whose business is to induce appropriate couples to meet, to love, and to marry. Such a celestial match-maker was the Jewish Raphael, who, though "one of the seven holy angels, which present the prayers of the saints, and which go in and out before the glory of the Holy One" (Tobit xii. 15)--yet condescended to conduct Tobias a long way to meet Sara, and instructed him how he could marry her with safety, and defeat a devil. Amongst other individuals, in the Etruscan mythological paintings who are winged, are the following, which are named thus by the authors who describe the vases, &c., whether rightly or wrongly it is not necessary for me to prove:--Janus; Furina, the goddess of thieves; Mercury, the messenger of Jupiter and the patron of robbers; Vacuna, or Desideria, or Venus, the goddess of indolence, desire, or love; Hymen, the angel or god of marriage; Cupid, the god of love; Victory, Bacchus, Silenus, Dryads, Calliope, Tempest, Fame, Proserpine; Iibitina, the goddess of funerals; Venus, infera, Nemesis, or fate; Death, life, Charybdis, The Furies, Geryon, Justice, Peace, Iris, and Diana. On such a subject the reader may consult with advantage Augustine (_de Civitate Dei_, b. vl. c. 9); Arnobius (_Adversus Gentes_, b. iv. c. 7); and Tertullian (_Ad Nationes_, b. ii. c. 11). We may now refer to a remarkable series of drawings, representing the funeral of Patroclus, described by Homer, which were discovered in the Etruscan sepulchre of the Tarquinii near what once was Vulci and is now "Ponte della Badia," in the year 1857, and which is described in _Noël des Vergers L'Etrurie et les Etrusques_, and in _Corpus Inscriptionum Italicarum_ (Turin 1867), the latter of which I use as my authority. In one of the scenes we find depicted the sacrifice of the Trojan youths at the grave of Patroclus. The artist has not left to the fancy of the observer the identification of his figures, but has written in Etruscan letters the modified names of the actors. Beginning from the right hand, we find Ajax Oileus, and next to him a naked Trojan youth, whose hands are bound behind his back, and who is guarded by Telamonian Ajax. Behind and besides him is Charon, and in front of the latter is another Trojan youth, nude, seated on the ground, and receiving his death-wound from Achilles. Behind the latter stands a winged, draped, tall female figure, whom at one time I took to be the glorified soul of Patroclus; but, having seen a similar figure on other Etruscan designs depicting human sacrifice or death, and finding over the head of this one the word _fanth, vanth, or fano_--according to the value which we assign to the digamma or F and O--which is, I think, equivalent to the Latin _Fatum_, fate, &c., we must regard the figure as resembling Azrael--"the angel of death." Besides and behind her stands a draped man unarmed, having a fixed countenance of settled melancholy, and regarding without a shade of exultation the death of the young Trojan whom Achilles slaughters. Over his head are the words _hinthial patrucles_, which is believed to signify "the shade of Patroclus." The last figure in the group is Agamemnon. This and the other sculptures in the tomb are extremely interesting to the archaeologists, firstly, because they bear evidence of a very superior style of art; secondly, because they testify to the antiquity of Homer's _Iliad_, and its popularity in other nations than the Greek. They show, moreover, that the wealthy men amongst the Etrurians were not ignorant of the Grecian language, or rather literature, although they had difficulty in adapting the Hellenic words to their own alphabet; lastly, they ought to be especially valuable to us inasmuch as they demonstrate the existence of a belief in ancient Italy of the resurrection of the body, and of the existence of angels precisely the same in shape as those which pious Christians delight to see in their churches, and in their manuals of devotion. It is worthy of notice that upon some Etruscan vases in the museum at Munich there are angelic warriors covered with armour--a winged female carrying a caduceus, and winged horses--like Pegasus, and probably like those seen by Zechariah, the Hebrew vaticinator. We consider it best to omit making any remarks respecting the ideas entertained about angels by the Phoenicians, for we have scarcely any information about their mythology beyond the names of certain gods and goddesses. It will be more profitable to pass on to the Greeks, and inquire into the general system of their theological belief. This is, we think, a matter of some importance, for this people, as victors and masters, came into contact with the Jews in the time of Joel, about b.c. 800; and if any captive Hebrews came back from Grecia (see Joel iii. 6), we believe that they would naturally bring back with them much of the Hellenic lore of their conquerors. The reader must not be carried away here with the once popular notion that everything which was found in heathendom, which resembled something biblical or Jewish, came of necessity from scriptural or Israelitish sources. The reverse is much more likely, for the Hebrews in old times are described by their historians and preachers as hankering after novelty--"going whoring after other gods," as the Bible has it. They, on the other hand, were encouraged to keep themselves aloof from others, and were never a missionary nation; nor, had they been so, were they sufficiently honourable or wealthy, as a race, ever to command respect. They were, indeed, generally despised by the people round about them, who would no more think of adopting Jewish fables than we should care to learn theology and cosmogony from African negroes. If we endeavour to reduce Grecian mythology to its simplest expression, we find that it consisted of a belief in a creator--grand beyond conception, and one whom the mind could not conceive, nor pencil nor the chisel depict. Under him there was thought to be a host of minor deities, who agreed, more or less, amongst themselves, each having a particular department of creation to preside over, or a definite function to perform. Jupiter, for example, had the air and the heavens generally under his management; Neptune superintended the sea; Rhea, or Gaia, or Gee, was the goddess of the surface of the earth; and Pluto had the management of the interior of the globe and of those who were buried therein. If corpses were unburied, they did not come under his immediate cognizance. Then, as it was quite possible that one deity might be counteracting another, as, indeed, they are represented to have done during the Trojan war, another god was necessary to be a medium of communication between the others, and Mercury became the messenger, or go-between. Below the major gods was an infinity of smaller ones, who presided over physical and moral matters. There were, for example, wood and tree nymphs; Dryads and hamadryads--gods of rivers, such as Simois and Scamander. Pan presided over husbandmen; Hermes, over thieves, &c. Others, like Eros, fulfilled the duty of bringing the sexes together. Hymen secured them in marriage, and Venus had the duty of insuring connubial happiness, whilst Lucina's business was to bring the offspring of the marriage into the world--with as little pain or danger as possible. Then, again, Fortune brought good luck. The "furies" brought evil, and the "fates" ruled the destiny of mortals. Against some of these gods others rebelled. For example, there were the Titans, the sons of Heaven and Earth (Cælus et Terra), who were all of gigantic stature, and may be said to be identical with the giants spoken of in Gen. vi. 2-4, as being the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men. These Titans were much disliked by their father, and confined in the bowels of the earth, or, as we should say, in Hell; but their mother relieved them, and they in turn revenged themselves upon their progenitor. When Jupiter succeeded to Cronos or Saturn, the giants, the sons of Tartarus and Terra, or Hell and Earth, united with their half-brothers, the Titans, and attacked Olympus, and its gods, in dismay, assumed disguises and fled into Egypt--a rare spot, whence also came as history tells us, the founder of Christianity and the doctrine of the Trinity. To regain his position, Jupiter found a man--a son of his own--whom he had begotten by lying three nights in the heart of the earth, or, as the fable has it, in the arms of Alcmena--Hercules by name, to attack the allied monsters, and thus with the aid of a mortal the gods became victorious. Just as in more modern days the divine mission and position of Jesus of Nazareth and Mahomet of Mecca, have been determined by the arms of human warriors. The power of men in heaven is wonderful, considering how great is their weakness upon earth! It is probable, that to the Greeks, Milton owed his ideas of _Paradise Lost_. According to the ordinary ideas of angels, the gods, demigods, goddesses, genii, and the like, were essentially the same amongst the Hebrews as the archangels and inferior hierarchy are in modern christian mythology. We shall the more readily see this if we inquire into the ideas of the Greeks respecting _demons_. "The latter were regarded as spirits which presided over the actions of mankind, and watched over their secret intentions." Many Greek theologians thought that each man had two, the one good, the other bad. These sprites could change themselves into any form, and at death the individual was delivered up to judgment by these companions, who testified to his actions during life. Socrates often spoke of his own peculiar "spirit." Not only were these creatures supposed to influence men, but they were also believed to guard places, and a genius loci was the same as the God of Ekron, or any other locality. It is almost impossible for a thoughtful man not to compare with the Greek ideas those held by moderns. We hear in familiar discourse, and read in popular books, about a good angel and a bad one. God is said to use both (see Ps. lxxviii. 49, and 1 Kings xxii. 21, 22.) Many, too, of the readers of Sterne will remember the remarks which he makes about a recording angel who was obliged to register an oath, but who contrived to blot out the entry with a tear (com. Mal. iii. 16.) As we have already adverted to the belief of Jesus that every child had an angel, who is always in the presence of. God, we need not remark again upon the matter. But though the Grecian gods and demigods were the counterparts of the archangels and lesser powers of the Jews and Christians, they were not pictorially depicted, as they were in other places, like winged men or other creatures. Arnobius, for example, in _Advenus génies_, when writing about the divinities of the heathen, remarks, that they are so like ordinary men and women, that the artist has to resort to some contrivance to show that any offspring of his brush, or of his chisel, is a god or goddess. A painter, he observes, will select the finest young women he can discover--or the handsomest prostitute in his country, and from one maiden, or from the collective charms of many, will paint a lovely woman and style her Venus; yet she is only a courtezan after all. His remark is a certainly true one. Jupiter is never represented otherwise than as a man, nor does Minerva ever figure except as a woman. None of the greater gods of Hellas are winged like the tutelar gods of the Assyrians and Persians were. Even Hermes, though he does bear pinions, does not carry them in the usual form. Instead of having powerful wings behind his arms, like the Gabriel or Michael of Christian mythology, he has little nippers attached to each side of a cap, of a pair of socks, and of a curiously-shaped wand--all of which he can put off when he pleases, or don when he is sent with a message. Jupiter's thunders bear similar wings. But such minor deities, or devils, as Eros or love; Hymen or marriage; Fame, or victory; Aurora, or day-break; the winds, the Genii, the Gorgons, the Furies, the Harpies, Iris, Isis, Hebe, Psyche, and even Pegasus--a wondrous horse, are winged with pinions which resemble those of the eagle. If we now pause for a moment to compare one thing with another, we readily see that Hymen may fairly be described as the angel of the covenant of marriage, and that Mercury is identical with Raphael. The "genius loci," the "dryad" or "hamadryad," is the counterpart of the cherubim guarding the ark and the mercyseat of the Jewish temple. Apollo is the angel in the sun (Rev. xix. 17.) Neptune is "the angel of the waters" (Rev. xvi. 5.) Nay, we may--indeed we must go further, and affirm that either the angel Gabriel, or "the power of the Highest," which, we are told in Luke i. 26, 35, overshadowed Mary, the espoused wife of Joseph, is a perfect counterpart of the Hellenic Jupiter who overshadowed Alcmena. Both produced a being equally celebrated--for we may fairly assert that Hercules was believed in by as many individuals as have faith in Jesus. For ourselves, we do not credit the myth of the Hellenists; of the very existence of a Hercules we are profoundly incredulous. Yet we do not doubt for a moment that Jesus of Nazareth lived as a man upon this earth, and founded, with the subsequent assistance of Paul, the religion which is called Christian. But of the supernatural conception of Mary and of her impregnation by a deity we are intensely sceptical. Of the theology of the Romans in the times prior to, and somewhat subsequent to, our era, we need say little. It resembled both the Etruscan and the Greek at the first, and subsequently it was modified by the Egyptian and by the Persian. But it was in Rome, whilst pagan, that the present pictorial type of angels was perfected (see Plates ix. to xiii, Lajard's _Culte de Venus_), in which allegorical figures, from old Roman bas-reliefs, precisely like modern angels, are represented killing the Mithraic bull. I may also add, in passing, that the crozier borne by Romanist bishops is a reproduction of the Etruscan _lituus_, the augurs' or diviners' staff of office. The Roman nation, like the Papist and Peruvian religions, was omnivorous, and not only venerated the old gods of the soil, but adopted new divinities eagerly. Whoever chose to import a new deity, and a novel style of worship was hailed, patronized and enriched, much in the same way as at London during recent times, Mesmerists, "spirit rappers," "cord-conjurors," clairvoyants, male and female, spiritualists like Home, very High Churchmen, and many other classes of a similar stamp have been encouraged. As in Athens, we are told that "the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing" (Acts xvii), no matter whether the novelty was religious or otherwise, so it has been elsewhere. London really, and Rome metaphorically are constantly adopting new ideas, some highly commendable and philosophical, others quite the reverse. Amongst the latter, we may mention that which professes that a certain man can, like Jesus is said to have done, heal by a touch. This assertion, however, is only sparsely credited on the Thames. Far more general is the belief which professes, that an Ecumenical Council can by a vote make one man and his official successors "infallible." We cannot pass by this subject without remarking that instability in religion is evidence of infidelity; and the adoption of new tenets is a proof of the low estimation in which old ones have been held. Even the new, or Christian dispensation, as it is called, is founded upon the insufficiency of the old or Jewish covenant, which, by those who adopt the one, is a confession that they believe the other was imperfect and therefore not of God. Consequently, when we find a "church," like the Roman, habitually patching its old clothes, we conclude that its leaders are dissatisfied with them and desire better. A lover who finds his mistress perfect neither seeks nor wishes to change her for another; nor endeavours to induce her to modify her attire until he is dissatisfied therewith. When he insists upon an alteration it is because his ardent love has faded. The philosopher may see clearly why certain prelates desire to have some infallible man to appeal to--for it is easier to find out the opinion of one individual than to harmonize the contradictory hypotheses of fifty dogmatical or authoritative writers. Yet the same man will not fail to see that such a proceeding, whilst it strengthens the hold of the church upon the weak-minded, cuts it adrift from the strong. The policy is not altogether bad, for it seeks to bind closer those who, whilst wearing the chains of captivity, regard them as ornaments. But all those who adopt such tactics ought, boldly and unequivocally, to withdraw from the rank of truth-seekers, and of envoys of that God who is not "the author of confusion but of peace." We may now proceed to the consideration of the angelic mythology of the Old and New Testaments. In our inquiry we shall endeavour to arrive at the ideas contained in the words which are used, and not content ourselves with simple quotation. There is strong reason to believe that Christians in general rarely examine into the real signification of words which they are taught to use, or which, from some fancy or other, they commit to memory. They imagine--if they think on the subject at all--that to repeat a text or a creed is to perform an act of faith, which, in itself, is praiseworthy and a good work. Such do not, in any appreciable degree, differ from the Thibetans, described by the Abbé Hue, who perform their devotions by turning round upon their axles certain cylinders, upon which some prayers are engraved. Not only these Asiatics, but Europeans of large mental calibre are often contented with vague ideas; and when they are challenged to support "the faith which is in them," show that they have never yet examined it. If, for example, they are asked how they can believe in the truth of such passages, "I have seen God (Kohim) face to face" (Gen. xxxii. 30); "The Lord (Jehovah) spake unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend" (Exod. xxxiii. 11); "Moses whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deut. xxxiv. 10), and the opposite one, "Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me and live" (Exod. xxxiii. 20)--the sole reply rendered is that the first passages are figurative, passing by entirely the comparison in the second, which asserts that God talked with Moses as one friend with another. As a farther illustration of my meaning, I may point to the glibness with which Christians talk, sing, and listen to discourses about blood. If people really gave heed to what they chant, and to the words of their ministers, they would really be puzzled to find a distinction between the god whom they worship and that idol deity of Mexico, which called constantly for the hearts and the blood of his worshippers. "Without shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. ix. 22) is a dogma that puts the Europeans' God on the same level as the deities worshipped in pagan Africa, New Zealand, and by the Anthropophagi generally. In like manner, if ordinary people are asked to reconcile such passages as the following--"Who maketh his angels spirits;" "A spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see me have" (Luke xxiv. 39)--with a host of others, in which angels are said to have appeared, talked, and acted like men, they allege that "much of the phraseology of the Bible is metaphorical." But if it be granted that the language is metaphorical, must we not equally believe that the facts referred to are mythical; and if so, how much of the so-called inspired book can we trust? If metaphor and figure-imagery are cities of refuge for theologians, those who fly to them must remember, that there they must remain and live therein all their days; they cannot be citizens of the world, and yet never leave their asylum: if, for them, facts are fictions, by parity of reason fictions are facts. If, when an individual, said to be a prophet, and, as such, the mouthpiece of the Holy Ghost or of Jehovah, tells us that he saw and talked with an angel, who imparted to him such and such information, we are bound either to believe the whole statement or to reject it as valueless, _quoad_ revelation. If the man did see an angel, and that angel spoke, it must have been material; and if material, it could not be a spirit, and if not a spirit, it was not an angel.* If to this it be answered that individuals do see what they deem to be spirits--just as many a drunken man avers that he sees "blue devils," we grant it at once. We go still farther, and state that we know individuals in full possession, apparently, of all their senses, who see, occasionally, men, women, horses, dogs, and other things, which have no more existence than the figures which appear to us in dreams. Such men not only see imaginary beings, but they hear conversations or speeches which have no reality in them. But we cannot for a moment allow that such delusions of the senses are sterling, and such utterances, messages from the Almighty delivered by angels. To be logical, therefore, the theologian must either accept the stories told in the Bible about angelic beings as literally true, to the exclusion of all metaphor, or believe that every thing tainted by such celestial mythology is entirely of human invention. * The authority for this is Ps. civ. 4; Heb. L 7, 14,--"Who maketh his angels spirits;" "Are they not all ministering spirits?" As an illustration, let us consider two episodes in the history of Elisha. We find in 2 Kings ii. 11, that a chariot of fire and horses of fire, appeared to this prophet, and parted him from Elijah, with whom he was walking, and carried the latter away into heaven; and we see in 2 Kings vi. 17, that Elisha's servant could really see a multitude of chariots and horses of fire round about his master. We must also remember that "the chariots of the Lord are thousands of angels" (Ps. lxviii. 17; see also Ps. xxxiv. 7.) Now these were, or were not, realities--if the chariots and horsemen existed, then we infer that some sort of stables and ostlers exist in heaven; if none such exist, then the chariots and horses could neither have been seen, nor have separated the two prophets. It may be urged that supernatural beings do exist for those who can see them, and for no other; just as the angel was seen by Balaam's ass thrice (see Numbers xxii. 22-33) before he was recognized by her master. But this observation is worthless, for it amounts to nothing more than this--viz., that the persons seen in dreams exist for the dreamers and for no one else; but it in no way proves the reality of the asserted apparition. It would be as useless to discuss, at this point, the actuality of what are called "spectres," as of other things named fairies, pixies, gnomes, or sprites. Of the existence of such there is abundance of evidence; and for hundreds of years there was not a human being who did not believe in them. But there was even stronger proof that the world stood still, and the sun went round it, and during untold centuries all who thought on the matter believed the statement. Yet in these days all the testimony is regarded as worthless in the presence of the stern facts of science; and ghosts are only believed in by such as write treatises upon squaring the circle, perpetual motion, and the plane figure of the earth. We shall take up the subject at length in our next chapter. If we were to follow the bent of our inclination, we should now endeavour to prove that the Jews had no idea of an angelic mythology prior to the Babylonian captivity, and that they had no distinct literature prior to the Grecian and Edomite captivity referred to in Joel, Amos, Obadiah, and Micah, except possibly such records and written laws as may be styled "annals" or "year-books;" and, as a consequence, that all parts of the Old Testament in which angelic beings figure are comparatively modern, having been fabricated after the long sojourn of the Jews in Babylon. But to carry out this intention would require a treatise rather than an essay, and I must content myself with saying that I believe it to be affirmed by all Hebrew scholars, that up to the time of Nebuchadnezzar--or Hezekiah--the sole unseen power recognized by the Jews was Jehovah alone. They did not believe either in angel or devil What their ideas were we may shortly describe*:-- * Long after the remark in the text was written, and long before it was in type, Dr. Kalisch, in his second part of a commentary on Leviticus, published his views upon the point referred to. When I can refer my readers to so masterly a composition as his essay upon Angels in the Jewish theology, it is seedless for me to say much on the subject. I may also refer those who are interested in the matter to a work entitled _The Devil: his Origin, Greatness, and Decadence_ (Williams & Norgate, London, 1871--small 8vo., pp. 72). My essay supplements these, and in no way clash therewith. 1. Angels were spirits, being also ministers (Heb. L 7.) They were a flaming fire (Ps. civ. 4); compare Jud. xiii. 20, and Acts vii. 35--that is, spirits are made of a combustible material which is, however, incombustible! 2. They could assume the form of men, and were identical with God (see Gen. xviii. 19; Tobit, and Luke i.): that is to say, they were masters, yet servants--the sender and the sent at the same time! 3. Their faces were terrible (Jud. xiii. 6); but they also shone (Acts vi. 15) and yet they were so good-looking and handsome that the Sodomites fell in love with them as Jupiter did with Ganymede (Gen. xix). 4 One was the superintendent of destruction, and was visible on one occasion to David (2 Sam. xxiv. 16, 17), to Oman, his sons, and to the elders of Israel (1 Chron. xxi. 16-20.) His weapon was a sword (_ibid._) He certainly must have had flesh and bones. It would be an interesting matter to inquire whether the sword was as spiritual as the angel was. 5. One angel was outwitted by a donkey (see Numb. xxii. 22-33.) Yet this angel was God (comp. Numb. xxii. 35, and xxiv. 4, 15,16). It is marvellous to me how any one can read this history of Balaam and his ass, and notice how the animal turned God from His purpose (see chap, xxii. 33), and yet believe the story to be of _divine_ origin! 6. They are made of light (Luke ii. 9), yet can talk the vernacular, and can be counterfeited by Satan (2 Cor. xi. 14); but how he manages it, and whether he then ceases to be a roaring lion or a fallen angel "reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day" (Jude 6), is a matter for surmise. 7. One of them fought with the Devil, and kept his temper (Jude 9.) Of the language used in the disputation we do not know; nor can we tell how the two recognized each other. 8. Some of them are guilty of folly (Job. iv. 18), and some sinned--how, one does not know--and were cast down to hell, and delivered into chains of darkness. It is fitting that beings who have no flesh and bones should be bound by fetters that have no reality (2 Peter ii. 4). 9. Some were discontented with their home and were punished (Jude 6); but where their original habitation was, or why it was regarded as so miserable that another place was desired, is a mystery. 10. They have food provided for them (Ps. lxxviii. 25), and they eat like men (Gen. xviii. 8; and xix. 3), consequently angels must have flesh, blood, and a stomach to digest victuals. Sometimes instead of eating food they order it to be burned, and the smoke from the viands serves as a vehicle to heaven (Jud. xiii. 19, 20). 11. Their number is twenty thousand (Ps. lxviii. 17). 12. They are chariots (_ibid_), yet they walk and get their feet dusty (Gen. xviii. and xix. 2; compare Jud. ii. 1; vi. 12); the chariots are of fire, and so are the horses (2 Kings vi. 17); but they are also clouds (Ps. civ. 3). 13. They are taught military discipline and arranged in "legions" (Matt xxvi. 53). 14. They are sexless (Mark xii. 25), yet were men when they appeared to Abraham, Sarah, and the Sodomites (Gen. xviii, xix.). 15. They are liable to do wrong, and will be judged by men, some time or other (1 Oor. vi. 2, 3). As in this passage the angels are put below the saints, and in Gen. xviii. and xix., it is clear that Elohim and Jehovah were angels, it follows that holy men, when raised, will be superior to the power that gave them heaven! 16. Though sexless, the angels, or sons of God, may be captivated by the beauty of woman, and engender giants with them in a very human fashion (Gen. vi). 17. They are very sensitive respecting the hair of women, and require it to be covered in worship--at other times they probably are not so particular. Although they minister upon those who are heirs of salvation (Heb. i. 14), they might be tempted from their business, if they were to see a pretty snood in golden tresses hid (1 Cor. xi. 10). 18. Every child has an angel, or rather angels, to look after it (Matt, xviii. 10), which leads to the belief that the number of angels has increased since the sixty-eighth Psalm was written, when there were only 20,000, and perhaps a few more.* * The words of the christian father, Tertullian, upon this subject are so very apposite to our subject of angels, that I am tempted to quote them--Clark's edition, vol. i. p. 487- 8. Speaking to the heathens, he says--"And you are not content to assert the divinity of such as were once known to you, whom you heard and handled, and whose portraits have been painted, and actions recounted, and memory retained amongst you; but men insist upon consecrating with a heavenly life, i.e.t they insist on deifying, I know not what incorporeal inanimate shadows and the names of things, dividing man's entire existence amongst separate powers, even from his conception in the womb, so that there is a god (read _angel_) Consevius, to preside over concubital generation, and Fluviona to preserve the infant in the womb; after these come Vitumnus and Sentinus through whom the babe begins to have life and its earliest sensation; then Diespiter, by whose office the child accomplishes its birth. But when women begin their parturition Candelifera also comes in aid, since child-bearing requires the light of the candle; and other goddesses there are (such as Lucina, Partula, Nona, Décima, and Alemona) who get their names from the parts they bear in the stages of travail There were two Carmentas likewise, according to the general view. To one of them, called Postverta, belonged the function of assisting the birth of the malpresented child; whilst the other, Prosa or Prorso, executed the like office for the rightly born. The god Farinus was so called from his inspiring the first utterance, whilst others believed in Locutius from his gift of speech. Cunina is present as the protector of the child's deep slumber, and supplies to it refreshing rest. To lift them when fallen there is Levana, and along with her Rumina (from the old word _ruma_, a teat). It is a wonderful oversight that no gods were appointed for clearing up the filth of children. Then to preside over their first pap and earliest drink you have Potina and Edula; to teach the child to stand erect is the work of Statina (or Statilinus), whilst Adeona helps him to come to dear mamma-, and Abeona to toddle back again. Then there is Domiduca, to bring home the bride, and the goddess Mens, to influence the mind to either good or evil. They have likewise Volumnus and Voleta, to control the will; Paventina, the goddess of fear; Venilia, of hope; Volnpia, of pleasure; Praastitia, of beauty. Then, again, they give his name to Peragenor, from his teaching men to go through their work; to Consus, from his suggesting to them counsel. Juventa is their guide on assuming the manly gown, and 'bearded Fortune,' when they come to full manhood. If I must touch on their nuptial duties, there is Afferenda, whose appointed function is to see to the offering of the dower. But fie on you--you have your Mutunus, and Tutunus, and Pertunda, and Subigus, and the goddess Prema, and likewise Perfica. O spare yourselves, ye impudent gods." 19. Some angels are evil, but are much the same as the good (Ps. lxxviii 49), in their power of doing mischief. 20. Every heir of salvation has an angel to minister to him in some way or other (Heb. i. 14); so have Roman babies--see note. 21. The angels are only a trifle superior to men (Ps. viii. 5), and in the invisible world will be inferior to them if the latter be saints (1 Cor. vi. 3; Heb. ii. 5). 22. They can speak all sorts of languages (1 Cor. xiii. 1); that which Michael and the devil used (Jude 9) has not been revealed to us. 23. They use a trumpet, probably as immaterial as themselves, and make a great noise thereby (Matt xxiv. 31); and horses (Zech. i. and Rev. vi). 24. They have wings and can fly (Rev. viii. 13; xiv. 6), although they are chariots. 25. When on earth they are clothed with a long white garment, have a face like lightning, and one can appear to be two, or not appear at all to some, though very distinctly seen by others (see Matt xxviii. 2, 3; Mark xvi. 5; Luke xxiv. 4; John xx. 12). Of all the angels mentioned in the Apocalypse we need not write. One of the best accounts I have met with of the angelic mythology of the Hebrews is in Coheleth, or The Book of Ecclesiastes, by Rev. Dr. Ginsburg (Longman, London, 1861). It is written in explanation of Ch. v. 5, wherein is the expression, "Do not say before the angel that it was error" (page 340), and the following remarks are condensed therefrom:-- "The angels occupy different rank and offices--seven of them as the highest functionaries; princes or archangels surround the throne of God and form the cabinet--(1) Michael, the prime minister, the guardian of the Jewish nation, the opponent of Satan (Zech. iii. 1, 2), of the prince of Persia (Dan. x. 13, 20), the conservator of the corpse of Moses (Jude 9), and the dragon (Rev. xii); (2) Raphael, who presides over the sanitary affairs (Tobit iii. 17, xii. 15)--'When God would cure any sick person,' says St. Jerome, 'he sends the archangel Raphael, one of the seven spirits before his throne, to accomplish the cure.' There can be little doubt that this was the angel who went down at certain seasons to move the waters of the pool to cure the impotent people (John v. 4); (3) Gabriel, the messenger to announce or to effect deliverance, also a presence angel (Luke i. 11-20, 26-35); (4) Uriel, mentioned in Esdras (2 b., ch. iv., w. 1 and 20). In Targums these four are represented as surrounding the throne of the divine majesty, but all do not agree; Jonathan's arrangement is--Michael at the right, Uriel at the left, Gabriel before, and Raphael behind.* The fifth, sixth, and seventh archangels are Phaniel, Raguel, and Sarakiel." * An observation such as this distinctly shows how completely the ideas of angels are associated with gross anthropomorphism. "Next to the cabinet comes the privy council, composed of four and twenty crowned elders (1 Kings xxii. 19; Rev. iv. 4; vii. 13; viii. 3), who surround the throne, before whom Christ will confess those who confessed him. Then comes the council, consisting of the seventy angel princes--the provincial governors presiding over the affairs of the seventy nations into which the human family is divided." Hence the Targumic paraphrase on Gen. xi. 7, 8--"_The Lord said to the seventy presence angels, Come now and let us go down, and there let us confound their language, so that one may not understand the language of the other. And the Lord manifested himself against that city, and with him were the seventy angels according to the seventy nations_." Hence the Septuagint translation of Deut xxxii. 8--"When the Most High divided the nations... he set the boundaries... according to the number of the angels." The doctor also notices the four angels mentioned in Zech. vi, who seem to have the management of four great monarchies, but he does not advert to the angels of the seven churches spoken of in the Apocalypse. He then proceeds--"Then comes the innumerable company of presence angels, since every individual has a guardian angel as well as every nation"... St Jerome, remarking upon Matt, xviii. 10, says,--"_Great is the dignity of these little ones, for every one of them has from his very birth an angel dedicated to guard him_."* When St. Peter was chained in his prison, his angel released him (Acts xiii. 7,11), and the damsel who opened a house door for him was told that he who was knocking was Peter's angel. * We have never been able to see the force of this remark, unless the idea of children having guardian angels was associated with the belief that these beings left them when they grew up. If the adults standing round Jesus had each an individual warden, there would be nothing peculiar in the warning given in the verse referred to. It is, however, just possible that the notion existed that it was to adults only that tutelary spirits were assigned, and that the prophet of Nazareth declared that each infant had a protecting genius as well as every man. Then there are angels who preside over all the phenomena of nature. One presides over the sun (Eev. xix. 17); angels guard the storm and lightning (Ps. civ. 4); four angels have charge over the four winds (Rev. vii. 1, 2); an angel presides over the waters (Rev. xvi. 5); and another over the temple altar (Rev. xiv. 18). We need not pursue this subject further; enough has been said to show that the Hebrew ideas of angels differ in no essential respect from those of other nations, who, if not older than the Jews, were certainly never influenced by the Hebrews. From the evidence before us, we are constrained to believe that the knowledge which we assume to possess of the celestial court has descended to us from heathen or pagan sources, and that the pictorial designs which pass current for likenesses of angels or archangels have descended from Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Grecians, Etruscans, and Romans, and cannot pretend to anything approaching to a revelation from God. We have already remarked that the Hebrew notions of the heavenly hierarchy are evidence of a gross anthropomorphism; they indicate a belief in the existence of a monarch having a face and back, a right hand and a left, ears and a mouth, and a wherewithal for sitting upon a throne--the part which was shown, as we are told, to Moses; they tell of a theology that recognizes places in the universe where God is not, and of which He has no cognizance save through messengers. If this be so, what shall we say of the hagiology which tells us that there was on one occasion a conspiracy amongst the courtiers of the celestial ruler, a discovery of treason, and a punishment of the offenders as dire as the most malignant man could invent? We have often thought that no human being, unless he were vile, brutal, sensual, clever, disappointed, and revengeful, could have invented the idea of hell, and that none would ever have believed in it unless he was both timid, thoughtless, and malignant The dormant hate of the orthodox against opponents is an awful quantity. The expression of "fallen angels" is a pregnant text; it recalls to our mind the passage--"Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me" (Ps. xli. 9). It reminds us of David, Absalom and Ahitophel, of Solomon and Jeroboam, of Joram and Jehu, Benhadad and Hazael, Louis XVIII. and Marshal Ney. We feel sure that an individual who could write the words--"If we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries" (Heb. x. 26, 27), could readily have invented a hell, if he had not found one already made to his hand. The sentence just quoted bears evidence of intense theological spitefulness, and a petty meanness that neither Sakya nor Jesus would have shown. Such thoughts are womanish, not manly, although apostolic. We can fancy it having been penned by James or John, who once asked Jesus whether they should not call down fire from heaven to consume the Samaritans, simply because the latter were not polite to the master--"because he seemed to be going to Jerusalem" (Luke ix. 53, 54). But if so, those disciples must have forgotten the rebuke of Jesus--"Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of." Here we must pause awhile, and consider the idea of various peoples about Hell. Some, perhaps we ought to say, many, earthly potentates have encouraged the belief that there is a place in which evildoers, who have escaped punishment for crime in this world will, after their death here, receive their deserts. A place of torment which no man has seen, or can see in life, and which, consequently, anyone can describe, is a wonderful supplement to imperfect police arrangements, and as such, has been fabricated or adopted in various nations. But in all the nations of antiquity, and those which we call pagan, Hell has been assigned to those who have committed crimes upon earth, such as murder, theft, and the like, and whose evil deeds have outnumbered their good ones. The idea of a torture vault for heretics has, so far as I can learn, been reserved for Christian times, and for nations who punish ecclesiastical offences more severely than the most atrocious crimes. The papal church, wherever she has had power, has punished rejection of her communion far more cruelly than she has dealt with rape, robbery, and murder; and all, who think with her, draw their arguments for so doing from what is said to be God's method of dealing with His rebellious angels. Surely, the idea runs, if the Almighty, who cannot do wrong, has punished with fire and everlasting torment the ministers who stood in His presence and around His throne, simply because they kept not their position, or did not watch over their principality--for both meanings may be assigned to the original words--surely man must treat his heretic fellow on a similar plan. God, runs the argument, made the Devil, and man must multiply his imps. It is true, according to Hebrew and Christian mythology, that the idea of a Devil was not originally in the mind of Jehovah. But when Satan rebelled he was immediately invested with power! In other words, Lucifer taught Elohim, and thoughtful Christians believe this!! If we now attempt to frame a history of the modern Hell, its rulers, its angels, or its devils, we find, in the first place, that the Old Testament contains no idea whatever of Satan being an angel originally bright and fair, but subsequently disobedient, rebellious, conquered, and punished. Nor is the New Testament much more communicative--we find the arch-fiend described as a murderer and as a liar; he also is associated with angels, as in the words, "the Devil and his angels." He is described as "the Prince of the power of the air,"--as "a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour." He is "the spirit which worketh in the children of disobedience." He is also represented as telling Jesus, that he is able to dispose of all the kingdoms of the globe, and to give their glory to whom he will. Yet nowhere is a hint breathed that he was once an angel in heaven. The only verse in the whole Bible which is supposed to bear upon this matter, shows that the devil and his imps are not identical with the fallen angels, for Jude distinctly declares (verse 6) that the latter are "reserved in everlasting chains, under darkness, unto the judgment of the great day," a condition quite incompatible with their identity with Satan, who is represented as telling God that he had been going to and fro through the earth, and walking up and down in it (Job ch. i., v. 7). A conversation then follows the question, which must have been quite impossible had God recognized him as an escaped convict. Again, if we turn to the book of Enoch (an apocryphal production, supposed for ages to have been lost, but discovered at the close of the last century in Abyssinia, now first translated from an Ethiopian MS. in the Bodleian Library, by Richard Laurence, LL.D., Archbishop of Cashel; 3d edition, 8vo. Oxford, 1838),--which is, and I think justly, believed to be the authority quoted by Jude, we find a full confirmation of our view of the independence of the Devil or Satan, and the fallen angels. The foundation of the work is the story-told in the sixth chapter of Genesis. In that work, the angels which kept not their first estate are described as those who preferred intercourse with human females to a celestial celibacy, for in those days there were sons of God and daughters of men. Nay, in one verse (chap, liii. 6) it is distinctly declared that one cause why the wrath of God came upon them was that "they became ministers of Satan, and seduced those who dwell upon the earth." In many places a reference is made to the close imprisonment of the angels who had "been polluted with women;" one such will suffice, (chap, xxi. 6), where, on seeing a terrific place, Enoch is told by Uriel "this is the prison of the angels, and here are they kept for ever." It is not even Satan who tempts the angels, for chapter lxviii. tells us that it was Yekun and Kesabel, two of themselves, who gave evil counsel, and induced their fellows to corrupt their bodies by generating mankind. It is clear that such a writer does not conceive the possible existence of angelic women. The nearest approach to evidence of identification is the statement made in the same chapter (w. 6, 7), that Gradrel was the name of one of the leaders of the fallen, and that he seduced Eve. But this testimony is wholly worthless in the face of the fact that he, like all his company, are kept chained up, which Satan certainly is not. From the foregoing facts and considerations, we can come to no other conclusion than that there is no truth in the angelic mythology current amongst ourselves--for which Milton and his _Paradise Lost_ are mainly responsible. We may, indeed, affirm that a belief in angelic mythology is wholly incompatible with an enlightened religion. If we regard the Almighty as omnipresent and omniscient, we cannot imagine that He can require messengers, or organize an "intelligence department" in Heaven. A man who is present with his family requires no servant to tell him what each is doing, or to deliver his orders to one or other. So, if God be always with us, it is downright blasphemy to say that He requires a go-between to let Him know what we are doing, or what He wishes us to do. In our next chapter we shall enter upon the consideration of a subject closely allied to that of Angels--namely, that of Ghosts, Apparitions, Disembodied Spirits, or by whatever name they are called. These mainly differ from the beings of whom we have treated in the fact that, whereas an angel is a messenger--one sent to do certain duties--a ghost is a being who comes upon the scene, which he or she has quitted, to do or to persuade somebody else to perform something that has been omitted to be done during the life-time of the deceased. In nine-tenths of the stories which we read of "revenans," the returned one is not sent as a messenger, nor does he come for any definite purpose. A man or woman barbarously murdered is painted as haunting the scene where the violence was committed, as flies flit over a carcase. Misers come to brood over their hoards, not to use them. In no case which I can remember do the tales represent the ghosts as being sent from either of the two powers--God and Satan; and to fancy that a deceased man or woman is a free agent after death is, to say the least of it, a proof that the believers in the doctrine do not believe the biblical text--"As the tree falleth so it must lie." The ideas of Angels and of Ghosts have their origin in what may be called a superstitious education; and credence in the latter is an almost necessary pendant to a belief in the former. Indeed, if we put ourselves into the position of Manoah's wife, Zacharias (Luke i), and Mary, we feel sure that we should not have known whether the being who appeared was an angel or a ghost. Note.--The reader interested in the subject of this chapter, will find additional information thereupon in Records of the Past (Bag-ster, London, 1873-74; vol. i. 131-135, and vol. iii.139-154). The volumes are inexpensive, and extremely valuable to the student of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian mythology. CHAPTER X. The inexorable logic of facts. Saul and the witch of Endor. Influence of Elisha's bones. The widow's son. Ideas about ghosts--about their power. Papal belief in ghosts. Ritual for exorcisms. St. Dunstan and St. Anthony. The Bible and ghosts. Scriptural ghosts. Ghosts independent of Judaism and Christianity. Japanese story. Buddhist priests, like Papalists, exorcise ghosts professionally. Ancient Grecian ghosts. Stories from Homer, Herodotus, Iamblichus. Modern French ghosts. Latin ghosts. Ghosts and lunacy. Ghosts and spiritualism. Mistakes of clairvoyantes. It is not until we systematically inquire into certain tenets of our own belief, and compare or contrast them with those of other people far removed from us, that we are able to form an opinion about how much we owe to what we call "our peculiar religion," and how much we hold in common with other distant members of the human family. It is probable that there is scarcely a "Bible Christian" in Great Britain who is not impressed with the truth of the statement made in 2 Tim. i. 10--_viz_., that Christ abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light by the Gospel. But the inexorable logic of facts proves to us that the idea of a life after death existed even amongst some ancient Jews--a people to whom it was certainly not revealed by God--and amongst nations who have not to this day become acquainted with Jesus, or what we call the Gospel, and who are mainly influenced by the doctrines of Buddha. To give examples: no one can read the very fabulous story of the Witch of Endor and Saul without recognizing the fact, that both the one and the other are represented by the historian to have believed, that, though the body of the prophet Samuel had been rotting for a long period in its tomb, the spirit of the man was yet existent. Nor does a Bible Christian see anything peculiar in the miracle of the restoration of the dead man mentioned in 2 Kings xiii. 21, who, when he touched the mouldy bones of Elisha, which represented all that was left, on earth, of that distinguished wonder-worker, at once revived, and stood upon his feet. But the story forces us to believe that the Hebrew writer, who had no revelation from Jehovah about a future life, was, from some cause or other, obliged to allow that the prophet had some sort of existence after his decease. A similar remark may be made respecting the story of the widow's son, given in 1 Kings xvii. 17-23, in which it is clear that both the mother of the child and the prophet believed it to be dead, although the latter acted as if there was yet its living spirit existing somewhere, and capable of being recalled. No simple figure of speech will explain away the doctrine referred to, for there is reference distinctly made to the idea of a life independent of that of the body. It may well be supposed, that the very extraordinary tales spoken of were introduced into the ancient books by modern Pharisees, as proofs of their faith being superior to that of the Sadducees--it is, indeed, probable that they were so; but into this point we will not enter. We pass by, in like manner, the real signification of the English word "ghost," and make no reference to the idea of there being a Holy, in contradistinction to a profane, vulgar, and unholy, ghost We may also omit anything more than a bare allusion to the fact that the third member of the Trinity, as it is called, appeared in forms recognizable by the eye; and that when it assumed an overshadowing condition (Luke i. 35), it acted as a male human body would have done, and impregnated Mary, as Jupiter did Leda. It is rather my desire to call attention to the ideas actually existing, probably in all Christendom, and certainly in Great Britain, respecting "ghosts." They may be thus described. It is believed by many that certain individuals have, during their lifetime, a power of determining that some immaterial part of their living body shall, after death, assume the figure and proportions possessed by the person during life, as well as his clothes, &c., and act as if this second self had a real existence, recognizable by men, animals, and even candles,* and a definite worldly purpose. In other cases it is assumed, that the defunct has not had any particular desire to return to life until after his death has taken place; but that his spirit, having as much power to think without its brains as with them, makes itself apparent with a distinct object, formed, not in the living body, but in the corpse. The purposes generally attributed to ghosts are, to give information about murder or money, to compel religious rites over their dead body, or to punish a relentless oppressor with daily horror. Still further, some suppose that ghosts are doomed for a certain time to walk the earth, and suffer during the day in fires perpetual, till, in some unknown way, the sins of their bodies have been purged away, or until some one, living, has made an atonement for sins committed and unpardoned during the lifetime of the "revenant" (Shakespeare in Hamlet). The so-called disembodied spirits are supposed to be able to operate upon matter, to throw our atmosphere into waves, producing vision and hearing, and to move from one spot to another. They have, still farther, the power of making and emitting light, and are so partial to using the faculty, that they prefer appearing by night, and in darkness. * "And the lights in the chamber burnt blue." --Alonzo the Brave.--Lewis. Of the real existence of such ghostly beings no devout Romanist can fail to convince himself; for his Church, which claims to be infallible, has provided special services for combating them, and a Papal priest has, many a time, claimed, and attempted to exercise, the power to drive what the French call "revenans," from the earth into the Red Sea. The saintly annals of the Church of Rome are filled with stories of angels, gods, and devils, who have appeared to holy men of old, either to applaud their conduct, or to try their faith The legends about Saint Dunstan and Saint Anthony are too well known to require repetition here, and it would be idle to refer to some particularly good ghost story, when everybody knows so many. The general credit obtained by the tales referred to has been attributed by many to the teaching of the Bible. The apparition of Samuel to Saul; the intercourse between the angel Raphael and Tobit; the manifestation of some celestial beings to Zacharias (Luke i. 11); to Mary (v. 28); to certain shepherds (Luke ii. 9); the statement that some men have entertained angels unawares (Heb. xiii. 2); the transfiguration scene, described in Matt, xvii. and Mark ix., in which Moses and Elias are said to have returned from heaven to earth, with the design of comforting Jesus; and the story of Peter and the angel, told in Acts xii. 6-15--all indicate a firm belief in the existence of ghosts, and form the Christian's warrant for believing in them. But an extended knowledge of the belief entertained by people other than the followers of Jesus shows that the idea in question is wholly independent of both Judaism and Christianity. A credence in ghosts is profound in Japan, and it resembles, in every respect, that which has been so long current in Europe. If any one, for example, will read a story in A B. Mitford's _Tales of Old Japan_ (Macmillan; London, 1871), entitled, "The Ghost of Sakura," a village, he will scarcely be able to divest himself of the idea that the legend is of British origin. Without going into the reasons which have convinced me that the writer has fairly given a purely Japanese tale, and one wholly untainted by Popish legends, I may shortly indicate the main points in the narrative, which purports to be a true one. A certain lord behaved very badly to his tenants, increasing the imposts upon them until life became a burden. By ordinary petitions he was unmoved, and it was necessary to have recourse to unusual means. The adoption of a promising plan was, in the mind of its proposer, a positive passport to a cruel death, by crucifixion. In a touching leave-taking of his wife, he ends his speech with the words--"I give my life to allay the misery of the people of this estate" (vol. ii, p. 12). His proceedings save the poor peasants, for whom he sacrifices himself, from utter ruin--every grievance which they have is redressed; but their saviour is condemned to be crucified, in which punishment his wife is included, and his sons are to be beheaded before his face. Unable to save the man, his nearest male friends become priests, and end their days praying and making offerings on behalf of their friends' souls, and those of the wife and offspring (p. 25), and they collect money enough to erect six bronze memorial Buddhas. "Thus," the tale goes on to say, "did these men, for the sake of Sogoro and his family, give themselves up to works of devotion; and the other villagers also brought food to soothe the spirits of the dead, and prayed for their entry into Paradise; and, as litanies were repeated without intermission, there can be no doubt that Sogoro attained salvation." The next sentence is a Buddhist text, viz.:-- "In Paradise, where the blessings of God are distributed without favour, the soul learns its faults by the measure of the rewards given. The lusts of the flesh are abandoned, and the soul, purified, attains to the glory of Buddha." I scarcely need mention, to those interested in Buddhism, that this conception of Paradise is very different to that which many persons uphold to be "nothingness." The Japanese "Nirvana" is evidently not annihilation. When Sogoro was to die, the friendly priests entreated the authorities that they might have his body, so as to be able to bury it decently; but the request was only granted after the corpse had been exposed three days and three nights. At the time appointed, Sogoro and his wife are tied to two crosses, and their children brought out for decapitation. The utterance of the eldest son (æt. 13) is very touching--"Oh my father and mother, I am going before you to Paradise, that happy country, to wait for you. My little brothers and I will be on the banks of the river Sandzu,* and stretch out our hands, and help you across. Farewell, all you who have come to see us die; and now, please cut off my head at once." With this he stretched out his neck, murmuring a last prayer (p. 28). * The Buddhist Styx, which separates Paradise from Hell, across which the dead are ferried by an old woman, for whom a small piece of money is buried with them. I may add that such a custom obtains amongst the lower orders in Ireland to this day. At length it is the parents turn to die, and thus speaks the wife--"Remember, my husband, that from the first you had made up your mind to this fate. What though our bodies be disgracefully exposed on these crosses? (compare Gal. iii. 13). We have the promises of the Gods before us; therefore, mourn not. Let us fix our minds upon death; we are drawing near to Paradise, and shall soon be with the saints. Be calm, my husband. Let us cheerfully lay down our lives for the good of many. Man lives but for one generation, his name for many. A good name is more to be prized than life." "Well said wife; what though we are punished for the many? our petition was successful, and there is nothing left to wish for..... For myself, I care not; but that my wife and children should be punished also is too much.... Let my lord fence himself in with iron walls, yet shall my spirit burst through them, and crush his bones, as a return for this deed." As he said this, he looked like the demon Razetsu (p. 30). The execution is completed by thrusting a spear into the side until it comes out at the opposite shoulder, and as it is withdrawn, the blood streams out like a fountain. Ere Sogoro dies, he again threatens his lord to revenge himself upon him in a manner never to be forgotten, and adds--"As a sign, when I am dead, my head shall turn and face towards the castle. When you see this, doubt not that my words shall come true" (p. 31). As Sogoro laid down his life for a noble cause, he was canonized, and became a tutelar deity of his lord's family. After the execution, those subordinates of the lord of the land were dismissed from their office, who, by their culpable and vile conduct, had made such a catastrophe necessary--a retribution that reminds the reader of that which is said to have fallen on the Jews, because of a death by crucifixion which they brought about. The Japanese historian then goes on (p. 34)--"In the history of the world, from the dark ages down to the present time, there are few instances of one man laying down his life for the many, as Sogoro did; noble and peasant praise him alike." Four years after this the ghosts of Sogoro and of his wife and family begin to torment their late cruel lord. His lady is gradually frightened to death; the crucified couple appear to her and to her husband in a far more fearful form than Jesus is said to have appeared to Constantine. They threaten both with the pains of Hell, and declare that they have come to take them there; and with them come other ghosts, who hoot, yell, laugh, and come and go at pleasure. No one, not even priests, could quiet the frightful sounds, or get rid of the horrible sights. Violence was wholly unavailing; mystic rites, incantations, and prayers were alike useless. The visions appeared at first by day, but subsequently by night. They were visible to everybody. But, after a long consultation, the once brutal, but now humbled, nobleman agrees to erect a shrine to the crucified man, and to pay him divine honours. This was done: Sogoro became a saint, under the name of Sogo Daimiyo, and the ghosts appeared no more. But terrible misfortunes fall upon the Lord Kotsuke, and he "began to feel that the death of his wife, and his own present misfortunes, were a just retribution for the death of Sogoro and his wife and children, and he was as one awakened from a dream. Then, night and morning, in his repentance, he offered up prayers to the sainted spirit of the dead farmer, acknowledged and bewailed his crime, vowing that, if his own family were spared from ruin, and re-established, intercession should be made at the court of the Mikado on behalf of the spirit of Sogoro, so that, being worshipped with even greater honours than before, his name should be handed down to all generations" (p. 43). In a foot note we learn that the Mikado of Japan could, like the Pope of Rome, confer posthumous divine honours upon whom he pleased. The tale tells us that, by the means just before alluded to, the spirit of Sogoro was appeased, and then positively became his quondam enemy's patron saint, and was universally respected in all that part of the country. His shrine was made beautiful as a gem, and night and day the devout worshipped at it Mitford adds (p. 47)--"The belief in ghosts appears to be as universal as that of the immortality of the soul upon which it depends. Both in China and Japan the departed spirit is invested with the power of revisiting the earth, and, in a visible form, tormenting its enemies, and haunting those places where the perishable part of it mourned and suffered. Haunted houses are slow to find tenants, for ghosts almost always come with revengeful intent; indeed, the owners of such houses will almost pay men to live in them, such is the dread which they inspire, and the anxiety to blot out the stigma." The parallel between an episode in Palestine, and that herein described as having occurred in Japan, will be completed if the reader remembers the passage in the Epistle to the Romans, wherein Paul, after speaking of the fall of the Jews, subsequent to the death of Jesus--who gave his life for others--remarks, "if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead" (Rom. xi. 15). In addition to the ghost story above described, many others are detailed by Mr Mitford that are exact counterparts of some of those most firmly believed by orthodox Christians, and most commonly met with in novelettes and magazines. We give a digest of them-- A paterfamilias is thrown into prison for gambling. After being confined some time, he returns home one night pale and thin, and, after receiving congratulations, he tells the friends assembled that he is permitted to leave the prison that evening by the jailers, for that he is to be returned to them the next day publicly. When the time arrives, they are summoned to remove his corpse--he had died the night before, and it was his ghost which had appeared. Compare Acts v. 19, and xii. 7-14. The next runs thus--A cruel policeman had a housemaid, who broke one of ten plates which he valued--she confessed the accident to the mistress. When the master came to hear of the loss, he tied the girl to a cupboard, and cut off one of her fingers daily. She managed to escape, and drowned herself in the garden well. Every night afterwards there was a noise from the well, counting up to nine, and then came a burst of grief. All the retainers left the place; the magistrate could not perform his duties, and was dismissed. The ghost was ultimately laid by a priest. After recounting this story, Mitford remarks--"The laying of disturbed spirits appears to form one of the regular functions of the Buddhist priests; at least, we find them playing a conspicuous part in every ghost story" (p. 50). The next tale is one of a haunted house. No paying tenant will live there, but a poor fencing master takes it for nothing. He first hears a terrific noise in the garden pond, and, on looking, sees a dark cloud enshrining a bald head. He inquires, and discovers that a former tenant, ten years ago, murdered a money-lender, and threw his head into the water. The actual tenant now drains the pond, finds the skull, takes it for burial to a temple, causing prayers to be offered up for the repose of the murdered man's soul. Thus the ghost was laid, and appeared no more. This tale serves as an additional means of recognizing the descent of Papism from Buddhism. Returning once again to Europe, we find that the ancient Greeks had not only an idea of the resurrection of the dead, and life after death, but that departed spirits could be summoned to appear by the living. For example, at the opening of the eleventh book of the Odyssey, Ulysses recounts how-he offered a certain sacrifice, and tells us that, after it, the souls of the perished dead came forth from Erebus--betrothed girls and youths--much enduring old men, and tender virgins having a newly grieved mind--and many Mars-renowned men, wounded with brass-tipped spears, possessing gore-smeared arms, who in great numbers were wandering about the trench, on different sides, with a divine clamour, and pale fear seized upon me.... At first the soul of my companion, Elpenor, came, for he was not yet buried.... The shade addressed the hero, and, after telling the manner of his own death, entreats to have his corpse burned, and a tomb to be placed over it After this shade, appears Ulysses' mother, then Theban Tiresias, having a golden sceptre (Bohn's translation, pp. 147, 8). The rest of the book is made up of a number of dialogues between the traveller and the illustrious dead. The following, from Herodotus (vi. 68, 69), might have been introduced into chapter viii, for it is not only an example of a ghost, but of supernatural generation--but it is most appropriate here. Demaratus, having been twitted by certain persons that he was not the son of his putative father, who was known to be impotent, and that he was begotten by a mean man--a feeder of asses--adjures his mother, by a most solemn oath, to tell the truth. She replies--When Ariston had taken me to his own house, on the third night from the first a spectre, resembling Ariston, came to me, and having lain with me, put on me a crown that it had, it departed, and afterwards Ariston came; but when he saw me with the crown, he asked who it was that gave it me. I said, he did; but he would not admit it.... Ariston, seeing that I affirmed with an oath, discovered that the event was superhuman; and, in the first place, the crown proved to have come from the shrine... situate near the palace gates, which they call Astrabacus's; and, in the next place, the seers pronounced that it was the hero himself. We need not dwell upon the miracle, being only desirous to show that, in the time of Herodotus, ideas of the return of departed spirits to earth were common--had it not been so, the story would not have been conceived. See also _Herod_ iv. 14, 15; _�sch Theb_. 710; _cf. Porson on Eur_. Or. 401; _�sch Ag_. 415. Perhaps the most striking example of a phantom is given in Herodotus viii. 84, where a spectre, in a woman's form, appeared, and cheered the Greeks on shipboard to a battle, saying, so that all the warriors heard her--"Dastards, how long will you back water?" In more recent times, Iamblicus (on the _Mysteries_, section ii, chap, iv.), speaking of different celestial and ordinarily invisible powers, observes--"In the motions of the heroic phasmata (or apparitions--phantoms or ghosts) a certain magnificence presents itself to the view." In the phasmata of the Archons the first energies appear to be most excellent and authoritative, and the phasmata of souls are seen to be the more moveable, yet are more imbecile, than those of heroes.... The magnitude of the epiphanies (or manifestations) in the gods, indeed, is so great, as sometimes to conceal all heaven.1' Then the author describes how this brilliancy is less in each inferior order of spirits, and is smallest in those souls below the grade of heroes (Taylor's translation, pp. 89, 90). In sect iii., chap, iii., the same writer remarks--"The soul has a twofold life, one being in conjunction with the body, the other being separated from all body." Again, in chap. xxxi.--"Still worse is the explanation of sacred operations, which assigns, as the cause of divination, a certain genus of daemons, which is naturally fraudulent, omniform, and various, and which assumes the appearance of gods and daemons, and the souls of the deceased" (Taylor's ed., p. 199). _Le Dictionnaire Infernal_, which I have previously described, gives two very modern-like histories from the Greeks, under the names Philinnion and Polycritus; but, as I cannot verify them by reference, I shall say no more of them. When we come to speak about the Romans, the first history which occurs to my mind is the well-known statement, that the ghost of Cæsar appeared to Brutus before the battle in which the latter met with his death. The narrator of the story dwells somewhat upon the coolness with which the living hero encounters the shade of the dead, as if it were strange for people, when they saw ghosts, not to be terrified. I think that we may believe in the Etruscans having an idea of invisible spirits becoming occasionally apparent, inasmuch as in a sepulchral painting, in the tomb of the Tarquinii, the shade of Patroclus is represented as standing over Achilles as he kills the Trojan captives in sacrifice. In later times, Otho declared that Galba's ghost had appeared to him, and had tumbled him out of bed (Suetonius' _Lives of the Caesars_, Otho, vii). We may take our next illustration from Cicero upon the nature of the gods. In book 2, ch. ii.,--"Who now," he makes Lucilius say, "believes in Hippocentaurs and Chimeras? or what old woman is now to be found so weak and ignorant as to stand in fear of those infernal monsters which once so terrified mankind? For time destroys the fictions of error and opinion, whilst it confirms the determinations of nature and truth. And therefore it is that, both amongst us and amongst other nations, sacred institutions and the divine worship of the gods have been strengthened and improved from time to time; and this is not to be imputed to chance alone, but to the frequent appearance of the gods themselves. In the war with the Latins... Castor and Pollux were seen fighting with our army on horseback... and as P. Vatienus... was coming in the night to Rome... two young men on white horses appeared to him, and told him that king Perses was that day taken prisoner." He told the news and was imprisoned as a liar; but further information confirmed the ghost's story, and he was liberated and rewarded."... The voices of the Fauns have been often heard, and deities have appeared in forms so visible that they have compelled everyone, who is not senseless or hardened in impiety, to confess the presence of the gods" (Bohn's translation, p. 46). In page 186 of the same edition, two remarkable instances are given wherein supernatural voices told of approaching trouble, and how it was to be avoided. No notice was taken of the warning, and the misfortunes which had been foretold occurred. The second miracle very closely resembled the modern voice of the Virgin at Lourdes. Whilst I was writing the preceding remarks, my attention was called by a friend to the following remarks in _The Examiner_, which seem to me so appropriate to this chapter and the preceding one, that I gladly quote them:--"If there is anything more striking than the thoughtless credulity with which men accept statements agreeing with their preconceptions, it is the stubborn incredulity with which they receive statements at variance with those preconceptions. The devotees of each religion, and even of each sect into which a religion is so commonly split up, accept and even adore the absurdities of their own belief, while they scan, with a sceptical severity that cannot be surpassed, the not greater follies of other systems of belief. In no respect is this fact more glaring than in the case of miracles. Each Church has its own special miracles, devoutly believed in, but repels with contempt or horror the alleged miracles of other religions. Happy that it is so. Were superstition not in its essence and nature a dividing folly, could it but muster in one herd all its votaries, common sense and truth would have a hard battle for existence." At this point of my subject, I feel the natural inclination of a physician to enter upon those changes in the nervous centres which induce individuals to hear, feel, and see, noises, sensations, and spectra, which have no real existence. But with the majority of experienced medical men, the matter is so well known that it would be idle for me to dwell upon it, further than to say, that it is a matter of fact that many an individual who hears and sees words and beings which are illusions, acts upon them as if they were real. Many an assault upon some quiet citizen, many an instance of wilful mischief, and even of murder, is due to a communication made, apparently by a supernatural visitor, to a person who has fully believed it. To a man in his perfect senses the delusive character of a spectre, or a message given in an audible voice may be readily recognized; but when an individual has a diseased brain, all delusions seem real, and it is a part of the affection that they are not only recognized, but acted on. The question has often suggested itself to my own mind, "How much has insanity of mind had to do with religion?" In modern times, the psychologist can readily see how far Swedenborg, Johanna Southcote, and many others, were influenced by a diseased condition of the brain; he can also see indications of lunacy in Ezekiel and the author of Daniel. But he is unable to prosecute the subject far without discovering that mental weakness is often bolstered up by fraud. Nothing is more easy than for an intelligent physician to understand the physical causes of such visions as certain religionists have talked of. But when a spurious miracle, like that of the apparition of a talking, immaculately-conceived Virgin at Lourdes, is traded on, the occurrence leaves the region of folly, and enters that of fraud. Into that it is injudicious to enter here. I may, however, advert to the current belief that certain individuals in the same family have, for many succeeding generations, their death foretold by some "wraith" or "phantom" appearing to them. This story is probably founded upon the fact that hereditary brain disease exists in the constitution of all such persons, and that its occurrence in each victim is marked by an ocular, and, perhaps, some aural delusion. The apparition may seem real to the diseased nervous system, though it has no absolute existence. We are then constrained to believe that the idea of ghosts has not arisen, in the first place, from any peculiar form of religious belief, but from the fact that in all inhabitants of the world there has existed that form of insanity which consists in the victim believing that he hears and sees individuals, inaudible and unseen by others. It is not, however, necessary that there shall be insanity with the hallucinations referred to; for I am personally acquainted with many individuals who have both seen and heard, as they imagine, persons and voices, but of whose sanity I have no doubt. Such delusions often come from overstudy, or too great mental emotion; and the medical worker in his closet and the Roman general in his tent may equally see a spirit. But it must be understood that to all classes the hallucination has the effect of reality, until, by the exercise of an active will, inquiry proves that both sounds and sights thus noticed are illusions. If, therefore, persons who have visions, &c., have not intellects which are cultivated, the spectres will pass for realities, and, as such, will be described. If we endeavour to apply this observation to certain cases, we shall see how far the deductions are _vraisemblable_. Of all the causes which produce atrocious crimes, insanity of mind is the most common. But this cause is rarely recognized at the time, even in a country like our own. Murder, rape, arson, and a host of other atrocities are often the first evidence of a diseased brain. The doctor is assured of this long before an ignorant public, and he traces without surprise the course of a malady which is not seen by the vulgar, until its culmination in some better known form of lunacy. These mental sufferers are exactly those to whom visions are most common, and who are most unable to test the reality of their hallucinations. If, then, they are integers of a people to whom insanity is unknown, it is natural that their narratives will be listened to with awe. The Japanese tyrant, whose case we have given, was probably brutal from impending brain disease, and the visions which appeared to him were caused by an increase of his malady. Shakespeare has evidently taken this view of the question, for, in _Macbeth_, he makes that hero (act ii., scene 1), soliloquise with a dagger which he sees, but cannot clutch--"Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible to feeling, as to sight, or art thou but a dagger of the mind; a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?" Conscious of the illusion, Macbeth recognizes the probable cause; but, at a later period, when the diseased brain is worse than it was before, the unfortunate man is quite unable to reason, and we find him in act iii., scene 4, affrighted by the ghost of Banquo--whose appearance he believes to be real, even although his wife recalls to his mind the dagger scene, and reasons upon his weakness. I do not think that we shall be far wrong if we assume that many nations, who were not far advanced in mental speculation, obtained their first ideas of the resurrection of the body from the hallucinations of approaching or actual insanity. Christian divines unquestionably endeavour to demonstrate the truth of the dogma referred to, by the frequent appearance of Jesus to his disciples after his crucifixion. But the manifestation of Jesus differed wholly from that of Moses and Elias who once came to talk to him. He takes particular pains to demonstrate to Thomas that he has flesh and blood and a hole in his side, as well as in his hands and feet. This indicates that Jesus did not die upon the cross, but that he fainted and came back to life. To insist for a moment upon the lessons taught by the narrative in the gospels, let us inquire what is the value of the argument which proves the resurrection of the body, either by the appearance to some one of a departed friend or enemy, or the visits of Jesus to his disciples. If it is demonstrated thus that the body is eternal and will rise again, it is equally certain that its garments, whether cloth, linen, or calico, will be resuscitated also! The subject, however, is not yet exhausted, for we have now to remark, that no one has ever been known to see a spectre which does not represent some one whom he has seen, or whose picture he has noticed; nor does he ever hear a voice in a tongue unknown to himself. Consequently, when we find individuals recognizing some one whose portrait they have seen, but who talks in the mother tongue of the visionary, we are forced to conclude that the matter is unreal. If a French girl--or several of them, see the Virgin Mary, and hear her talk French, it is evident to every thinking mind, either that there is mental disorder or priestly craft. In like manner, when individuals, calling themselves "mediums," declare their power to call before them the ghosts of Homer and Hero, Leander and Alexander, and assert that they can distinguish Plato from Socrates, and Seneca from Xenophon, and can converse with all in pure English, it is clear that such people are not insane, and that their pretended skill has no existence. That which goes by the names of clairvoyance and spiritualism is based solely upon an unreasoning credulity. In speaking of a belief in "spiritualism" as being analogous to implicit credence in ghosts--and both as being founded upon imperfection in judgment, it is right that I should give some reasons for what I say. More than thirty years have elapsed since I attended my first séance with a clairvoyant. She had then been in Liverpool some time, and not only came to us from America with a wonderful renown, but soon attached to her triumphal car some of the most conspicuous of our local savans. Having read much upon the subject of Mesmerism--the Od or Odyllic force, animal magnetism, &c., I was desirous of gaining some personal experience, and gladly accepted an invitation to see the lady referred to, at the house of a near relative. There were many present, and before the meeting formally began, I obtained permission to take notes in writing of what passed. The first undertaking was that we should be told what two of our number were doing in a dark room below stairs. I was one of the two, and we stood with one hand upon the other's shoulder, and the loose hands were held out horizontally. One leg of each was resting on the tabla The lady reported us as sitting together on a sofa. Her husband explained away the failure by saying that there was a mirror in the room! As there was a looking-glass in every apartment in the house, my friend and I took our position on the stairs; and on this occasion we lay down at full length heads downwards. The clairvoyant said that we were arm in arm talking. After this second failure, I was asked to take the lady's hand in mine, and think deeply of some place which she would then describe to me. I must here pause to notice the condition referred to. My mind was to be absorbed in what I required to be described--if I allowed my thoughts to wander, I was told that the woman would be confused, and her performance a failure. This involved the idea that I was not to criticise, as the affair proceeded, but to make one thing "square" with another, if I could. My part was carefully pointed out, but nothing came of it. I then gave a possible clue, which was followed up, and with some surprise I found the woman describe what I was really thinking about. But the repetition of a phrase struck upon my ear--it was this, "I see a lot of things going back and for'rads," and I found that I had interpreted this as men, women, schoolboys, horses, palisades, trees, cloisters, houses, and coaches! After my retirement an elderly man grasped the hand, and I with pencil took down the words the woman used, with the intention of asking certain outsiders next day if the terms conveyed to them any distinct idea. I found the favourite sentence referred to came so often, that I merely left for the words a space with t. b. f., to show where the phrase occurred. There were far more spaces in my manuscript than words. But the old gentleman was satisfied, and so was his son who was present. It had been agreed between them that the clairvoyant was to describe "their house"--both were satisfied that she had; but one was thinking of the town and the other of the country house! During the talk, the woman, every time she uttered a sentence, said, "Am I right?" and when told that she was wrong, she adroitly changed her statement. Every experiment that night was a failure, and to some of us who were sceptics our host remarked--"How is it that when you expect the most, everything goes wrong?" To this my reply was--"When doubters are present you scan evidence closer than when you are all believers together." When once I was known as a pyrrhonist, I was invited to see everybody who was regarded by others as extraordinarily perfect in clairvoyance; and was astonished to find out how ignorant the believers were of the laws of evidence. After a time clairvoyance was replaced by spiritualism, and I was again challenged to test the virtue of mediums. As my avocations wholly prevented my personal attendance, I challenged certain of the faithful to describe my library, saying that I should not be content with being told that there were windows and a door, a fireplace and a chair, a table and an inkstand, &c., but that I had something very peculiar in it, the like of which I had never seen before--if this were described, I should fancy that the spirits knew something. But I added, so long as "spirits" only did things which conjurors, prestidigitateurs, "et hoc genus omne," did, I should decline to believe that spirits were corporeal, and that Grecian statesmen, Latin orators, and Sanscrit theologians were familiar with the English language. It must be emphatically stated that a man must not attribute everything, of which he knows little, to a power of which he knows less. No one can tell why an ordinary tree grows upwards, whilst a few peculiar ones grow, after a certain period of their life, downwards; and if any one were to declare that the first were influenced by the spirit of an unicorn, and the second by the spirit of a cow's tail, he would be regarded as a fool. Not much wiser would he be, who, when he heard a knock of some kind or other, asserted or believed that it came from the angel of night--the well-known Nox. The untutored savage, when first he sees a watch, cannot tell how it goes--if he says that he is ignorant, we may respect him; but if he declares that a spirit moves it, we despise his credulity. The polite circles of civilized cities who attribute the absurd capers of tambourines, concertinas, tables, and the like to the vivacity of the ghosts of defunct philosophers, and who think that it requires the shade of Venus to tell us, that feminine women are more graceful than masculine hoydens, are not much superior to the natural savage. These remarks may be supplemented by the experiences imparted to me by several personal friends; for, as it seems to me, each one has his own way in looking at things, and has, so to speak, an idiosyncrasy in belief and scepticism. One man, for example, inquires "How is it that if I propound to a spiritualist, to an artist with 'planchette,' or any other person who professes clairvoyance--a question, through a friend who does not know the answer, I never get a correct reply; but if I propound the same question the response is always right?" In this case it is clear that the inquirer answers himself--not wittingly, it is true; but, by means of a slight hesitation under certain circumstances, he gives to the adroit professor the needful clue. How far this is true has been repeatedly proved by those who have made the spirits say anything--"Where is my sister?" such an one asks, and by the alphabet and raps he hears that she is in Munich; but as the inquirer never had a sister, the spirits have clearly been duped. One of my friends, ordinarily a thorough sceptic, was converted to the belief that one of his hands was positively and the other negatively magnetic, and he showed me how he turned, by their means, a book suspended between us upon a door key finely tied within the leaves. But when I showed him that this was done by a movement of the body, and could not be done if both hands employed were fixed upon anything--he was convinced that what seemed due to one thing depended, in reality, upon another. Yet that man was an acute and able chemical analyst. How the late Dr Faraday convinced "table turners" that they did, unconsciously, that which they wished, but determined not to do, will long be remembered as a marvel of philosophical induction. We all have not the faculty of analyzing evidence, and it would be well if those who are deficient in that power would be less bigoted than they are. We can scarcely expect it, however, for ignorance and arrogance usually walk together; and no man is more convinced of his knowledge than the one who takes it at second hand, and believes what he is told. The faithful swallow "squid," and become a mass of blubber; the sceptics feed on solid flesh, and are thin as tigers. CHAPTER XI. Reconstructive. Faith and reason. Result of previous investigations. Value of morality. Morality and Romanism. Vice encouraged by priests--end in view. Submission to priests more valuable than virtue. Vice better than scepticism. Theological false witness. Compulsory faith. Supply without demand--in theology. Correctness of doctrine proved by the sword. Church and state in modern times. "Nerve" required to change a belief. Moral courage. What is faith? Absurd definition given by Paul. Faith must be uncompromising. Why faith signifies blind confidence. Faith and folly go hand in hand. Faith makes fools. Jesuits and faith. Popery and faith. Faith persecutes reason. All religious teachers uphold faith--the reason why. Quiet after activity. The one who partly abjures faith resembles a mariner at sea. Faith and reason incompatible. The author's personal belief: Negative--positive. Opinions on various received dogmas. Laws of Nature. Providence. The Book of God in the universe. Sin--the ideas connected with children and whelps. Human and animal instincts. Religious laws against God's. Pious murder. When crimes are praiseworthy. Human laws and ecclesiastical. Effect on common law of priestly legislation. Ecclesiastical laws generally bad ones. The Church makes sins; so does society. A case supposed. Society contravenes the laws of Nature. The proper basis of legislation. Personal impressions. Duty the guide of conduct. Conclusions. Importance of them. Reason gives peace of mind. Fears of the orthodox. Reason may regenerate the world; Faith does not. Another way of treating the subject Mr Gladstone upon education. Opposes "dread of results" to "desire of learning." Gladstone and Strauss. Various oracles. Oxford graduates rarely philosophic. Lord Bacon's aphorisms. Science obstructed by human weaknesses. Progress of science barred by ecclesiastics. Religion and despotism. The man who scouts induction is a bigot. Revelation requires exposition. Three sets of expounders--all differ. Which must the faithful follow? Popish miracles claim credence from the faithful. He who argues must be logical. Can a bigot be a liberal? If learning is valuable, it must have free scope. Choice proposed--faith or reason? Men of mark who shun religious inquiry. Faraday and Gladstone. Influence of faith, or reason, on the clergy. Examples. An objection noticed. Reason useless in matters of faith--its absurdity demonstrated. It is now time to enter upon what has, throughout the composition of the preceding essays, been constantly present to my mind, viz., "reconstruction." In the two larger volumes, and in this small one, it has been my aim to clear away the foul rags which have, for many thousand years, been heaped upon the lovely figure of truth--to endeavour to remove the meretricious, or rubbishy, constructions that designing men have builded round the magnificent structure of God's universe. I have, in my own opinion, demonstrated that the Jews have no real claim to be regarded as Jehovah's chosen people, and that their writings present no marks of having been inspired or revealed--that, on the contrary, there are proofs to show that a large portion of their Scriptures are worthless fabrications, contrived by imperfectly educated men, for a political purpose, or to foster vanity. In our examination into the character of the Hebrew God, and of those individuals said to be his special friends and messengers, as given in the Bible, we found evidence to show that the historians were a semi-civilized, sensual, and malignant race, whose ignorance was only surpassed by their arrogance. It has been further shown, that every portion of the Jewish Scriptures which modern Christians have adopted into their own religion, came to the so-called "chosen people" from those whom they, and many amongst ourselves, designate "heathen." We have, still further, shown the almost absolute identity between the current Christian faith and that originated by Sakya Muni, which still reigns in Thibet, Tartary, China, Ceylon, Japan, and elsewhere. We have demonstrated that a high grade of civilization, and a form of government more paternal and provident than any which the old world knew, existed in Peru, without the smallest evidence of Christianity or Mosaism having ever existed there. We have, in addition, shown that the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary is not, by any means, as great a marvel as it is generally supposed to be, such an occurrence being as common to-day as it was from the beginning, and as it probably ever will be. By a similar inquiry we could readily have proved that the ascension of Jesus was not at all unique, inasmuch as great men of old were in the habit of rising after their decease, and making their dwelling in the heaven above--e.g., Romulus. We have, still further, demonstrated that the modern belief in an angelic host has nothing in it peculiar to Bible Christians and modern Jews, and that our notion of a resurrection of the body is not exclusively a portion of the Christian's creed, but that it was held, in one form or another, more or less distinct, by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and the distant Japanese. In fine, we have done much to sweep away the major part of the religious doctrines and dogmas which are prevalent in the Christian world.. Our writing hitherto has been essentially iconoclastic. But, amongst all the idols which we have attempted to throw down, we have not, in any instance, threatened morality. We take no credit for forbearance, but we point to the fact, inasmuch as whenever opposite religionists contend about their tenets, they never lay violent hands upon morality. They may abuse the practice of their opponents, and hold up the imaginary vices of their enemy to execration, but real goodness in the work of life is ever respected.* * I am, however, somewhat in doubt whether the Roman Church deserves the eulogy here given to other bodies. In my reading of history, especially in what are called the "Dark Ages" of Christianity, the Papal authorities winked at crimes against morality, so long as the sinners paid due deference to ecclesiastical authority, and bled freely, by pouring lands, treasures, and wealth of all kinds into the priestly treasury. The history of the Popes is written almost everywhere in blood. Murder, assassination, and spoliation were common weapons in their hands, and rape and robbery were condoned easily to those who were powerful and active slaves of the Church. As soon as the Popes of Rome were free from persecution and danger, they, in their turn, used the arts of the tyrants of old, and sought for political supremacy by pandering to all the passions of kings and great men--if, by that means, they could make them friendly. Up to within a very short period there has not been a Christian despot, or a Pope, who has not punished political crimes more severely than offences against morality. Yet, with all the fearful practices adopted by Romanists, they have ever had in their months exhortations to propriety and personal purity--their words have been peaceful, whilst war of the most malignant type has been in their hearts. What they have practised, however, they have accused their adversaries of having preached. It may also be objected that some small sects in modern days have really preached the doctrines of "free love," and license in sensuality; but of these it would be unprofitable to discourse. The people who join in promulgating such doctrines are below contempt. When controversialists find that they have one subject upon which they can all of them cordially unite, the philosopher would expect that they would study to develope it, and, for that purpose, place it in the foreground. But this is far from their practice. The ministers of every denomination, on the contrary, place morality far behind doctrine--those of the Protestant sect, for example, declare "good works" to be essentially valueless without "faith," and our pulpits teem with discourses which demonstrate the enormous superiority of a blind belief, in doctrine and dogma, over an intelligent morality, irrespective of creed. In this propensity our preachers do not stand alone, for, in every instance where history has led us to inquire into this point, we find that submission to priestly rule has been regarded as more praiseworthy than virtue. When Israel slew the Midianites there was no apparent difference between the morals of the two people. Both were equally bad or good; but such as they were, their deeds were sanctioned by different gods; and whilst the Jews were right, their opponents were wrong. When the Crusaders attacked the Saracens, there can be little, if any, doubt that the worth of the latter far exceeded that of the former; but as their faith differed, the practice was of no consequence in the eyes of the invaders, and he who died in fighting for his country was execrated by the robbers, who desired to steal it. If, from a comparatively distant past, we approach nearer to our own times, there is abundance of testimony to prove that the excellence of the French Protestants was superior to that of the Papal priests and their followers in the time of Louis XIV.; but this was of no avail--the good were persecuted by the bad, because they were good only in deeds and not in doctrine--the last being upheld by the bigots who persecuted them. We may all see precisely the same phenomenon in our own day. Those who are called Unitarians, and the vast majority of those who are designated atheists are, in proportion to their numbers, far more moral than those who are generically described as "Christians;" but their integrity in every relation of life does not prevent their being abused and persecuted, by parsons in "the establishment," by every means available in a free country, and amongst the weapons used, the most common are slander and false witness. On inquiry into its origin, we find at the root of this aversion to recognize probity as the most important item of religion, the undoubted fact that the upright, thoughtful man requires no other person to help him as a priest or a mediator between him and the Creator. To possess a doctrine there must be some one to teach it, and the demand begets a supply. But though the last aphorism is true in commerce, it is not by any means universally so, for many an inventor of goods has to force a supply, ere any demand for his article can arise. It is certainly so in Ethics. The Jews made no request to Moses for a new religion when he offered to lead them; they soon became weary of him, and wanted to go back to Egypt. Jesus constrained his first followers to accept a salvation of which they did not feel the need, and Mahomet compelled, at the sword's point, his victims to accept that which they detested. In these instances there was no want to be met, except on the part of individuals who desired to obtain personal influence. In religion the laws of supply and demand have only exceptional sway, for each individual priest or minister may, according as he pleases, elect to provide for known desires, or to inaugurate a new set of requirements. But whether he does one or the other he is clearly an opponent to, and frequently disliked by, any one who refuses all manner of traffic in spiritual affairs. He is then practically in the same condition as the English government was in when the Chinamen refused to take the opium which they had been receiving for many years before; and, like it, he must endeavour to enforce his wishes by war. But the parson does not fight with cannon and gunpowder, for he assumes the power to wield weapons of far greater importance--viz., the power to torture after death all his adversaries. "Believe me," run his words, "and you shall be saved from hell fire; reject my message, and you shall be burned in everlasting flames!" When belligerent kings go to battle, they do not go alone and fight single-handed for their cause; on the contrary, they enlist upon their side every man whom they can influence or compel; nor do they care, so long as the troops obey orders, what their private thoughts are; probably few Chinese who fought the British were not opium consumers, and few English cared for the drug at all. In like manner, when priests differ among themselves, they do not meet in wordy tournaments, but they enlist on their respective sides everybody whom similarity in superstition, interest, or any other motive induces to join their standard. When an issue is joined, the result is governed by force of arms, arts, or numbers, as the case maybe. Thus, in the last resort, the correctness of a doctrine is, as we have frequently remarked in previous pages, proved by thews and sinews--not by brains. So long as the Pagans were numerically superior to Christians, the latter were heretics and victims; but when the disciples of Jesus were actually the strongest, they became suddenly "the orthodox," and the poor Pagans "the damned." In later times Protestantism asserted its faith by the prowess of Cromwell's "ironsides" in England and Ireland; in like manner the Covenanters of Scotland proved, by the might of their swords, Presbyterianism to be superior to Episcopal government. By dint of Saxon might, Ireland was long politically at one with Great Britain; now by her numbers she is allied to the Vatican. The well-read politician will see that a contest similar to those thus indicated is going on almost all over Europe. In Great Britain and Ireland, in France, Prussia, Austria, and Italy--even in the once bigoted Spain, priestly parties are striving for supremacy over the party of rational order and philosophical government. The question at issue is by no means doubtful--it is one which has been agitated for thousands of years, but that has never assumed large proportions in consequence of general ignorance and consequent apathy. In England, France, and Germany, innumerable champions on the one side have risen, fought, and died, overpowered by the numbers-ranged against them; but, as persecution is said to be the seed of orthodoxy, so these men and their writings have, by dissemination through the press, and the effect of increased education in the languages of Europe, gradually raised so large a party, as to be able to contend with some chances of success. It will be seen that the question to which I refer is this--"Shall men and states be governed by faith?" in other words, "by the hierarchy of the most numerous section of the community--or by reason--i.e., by the good sense of the majority?" In Austria and in Italy this issue has clearly been tried, and in both instances the priesthood has been obliged to accept a secondary position. In Prussia the same momentous point is being tried with every chance of the sacerdotal party being worsted. In the British kingdom religion has long been regarded as subordinate to state policy; nevertheless there is yet a strong party who desires to reduce her inhabitants to clerical bondage. If all the individuals composing this section of the community were united, they would prevail by their numbers; but, as the aggressive army is composed of troops who bear an almost deadly hate against each other, small danger is to be anticipated from them. The Ritualist and Roman Catholic might unite together; but these would not stand shoulder to shoulder with the Wesleyan, Baptist, and Low Churchman. Although all equally detest those who say "parsons are not wanted," sects will not ally themselves, lest, if every one were to be compelled to select a form of faith, the compulsory decree might augment the numbers following some adversary. We have thus placed before our readers what we believe is the first article which has to be considered in Reconstruction. We have to ask ourselves whether we should enlist ourselves under the banner of faith, and endeavour to add one form of religion to those already existing; or, whether we should join the banner of reason, and repudiate all doctrines, dogmas, credences, and the like, which are offensive to common sense. We may fairly parody the words of the mythical Elisha, and say to ourselves--"Choose ye this day whom ye will serve; if faith suits your indolence, then hug your chains; if you prefer reason, gird up the loins of your mind, and metaphorically kill the priests of Rite." Ere, however, we can reasonably expect those who have hitherto been inconsiderate to make their selection of standard bearers, it is desirable to say something of the two. _In limine_ we must observe that we do not believe that the choice will be determined by the head alone, for there are many whose arms are, so to speak, paralyzed by a constitutional peculiarity. A hero in his study has often proved a poltroon in the field of battle. I may point the moral by quoting from memory a story in Addison's _Spectator_--"A B is a hen-pecked husband; he knows it, and bewails his thraldom; he consults C D, who sympathises with his case, increases his detestation for the home tyranny, and tells him how to break the chains. A B, full of resolution, tries the plan recommended, but breaks down at once." The moral is, that those who are born to serve, or are too weak-minded to assert their independence, had better submit to be ruled--even if the tyrant be a woman, than try to gain peace by conflict. Into this story I fully enter, for I know, from experience, how much "nerve" is required for any one to change his or her relative position. The moral courage of which I speak, is one that dominates over constitutional shyness and fear; it differs from the boldness of a soldier, and the dash of the beast of prey; it is not a simple mental assent; but it is a motive which, after being once placed, becomes a mainspring of life. To adopt Faith as a guide, is to go through life easily--so long as "thought" can be sent to sleep. To adopt Reason, is to prevent thought ever slumbering, and to live the happier the more steadily that the mind is watchful In few words, Faith is "a quack doctor," Reason "a physician." The first will always have the most admirers. Without further preface, let us inquire "what Faith really is?" This is a question with which I have been familiar since my childhood, and the answer offered to me for adoption was--"It is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. xi. 1). This reply has never suggested any distinct idea to me, and I am confident that the author of "Hebrews" had not a definite meaning in his own mind when he wrote the words. The context shows that the word [--Greek--] is used to signify distinct states of mind, and one example, which is given frequently, indicates a different signification from another that precedes or follows. For example, in v. 5 we are told that Enoch was translated by "faith;" but the only evidence for this is, that "he pleased God;" whereas, in verse 11, we are told that Sarah, who laughed at the idea of having offspring, and disbelieved the promise which said that she should have a son, conceived "through faith." Still further, the false history of the chapter disgusted me--e.g., we read in w. 24, 25, 27, that Moses by faith elected to bear affliction with the people of God, and from the same cause forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king, &c.--both of which statements are untrue, for he ran away both from the afflictions of the Hebrews and the wrath of the monarch, and required "pressing" before he would leave his retreat in Midian. I regard the chapter thus referred to as one of the great stumbling blocks of Christianity. Its logic is contemptible; yet it must pass for truth, because Paul is thought to have written it. Being now thrown back upon our own resources for a definition of "faith," we affirm that it signifies "_uncompromising_ belief in what one is told." Every religious book which occupies itself with this subject illustrates the word in question by affirming that it resembles the motive which actuates a child who, at a father's bidding; leaps from a height upon the promise that papa will catch him in his arms. Though, as a rule, I am disinclined to use adjectives, I have added the word in italics, because it is a material part of the definition, and involves more than at first sight appears. Peter tried to walk upon the water--he doubted, and began to sink. He has been imitated by others; they have all failed. "Doctor," a man may say, "can I swallow this without being choked?" "Yes, if you think you can." He tries to swallow the morsel, and is choked. The result in every case is attributed to a want of faith. In other words, hesitation cannot effect what confidence can. Consequently we are justified in asserting that faith and doubt are absolutely incompatible. Faith implies an absolute and perfect confidence. This faith may be compulsory--as when a shipmaster is obliged by local law to give up the management of his ship to a pilot; or it may be spontaneous, as when a patient trusts himself to a surgeon. For a man only to give a half confidence, is to cripple to that extent the capacity of the one who is responsible. Religious faith, then, involves the necessity of an absolute and blind confidence in the priestly pilot selected as a conductor through life to eternity; it precludes inquiry, discourages thought upon the most important matter which every man has to consider, and makes of a rational being an intellectual slave. In few words, it reduces its votary to the position of a tool, and renders him, so far as religion is concerned, mentally blind. We recognize the accuracy of our deductions when we find that the aim of the Roman church has been to reduce men to the condition here described, and then to use them as carpenters do planes, chisels, and axes. It is probable that there never existed in the world an order of men who have so completely reduced themselves, and voluntarily too, it must be borne in mind, to the position of a machine, as the Jesuits have done. They are an instrument in the hands of their superiors, and they blindly obey. Whether the order exists for good or harm, it is not my purpose to discuss. Next in order to the society of Jesus comes the gigantic society known as the Papacy, or Roman Catholicism. I place this as second to Jesuitry, because, for a long period, there was a certain freedom of opinion allowed to the superior clergy. But now, when it has become a tenet of the church of Rome, that its head is absolutely infallible in all matters of dogma and doctrine, it is probable that the demand of faith from the laity may equal, if not exceed, that made upon professed Jesuits. In religion, the only place in which uncompromising faith finds its home, is the Papal. That demands unlimited belief in everything ecclesiastically promulgated, hatred of everything dogmatically condemned, and acquiescence in every sacerdotal command. Amongst that sect, doubting is an offence, and opposition is a crime. We have seen this illustrated in the person of the learned Bishop Döllinger, who has been excommunicated simply because he refused to accept the new fangled notions of an almost effete old pope. He cannot see anything in a modern council to supersede apostolic traditions; he doubts; therefore the Papalists do everything in their power to damn him. In like manner, although prior in time to the declaration of the Pope's infallibility, we have seen the present king of Italy excommunicated; because he, as the head of his own dominions, ordered a decree to be carried into effect which, whilst it was good for the people generally, was regarded as hostile to the church. The observer need not, however, go far from home in search of illustrations, for every year sees one or another Protestant minister leaving the Anglican for the Roman communion, on the sole ground that in the latter there is no room for doctrinal doubts and contests. To the laity, the very repose of the religious mind is held out as a bait by Papal missionaries, and it is probably one of the most successful which "the fishers of men" employ. I once heard a brother physician express his opinion on this point. Conversation had turned upon a confrère who had been in religious matters "everything by turns, and nothing long." "Ah," said the Romanist, "he'll be tired of roaming some day, and find repose at last in the bosom of the church; his soul will then be at rest, and will wander no more." The possibility of Protestants entertaining a doubt upon the power of "the Church" to demand unlimited belief and obedience from the faithful, is a sore thorn in the side of many dignitaries of the national creed. As this propensity to inquiry is an essential part of the legacy bequeathed to Englishmen by the reformation, this last movement has been execrated by some of our High Churchmen. It is asserted, that, as the taking of the Bible for the sole rule of faith has been followed by a great splitting up of the so-called "Church of Christ," so it is advisable to change the standard, and to adopt that of "Ecclesiastics" personally or collectively. In any case, such advocates desire to re-establish the reign of faith. What the Reign of Faith has been in Europe, it would be idle to describe. As soon as the mind of an individual revolts from giving implicit faith to any creed, doctrine, or dogma, he must be regarded as a mariner who, being not quite contented with his own country, endeavours to find a better. In his voyage he first leaves the shore as a fledgling does the nest--he goes a short excursion, and returns; after a time he becomes more brave, and puts off more boldly. At first he probably finds a number of other barques as venturous as his own, and he becomes emboldened; it may be his arms are strong, his head clear, and his boat good; and he steers into the offing. No sooner does he leave the herd, however, than he is chased, and if he refuses to put back, curses follow him; and the friends whom once he had are condoled with. Such is the position of a Protestant who departs seriously from the religion of the majority. With or amongst the Romanists to leave the shore is an act of disbelief which must be atoned for by penance or punishment. It is clear that every such individual who, like a chick, leaves the shelter of the maternal wings, must be more or less at sea. He or she may have no idea of going very far, yet may be compelled to sail on until he has reached the other side of Doubting Straits, and has landed in the realm of Reason. We can well conceive the waters to be covered by small "craft," which keep together for company's sake, or who boldly sail out and solicit followers--some cluster, it may be, round a stately galleon, others sail with a dashing cruiser, some come into collision or hostile contact with their neighbours, and try to damage each others' barques. But all are at sea--driven hither and thither by breezes which spring up, no one knows how, and drop down again as swiftly as they rose. The mariners, however, seem to enjoy the excitement, and refuse to return to their own land. The individuals whom we here describe are the ordinary Protestant sects (not including the Unitarians, who have long reached a comparatively stable ground). These, by whatever name they are called, refuse to give implicit faith to the Pope; they will, however, accord, in some degree, to some pet parson, the management of their conscience; they dread what is called "free-thinking," as a mariner does a lee shore. They put up with every accident which arises from mingling faith with reason, and are, on the whole, contented, as long as too much pressure is not put upon them, to steer in a definite direction. Of these it may be said, "Thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out. of my mouth" (Rev. iii. 15,16). The endeavour to make reason subservient to faith, must ever be a failure as complete as would be the endeavour to weld iron with water, or to heat an anchor shaft by surrounding it with cold coals and wood, then blowing a blast of air upon the whole. He who is determined to use reason, must drop faith; and he who clings to faith, must drop reason. The conclusions drawn by all who attempt the combination will always be lame and impotent. If, in the stead of faith, an individual takes reason for his guide through this world to the next, he incurs the wrath and malignancy of the many, and the respect of the few. He comes in for far harder names than Pagans gave to Christians, and Papalists gave to Huguenots. If, unfortunately, he should live in a country where priests rule, he may be burned, as Savonarola was at Florence, Latimer and Ridley at Oxford, and Servetus at Geneva. Luther was said to be a devil--a so-called Atheist is believed to be something worse. Yet, notwithstanding all the obloquy thrown upon Freethinkers by the orthodox, they steadily have increased in numbers, ever since the spread of education and the cheapness of books have enabled men to study in retirement When there was little instruction and few books, people gained what knowledge they had from their spiritual guides. This power of the pulpit enabled the hierarchy to set up and substantiate any claims which they chose. But, since the power of the printing press has risen, the influence of the priesthood has diminished. With all this tendency to so-called Atheism, there has been no loss of propriety; on the contrary, the probity of the few exceeds that of the many, and in all there is a great improvement. The present times in Italy are far superior to those when the Borgias and their religion were supreme. When we inquire what the Freethinkers, or Rationalists, are, it is readily seen that they have been maligned by "the faithful." There is little difficulty in summing up their tenets: it is "Reverence, without servility." They draw their views from the book of creation, and hold it infamous to fight for supremacy where facts and logic can decide. This, however, is by far too meagre to satisfy either a friend, an inquirer, or an opponent; it is, therefore, desirable to go into the matter more fully. In doing so, I make no pretence to be the mouthpiece of a party, nor even to give a digested account of what those who have written and published before me have enunciated; my sole aim is to give, in as plain terms as I can command, the opinions which inquiry has forced upon my mind. My first confession of faith must be negative, for, until the ground has been cleared, it is not advisable either to plant or construct: 1. I do not believe in the authority of any written book as being an inspired production, or as containing a revelation from God to man. In my estimation, the Bible is not in any way superior to the Koran, to the Dhammapada, the Puranas, the Main-yo-Khard, the Avesta, or any other collection of scriptures held sacred. 2. I do not believe the story given in Genesis of the creation, of the formation of human beings, and what is ordinarily called "the temptation" and "the fall". 3. I do not believe in the existence of what is technically designated "original sin," nor that the human race is "a fallen one;" consequently, I do not believe in the necessity for "salvation." I do not believe that death came into the world by sin. 4 I do not believe in the existence of "sin," in the ordinary acceptation of the word; nor do I believe that man requires the intervention of any fellow mortal, either to reconcile or embroil him with an unseen power. 5. I do not believe in the existence of a Devil, or of any other power in the whole universe, than that of the Supreme Maker of all. 6. I do not believe in any description which has yet been given of Hell or Heaven. 7. I do not believe that God has ever directly spoken to man. 8. I do not believe that God has ever become incarnate, or that he has a celestial spouse, or a son. 9. I do not believe in the existence of truth-speaking prophets, in the existence of angels, or ghosts, or in the supernatural birth of any one. 10. I do not believe that God has now, or ever has had, a separate and chosen people, peculiarly "His own," and, consequently, that there are none to whom the term "the elect" can apply. 11. I do not believe that what is generally designated religion is necessary to the existence of law and order in a state or in a family. 12. I do not believe that God requires the assistance of man, here or elsewhere, to enable Him to find, or to keep, or to punish, His subjects. These negatives might be multiplied, but I doubt whether profitably so, inasmuch as the more we dilute important points, the less readily are they recognized. We may now proceed to affirmations:-- 1. I do believe in the existence of a distinct Power in creation--great beyond conception, which pervades all space--which is everywhere present in the earth, the sea, the air, and in every conceivable part of the Universe--which made all things, and gave to them properties, powers, and laws. A power to which it were blasphemy to assign ears, eyes, hands, or human parts, and an evidence of a grovelling mind to suppose it capable of human passions, such as love, hate, jealousy, and merriment, and to describe it as ignorant, vacillating, and grieved at its own work. That Power I cannot conceive as having either an origin or an end. Into the designs of such a power, man cannot enter, nor can he even seem to approach them, except by noticing the works of creation, and studying the laws which apparently govern it By the term, "laws of nature," I understand "the laws of the power of which I speak." I cannot conceive how man can form an idea of a state of spiritual existence of which he can neither see, observe, or notice anything. It is, in my opinion, unnecessary here to enter into the vexed question of the continued interference of this Power with its works, for where we have only human analogies to guide us, it is undesirable to argue upon them in the attempt to discover the superhuman. As we shall have occasion shortly to indicate our views upon a matter analogous to this, we will postpone anything which we may have to say. I believe that the Power has never made, nor can ever make, a mistake; that all its works are perfect, and that where they seem to us to be otherwise, it is from our ignorance of their design. It seems to me that lions and lambs, sharks and gudgeons, that hawks and chickens, form a portion of a grand scheme: that the distinct classes of animals were originally perfect; that they may deteriorate, yet never advance beyond perfection. I do not believe that a lion could become, under any circumstances, a bull; a bear a camel, or a pig an elephant. 2. The belief that the Creator made each creature originally perfect, and with certain well defined propensities, involves the further confidence that the indulgence in those propensities is a necessary part of the scheme of creation; consequently, I believe that the tiger eats flesh because it is a law of his existence, and that in doing so he commits no sin. I believe, still further, that a close observation of nature gives us some apparent insight into the plan of creation For example, I think the existence of gills in a fish leads us fairly to the conclusion that it was intended to live in the water; that the existence of teeth implies that they were to be used in eating, wings in flying, legs in walking. Still further, when we notice that vegetables can assimilate mineral matter, which animals, as a rule, cannot, I believe that the vegetable kingdom has its special place in the world; and when, moreover, we find creatures who can eat and digest vegetables, and have a special apparatus for the purpose, it is fair to conclude that they too have their station assigned. A corresponding remark applies to the carnivora. Once again,--when an extended observation shows us that the beasts and birds of prey select for their victims the young of animals which their parents are unable to protect, the aged, who are too infirm to fight for themselves, or the sickly, which are quite unfit to live: when, moreover, we find these carnivorous creatures die when age or accident deprives them of the power of getting food; nay, when we see large numbers of all animals die from want of food, of air, of warmth, or from accidents--I believe that we are justified in deducing the idea that it is a design of the Power, that those which cannot live shall die; I believe that death is as essential a necessity to every creature as is its birth, and that its many forms have a definite purpose. Let us now, for a moment, turn our attention to the very commencement of life. If from any cause the new being is seriously malformed or diseased, it is a common thing for the dam to miscarry. If a mother, say a pig, rat, or bird, brings forth a larger brood than she can nourish, she commonly kills the smallest, and allows only those to survive which she can find food for--the bird that lays more eggs than her nest will hold, turns the overplus out; and if, when the fledglings grow up, they are too bulky, one of them will be discarded. The cuckoo's chick has a special provision made for helping it to turn out the young of another bird, and its mother has also a special instinct to lay its eggs in the nest of the hedge-sparrow. The life of one involves the death of three or more. Again, in the aquatic world, one fish makes no scruple to feed on its own young ones or those of its neighbours, and the old crocodile seeks out its offspring as a favourite luxury. We find, moreover, that where these creatures abound there may often be found a small animal--the ichneumon--whose instinct teaches it to seek for and destroy the eggs of the saurian. In like manner crows, rats, cuckoos, and probably many other creatures, have a propensity to feed upon the eggs of various birds. In few words, we recognize throughout creation an apparent design to prevent a superabundance of life. This remarkable provision, working, as it does, through laws which seem to be fixed and established, prevents our belief in the interference of the Creator. When an animal has reached the period of nearly adult age, there is in many instances a considerable amount of instruction given to it, sometimes by the sire, but mostly by the dam. When that has been imparted, parents and offspring seem to be like strangers to each other. It is probable that, if we could observe all animals, we should find some system of training of the family. As it is, we can only speak of domestic fowls, and notice the order which the hen keeps up amongst her brood of chickens; they are taught to live peaceably. Her punishments are never lenient; they are, indeed, necessarily severe. We may next proceed to inquire into the animal instincts which exist in adult life, at a period when every creature is supposed to be in its perfection. At a certain time of the year there is a propensity for the male and female to unite. There is not anything in creation which affords a more attractive study than this, for every class of creatures has a practice peculiar to itself. One might fancy that in an act so necessary and so simple there would be little cause for interest; yet, in reality, "the prodigality of design"--a term which we hope to explain fully hereafter--is more largely shown in this process than in any other. It is, however, a subject upon which one cannot descant before the general public. So far as we are able to observe animals, we find that at this period there is, amongst a great number of classes, a power amongst the males to discover the most perfect amongst the females, and to fight for them. By this means the young are certain to be the offspring of perfection of grace and beauty in the dam, and strength and size in the sire. We can readily understand that, if the loveliest hind were to pair with the weakliest stag, the breed would degenerate, and probably die out. But the conqueror can hold his place only so long as he has vigour; when age has weakened him, the youthful successor practically prevents the old buck from being a father. In some exceptional cases (apparently so at least) the number of males exceeds that of the females, and, as a result of the instinct before alluded to, the fight ends in the majority of the males being destroyed. The survivor then has one spouse only, and not a seraglio. This is said to obtain amongst rats and lions. As yet, there is not a sufficient amount of observation available to enable us to affirm what is the general cause of exit from life, when no death by violence occurs. We do not know the end of old buffaloes, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotami, whales, and other monsters. Tales are told of decrepit lions being occasionally seen tottering to their fall; and gossip says that ancient cats know when they are about to die, and retire to some secluded nook, where they give up the ghost quietly. I cannot charge my memory with a single anecdote in which the youthful animal endeavours to sustain the old one, by feeding it during its decrepitude. Throughout creation parental affection signifies solicitude for offspring. We do not anywhere discover a love towards a parent after the younger creature has reached adult age. In all the cases to which I have referred, and, were I a naturalist, they might be greatly multiplied, there is no pretence, even amongst the orthodox, that any of the creatures have committed "sin" against the Almighty, or against the community of which they form a part. On the contrary, what is done, even though it amounts to murder, is regarded as a necessity; and we admire the laws of nature which bring about such results. We do not stop to inquire whether any contrivance would prevent birds from laying too many eggs, and cuckoos from dropping theirs into the nests of other birds; we content ourselves with saying, "such is the will of Providence." It is easy to come to such a conclusion as regards what we are pleased to call "the lower animals," but as soon as we inquire "whether similar laws or instincts are implanted in us," we are generally met with a howl of repugnance. But I believe that we shall never understand our true position in life and in nature until we deliberately investigate that which we have in common with other animals, and wherein we are different--probably superior. I use the word _probably_, because, in the estimation of higher beings than ourselves--if such there be--the horse and the elephant may be regarded as being far above us in the scale which those beings have framed for themselves. I have never yet seen any deliberate attempt to work out the problem referred to. Every one, or nearly so, who if orthodox, assumes that it is absolutely wicked to compare the beasts which perish, to man who has a soul As I have, in a previous volume, shown that the evidence for the immortality of the horse is equal to that for the human race, I will not stay to point out the absurdity of building an important argument upon a baseless assumption, but simply express my belief that man has very much in common with other mammals; but that he is in possession of something superadded, which, at first sight--though not in reality--takes him out of the trammels of the ordinary laws of nature that operate in the brutes. No one can doubt that man has as strong a propensity to unite with woman, as bulls and stags have with the females of their kind. He has, even in civilized societies, a propensity to fight with one or more of his fellows for a female of surpassing beauty. Men will combat about a disputed field or country as fiercely as dogs over a bone, or hermit crabs over a shell. As a rule, man detests to be taught, quite as much as does the whelp; yet, when he has gained an art, he is as proud of it as a highly trained spaniel. Men are gregarious as horses in a field, and quite as intolerant as they, of an interloper. Like the wild wolves, men will unite together to capture and prey upon creatures of each of whom individually he stands in fear. Like a set of wild bulls or buffaloes, men will, for a time, agree to obey a leader, and, when the object is gained, break loose. Like a cat, man will steal, when he can, his neighbours' goods, like a crow, he will pay no attention to his parents, nor to a Sunday. Without entering into farther particulars, we may affirm that some highly trained elephants, dogs, and horses, are superior to many human beings in every point upon which an impartial judge can determine. It is my belief that, for a man to obey an instinct which is implanted in his nature, is not "a sin" against God. To see this in a fair light, let us assume, as we have a right to do, that it is an instinct in the nature of all known creatures, to increase and multiply their like. To avoid doing so intentionally, is a contravention of one of the Creator's laws. If this be so, then celibacy is a sin, as great, indeed, as if one were to refrain from food of all kinds; and no one can be considered as worthy of the name of good, who remains unpaired without just cause. In like manner, it is not an offence against the laws of God for any man and woman to unite, for it is as much a law of nature that they shall do so, as that they must eat and drink. The plea of "religion" cannot make that wrong, which is by nature right. In like manner, if in a limited community--say upon an island, the number of men exceeds that of the women, I believe that a fight amongst the males for the possession of mates, would not be "sin" against the Omnipotent even though many combatants died during the contest. Nay, so common upon many points is the agreement; amongst even the most orthodox, that none would say that a man commits a crime when he steals the store of honey laid up by bees, kills animals for food or for their fur, or covets and appropriates the prairies hitherto occupied by herds of deer and bison. Even the commandments said to be delivered by God Himself are held not to be literally binding upon man, except in relation to his friends. He may, for example, by the laws of war, murder his enemies, fornicate with their wives, steal their property, and deceive them in every way. Abraham, the so-called friend of God, murdered many Orientals, and plundered them; not because he had any quarrel with them, but simply because they had murdered and plundered some of his friends. David again, a man after God's own heart, with his dying breath, gave his son instructions to put individuals to death in cold blood, superseding the law of Sinai, by a heritage of hate. When, therefore, common consent takes certain actions out of the list of crimes or sins, provided that the deeds are done against enemies, we have to seek for the origin of those ideas which make murder, theft, robbery, rape, and false-witness crimes in the abstract. To understand this point, we have really to start from the bestial basis, and aver that what is not sin in them, is not sin in savage man. No one of any intelligence would say that a Briton would be justified in shooting an Ashantee because the latter had killed and eaten an enemy, or an aged parent; nor would any one of us sentence a Hindoo to death because he had killed a dozen Thugs. Even in comparatively civilized American backwoods, a person who has killed a bully has been thought a public benefactor. Again, when we cast our eyes upon Australia, and learn the brutal way in which the black native virgins are violently carried away from their relatives and married, and how again they are repeatedly carried off as wives by other men, we feel ourselves justified in leaving the ravishers without punishment, for there is no violation of law, or, if there be, Englishmen have no right to interfere. But what we tolerate in uncivilized lands, even where we are ostensibly rulers, we will not suffer in our own. The reason of this is, that we have banded ourselves into a society in which "the laws," once settled and determined by the majority, supersede, in certain cases, individual action. To make our meaning clear, let us imagine that amongst some nation or people there is one man more astute and powerful than his fellows; still further, we assume that he has fought, or is desirous to fight, a neighbour of nearly equal force. It is clear that if his people murder each other from any cause he will lose warriors; consequently, he will let his tribe understand that he will punish homicide, on a plan which he thinks will be deterrent. Still further, as he requires soldiers of strong limbs and sturdy constitution, he declares that no woman shall many without his consent, so that he may prevent any one selling herself, or being sold, to a weak or old man for mere pelf. As, in a savage state, most possessions are those which are useful in war, he would prohibit theft. As a consequence, he, and all who respected his power to punish, would regard murder, theft, rape, and unauthorized wife-selling as crimes--offences, that is to say, against the ruler of the state, and not against the Creator of mankind. It signifies little to my argument, whether society is governed, as the early Aryans were, by warriors, or, as the later ones were, by Brahmans. In either case the leaders make laws, and declare a violation of them to be punishable. When communities are small in size, and extend over a small area, few rules of life are necessary; but when a nation increases in size, and especially when it consiste of many tribes or class which have voluntarily united together, legislation is far more complicated, inasmuch as the ideas of right and wrong in each section may, from long custom, vary from each other. For example, in most of the United States of America bigamy, or the possession of two wives at a time, is a crime; whereas, in Salt Lake city, its rulers have twenty, and its men a dozen, if they like, and yet are esteemed saints, and really conduct themselves as if they had a clear claim to the title. The greatest complication is when the laws of a community have been framed, partly by soldiers, partly by ecclesiastics, and partly by mercantile men, for each party has a different creed. The first makes no scruple to fight at the command of the second, whilst the third endeavours to prevent all war whatever. The second set intrigue to have the supreme power; the first and third often endeavour to suppress the second, knowing its aggressiveness and lust of supremacy. When a nation is under what is grandiloquently called a Theocracy, every offence against a command given _ex cathedra_ is regarded as a sin; not simply a disregard of the law, but a defiance of the God who is said to have ordained it. Thus, according to what is known as the Mosaic law, it was a crime punishable by a lingering death to gather sticks on a Sabbath day (Num. xv. 32-36); but it was no crime to kill all the males and women of a whole nation, and retain the maidens for private prostitution and for the use of the priest (Num. xxxi. 17, 18, 40, 41). In such a nation it was no crime to commit forgery--and of all the bearers of false witness, none exceeded in ancient times the Jewish writers in the Bible--but in mercantile England, the former has been at one time punished with death, and the latter by ignominious penalties. In modern Theocracies, such as once existed in Austria, Spain, Italy, England, and elsewhere, it was considered criminal to think differently, upon any religious point, from the authorized standard. In those kingdoms many a person was doomed to die a painful death, and thereafter sent--as it was supposed, to Hell--whom we now regard as a virtuous, brave, and noble individual. The common sense of mankind induces all citizens to buy what they have need of, at the smallest possible price; but a mercantile government says to its people--"You shall not buy anything from anybody who has not first paid us for the privilege of trading, and something more for every ware which he offers for sale, and every one contravening this order shall be seriously punished." Here, again, an artificial offence is manufactured that has no origin in nature. When a people has succeeded in throwing off publicly the trammels of Ecclesiastical legislation, as England, Italy, Spain, France, Austria, Belgium, and other nations have done, they by no means shake off their private shackles. The only difference between Spain, Austria, and other places, now and formerly, is, that the priesthood are seeking to attain by subtlety what they could previously command by their state power. At one period in the history of modern Rome, it was a crime not to kneel on the bare ground when certain priests passed with a bit of wafer surrounded by gorgeous trappings. This is a crime no longer against the state, but for all who believe the Papal hierarchy it is yet a sin. At one time in England, it was a crime not to go to church on Sunday; it was equally punishable to carry on any business. The laws respecting these matters have not yet been repealed, and they have been put recently into operation, although the good sense of the majority has made them practically obsolete. Yet, though this is the case, and the law no longer punishes Sabbath-breaking, the priestly body continue to launch their thunders against all who regard every day alike. It is, indeed, doubtful if, in the eyes of our parsons, there is any sin so great as enjoying one's self on a Sunday. The law of our country does not make it a crime for a woman to prostitute her body, or for a man to have a concubine of greater or less permanency, but the hierarchs denounce the arrangement as criminal in the sight of God. We need not multiply our illustrations farther. Sufficient has been advanced to show that there are two distinct classes of sins--one, those made by Ecclesiastics, or by those legislators passing under the name "Society;" the other, those which are against the laws of nature--e.g., an enforced celibacy, such as that to which Romish priests are doomed. In saying this, we readily allow that what is right, according to the laws of God, as set forth in the universe, is wrong according to the code made by the legally constituted authorities of the state in which an individual lives. We grant, moreover, that, if a government is strong enough, the laws of man should be enforced by human means. But we do not believe that mortals should be compelled to carry out that which priests tell them is the justice of the Immortal, of which they know absolutely nothing. I hold that no state can fairly claim to take cognizance of, or to punish, thoughts, or any private indulgence which creates no public scandal. If we endeavour to reduce our views to a still clearer issue, the difference between divine and human laws will be the more readily understood. Let us assume that Miss Kallistee is the most perfect woman in a district. For her contend with their natural weapons Messrs. Dunamis, Kratos, Kalos, Sophos, and Mathesis; and the conqueror, having killed his adversaries, takes the lady to wife. The law of man or of society now steps in and kills off the survivor; or, if it should know beforehand of the coming contest, will prevent it. As a consequence, the lady must be contended for peaceably, and may become the bride of impotent old age or wealthy disease. As a result, the healthy offspring, which nature would have reared, are either absent, sickly, diseased, or idiotic. Here, then, I affirm that a law of society is a sin against God. I would wish my readers to ponder over this matter, which gives much food for thought. I do not think that such contests as I have described can be tolerated in any society of civilized beings, for, in proportion to our emergence from barbarism, we do not seek mere strength and beauty of form in our population. We desire to cultivate the intellectual rather than the animal in man. But experience has shown that, as a rule, the further man departs from the latter, and the nearer he approaches to the former, the more does his progeny deteriorate physically. It is a problem whether, by any available contrivance short of that which was adopted by the Incas of Peru, man can uniformly develope upwards. The physiologist can readily see how the matter might be effected, but in republican or constitutional kingdoms, the means will never be adopted. We have now come to a point when it is necessary for me, as an individual, to express an opinion as to the selection which a philosopher, living in a comparatively civilized community, should make between a promulgation of the so-called laws of God--an instruction respecting the laws of nature--or an utterance of the laws of society, with the enforcement of them. Ere forming a decision, let us endeavour to ascertain what each alternative involves. If a state, acting through its executive government, decides to make what are called the laws of God the basis of legislation, it must first decide what those laws are. In the endeavour to do so, every thoughtful man will recognize the impossibility of verifying a single one. The whole must, therefore, be promulgated on assumption; and if so, the legislators will be conscious that they have no valid authority. If, on the other hand, they assume the laws of nature to be a safe guide, they must allow proceedings which are opposed to the feelings of the majority of civilized mortals. Being, then, averse to elect either of these codes as a sole basis, the statesman will endeavour, as far as in him lies, to make or adapt laws for the society in which he lives. When the well-being of the community becomes the basis of its legislation, the idea of sin vanishes from the statute book, and the stern realities of life have to be envisaged with firmness and decision. So also when religion has merged into common sense, and facts are appealed to rather than fancies, policy takes the place of dogma, and the voice of a majority overcomes that of any priesthood. Into political economy, however, it is not my desire to enter, further than may be necessary to illustrate my own opinions upon religion. Having emancipated myself from the thraldom of bibliolatry and priestcraft generally, it is my aim to examine what seems to be my duty as a man and an integer of society. I conceive that, although I have no certain knowledge thereof, I am one of the myriads of instruments by which the Almighty works out His designs. My appreciation may be imperfect, but still it seems to me a duty, always to be a good husband, father, friend, and citizen--to act ever towards others as I should desire myself to be treated under the same circumstances--to improve such talents as I am conscious of possessing; and, in a general way, to do as much good as I can during my lifetime--taking care, if possible, to leave after my death no mischievous agency set on foot by me. In few words, I believe that the only true religion consists in a constant steady performance of duty--a duty discovered and determined by the individual, and not one prescribed by any set of men. The conclusion thus arrived at, appears at first sight, to be meagre in the extreme, but when it is fully examined, it is found to involve important consequences. The faithful, for example, or, as they style themselves, "the orthodox," live, when they pay any attention to such matters, in a state of perpetual fear of God and eternity; some, indeed we may say many, go mad from the oppression which they feel from having committed an unpardonable sin; some pass through life weighted by the dread of not being finally "saved"; all, with rare exceptions, have a horror of death and of the results of "the judgment." Feeling assured that few will be saved, and the many will be damned, they have a dreadful feeling of certainty that either they or some of their dearest relatives or friends will be amongst the majority. Some go through life sinning and repenting--"in dust and ashes," as the technical phrase runs--until they are ashamed of their own vacillation, or go on sinning, without any qualms of conscience, until it is too late to mend; and they recognize before them "a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation." These fantastic terrors are far more deeply rooted in the Protestants than in the Papists, who have so completely become imbued with the belief that their priests have almost unlimited power in the unseen world, that the dying folk become easy in their minds, by a full assurance of hope that friends, hierarchs, and "masses" will make purgatory bearable and heaven certain. Of fear about eternity I know nothing; feeling confident that the God who made me--directly or indirectly it would be a waste of time to discuss--had some work for me to do here. I am quite content with whatever may be assigned to me hereafter by the same Power. Of a future state I am wholly ignorant. As an integer, I feel a sort of instinct that death is not absolute annihilation; but beyond that I do not now seek to know, for every source of intelligence is absent. To some inconsiderate enthusiasts this may seem a cold belief, but in reality it is anything but that, for my days and nights are freed from that wet blanket of vague dread which makes so many mentally shiver; and my time is passed pleasantly in the alternate labour required by duty, and the repose necessary to recruit one's energies. Let us, for a moment, consider what would be the condition of the world, if each individual conducted himself according to the dictates of a pure and enlightened morality, instead of according to the direction of a body of Ecclesiastics. We may, I think, fearlessly assert that there would be no wars, no murders, thefts, adulteries, libels, violations of female purity; in short, every one would do as he wished to be done by. In such a people persecution would find no place, ignorance would not be permitted, and law would be unnecessary. Other desirable things would also take place, to which it is unnecessary to refer at large. When all are strictly proper in every relation of life, I cannot believe that anything more would be wanting to make the human family as happy as it can be here. What, let us ask, would the orthodox declare was amissing? The reply is, to my mind, awful: There would be, first, the want of hatred and malice; then would be added the want of Hell-to which enemies could be sent, and of a Heaven, in which the faithful could feed their malignancy by watching the tortures of those whom they detested on earth. In fine, I beg to express my own deliberate opinion, which has been growing stronger monthly since I first began to collect materials for this work, that those who can find nerve to sweep from their minds the trammels which have been woven around them by hundreds of generations of hierarchs, and adopt the simple faith which I have above indicated, will be far happier and better than ever they were before. No man will stand between them and God, and they will find Him infinitely more good and merciful than any of those who profess to be His agents. There is yet another way by which the subject of "faith and reason" may be approached, and their antagonism tested. This is by considering how far the former is essentially human, and the latter divine--by which we mean, superior to the propensity which all mankind has in common. We recognize the importance of the inquiry, when we find Mr Gladstone, a Prime Minister of England, discouraging the action resulting from philosophical thought, because a man named Paul, some 1800 years ago, recommended his friends to hold fast that which he, and they, under his teaching, believed to be good. The speech of the Premier, which was delivered at a large Liverpool School, and was written with unusual care, held up, to a lot of schoolboys, the propositions of Strauss as something which were so bad, that the enunciation of them carried with it their refutation. Yet, at the same time, the speaker allowed that the German thinker was conspicuous for intellectual attainments, powers of thought beyond the ordinary run of mortals, sobriety in mental culture, and boldness in the enunciation of the conclusions to which his reason compelled him. In Mr Gladstone's opinion, such a man's doctrines deserved to be withered; not because they were opposed to reason, to logic, to the stern reality of facts, but because they opposed the prejudices of certain persons educated in a different style of faith. If we inquire in what way the German philosopher and the English bigot differ, we can come to no other conclusion than that the one has used his intellect upon the dogmas which have been presented to his mind, from his infancy upwards, until they have been mistaken for fundamental truths, whilst the other has exercised his mental powers upon something beyond the doctrinal grounds on which his early education has been framed. The then English Premier, who had to direct the state, allowed himself to be guided by defunct men, precisely in the same way as Pyrrhus, Croesus, and others, were governed by the pretended oracles at Delphi, Dodona, and elsewhere. The man, in other words, who once wielded the might of England, and is conspicuous for his classical acquirements, is as much the slave of superstition as any ancient Egyptian or Grecian monarch, only his oracles are not the same as theirs. It is clear, that when the speech, to which reference has been made, was composed, Mr Gladstone was under the influence of the belief, that what he had been taught, and had adopted, must necessarily be the only truth which can be relied on, at least, in its fundamental points. It is this very presumption, this lazy habit of mind, that was long ago pointed out by Bacon as being the most fertile cause of the retardation of science, and it is remarkable that Oxford, as an University, and most of its alumni, are still victims to the weakness referred to. It naturally follows in the train of what is called classical learning, when the mind is taught to remember rather than to think; and one easily believes that he can recognize in the late Premier the gradual development of thought, and can tell the epochs when cherished idols have been thrown aside, with the energy of one who is suddenly roused to exercise a powerful mind in an independent manner. It would be useless to copy all the aphorisms by which Lord Bacon attempted to destroy the old philosophy, which, in his time, was most universally adopted, and to build up a new state of things, in which science should advance, but a few of them are of such value that they deserve recording. In _Novum Organum_, aph. 23 we read--"There is no small difference between the fancies [--Greek--] of the human mind and the ideas of the divine mind--that is, between certain notions that please us, and the real stamp and impression made by created objects as they are found in nature." That is to say, man commonly imagines things to be what he fancies they ought to be, and neglects what they really are. The learned aphorist then points out certain peculiarities of men, by which they are induced to cleave to the bad, and neglect the good. Aph. 46---"The human understanding, when any proposition has once been laid down (either from general admission and belief, or from the pleasure which it affords), forces everything to add to it support and confirmation. But this evil insinuates itself still more craftily in philosophy and in the sciences, in which a settled maxim vitiates and governs every other circumstance, although the latter be much more worthy of confidence." Aph. 47--"The human understanding is most excited by that which strikes and enters the mind at once and suddenly, and by which the imagination is immediately filled and inflated. It then begins, almost imperceptibly, to conceive and suppose that everything is similar to the few objects which have taken possession of the mind, whilst it is very slow and unfit for the transition to the remote and heterogeneous instances by which axioms are tried, as by fire, unless the office be imposed upon it by severe regulations, and a powerful authority." We may paraphrase the preceding axiom thus:--Those who, from personal preaching, or by parental influence, have adopted a certain belief in the truth of that which has been taught to them as a "revelation," no matter who the individuals are, or may have been, who propound it, are loth, ever, to inquire into the real nature of the matter. Hence it is that "clairvoyance" and "spiritualism" have so many staunch adherents. Aph. 56--"Some dispositions evince an unbounded admiration of antiquity, others eagerly embrace novelty, and but few can preserve the just medium, so as neither to bear up what the ancients have correctly laid down, nor to despise the just innovations of the moderns. This is very prejudicial to the sciences and philosophy, and, instead of a correct judgment, we have but the factions of the ancients and the moderns." There are other aphorisms following, which point out the mischief of following certain theories, simply because they have been long accepted, and are generally supposed to be correct. At the period when Bacon wrote, there was the same conservatism in science and philosophy as there had been in the Roman Church for ages, and very few, if any, had ventured to suggest the necessity for a radical change. In England the reformation of church and state preceded the reformation of philosophy; yet, there are many amongst us yet who regard all such changes as a mistake. We constantly find individuals who hanker after a despotic rule, by king or emperor, who cannot endure a church in which there is no tyrannical head, nor a science which only professes to advance, and refuses to be stationary. Yet the thoughtful know how much the world would have lost, had it yet been prostrate at the feet of Aristotle and of barbaric Popes; and there is not a Christian who does not rejoice that Jesus prevented mankind from worshipping Moses, and adhering to Hebraic notions. When, therefore, an individual, professing to be learned, scouts the propositions of a careful inductive and rigidly reasoning philosopher, simply because they violate generally believed notions; and when, in addition, he appeals to the ignorance and impressionability of schoolboys rather than to the mature judgment of adults, he proclaims himself, in that respect, at least, a bigot--of a dye as deep as those fanatics who urged on their fellows to suppress the discoveries of Galileo. But the matter does not end here. We recognize the necessity for a public man, who has once proclaimed his adherence to the doctrines of Revelation, and has preached the necessity for "faith," and its superiority over reason--however calm and rigid, to go further, and to proclaim that which he regards as Revelation, and who are the individuals he will receive as the interpreters of that so-called communication from God to man. It is clear that the words which have been uttered by man require a human expounder; equally clear is it that, if the original sayings are regarded as being inspired, but, nevertheless, of doubtful meaning, they can only be cleared up by other men, who are, like the original oracles--"inspired." But, as a matter of fact, there are in our own times three distinct sets of individuals who lay claim to the faculty of interpretation; and these differ so amongst themselves, that certainly, at least, two, and very probably all, are wrong. The man, then, who is disposed to make faith his guide must, in so far as Christianity is concerned, join himself either to the Greek or Roman Church, whose pretensions to a divine presence in their midst have been of the longest; or to the Protestant Church, which endeavours to oust the other two upon the plea that they cannot be under divine teaching, because they have become corrupt; and then, on the plea of having discovered the alleged faults, it assumes to have the authority which its predecessors have forfeited. Thus, as we have frequently remarked before, man sits in judgment upon Him whom he calls his maker. The Protestant Churches, however, are the only ones who do not formally lay claim to having the divine presence amongst them in a conspicuous degree; they do not pretend to the performance of miracles, and they scout the idea that any modern representative of Jesus can do any wonders like those that teacher did. The Roman Church proves to the satisfaction of its votaries that "the Lord" is still with them, inasmuch as the presence of the Virgin, in a visible form, occurs to cheer her servants that trust in her intercession, and even pictures of her become instinct with life. If, then, an individual is resolved to walk by faith alone in matters of religion, he is bound to join himself to that church wherein the divine founder is habitually and visibly present; to whose saints the saviour has appeared, and given stigmata like those which were produced in the original by the barbarous nails and spear of the Roman soldiers. For the votaries of faith--pure and unadulterated belief in things divine--the only legitimate home is the bosom of the Papal Church. Why, then, do not men, like Mr Gladstone, join it? Simply because their faith is not a pure and confiding one. It is tainted by the doubt whether the pretensions of the Roman See are sustainable, or by the certainty that Popish miracles are contemptible shams. They believe that Francis of Assisi made the stigmata, which he professed to receive from his "crucified Saviour," by burning his hands, feet, and side, with some strong caustic, or by a heated iron. By these doubts, or certainties, individuals demonstrate that they are not in the list of the faithful; for doubt implies unbelief, and both are incompatible with faith pure and simple. Whenever, then, a person confesses, by his words or actions, that he does examine into the grounds of his belief, he is logically bound to continue those inquiries into everything wherein there is a possibility of human error creeping. When we pursue our observations further, and inquire into the reasons why a Papist believes certain things which a Protestant rejects, and vice versa, we find that, in the first place, each believes what he has been taught; he--to speak figuratively--imbibes his dogmas and belief with his mother's milk; and when he advances in age, is taught and imagines that he has mastered the stock arguments which are relied upon by the opposite parties. There is, therefore, on first sight, a reasoning power exercised by each; but it is not so, for the arguments themselves, and their force, are regarded as matters of faith--as weapons with which a warfare may be waged, but which, in no sense, are to be tested by those who use them. As far as the common run of religionists are concerned, they are all in this "fool's paradise;" they fancy that they are secure, invincible, and mighty, because they take their own prowess and their opponents weakness as matters of faith. But when one of these comes into collision with another whose reason is exercised upon facts and the deductions to be drawn from them, the questions occur, possibly for the first time, Are the grounds of my belief tenable? am I justified in using my reason only in one direction? if I profess to argue, am I not bound to be logical? and if what has been given to me as sound meat, is rotten in reality, am I bound to eat it? can it do me good in any way? When a thoughtful man has arrived at this point, he has to elect between Faith and Reason. Then, if, like Mr Gladstone, he foresees to what his inquiries will probably lead, and is disinclined to pull down a cherished edifice, even to erect a better, he will naturally cling to the old belief, saying--"With all thy faults, I love thee still." With his eyes wide open he hails the banner of bigotry, no matter what may be the scutcheon which it bears. Then come the important questions--"What right has any religious bigot to profess himself a liberal?" and, "With what face can a man, who refuses to exercise his understanding upon what he calls the most important part of life, i.e., the preparation for eternity, proclaim himself a friend of education?" To insist upon the value of "learning" in forming the mind, and then to set the example of recoiling from the knowledge which intellectual efforts bring, is, in a statesman, a mean vacillation. Mr Gladstone ought either to proclaim that his ideas are those of the Jesuits, or to pronounce in favour of education, to whatever goal it legitimately tends. To say to boys--or men--you must learn to think; but you must only come to the same conclusions as myself, would disgrace a statesman of a free country, though such a proclamation would seem natural to a pope, or any other tyrant I do not, for a moment, assert that the then Premier of England did, in a written, and, therefore, a deliberate speech, to a large and influential school of boys, utter the words which I have used; on the contrary, he employed his rhetorical powers to express the idea, without either clearly understanding it himself, or giving the lads a clue to it. Had the meaning of the discourse been put into a few pregnant sentences, it may be doubted whether it would ever have been uttered. If Mr Gladstone, like the mythical Elijah, had placed before his auditors, in naked words, the proposition--"Choose ye this day whom ye will serve, Faith or Reason," his discourse would have been clear. Even his own mind could not have painted the two as being the same thing; nor would a school-boy have failed to see that, in the future, he must elect between indefinitely expanding his intelligence, and materially contracting his intellect to the narrow limits prescribed by the faith of his parents. To my mind it is sad to witness men of great general capacity, like the late Dr Faraday, and the past Prime Minister of Great Britain, shunning, in every way, an inquiry into the basis of their belief. We cannot regard this as a result of simple intellectual indolence, or ignorance. The only cause to which we can attribute it, is that weakness which, by most people, is called moral cowardice; a fear, not so much of Mrs Grundy--the world and its dread laugh--but the fear of some unseen, unknown, incomprehensible danger to themselves--of dangers that have no reality, except in an imagination which has been moulded long before the mind was capable of thought, but whose hold upon the individual is such, that he shrinks from the mental effort necessary to efface its impressions. There is yet another phase of faith, which deserves a passing mention. It is that which declines to see or to hear a proof or an argument, lest it should be convinced against its will. There are many men amongst us who, in Scripture phrase, refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely. This obstinacy, stupidity, dogged-ness, or firmness, is quite compatible with a partially cultivated intellect, and is in itself a measure of intellectual capacity. I have heard, for example, a learned divine, but one whose writings are often so bemuddled, that the ideas which they contain are as difficult to discover "as a needle in a bottle of hay," declare that he would no more listen to an argument against the existence of "the trinity," than he would open his ears to hear evidence that his wife or mother was adulterous. Such strong asseverations we may sympathize with, and even admire; but they prove nothing beyond the impracticability of an individual mind, or what, in some cases, takes its place--viz., the injudiciousness of acknowledging a truth, when the enunciation of a belief in it would be followed by unpleasant consequences. Again, I know of another divine, who has steadily refused to inquire into the value of what are called "the Christian evidences," his reason being, that he is conscious that inquiry would shake his confidence in the doctrines which he teaches. He clings to what he feels to be a sham, lest others should, by his means, regard it in its proper light. Another divine, who has not feared to be an inquirer, is incessantly persecuted by his brethren, not because he has asserted his intellectual freedom, but because, by having done so, he has, by implication, cast a sort of odium upon those who hug their mental darkness. His argument is--Can a man who hates the light be worthy to speak of the "Sun of Righteousness?" Their reasoning is based upon the assertion, that those who live in darkness, and like it, need not be told about a luminary. If people chose to believe that the moon is made of green cheese, it is more profitable to talk to them about its connection with the milky way, than to say that the notion is absurd. Faith teaches that, where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise; whilst reason only impels one to habitual thought or mental worry. Other divines of my acquaintance have used their reason in a twofold way: they have ceased to hold their first faith, yet they hold their "livings," as they have no other means of subsistence; whilst a few have, with their advancement in knowledge, paid for their knowledge by embracing poverty. The world treats those who walk upon the ground with a far greater injustice than it treats those who lie beneath its surface. For a man who disturbs us in our fool's paradise, more feet than hands are used; but to him who only disturbed the father's complacency, and taught the son in youth, we erect memorial statues. Jesus was crucified when he was alive, and deified when dead. His apostles were persecuted when living; now that they are deceased, they are called saints. Savonarola was burnt alive at Florence; now his memory is cherished, and his worth fully known. Luther was detested when he was able to thunder in men's ears; now he is regarded as a son of light. The present Pope, Pio Nono, has found an obsequious council, whose voices have declared him to be infallible--a god upon earth; the time will come when that Pope, and that council, will be regarded as the personification of blasphemy and folly. The days of Faith will be everlasting; but her power to act wickedly will be curtailed more and more. The reign of Reason advances every year, for it is allied to thought and knowledge; and we may fairly hope that the old adage will be true--_Magna est Veritas et praevalebit_. It may be said that, in the preceding parts of this essay, I have wholly lost sight of, or, at least, have not referred to the argument--or the statement, made by the upholders of faith, as a rule of life--that reason has nothing to do with things divine, and that where God has made a direct revelation of His will to man, no human being has a right to criticise or object to it. This kind of remark is in the mouth of every preacher, and each minister who utters it imagines that he deals a blow so very heavy that nothing can stand against it. But in reality it is only a big bubble, which collapses when it is touched. "How," for example, we may ask, "can anything be recognized as divine, unless human judgment is passed upon it? or, How can any revelation be accepted, unless the mind has examined the messenger and the message?" Who would believe the ravings of a lunatic, even though he told us that God had sent him with a message to man? Why do Christians, as a body, reject the revelation made to Mahomet, and the frequent inspirations which give laws to the latter-day saints? To these queries the reply is--"Because we know that God does not speak to man now, and that when the bible was closed all revelation ceased." But when we inquire into the reason for this belief we can find not one. Every theologian must allow that the God who spoke once to Moses spoke again; that He supplanted one dispensation by a second, and has promised a third. Thus we see, that by their own books, the orthodox are bound to believe that supplementary communications must be made to the human race; consequently, when any one asserts that he is a divine prophet, his pretensions are examined. The faithful Christian disbelieved in Mahomet; the trusting Arabs believed in his mission, and fought for their creed. They, like orthodox divines of to-day, refused to use their reason in things divine, and to cavil at a revelation, Unable to agree, the followers of Jesus, and those of Mohammed, fought, the latter almost annihilating the former for a time, thus proving the value of their faith. Both parties had a firm belief--the one in the prophet of Nazareth, the other in the prophet of Arabia; and no reasoning could have convinced either that his trust was misplaced; nor, to this day, has reason convinced the Mahometans that Jesus was superior to Mahomet, or the Christian that the Arab sectarian was a prophet at all; and it is singular that both parties call in reason in attestation of their respective creeds. Is, then, the sturdy English theologian to be content to leave the followers of Islam alone, because they have faith? or, must he still endeavour to convert them by the use of reason? Can the Christian adopt the belief that Mahometan and Mormon are both orthodox because they have faith? and that the Jew must still be dear to Jehovah, inasmuch as he still clings closely by faith to the revelation given to Moses and the prophets? If this cannot be done, how can the follower of Jesus hope to convert others to his belief, unless by the use of reason? If, then, the theologian uses reason as a weapon against heterodoxy, upon what ground can he object to its being employed by another? Latter-day saints have made many proselytes in Christendom, and a Mahometan floored in debate the late pious Missionary, Henry Martyn, whose propositions were met by counter ones, and every one of whose arguments was taken up and retorted, the names only of the persons spoken of being changed. "I know," said the one, "that God spoke to us by Christ Jesus"--"I know," said the other, "that Allah spoke to us by Mahomet" "You are wrong, my friend," said one, "Allah has not spoken to man since the last Apostle died." "You are wrong," said the other, "God has spoken to us long after that. You may call Mahomet an apostle, if you like; we call him a prophet of Allah, and know that he was one." And so controversy goes on now where there is faith without reason. It is clear, then, that truth cannot be established by any number of people thundering out "I believe it," and by their victoriously fighting for it. The argument, therefore, which I may be accused of omitting, is of no value at all; it is sheer nonsense--a windbag, or, perhaps, it may best be compared to a boomerang, which, when badly used, recoils upon the person of him who threw it. Of such arguments theology is builded up. CHAPTER XII. Honesty. A question propounded. Are "divines" honest? Meaning of the word. Learners and teachers--their relations to each other. Honesty expected in a professor. Teachers of religion are trusted--they are bound to be faithful. Political rights of men in respect of the clergy of the Established Church. Right to see that religion is not adulterated. Man's right to truth. What truth is not. Assertions required at "ordination." Canonical Scriptures. Verbal inspiration. Doubts of laity. Two schools--those who will and those who will not inquire. Rev. Dr Colenso. Rev. Dr Browne. Precious stones and "paste." How should a doubt be tackled--by inquiry, or by ignoring it? An analogy. Compass and bible. If compass wrong, why steer by it? Passenger and captain--one appeals to stars, the other to his owners and the seamen under him. Precision of Colenso--his words falsified so as to be confuted: this is not honesty. Is Bishop Browne honest in controversy? Tabernacle, temple, doors, &c. The _Speaker's Commentary_ not an honest book. Papal falsehoods; false decretals; false letter from Prester John. Pious frauds. Influence of dishonest teaching on education. The point involved in sectarian discussions. Lying miracles--are they promulgated honestly? Is it honest in religion to promulgate that which we knew to be wrong, or which we dare not inquire into for fear of consequences? Do Papal authorities believe in the annual miracle at Naples? The Protestant Church judged by a ruler of Siam. Bigotry, by not inquiring, does not establish truth. Each man who is deceived has a propensity to deceive others. The masses agree to be deceived. Mr Gladstone on education. His proposition that inquiry is bad if it leads to change of religious opinions. Anecdotes of stupidity. Sailing in search of truth. Captains who avoid the right course. The condition of society when the schoolmaster overrides the ecclesiastic. Reason and education ought to precede faith. Result of honesty. Divines recoil from the honest truth. Parsons in their pulpit preach what their week-day precepts oppose. Honesty in ecclesiastical matters is not the best policy. Divines and the silversmiths of Ephesus. Examples. An honest parson is persecuted by his fellows: this insures mediocrity and bigotry. If an author cannot be persecuted he is avoided. Ecclesiastics persecute their colleagues, but do not prove them wrong. Excommunication easier than refutation. What an honest merchant and divine should do when they discover a diamond to be paste. Ought the divine to be less honest than the merchant? The Author's challenge. Conclusion. I am now about to propound a question which I have heard mooted in quiet by many, but for which publicity seems to be dreaded by all--_viz_., "Is there honesty amongst Christians, and especially amongst the hierarchy of the Churches of England and Rome?" No one can doubt the importance of the subject; there is not a thoughtful person who does not, in words at least, scorn to build up his everlasting belief upon a fable, and who does not affect to be disgusted with everyone who is deliberately untruthful I speak not now of those time-servers who regard every artifice to be fair in love, war, and theology; but only of those earnest minds who are anxious to seek out and to hold fast that which is true, and who, under all circumstances, resolve to be honest with themselves. That there may be no doubt as to the sense in which I use the word, the following may be regarded as, in my opinion, the synonyms which are properly given in _Webster's Dictionary_--"Integrity, probity, uprightness, trustiness, faithfulness, honour, justice, equity, fairness, candour, plain dealing, veracity." To this may be added--"not bearing false witness." Presuming that English scholars agree in this definition, let me now inquire whether "we"--by which term I mean the non-theological class by profession--have a right to expect "honesty" amongst our teachers--be they Roman, Anglican, Hibernian, Scottish, Unitarian, Wesleyan, or of any other body? and, in the next place, whether we get that to which we are entitled? Presuming that it is necessary to begin with the foundation, let us first inquire into "our rights," and whence they are supposed to be derived. The positions of a learner and a teacher--or a disciple and a master--are, in some cases, different to what they are in others; for example, I need not, unless I think it desirable, learn astronomy, chemistry, the art of telegraphing, or that of ship-building; but if I do elect to learn any of these matters, and engage a man to instruct me, I have a legal claim upon him for his services. There is, indeed, a contract between us--he engaging to teach me, and I agreeing to pay him for his labour. In my selection of a professor, it is quite possible that I have not chosen the best; nay, seeing that I require to be taught, it is nearly certain that I cannot assume the position of a judge as regards the superiority of one teacher over another. But when the agreement is once entered into, each of the parties is bound to perform his part of the contract to the best of his ability. If, for example, I bargain with a master to teach me Spanish, and I, being wholly ignorant thereof, am instructed in Portuguese, I have a definite legal claim for redress. If, on the other hand, the law, or the custom of the country, compels me to take a certain class of teachers, whether they are competent or worthless, I, as one of the community, am justified in investigating the intellectual power of the professors, individually and collectively, in every way in my power. At one period, when autocracy, or tyranny, was supreme, this right was denied, and the legislators made it a criminal matter for any one to call in question the nature of the instruction which was given to the people in matters of politics, religion, and other things, wherein the government was concerned. At the present time there are few, if any, states whose ruling powers demand from the people such an abject submission. But, although a republic may allow unlimited latitude of opinion in matters of political economy, there may be a religious section within it, which consists of those who consent to be led, in matters of faith, by certain individuals, who, on their parts, are declared to be, by some power that the laity are disposed to submit to, the only persons competent to conduct persons to a happy eternity. Every individual in such a family is associated with the rest by voluntary ties. He may, if he chooses, inquire into the capacity of his guide; he is at perfect liberty to analyse his arguments, to inquire into his allegations, and, speaking generally, to test his truth. If, as a result of the investigation, any one is satisfied that the teacher is incompetent, the two are perfectly clear to make new engagements. There has been no definite contract, nor can there be any legal claim for a presumed breach thereof. When, on the other hand, there is a State Religion, supported by Parliamentary authority, and to which, in one way or another, the majority of the people must subscribe, each man has as perfect a right to see that he gets what he pays for, as he has to see that the member of parliament for whom he votes, does not neglect the interests of the town which he represents. As an Englishman, I have no right to call in question the power of the Pope of Rome, the Patriarch of the Greek Church, the Elder of the Mormon Communion, the Arch-Pneuma of the Spiritualists, or any other religious head, to teach his followers any doctrine that he may please. I may laugh at the "false decretals" of the papacy, and the charlatanerie of the clairvoyants; but no political right supports me in my calling them to account for their stewardship. On the other hand, when I know that the bishops of the Church of England are parties to the formation of our laws, and I find myself called upon to pay tithes or dues to individuals of the same establishment, I have a political right to ascertain, that the persons actually do what they profess to do for their money or position. If, for example, I live in a sparsely populated district, I and all my family are dependent upon the parson of the parish for instruction how to get to heaven; or, as an alternative, if I do not agree with his doctrine, I may abstain from being instructed at all. If, on the contrary, I inhabit a large town, still I am dependent for religious teaching upon the state clergyman, unless I elect to do without him, and any one else of the same persuasion, or select some non-conformist preacher who is to me no less offensive than the parliamentary parson. When a confraternity has obtained, no matter how, or by what means, a definite prescriptive right to sell a certain material to the community at large, the latter have certainly a legal power to see that the stuff given is according to contract. If a company of millers engage, for certain privileges, to sell good wheat flour to all comers, the last can deprive them of their exclusive right, provided that it can be proved either that the flour is bad, or that it comes from barley, rye, oats, or potatoes, or is adulterated with gypsum, &c. Presuming that this argument is tenable, our next inquiry is into that which our national church professes to sell, or to impart, in return for its privileges. In the fewest possible words we may say, that its duty is to impart "truth," or to teach what is, in its learned and educated opinion, the true religion for life and eternity. The word truth is one which lies at the root of our question respecting honesty. Pilate is reported to have said--"What is truth?" We may put the same question now. Without saying what "truth" is, we can readily declare what is "untruth." It is not truth if we, in argument, misrepresent an adversary; affirm that he made a certain statement, and then oppose--not the thing said--but some other matter which was not spoken of at all, and then assert that we have confuted him. It is not truth to affirm, that observations recently made have been oftentimes presented before, and always successfully refuted, when the remarks in question are novel, never have been controverted, and apparently, are not capable of being disproved. It is not truth to affirm, that human "authority," which, has been long acknowledged, can falsify "a fact," or make an unfounded assertion equal to a reality; or to declare, that one religion is good and another bad, simply because the speaker believes the matter to be so. It is not truth to assert, that a certain book, and every part of it, is the revealed word of God, when it is known to be contradicted by science--i.e.t by a knowledge of the laws imposed on creation by its Maker, to be inconsistent with itself, and to contain internal evidence that it was composed by men of small knowledge and of grovelling disposition. It is not truth to affirm, that if God's world proves what is called God's Book to be wrong, science must be neglected and the Bible upheld. It is not truth to affirm that God spoke exclusively to one people, when it is known that the race in question drew nearly, if not quite, all their religious beliefs, from the neighbours amongst whom they were thrown. It is not honest to propound in the pulpit the propriety of examining the Scriptures daily, and yet to persecute any one who by doing so becomes convinced of their human origin. It would be honest, and prove the existence of a love of truth, if every preacher of every denomination spent as much time in trying the value of his text-book, as he does now in expounding it and explaining it away. We should imagine that a minister loved truth, if he were first to ask himself how he treats the Vedas and Puranas, the Avesta, the Koran, the Apocryphal Gospels, the Apocrypha, the Book of Mormon, the visions and prophecies of "Latter-day saints," "Friends," Roman visionaries, and the oracles delivered at Delphi and elsewhere, and then to treat his own book with the same measure as he used with the others. On the other hand, we should regard him as untruthful and dishonest, if he weighed the books and belief of others with weights and scales different to those with which he tried his own. From each minister of religion the people have a right to demand an impartial inquiry into the absolute value of the doctrines which he teaches, and an investigation into the foundation, as well as the superstructure; and they may require, still further, that he, like Great-heart in Bunyan's story, shall do battle with assailants. When such a leader professes to fight, but always avoids the shock of battle, he cannot be regarded either as honest, or as comparable with Valiant-for-truth in the _Pilgrim's Progress_. We are then, as laymen, justified in requiring that our spiritual leaders shall take a conspicuous part in examining the grounds of the faith which they teach, and that the leaders of the Established Church shall seek to establish its doctrine upon as firm basis as it is possible to obtain. This certainly involves inquiry and discussion upon those points which modern criticism has prominently advanced. When we turn to the "Prayer Book," we find that Deacons are required to say, that they unfeignedly believe all the Canonical Scriptures. Priests are obliged to affirm that the Holy Scriptures contain sufficiently all doctrine required of necessity for eternal salvation, through faith in Jesus Christ, &c. In the consecration of bishops the same, or nearly the same, formula is gone through. Thus, at the outset of their career, the ministers of the Church of England commit themselves to, or are required by law to make, a declaration which will preclude inquiry into the value of the book on which their teaching is founded; their first step in the ministry puts it out of their power to be honest, if experience should teach them more than they knew when young. The bishops and priests, however, when they subscribe to the opinion that the Bible contains all things necessary for salvation, do not pledge themselves to the belief that every sentence, part, division, book, or arrangement of the Canonical Scriptures is, and must of necessity be, true. Even in the dawn of ecclesiastical information in England, there was not a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. Of late years, when habits of thought and the art of printing have increased, the knowledge, and consequently, the power of the laity disproportionally to the advance made by clerics--a strong propensity to accumulate facts, and to argue thereupon has been very generally developed, and the increased information obtained has induced steadily increasing numbers to doubt, not only the verbal inspiration, but even the historical truth of the Scriptures. When this difficulty occurred, or rather, when it became recognized, scholars, no matter whether they were professional or amateur ecclesiastics, divided themselves involuntarily (we may fairly say, unknowingly, inasmuch as each individual worked quite independently, in the first place, of another) into those who believed that, if the Holy Spirit dictated the Scriptures, he must have seen that his amanuensis wrote correctly; those who imagined that the Bible was to be taken "in the lump;" and those who considered that the Scriptures are entirely of human origin, and absolutely valueless as a guide of faith. Consequently, three schools have arisen, two of which are essentially ecclesiastic. Of these, one regards all inquiry into the accepted text as improper, the other considers that everything should be done to verify the value of the so-called original Scripture. Amongst the latter, Dr Colenso, Bishop of Natal, stands out conspicuously. Of the highest intellectual attainments, trained to close and scientific inquiry; able, far better than men of meaner capacity, to weigh the value of "evidence," whether "ancient or modern," he has drawn the conclusion that the Bible is not what it is generally supposed to be; in other words, that its historical portions are not trustworthy, and that there is grave reason to believe its writings to have been produced for a purpose, which involved dishonesty in the scribe, and in the promulgator of his writings. The learned doctor was honest in his investigation, and fearless in announcing his conclusions. As an upright man, the Bishop of Natal is as completely justified in his inquiry into the validity or importance of an ancient book, alleged to be a pearl of great price, a gem or diamond of the first water, as the official curator of a museum would be, in determining whether a certain ruby, given into his charge, were real or artificial. Of the necessity of such an inquiry, the following anecdote, which was told me by the gentleman concerned, will convince the reader:-- A wealthy lady, of high position in life, sent to a museum, for exhibition, a number of "precious stones." If they were really what they were supposed and stated to be, their value would have been reckoned by thousands of pounds sterling. If accepted as genuine, and found, upon their restoration to the depositor, to be imitation jewels, the curator would be liable, not only for their value, but his character for honesty would be gone; consequently, ere he gave a receipt for the lot, he tested each. Not one was real! This man was in the position which Dr Colenso occupies now. The owner of the jewels was indignant at the idea that the stones were false, and the apparent insinuation that imitations were being foisted on the public as realities; but her fury did not alter the fact. If she were artful, her plan was detected; if she had been deceived, her anger, though useless, was justified. On the other hand, there are many Bishops who uphold the verbal inspiration of the Bible, and will not inquire if the gem be real, or only test it by plans known to be valueless for the purpose. Some do not go altogether so far as this, They consider it obligatory upon them to examine just a little bit, but not to go too deeply, lest they should be forced to believe that there never was such a man as Moses--a man who is commonly reported to have written certain books at a distant period. Some persons seem to think that their hope of happiness in this, as well as in another world, and not only their own, but that of everybody who is under their instruction, depends upon their feeling sure that Israel was once in Egypt--that Abraham begat Isaac, and became the progenitor of an innumerable offspring, exceeding in number the Indians of Hindostan, the Assyrians of Mesopotamia, the Egyptians of the Nile, and the Romans of Italy. Between these two inquirers, if the latter class can fairly be called such, the issue is distinct. There can be no difficulty amongst scholars as to the means by which the question ought to be settled. An appeal to hard and dry facts is the plan adopted by philosophers. For men, who have a single eye to discover the truth, it matters little in what direction their inquiries lead them. Metaphorically speaking, they may begin a series of investigations, expecting that everything will lead them northwards, and they end by reaching the south; just as many an enthusiastic, but little instructed, man has accumulated "pyrites," under the impression that it was an ore of gold, and found, on inquiry, that the material was a sulphuret of iron, and of small commercial value. But it is this very possibility of research bringing them to an undesirable goal, which deters so many of our divines from making any inquiry. Outwardly, they allow that it is their duty, as leaders, to examine, not only the condition of their own forces, but the position and power of those who assail the army which they profess to guide. Inwardly they find reasons for remaining quiet, and excuse themselves to their followers in some plausible fashion. Why, however, should any goal be undesirable which leads us nearer to truth? Why should any body of professedly learned-men run the risk of being considered wanting in honesty, or candour, by avoiding their opponents, whom they are in honour bound to encounter? The reply to these questions generally runs thus:--"We, as ministers of the Established Church of England, are bound to be faithful to the Bible, and to it we must adhere, whatever our own private judgment may be. We did not make the law; we simply take it as we find it, and, having sworn to obey it, we do so." This answer would be exhaustive, if it were the fact that the laity made the law for the theologians. But, as we know, that the ecclesiastics have, in the last resort always made laws for themselves, the rejoinder is not conclusive History tells us how ministers of religion have instructed the people, and how these, again, have legislated under the tuition of their advisers. When Paganism was supplanted by Christianity, the change was effected by preachers, who taught the populace to believe the new doctrine, and who influenced the minds of the lawmakers. In like manner, when Popery in England was put down by the Protestants, each party was headed by its priests. Many a minister, at that period, felt bound to follow what he believed to be truth, rather than to abide by a vow made in youth; and they who had upheld the authenticity of Popish miracles, and of Apocryphal Scriptures, ceased to give credence to them, or to use them as authorities in matters of religion. These men were honest. That which has been done by men aforetime, may be done or imitated in our own day; and our divines have as great a power to examine into the value of the Bible now, as they had at the Reformation. If they refuse to make the inquest suggested--in what way, may we ask, do they differ from the Romanists in the time of Luther, who would not inquire into the truth of his arguments lest they should be convinced? Can any one who professes to be a Protestant--a child of the Reformation--honestly refuse to investigate the grounds of the faith which is in him, and shelter himself, as Bonner and others did, under the pretext of a declaration or vow made at ordination? If those who make the excuse just referred to, are honest, they are bound to reject every doctrine which they, or their predecessors, have received from Romish priests, who propounded in adult life, doctrines different to those which they professed when yet almost children. To illustrate the tendency of our remarks still further, let us, for a moment, suppose that the captain of a ship has, from any cause whatever, adopted a particular "compass" by which he directs his course, and which perhaps he calls by the name of Faith. All in the vessel are, to a great extent, dependent upon him for a successful voyage, and a safe arrival at the desired haven. Seeing how the master-mariner honours the magnetic needle, every thoughtful passenger will probably consult it in like manner. One more advanced in knowledge than the rest may desire to test the instrument by the position of the pole star, and thinking that he could recognize the latter, might infer that the magnet did not point truly. This doubt, we will imagine still further, he imparts to the captain, who, disinclined to distrust his compass, endeavours to demonstrate that the position of the pole star is doubtful. In the place of the mariners' compass let us read the "Bible," and, instead of the pole star, let us substitute "science." We shall then recognize the position of such men as the Bishop of Winchester and Dr Colenso--the latter endeavours to test the value of the instrument which is most used by churchmen by certain well-known means; the former, on the contrary, aims to demonstrate that what he regards as a true indicator is so in spite of all which the planets prove to the contrary. To carry on our metaphor a point further, let us imagine that the captain and the doubting passenger appeal to the seamen and the other people on board the barque--the latter telling in simple terms the grounds of his belief, whilst the former appeals to the passions of those who have long trusted him, and only notices the arguments of his opponent to misrepresent them. This is what was done by the Papists, in every country, at the time of the Reformation, and which more recently has been done by the Bishops and Archbishops of the Church of England, when in controversy with the Bishop of Natal Dr Colenso has in voluminous works, and with a precision which every scholar must admire, shown that the Old Testament--the "compass" of churchmen--is not what it is supposed to be. Against his views a new "Bible commentary" has been issued, with the sanction of the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries; and in it the authors stoop to misrepresentation! If there were no pretence of joint authorship, one might imagine that each writer was responsible only for his own shortcomings; but when there is a parade of great names, which is intended to demonstrate the almost infallible truth of everything (except typographical errors), one is bound to treat the contributors as being on a level with each other, and all hierarchical coadjutors. How can any one, with a tendency towards fair dealing, characterize but with the epithet "contemptible dishonesty," a deliberate quotation from Dr Colenso, which is falsified, that the fabrication may be refuted? The Bishop of Natal's argument is a just one, and, although it is only contained in a note and not in the text itself, is of great weight. It runs thus (Part v., p. 97)--"Of course the fact that the tabernacle at Shiloh had _doors_ (1 Sam. iii. 15)-- that the lamp was allowed regularly to _go out_ in it (1 Sam. iii. 3), and that Samuel _slept_ in it, and apparently Eli also (1 Sam. iii. 2, 3), are sufficient to show that this could not have been the 'Mosaic Tabernacle.'" This is a fair and scholarly statement; the layman recognizes it as such, and looks to his ecclesiastical superior for an honest opinion on its value. What does he find? Simply this--Bishop Browne answers: "The objection (Colenso, Part v., p. 97) that the Tabernacle (at Shiloh) could not be the tabernacle, in the wilderness, because it had a 'door' (1 Sam. ii. 22) is rather singular, if we observe that the words in Samuel, on which the objection is founded-- 'The women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation'--are literally a quotation from Exod. xxxviii. 8--'The women assembling, which assembled at the door of the tabernacle of congregation.' Of course the word door, fine _pethah_, is as applicable to a tent door as to a house door, and is constantly used of the door of the Tabernacle in the Pentateuch." In this observation of the Bishop of Winchester a false issue is deliberately raised; the quotation given by Colenso is not touched, and for it another, wide of the mark, is substituted! In the verse referred to by the Bishop of Natal the words are--"And Samuel lay until the morning, and opened the doors of the house of the Lord," &c.--"doors" being in the original, _dalethoth_--a different word altogether to _pethah_, and certainly in the plural number. In other language, we may say that in the _Speaker's Bible_, almost every argument and criticism of Colenso and his German authorities are left unnoticed and unanswered; and this, almost the only quotation made, is not a true one! Is this honest? So gross, in my opinion, is the want of candour shown in this case, that I, for one, cannot trust a single assertion of the Bishop of Ely, now translated to Winchester, even when he quotes chapter and verse, until I have verified the extract. But the flagrancy of the proceeding is, if it can be, heightened by a reference to the subject Dr Colenso was endeavouring to show, by those undesigned coincidences, that hierarchs profess to love so much, and which they parade with great earnestness when it suits their purpose, that the tabernacle at Shiloh was not that described in the Pentateuch. It was perfectly open to Dr Browne to adduce evidence that it was the same. This he does not do--the scholar can well understand the reason why, viz., that a close inquiry supports the Bishop of Natal's view. For example, in 1 Sam. L 9, we find that Eli is sitting "upon a seat by a post of the temple of the Lord." This sentence is significant in English, it is much more so in Hebrew. The words "post" and "temple" certainly are quite incompatible with a tent or tabernacle. In the Hebrew, the tabernacle is generally spoken of as _ohel_, whilst "temple" is _heckal_. Still further, the expression, "post of the temple," is peculiar, because a corresponding one is found only once in the Old Testament--viz., in Ezek. xli. 21, where the English version has "the posts of the temple," whilst the marginal reading has "post" The word _heckal_ is in constant use throughout the later Jewish books, but does not occur once in the Pentateuch; and it is a significant fact that, in 1 Kings xxi. 1, 2 Kings xx. 18, Ps. xlv. 8, cxliv. 12, Pro. xxx. 28, Is. xiii. 22, xxxix. 7, Dan. i. 4, the word in question is translated in our authorized version _palace_. As the idea of a palace--a royal residence, is totally distinct from a tent or tabernacle, it is clear that the narrative about Eli, Hannah, and Samuel, was written by some one to whom the story told in the Pentateuch was quite unknown. The dishonesty--we speak thus, controversially--of the bishops concerned in the new commentary is not only shown in the _suggestio falsi_, but in the _suppressio veri_; and no amount of skill in argument or of book-learning can, amongst those who are aware of the fraud, get over the effect which is produced by the cheat. It is evident, that the questions which the Bishops ask themselves are--"Since there are so many who are wholly ignorant of this matter, shall we not do more to uphold current ideas by fraud than by truth?" and, "Is it not right for us to risk our own souls in support of a faith which we do not, but which the people do, believe?" In a time when all men are ignorant enough not to understand what is history and what pure fable; when they are so careless as not to examine quotations, made from "authorities," in confirmation of opinions, or so credulous as to believe anything which a churchman, and, _par-excellence_, a Bishop, may affirm, it may be regarded by ecclesiastical writers as a pardonable sin, if not, indeed, a tactical master stroke, to misrepresent an adversary. But in the present day, when all educated Englishmen have heard of the false decretals on which the Popes have founded their claims to superiority, and the astute legend of Prester John, it is bad policy for a Bishop to found an argument upon a wrong quotation, or to imagine that a glaring untruth can by any possibility support his position. For myself, I confess that I began to read the _Speaker's Commentary_ with interest, inasmuch as it purported to be an exposition and refutation of the arguments against the authenticity of certain Biblical writings; but when I found an English hierarch could so forget his duty to "the truth" as to misquote such a man as his episcopal brother, the Bishop of Natal, I abstained from a farther perusal, for I found the necessity of verifying quotations involved more time than I could afford. Dr Colenso has, however, sufficiently shown the viciousness of the new commentary, and there is no necessity for a second investigator. From what has been said, we have shown that the members of the Church of England, and all Protestant dissenters, have a right to expect from their teachers an opinion, founded upon learned inquiry, "whether the objections made by scholarly critics against the inspiration of the Bible are well founded," and that ministers of all denominations, as a body, not only shirk the duty, but persecute such of their fraternity as venture to do so. When an individual in the community accepts a trust and does not fulfil it, he is amenable to the law; and if it can be proved that there has been wilful negligence, the trustee may be punished. This does not, however, apply directly to the clergy, for the trust which is confided to them is to preach and teach from the Bible. That, certainly, is what they engage to do before the law, but the very essence of their existence as ministers of religion is, that they shall instruct men in the way of salvation. This trust, which is never put into legal phraseology, is proclaimed to be in existence by every preacher; and each minister, by implication or assertion, declares that he is desirous of exercising this trust to the best of his ability. If, then, the real value of his leadership is challenged, he ought, as a champion, to defend it. He does so in every point, except that which is most essential He will discuss circumcision with a Jew, infant christening with a baptist, purgatory with a popish priest, bishops with a presbyterian, confession with a ritualist, and the like. There must, then, be some cause why Revelation should not be treated of. If we consult human nature, the only causes to which we can assign this reticence are, conscientious cowardice and dishonesty. The first is, by many persons, regarded as a duty--they are taught that it is sin to doubt; the second is not called by its right name. Yet, as we have said elsewhere, our religious societies are founded upon the principle of sowing doubt broadcast; and we denounce the pious frauds which invented winking virgins and bleeding nuns. Surely, if there be any truth in the line--"An honest man's the noblest work of God," it is most essential that they, who style themselves His ministers, ought to be conspicuously honourable, candid, and thoroughly trustworthy in matters of doctrine as well as of morality. The subject on which we are now treating has ramifications so wide, that it is difficult to see the end of the branches. Amongst the most obvious is the influence which it has upon the matter of public education--one which occupies a large portion of the interest of our nation at the present time. In our preceding vol. II., p. 113, we have a note to the effect that there is much doubt upon the subject whether faith ought to be drilled into the minds of our youth prior to an acquisition of, or the power of using, their reasoning faculty, and we remarked that the question is far too extended to be treated in a casual note. The matter was shortly afterwards discussed in parliament, but not one of the orators ventured to touch upon the point involved. If we ask ourselves "the reason why," it is probable that the answer would run--because all the interlocutors did not venture to be honest; by which I mean, did not wish to utter, in distinct language, the opinions that they held, and the end which they sought. There are some legislators who regard moral cowardice as a virtue, and political dishonesty as a desirable kingcraft. If an observer of the parliamentary debates, to which we refer, was also a diligent and thoughtful reader of orations made in country towns and metropolitan districts, by preachers and teachers of all our various religious denominations, he would readily come to the conclusion that there was something underlying every speech, which was never allowed to come to the surface--a something which each was perfectly cognizant of, but which it would be unmannerly to name, or even to hint at strongly. It is not, in public meetings, or in parliament, permitted to any speaker to accuse an adversary of falsehood or dishonesty. Yet, what an orator may not judiciously say of particular individuals, a writer may assert of a class, or of a single person, if he is a representative of a body. I may, for example, accuse the Pope of dishonesty in misrepresenting certain well-known facts. I may equally charge controversial writers with fraud, when they falsify the words or arguments of an opponent. Whoever frames such an indictment is, however, bound to take into consideration the possibility of there being an unintentional error. It may, for example, be true that Popes never see newspapers which tell the truth, and that divines may quote without ever reading the book which they profess to criticise. In both cases the critic acquits them of malice, but only to convict them of culpable ignorance. When we investigate how this bears upon education, we ask ourselves--"Do we, as historians, or in our capacity of reading men, know that the pretensions of the Church of Rome are founded upon, or are bolstered up by, assertions which every learned man knows, or ought to know, are unworthy of belief?" To be more particular, let us propound the question--Does any Papal hierarch believe that Francis of Assisi received certain bodily marks on his hands and feet direct from Jesus? or that any portion of the blood of a man has been preserved for ages in the Cathedral of Naples, as having once belonged to a person who is called by the same name as the first month in our year? We might readily increase our queries by remarking about St. Dennis, St. George, St Fou-tin, and a variety of others who appear in the Roman heaven. Our purpose, however, will be answered if we ask, whether the thoughtful amongst us do not object to the Papal faith, because those who proclaim it are not to be trusted? If we listen to energetic Protestant divines, we hear much of "lying wonders," wrought by Antichrist, which are calculated even to deceive the very elect. These men frequently quote such passages as the following:--"Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, are these" (Jer. vii. 4); "They have committed villany in Israel, and have spoken lying words in my name, which I have not commanded them" (Jer. xxix. 23); "Have ye not spoken a lying divination," &c. (Ezek. xiii. 7, 8, 9); "Then shall that Wicked be revealed, whose coming is with lying wonders, and with all deceivableness of unrighteousness; and for this cause God shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie," &c. (2 Thess. ii. 8-12). Indeed, the main objection to the Roman Church, amongst all those who are acquainted with its secret history, is that it is founded, and still exists, upon a foundation of fraud. There are many who consider that the Churches of England and of Scotland have not a better basis; but both have so many friends in Great Britain, that the sins of neither are closely examined, except by their adversaries. Each sectarian is fully alive to the want of good faith shown by every other division of the Church of Christ; and not only so, but we have seen, in our own times, a ruler in Siam who knows about them too (see _Wheel of the Law_, by H. Alabaster; Triibner & Co., London, 1871), and is perfectly alive to the fact that we deceive ourselves. It is a part of human nature that each individual has a propensity to deceive himself or herself. A child, who has been told that Old Bogy lives in a certain cupboard, will not go and look therein; a man who adores a lovely wife will not believe in her frailty; and a fond woman will not credit even her father, when he tells her that her admirer is a worthless scoundrel. We grant this readily, but we add the proviso, that we only allow ourselves to be deceived by our own friends. It would be, to all of us, a frightful infliction if our sons or daughters were to tell us that we were under strong delusions, and believing in lies. Consequently, everyone desires that his family shall have a similar faith with his own. At the present time, however, more conspicuously than at any other since printing was invented, there is, in society, a vast number of men who believe, from their critical inquiries, that all religionists trust in lying vanities which do not profit. These individuals have become sceptics, in consequence of education having led them to think for themselves. Being opposed to all, they are friendly with none; and although they are not aggressive, as a rule, they are vigorously attacked by every sect which steadily refuses to come to the light. Under these circumstances every hierarch argues: "The education which frees the mind from all the shackles of superstition is prejudicial to us, who earn our living hy making fetters, fixing them, and relaxing them when duly paid to do so. A sound teaching--a style of instruction that will induce the rising generation to examine into our pretensions will cut the ground from under our feet. We must, therefore, endeavour to limit, in some considerable degree, our tuition." Like the Jesuits in Austria and of to-day, they will cram the memory, but not exercise the understanding; they will crowd the mind with lying statements, and prohibit all inquiry. Sectarians, therefore, as a rule, object to education, unless it has a religious element in it. They agree in this point, but differ as to the style of faith which is to be taught Hence all the difference of opinion, for as the sectarians cannot decide upon what faith is to be taught, they object to all instruction whatever. Are they honest? If, instead of nursing a private idea, each legislator were boldly to say what he desired to obtain and to avoid, there might be some chance of united action. But when all pretend to work in common, yet not one is absolutely in earnest, and all, more or less, play at "make believe," no valuable end will be obtained. One politician, whose memory is tenacious, and his temerity great, cannot bear the idea that the British mind should approximate to that of the Germans; and, whilst he eulogizes education, he denounces Strauss. Not because the latter is not a man of profound learning, but because the cultivation of his intellect has led him to certain conclusions which are distasteful to an English politician. This is not honesty. Again, our bishops and the priesthood generally say, "Education is a desirable thing; it is wrong for man, who has a soul to be saved, not to seek out the way of salvation." But if, in the course of inquiry, a scholar imagines that their way is incorrect, he is anathematized, and his fellows are instructed to believe that no one can find comfort for the soul except in the way patronized by the Church. This, again, is not honest. But--and the word is of mighty import--if, instead of saying this distinctly, a few individuals of high standing in the Protestant community deliberately, and with the intention to deceive--or to retain people in the bonds which astute predecessors have thrown around the laity, state, as their belief, that which their critical knowledge tells them is untrue, or withhold knowledge of importance, because they deem its publication detrimental to ecclesiastical institutions, they are not simply dishonest--they are culpable, and guilty of spiritual murder. My meaning may be illustrated by one or two pertinent anecdotes: The captain of a man-of-war was doubtful of the existence of a rock laid down upon a chart. One day at dinner he announced to his company the disbelief which he had, adding, that if the spot were truly described, the ship would strike directly. It did so, and few survivors were left to tell the tale. The commander judiciously elected to perish with his vessel. Had he told his officers, and the distinguished passengers whom he was carrying, what he was doing, it is certain that the danger would have been avoided. Another ship captain was addressed by a civilian who was on board, and told that a hurricane was approaching, which might be avoided by steering in a certain direction; but, metaphorically speaking, the bishop would not listen to the layman. The typhoon came, the vessel was partially dismasted; then the passenger was consulted, and by his aid the ship got out of the danger. The civilian was well read, not in ancient books, but in modern science; the master mariner knew only his log-book, compass, and "the rule of thumb." A person who loses his ship because he is too stupid to believe a chart, or the rules of a science, which every scholar may test, deserves the name of an imbecile, and our Board of Trade would deprive him of the power to do any more mischief as a captain; but bishops and priests may pilot their vessel wrongly, for none have any jurisdiction over them, provided always that they steer in the old channels. It matters not how far the way may be shifted, all is supposed to be right, if the old landmarks are still used. To make our meaning still more clear, let us imagine ourselves a nation of mariners, and of ocean-travellers. We go to school, and learn astronomy, trigonometry, geography, physics, and the like; yet, when we are at sea in any ship whatever, we must neglect our knowledge, and trust implicitly to the captain of our ship. We know that we are, in reality, going southwards, when our proper destination lies to the north: for us it is easy to read the stars, and thus to test both the chronometer and the compass; must we, then, be quiet because we have embarked in a vessel belonging to a certain "line," which is commanded by a master appointed by the "firm" or "company" to which the barque belongs. What is the value of education unless it enables us, when necessary, to find whether we are in the right way or not? Let us, still further, suppose that we remonstrate with the captain, and that he, in place of arguing the matter fairly, endeavours to override our objections by quoting from ancient geographers, to demonstrate that what we believe to be the wrong is, in reality, the only true way to go; we may be silenced, probably until we accidently discover in the ship's library, a dissertation proving that the old traveller's charts are worthless. When we find out that, what will be our opinion of the captain? Can we believe him to be honest? If we now were to remonstrate with our naval dictator, and he were to rejoin--"My worthy brothers, I know that you are right, and that I have been wrong. I have, indeed, known it from the time I began to be commander, but my living depends upon my belief in old charts and ancient compasses. I dare not change my plan, for my masters would dismiss me. They know--at least I feel convinced that they are aware, that the old sailing directions are wrong; but they have not the courage to say so, or to alter them--and if I do so, they will cashier me." Is the "firm" or "company" honest? and if we are to mete out degrees of culpability, to whom must the severest punishment be awarded? Surely, in the case of the Church of England, to her Bishops, who, knowing, as scholars, that their compass and charts are incorrect, yet oblige those under their command to steer by them--thus compelling the men who ought to be standard-bearers in the forefront of intellectual work, either to be silent, or to fight at a disadvantage. It is the knowledge of the duplicity of a vast number of intelligent divines, which has induced laymen to take the business of education out of the hands of the clergy as a body. The Protestant believes that a Jesuit will not teach correct history; the Romanist feels certain that, even in biography, evangelical narratives cannot be trusted; and Nonconformists generally feel that they cannot rely upon the instruction given by those of a different sect. It is desirable to sketch, if possible, what would be the condition of society if, in the place of the clergy, there was a set of men trained to the office of instructor, and that all individuals in the kingdom were compelled to attend school for a definite period in their youth. In the first place, nothing would be taught which is not known to be true. After having mastered the rudiments of knowledge, the art of reading, writing, and ciphering, the students would be taught to train their minds in drawing inferences from facts, and the art of passing from imperfect knowledge to certainty. They would be schooled into habits of exactness, and the necessity for careful inquiry before they believed an assertion to have the same power as a fact Those whose inclination led them to study one or more of the arts or sciences, drawing, painting, sculpture, designing, weaving, chemistry, engineering, building, and a host of others, would learn that in every one of them knowledge and precision are required to ensure success. When the instructor found that his pupils were sufficiently trained to the exercise of reasoning, he would then proceed to explain the ideas which have been entertained by various people about the existence of beings, other than those which can be recognized by the senses. He would lead his class through the geological history of our planet, and point out the sequence of events from the latest formation, to the primary rocks; on his way he would linger on the nature of ancient plants and animals; from our earth he would lead them to a study of the stars, and then point out how very natural is the opinion that all the universe had a designer. Then, after giving a history of the belief in ancient times, he would gradually descend to our own. He would critically examine the pretensions of any person who had, in former ages, asserted, or who proclaimed now, that he or she knew all about this presumed Creator, and was charged to communicate that knowledge to mankind. After explaining the critical test by which such an assumed mission might be examined--viz., by accurate knowledge of the earth and of mankind, he would apply this trial to all known pretenders to inspiration. As a result, his pupils might prefer one to another, or refuse to believe in all which have hitherto appeared. In any case, each individual would enter upon the form of faith which he selected with full knowledge of the facts in favour of it. He would, therefore, be a disciple worth having. If, on the other hand, he disbelieved all pretenders to inspiration, his condition would be the result of deliberate reasoning upon ascertained facts, and not built, as all religion now is, upon parrot lore, taught in childhood, ere thoughtfulness has begun to grow. Assuming that men were thus trained by honest and able instructors, all those people who live upon the weaknesses and the ignorance of the multitude would cease their endeavours to prey upon mankind, and to get a living by playing upon the fears which so many persons have of the unknown. There would then be no religious wars or contests--no popes, prelates, priests, nor deacons. Quackery of all kinds would cease, and statesmen would all agree in endeavouring to procure for mankind the greatest amount of available happiness. This would be the result of honesty. But from such a picture many men absolutely recoil As the effect of training has been to make them believe that unsubstantial things are of sovereign importance, they cannot endure the idea of man being wholly rational; and they insist, as does the late Premier of England, that, if scientific schooling of the mind leads men to neglect what some call Revelation, the plan must be radically bad and worthless. But to eulogise education and to deprecate its results is dishonest. This political tenet or practice resembles that of many a parson, who tells his hearers from the pulpit that they are to "take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow will take thought for the things of itself;" "they are not to take thought for life, for food, for raiment; nor to lay up for themselves treasures upon earth" (Matt vi. 19, 25, 34), and on the week-day urges them to lay by a store against the time of sickness or old age. Such double-dealing is dishonest, and is unworthy of a thoughtful man. If Jesus was right, why not enforce his teaching? if he was wrong, why not say so? Is it possible that any minister in politics, or religion, can believe that "Honesty is the best policy," and yet act with double-dealing? Can any person, who has power to think, believe that he will be respected when he, on a Sunday, preaches improvidence as being taught by the Almighty, and on a Monday proclaims that men are wicked who do not make a provision for the future? If such people were honest with themselves, they would soon discover that the doctrine propounded from the pulpit is a Buddhistic one, acted upon by all the early disciples of Sakya Muni, and in a conspicuous manner by himself. Yet, if a parson were to be candid thus far to himself, he would probably say--"I cannot afford to be honest in this matter openly, and I must keep this knowledge to myself." Interest, unfortunately, determines the actions, even of our divines, more than a rigid uprightness. We are thus at the foundation of those causes which are in operation to make the thoughtful laity distrustful of the clergy--it is, that the latter are not honourable or strictly veracious--they preach one doctrine, and act upon another. Honesty is on their lips, but self-interest in their hearts. From the Pope to the humblest deacon, there is a conscious reticence in every mind--an inner belief that their pretensions are not tenable, yet an outward determination to proclaim them at all hazards; like the silversmiths of Ephesus, they all unite in the belief that "their craft is in danger" when the apostles of reason appear. Far be it from me to assert that all the clergy are dishonest in the full meaning of the word. I believe that many of them have such undeveloped minds, or such mean intellectual capacities, that they are absolutely unable to think upon any subject which has not been drilled into them when their brains were childish and ductile. Others, again, have been schooled into the belief that "doubt" and "the devil" are identical, and who pray to be defended from both--with them, "to inquire" is a temptation of Satan, and so is to be manfully resisted; others, again, say to themselves, and sometimes even to their friends--"I know what will follow if I go into 'the evidences'--I dare not do it, and prefer to remain in my present condition." Others, again, say to their conscience--I am paid to expound a certain book, in a certain way; I cannot afford to give up my position; consequently I will neither hear of nor argue upon either the volume or the doctrine. There are, again, some few religionists who, by constantly encouraging a blind faith, and repressing all intellectual doubts, come at length to believe their position impregnable, and who trust it because it is, as it were, always kept under a glass-case. Some such I know, or have known, personally; and have heard from their own lips how their very accurate knowledge of the Bible has made them doubt its inspiration, and how "they have wrestled with God in prayer"--to use their own expression--until the temptation to distrust has been changed into a childlike confidence. Men like these are not dishonest to the world, they are only so to themselves. The career of one of my acquaintances has been so striking, that it deserves a record. The man of whom I speak was one of powerful intellect, and of an inquiring turn of mind; but he was in holy orders, and had schooled himself never to investigate the Bible's claim to inspiration, or anything connected with religion. He faithfully did the ordinary duties of a minister according to his lights; but throughout his ministrations, in the composition and delivery of every sermon, there was a powerful undercurrent of the mind which was constantly saying, without using words--"You know that you are not honest." Prayer did not subdue this mental conflict, and day by day the undercurrent grew stronger. It was, however, resolutely opposed, and an outward orthodoxy rigidly kept up. Of the throes of such a man, when he was quietly alone, few but those who have felt them can have an idea. Under their influence the brain gave way, and insanity was the reward of a resolute determination to be orthodox against personal conviction. Similar cases are not uncommon, when faith opposes reason. It is very doubtful whether ordinary laymen have an adequate idea of the extent of clerical dishonesty existing amongst us, not only in the seats of learning, but in our towns, cities, and villages. As I have had much correspondence and conversation with many ministers of religion, I have formed the opinion that parsons of all denominations regard themselves much in the same light as trade unionists and non-union men, the two parties look upon each other as hostile. The former, who call themselves the orthodox, keep up a sort of spy system upon those whose opinions they fear, because they are not in the union. Such men, if they had a chance, would not scruple to "ratten" an adversary. They judge of a man by the books which they chance to see in his library, book-cases, or upon his table; and, without the manliness to confront, they have the weakness to backbite those whose mind is more robust than their own. As a physician, I have been consulted by a Church of England minister, who was suspected by the rest of the ministers in his town of being a non-union man. Of strong mind, he did not preach the usual jargon which the pulpit delights in. Irons upon _Prophecy_ and Inman's _Ancient Faiths_ had been seen in his study, and he spoke approvingly of Colenso. As a consequence, he was watched in the pulpit and in the street. He was followed to the homes of poverty, and sick folk were visited, that the nature of his ministrations might be searched out. He was visited by persons of all classes, who, taking their cue from the New Testament, strove to entangle him in his talk. Being married, and having a family, and no means of subsistence, save his church living, this trade union persecution made him miserable, and seriously injured his health. But he was resolute not to be dishonest, and held on his way. I was, he assured me, the only person whom he knew that could appreciate his condition, and he was most thankful for my sympathy and advice. He left my house already improved in health; and the feeling that he had a friend to whom he might always apply, enabled him to bear his persecution manfully. He still retains his position, notwithstanding all the wiles and "picketings" of the trade unionists. This spy system, mentioned in the above example, is associated with an attempt to discover and apply backstairs influence--those who have the power of making appointments in the church, the chapel, or the meeting-house, are studied, and their opportunities to remove a non-unionist taken advantage of by clerical "By-ends," who endeavour to shape their judgment according to that of their patrons. This dishonesty reacts upon itself. Men who preach habitually one set of doctrines to a congregation, tie themselves and their understanding down to the low level of the majority of mediocrities; and as this level has, under such circumstances, a tendency to lower itself, the clergy have been compelled to fall, with their patrons, far down in the intellectual scale, and the intelligence and educational status of ministers of all denominations sinks annually lower. The proprieties of society prevent me from repeating what has come to my ears from the lips or pens of distinguished clerics. It will be enough if I utter my belief that one or more outspoken laymen will do more good to religion, and advance the interests of society more, than all ecclesiastical unionists. In this and the preceding volumes it has been my aim to be thoroughly honest. In some things of small moment, such as Greek accents, Hebrew points, &c., it is probable I have been faulty. I will even allow, willingly, that a more perfect Hebrew scholar than myself may esteem my etymons fanciful and incorrect. My work having been done in the midst of constant interruptions, I concede that, to accomplished bookworms, it must appear disjointed. But, with all its faults, it is honest; and, being so, I claim the right to challenge any one who chooses to enter the lists, and encounter me honourably, to a knightly combat. I am sure that my aim has been, and is yet, to elicit truth. To me vituperation, because I have run foul of what are called established doctrines, has no more influence than it had upon the prime movers of any revolution. A foul blow, such as iniquitous misrepresentation, would probably anger me for a moment, yet it would nerve me, in the course of a few hours, to make an onslaught more furious than ever. With a literary rascal one cannot observe the strict laws of knighthood, except indeed, those which govern the relations of the noble and the varlet. I make this challenge the more boldly, because the so-called orthodox cannot persecute me by those meannesses which they employ against each other. Having no ecclesiastical status, I have no penalty to dread from frightened bishops or malignant priests. In the face of such a defiance the clerical party must fight fairly, or slink away as cravens. One condition, however, I must make with any one who enters the lists--viz., that any misrepresentation, such as that made about Bishop Colenso by Dr Browne of the See of Winchester, shall be regarded as _ipso facto_--a signal of defeat. To return to the idea which is enunciated at the early part of this essay, let us contemplate what would be, or rather, what ought to be, the duty of an honest man, whose aim is to defend the faith which he professes, and to prove that the book which he reveres is deserving of his confidence. It is probable that, if a merchant had in his possession a bill, or promissory note, which some person had examined carefully, and pronounced to be a forgery, he would never think of parading it before his customers as a valid "asset." Yet, as I write the sentence, memory recalls to my mind that traders have done this very thing, and have counted what they ought to have known were bad debts, or fraudulent bills of exchange, amongst their securities for money; and that, when the parties so acting have become bankrupt, their proceedings have been severely punished by the authorities, as being dishonest and fraudulent. The analogy is an useful one, inasmuch as it enables me to ask the question--"Ought the morality of a 'divine' to be inferior to that practised by a merchant or banker?" Still further, let us inquire whether we should have a high opinion of a trader, who endeavoured to palm off upon us, as a genuine diamond, an article which had been publicly declared to be a bit of "paste," and whether we should be satisfied with his excuse--"I believe everything is a gem that goes by the name of a precious stone." In the course of this and our preceding volumes we have, as plainly as words could express our meaning, enunciated our conclusions upon certain Biblical difficulties. We have, at least, endeavoured to be honest; we have not misrepresented those with whose opinions we differ, nor have we tried to shirk any question, however difficult it may have been. We claim a corresponding degree of honesty from those who profess to be authorised guides--and certainly are in the position at present of national leaders in religion. We are not like an unfortunate clerk in "holy orders," who can be silenced by law. We are, on the contrary, a stranger knight who comes to a tourney, and claims the right to combat with the most redoubtable of the champions of their court and kingdom. Still further, we assume the power to write those down as cowards who, upon any pretence whatever, decline to compete in the lists with us. In the days of chivalry there was not a knight who would not have been regarded as "craven," if he declined a combat because his challenger did not speak or write French correctly, or had a speck of rust on his armour, a dint in his shield, or a hole in his breastplate. Yet, in these degenerate days, we see that poltroons refuse to entertain the arguments of a writer who, from any cause whatever, appears to be inaccurate in Hebrew points, or consonants, or Greek accents, or transliteration. For ourselves, we regard every excuse which is framed to avoid meeting a fairly stated argument as a proof of weakness, and when it is uttered by a professional champion, as an act of cowardice. When such champions are paid by a state to uphold the honour of their country, to avoid a challenge by evasion is dishonesty. There was, however, in knightly days, some established law of chivalry that no champion need fight a "squire" or "varlet;" but, on the other hand, no nobleman could refuse to enter the lists on the plea that his challenger had a different faith to his own. Combats between Christians and Paynim were common. Consequently, we cannot regard a bishop justified in declining a fair challenge, because he is invited to enter the lists by an "Infidel." Considering myself as an university graduate and an English gentleman, entitled to give a literary challenge, I make no scruple to enter the lists, and invite champions to break a lance with me in favour of their patron saint or lady. I assert that their tutelary saints--Adam, Abraham, David, Moses, Solomon, and the prophets, are imaginary beings, or, where real, were not as worthy as they are supposed to have been. I defy scholars to prove that the Israelites were ever, as a body, in Egypt; that they were delivered therefrom by Moses; that the people wandered during forty years in "the desert;" received a code of laws from Jehovah on Sinai; and were, in any sense whatever of the words, "the chosen people of God." I assert that the whole history of the Old Testament is untrue, with the exception of a few parts which tell of unimportant events--e.g., it is probable that the Jews fought with their neighbours, as the Swiss have done in modern days--but I do not believe the tale about Samson any more than that of William Tell. I assert that there is not a single true prophecy in the whole Bible, which can be proved to have been written before the event to which it is assumed to point, or which is superior, in any way, to the "oracles" delivered in various ancient lands. I assert that the whole of what, is called the Mosaic law had no existence in the days of David, Solomon, and the early Hebrew chieftains--or kings--if they are thought to deserve the title. Here there is no room for evasion--the issue is clear; the cause to be adjudged by combat is unmistakable. As the weapons on both sides must necessarily be literary--the pen, and not lance or spear, it is advisable to say a few words thereupon. In argument I do not recognize that style of logic which considers that the words "it may be" are equal to "it is." I am induced to make this remark, because in theological works, the two forms are constantly used as if they were identical. Many years ago, a near relative, staying in my house, was preparing for ordination in the Church of England, and amongst other hooks, had a certain work of the late Cardinal Wiseman, for perusal--with the intention of collecting materials for refuting it. He told me that the Papal Archbishop was too strong for him, and requested my aid. As a result, I became familiar, not only with many dogmatic writings of the Roman, but also of the Anglican, Church. All of them had, in my estimation, the same logical fault. Their authors imagined that any given point is proved when it can be shown that the occurrence in question _may_ have happened. At a subsequent period I discovered that this was the prevalent argument amongst writers in my own profession. It has, indeed, been supposed generally, that success in proving an opponent to be wrong, is the same as demonstrating your own propositions to be right. The writers in the _Speaker's Commentary_ upon the Bible have not advanced beyond this. A thousand such commonplaces as fill its pages, are worthless to the philosophical inquirer, and I no more regard them, than a knight would a targe and lance made of barley-sugar. My challenge, however, is not confined to the subject of the Old Testament; I affirm that the New Testament is equally untrue--although not to the same degree. Yet, as in the latter, there are not so many asserted facts, there cannot be so many points for cavil. To be more specific: I assert that the history of Jesus was framed upon that of Sakya Muni, and very probably at Alexandria, long after the death of the son of Mary. I do not deny the existence of Jesus; but I assert that every miracle which is told respecting him--and the narrative of his miraculous conception, and of the marvels occurring at his birth, have no foundation in fact. It is unnecessary to repeat what I have already said upon such points as "original sin," "the fall of man," and "the need of a Saviour." In what I now say or write, I am perfectly honest. I have not been paid to preach a certain doctrine, whether my understanding assents to it or not I affirm, moreover, that the comfort in which I live, is wholly unbroken by any fears for the future; and that I look back upon the period when my days and nights were made wretched by superstition, and rejoice that I am emancipated from the shackles of Ecclesiastics. "The Church," and every sect of it, which is known in Christendom, is, in my opinion, unfit to be trusted by thoughtful human beings. Its votaries are only happy in proportion to their power of forgetting its doctrines, or explaining them away. Yet all, as I said in the first chapter of my second volume, agree "to make believe," and by dint of persistently doing so, end in persuading themselves that they are clothed with lovely garments--which have no existence, save in the opinion of the wearer. My whole life has been passed amongst religionists of more or less piety. I have known them in public and in private, in their connection with the world, and their relations with wife, children, and servants. I am also familiar with some who are avowed free-thinkers. As an impartial judge, and certainly having the desire to be an honest one, I declare that the so-called irreligion or infidelity of the latter makes them better citizens of the world, better fathers of a family, and better priests to those who are struggling with misfortune, than the religion--orthodox or non-conformist--of the former induces them to become. If there were in reality, as there was once in fable, a domain in which every one was constrained to speak the truth; and if, still farther, one could carry thereto every religionist, and inquire into his belief, I feel sure that those whom the professed Christians affect to despise as infidels, would be the only ones who would be found faithful in private, to the principles which they profess in public. If, for an example, the question were put to both "What is honesty?" the answer of the free-thinkers would be--"Doing to others, in every position of life, that which you would wish others to do to you;" the reply of the dogmatic would be the same, with the important addition--"Except in matters of faith." My readers must not imagine that I am hasty or unscrupulous in what is passing from my mind to my pen. There never was a time in which I have felt more deeply that my duty, as an independent man, is to speak plainly. On the other hand, there is not one single religionist of my acquaintance, to whom the words--"Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of" (Luke ix. 55)--do not apply. On the shelves of my library are books written by almost all classes of authors, and in many different languages. It has been a self-enforced duty to compare their contents, and to endeavour, still further, to elicit from those who are not writers, information which may assist me in forming a correct idea upon any particular point. Up to the present time I have not found one single work, which has relation to the religion of opponents, and is written by a parson, thoroughly trustworthy or honest Everyone is guilty, either of the _suppressio veri_ or _suggestio falsi_--generally of both. A book emanating from a priest is bad, that from a bishop is worse. Colenso, whom I regard as the only thoroughly truthful member of the episcopal hierarchy, is the one who is more foully treated by religionists than any other minister has ever been--"Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis, 'tis true." We may be pardoned, if we close this chapter by the expression of our views as to the religion which will prevail when men have thought as much upon their future life as upon their present, and are honest with themselves: 1. They will try to form some distinct idea of what would be to them a heaven; but, as they will be wholly unsuccessful, they will cease to speculate upon it. 2. They will cease to fear a hell, knowing that, if there be any immortal part of man, it must be immaterial; they will not believe that it can be tormented by material fires, forks, and furies. 3. They will cease to pay any attention to men who call themselves prophets, divine messengers, or vicars of God on earth, whether they use lying wonders or not. 4. Instead of constantly cogitating how much they can sin against, and yet get pardon from, some unknown deity, they will recognize the laws of nature for their guide, and live in communities as their reason dictates. The future will be left wholly in the power of the Creator. 5. There will be no belief in a trinity, in a virgin mother of God, in intercessors of any kind whatever between human beings and the invisible God; each man and woman will be independent and alone in the presence of the Supreme. 6. Man will no longer try to usurp the place of God, and persecute his fellow mortal on religious grounds. 7. There will be no priests or ministers of religion; but there will be instructors in science, in the laws of life, and moral order; there will be magistrates to enforce social propriety, and establishments where the insane and the criminal can be secluded. 8. There will be no strife about religion, for each will attend to his own personal concerns. 9. The laws of nature will be studied as regards marriage and family; the infected will not be allowed to perpetuate a feeble race, nor the diseased infant be pampered, that it may live to a sickly and useless maturity.* * We may add, that there will then be neither silly women nor crotchety men, who will encourage free trade in fornication, and the diffusion of loathsome diseases, and endeavour to promote unnecessary suffering by their opposition to the methods of avoidance. 10. No law will be made but that which is drawn from a study of the ways of the Creator, and the proper requirements of His creatures. 11. Every pretender to revelation, or inspiration, will be incarcerated as a rogue or a lunatic. 12. The aim of all will be individual and general comfort, and as much happiness as is compatible with humanity. When each does to others as he would be done by, the millennium, so much talked of, will have come. APPENDIX. 27th March, 1875. Dear Dr Inman, At pp. 11 and 81 of your new volume, the proof-sheets of which you were good enough to show me, you intimate that an earlier origin can be found for all Hebrew feasts and observances excepting the Sabbath. It would appear, from discoveries made and works published since you began to write, that you need not make even this exception. There are, I think, plain indications of a Sabbath among the Egyptians, and proofs of its observance by the Assyrians. Dr G. G. Zerffi, in a note appended to Mr Tyssen's _Origin of the Week_* says--"Judging from the Egyptian mythology, we are justified in assuming that they had some correct notions of the division of time. Their eight gods of the first order point to an incarnation of the cosmical forces, or the planetary system. The twelve gods of the second order undoubtedly presided over the twelve months of the year; whilst the seven gods of the third order were to watch over the seven days of the week..... The Teutons have inherited the division, not only of the week in seven days, but also the names by which these days are called, from the Indians....." (Bohlen's _Das alte Indien_; _Toth_, by Dr Uhlemann; and Bunsen's _Egypt's Place in History_; Tacitus, Suidas, Pliny, and Amosis). * The Origin of the Week Explained, by A. D. Tyasen, B.C.L., M.A.; Williams & Noigate, 1875. These, perhaps, are only what I have called them, indications of a Sabbath, since it is conceivable that a week of seven days might exist without one day being more sacred than another. A plainer indication may be found in the Hymn to Amen-Ka, which exists upon a hieratic papyrus, judged to be of the fourteenth century, B.C., and purporting to be only a copy of an earlier writing. I quote four lines, and call attention to the fourth:-- O! Ra adored in Aptu [Thebes]: High-crowned in the house of the obelisk [Heliopolis]: King (Ani) Lord of the New-moon festival: To whom the sixth and seventh days are sacred.* When we leave Egypt for Assyria, we pass from indication to proof. At p. 12 of George Smith's _Assyrian Discoveries_,** the author says--"In the year 1869 I discovered, among other things, a curious religious calendar of the Assyrians, in which every month is divided into four weeks, and the seventh days, or 'Sabbaths' are marked out as days on which no work should be undertaken." More precise information as to these Sabbath-days is given by Rev. A. H Sayce, M.A., in _Records of the Past_, vol. I., p. 164, where the following words occur:--"The Babylonian year was divided into twelve months of thirty days each, with an intercalary month every six years.... According to the lunar division, the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days were days of 'rest' on which certain works were forbidden." * Translated by C. W. Goodwin, M.A., in Records of the Past, vol. II Bagster & Sons. ** Sampson Low, & Co., 1875. The Assyrian legends tell of seven evil spirits who rebelled against the gods; of the goddess Ishtar descending to Hades, and passing through seven gates; of a deluge, the duration of which was seven days, &c., &c. Mr H. F. Talbot, F.R.S., speaks of the great degree of holiness which the Assyrians attributed to the number seven, and where that number was sacred, the seventh day could scarcely escape special honours. _Why_ the number seven was sacred, or whether the Babylonian Sabbath was at first any more than an unlucky day, like the sailor's Friday, when it was sowing for the whirlwind to begin any enterprise, are other questions. I am, yours faithfully, GEORGE ST. CLAIR. These observations of Mr St Clair deserve attention, for they show that, from an ancient period, a sixth and seventh day were holy in Egypt, although we cannot discover from the context whether they were reckoned after the first day of a year, a month, or a week. But this is of small importance, as I do not find evidence that the Jews borrowed any Egyptian ideas, even if they ever knew any. It is far more important to know, that in the Assyrian calendar the seventh, fourteenth, nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-eighth days of the month were days of "rest," for all Biblical testimony points to the adoption of the Jewish Sabbath in the time of the second Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel--i.e., not very long after the Assyrians made their power felt in Palestine. When we consider the propensity which the Hebrews had to copy parts of the religion of those who conquered them, it is highly probable that some astute priest of the Jews adopted the idea of consecrating a seventh day, as their Mesopotamian adversaries had done, to the most high god Saturn; and as it was desirable to have some pretence for the introduction of the Sabbath, it was natural that it should be put under the same head as the new moon, and that stories should be invented, and gradually circulated, of the vast antiquity of the new institution. It is clear, from the Jewish history, that the Sabbath was not generally known amongst the common people until long after the return from Babylon. Had it been so, Ezra would not have thundered so energetically in its favour. The same remark applies to Nehemiah. I have elsewhere remarked that the Sabbath was unknown to David and Solomon, and may now add that any one who will read the episode in the history of Elijah, recorded 1 Kings xix. 7, 8, will see that this prophet could have known nothing, and the angel who spoke to him could have known no more, of the Mosaic Sabbath, inasmuch as the latter directs, and the former obeys, an order which must have involved a breaking of the "rest" of at least five, and possibly six, Sabbaths. The whole life, indeed, of Elijah shows a perfect ignorance of this so-called Mosaic institution.