TOalbone i raham Date. Vol... How acquired Price, $. PLEASE READ, REMEMBER AND RETURN. GIFT OF VH u;. THE GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION THE GENESIS AND GEOWTH or RELIGION THE L. P. STONE LECTURES FOR 1892, AT PRINCETON THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW JERSEY. BY THE REV. S. H. KELLOGG, D.D. OF TORONTO,' CANADA AUTHOR OF " THE LIGHT OF ASIA AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD, "A GRAMMAR OF THE HIKDI LANGUAGE AND DIALECTS," ETC., ETC. gorfc MACMILLAN AND CO. AND LONDON 1892 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY MACMILLAN & CO. TYPOGRAPHY BY J. S. GUSHING & Co., BOSTON, U.S. A, PRESSWORK BY BERWICK & SMITH, BOSTON, U.S.A. PREFACE. THE Lectures herewith presented to the public were delivered in February, 1892, by invitation of the Faculty of the Theological Seminary in Prince- ton, New Jersey, to the students of that institution ; and constitute the "L. P. Stone Course" for that year. The limitation imposed by the terms of the L. P. Stone endowment, that the lectures of the course shall not exceed eight in number, made it impossible to attempt an exhaustive discussion of the question of the origin and growth of religion. Hence it seemed best to confine the course to a brief con- sideration of those theories regarding this subject, which appear at present to have the most extensive influence among those with whom the students in our theological schools are likely to have most to do ; and, in the constructive part of the argument, to present chiefly such facts and considerations as appeared likely to be of most practical service to ministers and intelligent laymen, for the defence and V 371514 VI PREFACE. confirmation of the teachings of Holy Scripture regarding the beginning and subsequent develop- ment of the religious life of man. It may properly be remarked that Lectures III. and IV. are based upon articles of the author in review of the theories of Professor Max Miiller and Mr. Herbert Spencer, which were published a few years ago in the " Bibliotheca Sacra," Oberlin, Ohio ; but have been prepared in the light of and with reference to the most recent published works of the authors reviewed. The Lectures are now published in the hope that they may be helpful to many more than the students for whom they were originally prepared. S. H. KELLOGG. TORONTO, CANADA, August, 1892. TABLE OF CONTENTS. LECTURE I. WHAT is RELIGION? PAGES Origin and growth of religion; importance and difficulty of the question Difficulty of defining religion ; must include atheistic faiths Definitions of Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Reville, Flint ; of Feuerbach, Gruppe Defini- tions grounding religion in feeling, as of Goethe, Teichmuller, Schleiermacher Religion not a mere sense of dependence Definitions- centring religion in the will, as of Hegel, Caird Max Miiller's definition criticised Definition assumed in these lectures ; re- lates religion to the intellect; the emotions; the will Justification of the definition 1-27 LECTURE II. RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. FETISHISM AND ANIMISM. Naturalistic theories of origin of religion commonly assume origin of man by mere natural descent ; necessitates denial of primitive monotheism The assumption not justifiable Testimony of Yirchow ; of A. R. Wallace Proof of origin by descent not proof of origin by descent alone A. R. Wallace again Bearing of question on vii Vlll TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGES origin of religion Fetishism and animism defined Tiele's theory; primitive man regarded nature as living Would not account for fetish-worship, only for ani- mism Tiele's argument criticised Low intellectual capacity of primitive man unproved Facts against this Modern savages not primitive types Proof from their languages Admissions of Max Miiller ; of Her- bert Spencer Belief in a personal God coexists with animism and fetishism Sir John Lubbock's mistake Degree of religious development not conditioned by de- gree of civilization Fetishism and animism not most common among most ancient peoples ; e.g., China, India, Egypt Ideas of God, responsibility, sin, not derivable from animism or fetishism . 28-63 LECTURE III. HERBERT SPENCER'S GHOST THEORY. Ancestor-worship the earliest form of religion Belief in spirit and its survival after death to be accounted for Mr. Spencer's explanation Primitive man observed that some things had a visible and invisible state ; might change their substance, and form ; hence inferred a double of himself and all things This confirmed by dreams, especially of the dead ; whence survival of soul inferred ; and post mortem reward and retribution Idea of God evolved from idea of a ghost The theory applied to fetish-worship; to nature- worship Mr. Spencer's ad- mission ; modern savages not primitive, but degraded men A dilemma ; facts versus theory Mr. Spencer's a priori primitive man; a petitio principii His theory denies innate ideas; inadequate to account for phenomena of sin ; for whole content of idea of God ; as Cause ; TABLE OF CONTENTS. IX PAGES Moral Governor; as offended with man Ancestor- worship not most common among lowest races Idea of God coexists with ancestor-worship ; no proof that the latter was derived from the former; witness China, India, Egypt Mr. Spencer's argument from names for God ; not sustained by facts His appeal to the Old Testa- ment Conclusion 64-109 LECTURE IV. PROFESSOR MAX MULLER'S THEORY OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION. Professor Max Miiller's attitude toward Christianity and the Scripture records Makes religion to beginning with sense-perception of the infinite Classification of sense- percepts ; tangible, semi-tangible, intangible ; the last- named the earliest deities Primitive Indo- Aryan religion Progress from henotheism to monotheism Origin of religion explained by the origin of language His argu- ment based on erroneous definition of the infinite ; on sensationalist philosophy Senses cannot give idea of the infinite Idea of moral obligation not derivable from observation of physical order Sense-perception cannot originate idea of cause; of God as Moral Governor; of responsibility, sin, and guilt Argument from history of Indo-Aryan religion inconclusive Indo-Aryan religion not primitive Order of religious development in India not as required by his theory Recognition of a " Heaven- Father " earliest "Henotheism," the first step in religious declension Terminus of Indian development pantheism Pantheism confounded with monotheism Significant Hindoo appreciation of Professor Max Miiller's Lectures on Religion 110-150 X TABLE OF CONTENTS. LECTURE V. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. PAGES Two factors in genesis of religion The Subjective factor : the constitution of man's nature Man has by nature a religious faculty Proof in the universality of religion Universal sense of dependence on an invisible Power Laws of thought compel belief in unconditioned Being Conscience constrains belief in a moral Power above man In all this man contrasted with highest brutes Objection : Many races without religion Pre- sumption against correctness of this assertion ; often based on narrow definition of religion Religious beliefs of savages difficult to discover Assertion of races with- out religion often disproved after full information Objection: Many individual atheists Exceptions to a law do not warrant denial of a law The Objective factor in genesis of religion : a revelation of God Proof of such a revelation Religious beliefs, spontaneous, univer- sal, intensely strong, persistent This not disproved, but confirmed by history of Buddhism ; unaccountable if no revelation Denial of revelation logically involves universal nescience Revelation of God in conscience ; in the mind ; in the universe of matter and mind Ad- mission of Reville Recapitulation 151-181 LECTURE VI. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION. SIN AS A FACTOR. Development in religion ; not inconsistent with super- naturalism Primitive religion elementary Reville's misunderstanding of Christian belief on this point The TABLE OF CONTENTS, XI PAGES elementary not necessarily erroneous Has monotheism been the beginning or the terminus of the development ? Xo " idle question " Reville's assertion ; " polytheism original" Is this true? Order of development from beginning not ascertainable historically The order in historic times presumably that of prehistoric times Argument from antecedent probability applied Signifi- cance of phenomena of sin Mistaken assumption that religious development has been normal ; hence religious progress must have been the law Reville's assumption Sin involves consciousness of the morally abnormal This assumed in all religions ; a potent factor in their development; unscientific to ignore this Sin involves religious degradation ; by dulling conscience ; by causing dread of God; as involving desire of what moral law forbids Hence false conceptions of Deity ; predisposition toward atheism, agnosticism, pantheism Influence of pantheism ; diminishes sinner's few by denying holiness of God ; His personality and moral government ; makes sin a necessary stage in evolution Influence of polythe- ism; lowers ideal of God; therewith lessens sense of moral antagonism between man and God Xo tendency in sin to self-improvement, but the reverse ; hence, that man, as sinful, should have ever tended by nature to religious elevation, impossible 182-202 LECTURE VII. HISTORIC FACTS REGARDING THE ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. Coexistent polytheism and monotheism of ancient Egypt Monotheism most prevalent at first; testimony of Rouge and Reville Egyptian degradation of religion Xll TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGES Earliest deities of Indo-Aryans " Henotheisiii " Vedic monotheism Development of pantheism; the Upanishads; the "Six Systems"; triumph of Vedantic pantheism Modern Puranic Hindooism Failure of attempts at reform No development of monotheism in India Hindoo testimony Zoroastrianism Rela- tion to Vedic nature- worship Persian dualism not primitive The monotheism of the Gathas Zoroaster preached monotheism to idolaters Development of Persian dualism Modern Parseeism Religion of primi- tive Babylonians The " Magical Texts " The " Peni- tential Psalms " Growth of nature-worship Shemitic influence Philosophic speculations No tendency to monotheism Chinese religion Worship of heaven and earth ; of ancestors Professor Legge's views Religious attitude of Confucius ; of Lao Tze Religious beliefs of savage peoples The Santalis ; the Kolhs ; the Aimares ; West African negroes;, American Indians No Indo- Germanic or Turanian people has ever shown a native tendency to monotheism Inference as to primitive form of religion 203-247 LECTURE VIII. SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. CONCLUSION. Asserted exception to the law of religious degeneration The Shemitic race All existing monotheism of Shemitic origin " Monotheistic genius " of Shemites ; Renan's assertion " Did Israel produce the one God, or did the one God produce Israel?" Original Shemitic con- ceptions of God; superior to those of most peoples; illustrated by names for God Exceptions ; the Egyptians ; Bactrians Religious degeneration of TABLE OF CONTENTS. Xlll PAGES Euphrates Shemites Primitive Arabian Sabeism ; later worship of trees and stones Mohammed's concessions to Arabian idolatry Alleged Hebrew evolution of monotheism Hebrew records affirm a universal tendency to forsake the one God Patriarchal times Israel in Egypt; in the wilderness ; under the judges; under the kings Total lapse of the ten tribes Hebrew monothe- ism since Babylonian captivity ; cannot be explained as a natural development ; was in spite of natural tendencies Recapitulation Facts irreconcilable with supposition of a gradual evolution of monotheism from some other form of religious belief Relation of historical monothe- ism to supernatural revelation Conclusion . . . 248-275 THE , GENESIS AND GEOWTH OF KELIGION, LECTURE I. WHAT IS KELIGION? THAT the question of the origin of religion is of fundamental importance will be evident to any one who considers how profoundly and extensively the religious beliefs and practices of men have affected the historical development of the race. One may be a total disbeliever in religion, regarding it in all its forms as a baseless superstition, always evidencing a de- gree of intellectual immaturity or imbecility ; yet the fact still remains of the almost uni- versal prevalence of religion in all ages, and of the mighty influence which religious beliefs have had, both on individual conduct and on the history of mankind. Hence the question B 1 2 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF KEL1G1ON. as to the origin of religion has ever been one of the greatest interest to every thoughtful and philosophic mind. But the problem of ascertaining the genesis of religion, if approached only from the his- toric side, has proved one of the greatest diffi- culty. For the history of no nation reaches back to a point anywhere near the absolute beginning, either of religion, or of the human race. The earliest records show us religion prevailing in very early times as now ; but those most ancient times are still far this side the beginning of religion, or of human life. Evidently the solution of the problem must be sought in some other way. Historic investiga- tion will no doubt be useful, and is, indeed, indispensable in its place, but alone it will not suffice. Before entering upon any examination of certain theories which have been proposed to account for the existence of religion, it is nec- essary, first of all, in order to clear thinking, to determine precisely what we are to under- stand by this term, " religion." The definition WHAT IS RELIGION? 3 of such a familiar word might, at first, seem a sufficiently easy matter; but it is evident, from the great number and diversity of the definitions which have been given, that practi- cally it has been found very difficult. Nor, when we observe how very numerous and how exceedingly diverse have been the manifesta- tions of religion, can one wonder that to find a definition which should comprehend all these, has proved so hard. Most would doubtless say, at first, that religion certainly has to do with a man's relation to God, and would not object, perhaps, to such a definition as that of Seneca : " Cognoscere Deum et imitari " ; or, in modern times, that of Mr. Martineau, namely : " A belief in an ever-living God, i.e. a Divine Mind and Will ruling the universe, and holding moral relations with mankind " ; or, again, that of Professor Flint : " Religion is man's belief in a Being, or beings, mightier than himself, and inaccessible to his senses, but not indifferent to his sentiments and actions, with the feelings and practices which flow from such belief." It is an excellence of this last definition that 4 GENESIS AND GKOWTH OF RELIGION. it fully recognises the fact that religion is a complex experience, affecting man's whole nature, as a rational and moral agent, his intellect, emotions, and will. We must, how- ever, regard this, in common with the other definitions mentioned, as open to the very serious objection, that inasmuch as it assumes the existence of a God or gods, it thereby excludes certain systems of belief and practice, universally regarded as religions, which yet ignore or deny the being of a God. Of such, the chief illustration, of course, is Buddhism. For by this time it should be regarded as finally demonstrated that such scholars as Professors Max Miiller and Oldenberg, Sir Monier Monier- Williams, Rhys Davids, and others are right when they assure us that the original orthodox Buddhism, if it did not formally deny, yet utterly declined to recognise in any way the existence of a God, in any sense of that term. If not dogmatically atheistic, yet the whole original Buddhist system of doctrine and practice was so completely independent of any reference to a God, whether personal or imper- WHAT IS RELIGION? 5 sonal, that if one could conceive that atheism should be finally demonstrated, not a proposi- tion or a law in Buddhism would require on that account to be in the least modified. And yet, with practical unanimity, it is agreed that Buddhism must be accounted a religion ; a fact which is the more significant that it is also among the most widely accepted of all religions. It has been indeed rejoined to this, that Buddhism, nevertheless, however inconsistently, does recognise the being of a God. It is a fact that the Buddha himself is worshipped by many as a God; and that f even in the earliest Buddhist authorities, the existence of the gods of Hindooism is taken for granted. As for the deification of the Buddha, however, it must be remembered that this did not belong to the original Buddhism, but is a very late develop- ment, which is even yet confined to the Northern school of Buddhism. The fact is indeed of great significance, in that it shows how impossible it is for a man to rest in a religion which does not present to him a personal object of worship ; but shall we 6 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. therefore venture to say that until the Buddha was deified there was, properly speaking, no Buddhist religion ? As for the recognition of the gods of the Hindoo pantheon, which we find in the primitive Buddhism, their position in Buddhism is so different from that which they have in Hindooism, that practically they retain but the name. The idea of the dependence of man upon the real or imaginary beings regarded as gods, which is essential to the conception of deity, and is found in all polytheistic religions, is absent from the Buddhist conception of the gods and their relation to man. The gods themselves might all be left out of Buddhism, and its general character would not thereby be affected. We must therefore still insist that while Buddhism, by general consent, is judged to be a religion, it is yet wholly destitute of any recognition of a God, or of gods, as standing in any necessary relation to mankind. But if we must then reject the definitions above specially mentioned, as too narrow, because excluding by their terms such a widely accepted religion as this, we must reject also all others, WHAT IS RELIGION f 7 which, in like manner, either explicitly or im- plicitly, assume the recognition of a Deity, or of deities, as essential to religion. Such, for example, is that of Spinoza, that " religion is the love of God, founded on a knowledge of his Divine perfections " ; or that of Kant, that religion essentially consists in " the recognition of our duties as Divine commandments " ; or the closely similar definition of Fichte, that religion " is conscious morality ; a morality which, in virtue of that consciousness, is mindful of its origin from God "; or, among the latest, that of Professor Reville, that " religion is the deter- mination of human life by the sentiment of a bond uniting the human mind to that myste- rious Mind whose domination of the world and of itself it recognises, and to whom it delights in feeling itself united." But in the orthodox Buddhism there is no recognition of a Divine Being who could give commandments, or whose will could be the origin of morality; and whereas the definition of Reville assumes both the existence of the human mind as distinct from the body, as also of a superior Mind, 8 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. manifest in the world, Buddhism, formally and in explicit terms, refuses to admit the existence of either. Without multiplying illustrations of definitions of this class, we may now glance at others which err in the opposite direction. Among the most extreme is that of Feuerbach, that religion is " man's worship of himself idealised"; the gods are " nothing but the wishes of men conceived as realised." The essence, therefore, of religion, consists in selfish desire. This thought has been elaborated by the positivist Gruppe, whose view^s have been set forth and % effectively criticised by Professor Max Miiller in his " Natural Religion." l Religious belief is "a doctrine professing to be able to produce union with a Being or the attainment of a state w r hich, properly speaking, lies beyond the sphere of human striving and attainment." Not only does Gruppe deny the universality of religion, and therefore its necessity in some form, but he ventures to maintain the astounding proposition that religion is a comparatively recent invention. 1 Op. cit. pp. 74-80. WHAT IS RELIGION? 9 Despite modern discoveries in Assyriology and Egyptology, lie doubts if the existence of religion can be proven for any period earlier than 1000 B.C. He supposes religion to have been an invention of some one, and its so general acceptance to have been due to three causes, namely : " the unconscious vanity of its founders, a belief in the happiness which it procures to its believers, and the substantial advantages which society derives from it." To this theory that religion is in the last analysis a form of selfishness, we may reply that so to regard it, is to set at defiance alike the general testimony of human consciousness and the most manifest facts of history. The religion of millions is directly opposed to their selfishness, which it constantly condemns. Re- ligion has, in fact, been the chief spring of whatever of unselfishness has brightened the history of our race. Nor even were the contrary assertion conceded, would it yet be explained how, even so, religion should have secured such universal acceptance. A man may be selfish in the highest degree, but he is not on that ac- 10 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. count able to believe in the existence of anything and everything which for selfish reasons he may regard as desirable. Surely there must have been some reason besides human selfishness for the so extensive acceptance of religion. Many philosophers and theologians have made religion to consist in desire, or feeling. So the author of "Natural Religion" defines religion as "a habitual and permanent feeling of admira- tion"; Mill, as a "craving for an ideal object"; Goethe, as " a feeling of reverence for what is above, around, and what is beneath us." Teich- miiller makes religion to consist of feelings of fear, of aesthetic feelings, such as admiration for the beautiful, and of moral feelings. Among definitions of this class, most impor- tant and influential, probably, has been that of Schleiermacher, who says that religion " consid- ered simply in itself, is neither a knowing or a doing, but a determination of the feelings." 1 That which distinguishes the religious feeling from all other feelings is said to be this, that " we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely 1 "Der Christliche Glaube," 5te Ausg., S. 6. WHAT IS RELIGION ? 11 dependent." * It should be well understood that Schleiermacher did not by these words intend to exclude either knowledge or action from religion, but only to deny that the essence of religion consisted in either of these. He argues that religion cannot consist in knowing, else the man who knows most would be the most religious ; 2 neither in action, else the religious- ness of an action would be determined by its own inherent character, as bad or good, as significant or absurd ; but actions of every variety, the best and the worst, the most significant, and the most silly and absurd, are recognised by some as religious ; whence he infers that the religiousness of any act must be determined, not by its own essential character, but by the feeling of which it is the expression. 3 It is to be admitted that this well-known defi- nition rightly calls attention to the fact that a feeling of dependence upon an invisible Power beyond man's control, is manifested, in one form or another, in all religions. Even the Buddhist 1 " Der Christliche Glaube," 5te Ausg., S. 5. 2 Ib. S. 11. a Ib. S. 12. 12 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. regards himself as in bondage, not indeed to a person, but to the mysterious power known as Karma, which has determined all his thinking, feeling, and acting, his suffering and enjoyment. Nevertheless, as has often been pointed out, the definition of Schleiermacher is inadequate. It is so because, on the one hand, a feeling is inconceivable, which does not suppose a previous perception or cognition of something, as its occasion ; and, on the other hand, this feeling of dependence, which is an element in all religion, universally prompts to action. It is not accurate, therefore, to represent feeling as any more essential to religion than knowledge or action. Nor, again, although all religion expresses a feeling of dependence, is it true that this is the only feeling which is essential to religion. It was Hegel's rather rough criticism of this definition, that if it were true that the sentiment of dependence was the one essential element in religion, then a dog would be the most religious of all creatures ; a remark which must be admitted to be not wholly without reason. WHAT IS RELIGION ? 13 Hegel's own definition, however, we must also reject as inadequate, that religion is " perfect freedom." In this we understand him to refer to the fact that in the consciousness of every free moral agent, there is a contrast and a con- flict between the actual and the ideal. And whereas man, in his efforts to realise the moral and spiritual ideal, ever feels himself resisted and thwarted by forces without and within him, it is, as he regards it, distinctive of religion that man therein escapes from this bondage, so that his inner impulses are no longer in conflict with his aspirations after moral and spiritual perfec- tion ; and in reaching forth unto perfection, he is thus thwarted no longer. The thought has been finely expressed by Principal Caird, who tells us that it is of " the very essence of religion that the Infinite has ceased . to be merely a far- off vision of spiritual attainment, and ideal of indefinite future perfection, and has become a present reality." l But if the definition of Schleiermacher was at 1 " Philosophy of Religion," p. 294. Italics not Principal Caird' s. 14 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. fault in that it centred religion in the feelings, as that of Fichte, in knowledge, so is this faulty in that it centres all in the will. It may be readily granted that religion concerns the will, and that so closely and necessarily, that where there is no willing, there cannot be said to be religion. But we can no more restrict religion to the volitional, than to the emotional or the cognitive faculty. It has also been justly objected to this defini- tion, and to others essentially like it, that it logically excludes progress in religion, in that it apparently disallows the existence of religion where anything less than this perfect spiritual freedom and inner harmony of the soul with God is found. Nor is the answer which Principal Caird has given to this objection satisfactory. He has said that the religious life is indeed a progressive one ; but that the infinite ideal is not realised " only in the way of adding perpetually to the sum of its spiritual attainments," in which case the infinite perfection of the ideal "would be forever unattainable." * The infinitude of 1 " Philosophy of Religion," p. 295. WHAT IS RELIGION ? 15 thought, of love and goodness, is " not that which has in it no element of finitude, but that which is determined by nothing external to itself." To attain the ideal in this sense, he says, " consti- tutes the very meaning and essence of religion." For, again explaining himself, he says that religion is "the surrender of the finite will to the infinite, the abnegation of all desire, incli- nation, and volition, which pertain to me as this private individual self, . . . the absolute identification of my will with the will of God." And this " oneness of mind and will, with the Divine mind and will, is not the future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the strug- gle between my false self and that higher self which is at once mine and infinitely more than mine." 1 But, assuredly, there is much in the world which may be truly called religion, which cannot be so described. Surely, Hindoos and Mohammedans are often deeply and in- tensely religious ; yet, from every side we hear 1 "Philosophy of Religion," pp. 296, 297. 16 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. among them the confession, and most of all from their best men, that the struggle between self-will and God's will is not with them at an end. This is not even true of the Christian. It is, instead, his chief trouble that he has not yet reached the absolute identification of his will with the will of God. Like the Apostle Paul, he is constantly constrained to confess, " I find a law that when I would do good, evil is present with me." We conclude, therefore, that all definitions which, more or less explicitly, make religion to consist in " perfect freedom," err, not merely in that they regard only the volitional part of man's nature, but also in that they make that to be of the essence of religion, which only belongs to the complete ideal of the Christian life ; a goal which the most profoundly religious in all lands and ages have the most earnestly and sadly insisted that they had not yet attained. Among the most recent important definitions of religion is that which has been given by Pro- fessor Max Miiller, in the Gilford Lectures for 1888, viz. : " Religion consists in the perception WHAT IS RELIGION? 17 of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man." l This is a considerable improvement on his earlier definition of religion, as given in his lectures on the Science of Religion, in 1873, and repeated, although with less confidence, in the Hibbert Lectures, in 1878; namely, that "religion is a mental faculty which, independent of, nay, in spite of sense and reason, enables man to appre- hend the Infinite, under different names, and under varying disguises." 2 He himself, in these later lectures, justly remarks that in the earlier definition he did not lay sufficient emphasis on the practical side of religion. There is perhaps room in this definition, as not in the former, for the suggestion, at least, of the ideas of law and obligation, as connected with religion. Still the objection holds good against the earlier and the later definition alike, when read in the light of his own explanations, that in them both he uses the word " infinite " in a sense in which it is 1 "Natural Religion," p. 188. 2 " Introduction to the Science of Religion," p. 13; "Origin and Growth of Religion," p. 23. 18 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. rarely, if ever, employed. He defines it as " all that transcends our senses and our reason." l He uses it, therefore, as interchangeable with the words, "the invisible/' "the unknown," the " indefinite." One cannot but feel that, as was not unnatural perhaps for a philologist, he has been misled by an etymology. He has apparently reasoned that since the finite is that which is apprehended by the senses as having limits ; the in-finite is the not-finite, i.e. that which is not apprehended by the senses as having limitations. 2 But surely that is not the sense in which men commonly use this word. In order to perceive this, we only need to apply the word, as used by Professor Max Miiller, to many objects which tran- scend the senses. For example, the human soul transcends the senses. But is it there- fore infinite, as men use that term ? Professor Max Miiller, indeed, apparently limits the application of the word to "the Cause beyond 1 " Origin and Growth of Religion," p. 27. 2 Yet he says, quite correctly, that the infinite ' ' cannot be treated merely as a negative concept." Ib. p. 29. WHAT IS RELIGION ? 19 all causes." 1 But certainly it is no more true of this First Cause than of a multitude of secondary causes, that it transcends the senses. For the immediate causes of a large part of the operations of nature transcend the senses ; shall we, therefore, apply the term " infinite " to these ? If the definition "be correct, why restrict the term to the "Cause beyond all causes"? Perhaps the definition may seem less unsat- isfactory, at the first, to some, because the term " infinite " is so often used as an epithet of the Supreme Being. But in the Pro- fessor's vocabulary this term has no such exalted and precise meaning. This is plain from the words which he substitutes for it as equivalents. For instance, in replying to those of his critics who have complained that they were unable to see any difference between the term "infinite," as employed by him in his argument, and the word " indefinite," he says that he " can quite sympathise with them," because he himself can see " none what- 1 " Natural Religion,' 1 p. 124. 20 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. ever ! " 1 Shall we, then, substitute this latter term, and define religion as " the perception of the indefinite " ? and will this be any more satisfactory, although it is added that in religion " the indefinite " is perceived under such aspects as to influence the moral char- acter of man? Again, Professor Max Miiller rightly remarks that the terms used in a definition of religion should be such as to be applicable to all relig- ions ; and he is at some pains to show that his definition has this excellence. He says: "I know of no religion that cannot be caught in this wide net." 2 We will admit that this may be true of Buddhism, which is his special illus- tration ; but how about its applicability to the Christianity of the New Testament, or to the inner experience of New Testament Christians ? Would it be just to describe the religion of the 1 " Physical Religion," p. 298. He tells us, indeed, that in the Hibbert Lectures he wished to prove " that indefinite and infinite are in reality two names of the same thing"; and that "the In- finite must always remain to us the Indefinite." "Origin and Growth of Religion," p. 36. 2 "Natural Religion," p. 190. WHAT IS RELIGION ? 21 Apostle Paul as a perception by him of the indefinite, in such a way as to influence his conduct ? Will any Christian recognise this as a description of his own case, that in his relig- ious life, his apprehension of the Infinite is nothing more than an apprehension of the in- definite ? Such questions answer themselves, and in the answer condemn the definition be- fore us. Where so many of eminent scholarship and ability have failed, one may well feel diffident in suggesting anything else. But may we venture on something like /the following, as a definition of religion in its broadest sense ? Religion essentially consists in mans appre- hension of his relation to an invisible Power or powers, able to influence his destiny, to which he is necessarily subject, together with the feelings, desires, and actions, which this apprehension calls forth. In justification of this definition it is to be observed, first, that it makes religion to be an experience which has to do equally with every part of our nature. Religion does not consist in 22 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. knowledge merely, nor in feeling merely, nor in desire or willing merely, but in all of these, combined in a necessary and inseparable rela- tion. In the first place, there is in all religion a cognitive element, an apprehension of some- thing supersensual. This apprehension is in- deed variously interpreted by different peoples and races, but always there is an apprehension of something. Without this, obviously, a feel- ing of dependence, for example, could not arise ; much less any desire or action of a religious character. We further define this apprehension to con- sist in the cognition of a Power or powers. Of the nature of such Power or powers nothing is affirmed, so far as the definition is concerned ; it may be real or imaginary, one or many, personal or impersonal. The apprehension, however, becomes religious, if it regard man as dependent in some way on that Power or powers. The definition is therefore applicable to every form of religion, from the lowest superstition to the highest type of Christianity. It applies, for instance, to fetishism. For that which WHAT IS RELIGION ? 23 makes the fetish to the apprehension of the savage that which he imagines it to be, is the belief that, connected with that bit of wood, or bone, or whatever it may be, is an invisible power able to affect his life. The definition applies equally to all pantheistic systems of religion, as, for instance, to Hindooism, whether philosophical or popular. The former recognises a Power behind all that exists, by the activity of which everything is certainly predetermined. It is impersonal, but it is, above all else, a Power; nay, the Power. Popular Hindooism worships its many gods, but all are conceived of, as, however diverse in other respects, always powers, able to influence the destiny of man. And this definition will include even Bud- dhism. For although orthodox Buddhism rec- ognises no God as determining human affairs, it still regards the life of man as determined ; not, indeed, by Brahma, or any or all of the gods which it recognises, but by Karma. Karma means "action"; and what I am has been determined by Karma; that is, by the power of the whole eternal series of activities 24 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. in that chain of existence in which I am a single link. And, as my present, so shall also my future be determined by this same mysteri- ous power, the power of Action. It is true that here the religious idea is reduced to an extreme attenuation. The Power is no longer a god, still less, the One God, personal and almighty ; not even a God in the pantheistic Brahmanic sense, impersonal, unconscious. But yet it is admitted that there is a Power, superior to that of the individual man, or of the whole of man- kind, which absolutely determines all that con- cerns us. In the second place, the definition makes religion also to include an emotional element. Fundamental in every religion is a feeling of dependence on the Power or powers believed to exist. Then out of this feeling arise other feelings, according as man conceives the nature of the object or objects of the religious sentiment. At the one extreme, we find fear, often of a very gross and earthly kind ; at the other, reverence, rising at last to an adoring love, like that with which the Christian regards God in Christ, re- WHAT IS RELIGION? 25 ! v vealed as Love incarnate and dying for man's redemption. Finally, with the cognitive and the emotional element in every religion are always combined desire and volition, taking effect in various actions. These, naturally, vary according to the mode under which the invisible Power is conceived. Most fundamental is the desire to attain and maintain such a relation to the Power or powers believed in, as shall promote the worshipper's well-being, here and hereafter ; and according to the way in which the Power is conceived, will be those determinations of the will by which it is sought to attain a satisfac- tory relation thereto. Hence there is abun- dant room in the definition for the most diverse and morally opposite actions, by which religion in different peoples finds expression ; whether in the noble devotion to the present and eternal well-being of all men which is the ideal of Christian character ; or in the revolting cruel- ties by which multitudes in other religions have sought to commend themselves to the Power or powers they have worshipped ; or, in the 26 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. absolute asceticism of the ideal Buddhist, who forsakes the world, that he may ever live " alone like a rhinoceros," 1 without ties, with- out affection to anything that is. Religion, then, according to our definition, is a complex experience consisting in the appre- hension by man of the existence of an invisible Power or powers, determining his destiny, to- gether with the feelings, desires, and actions to which this apprehension gives rise. This definition being granted, we are now prepared for the inquiry as to the origin of this experience. And inasmuch as the feelings, desires, and actions, included in the definition, are called forth by the apprehension of the existence of an invisible Power or powers, with which man stands in a necessary relation of dependence, the question as to the origin of religion resolves itself into this : How did man first come to believe in the existence of such a Power or powers, as related thus to himself and to the universe ? And this leads us to 1 See " Khaggavisana Sutta," s. 2, 4, in " Sacred Books of the East," vol. x, part 2, p. G. WHAT IS RELIGION? 27 examine some of the more noteworthy of those theories which in our day have been pro- pounded, and have been accepted by many as a satisfactory answer to this question. LECTURE II. RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. FETISHISM AND ANIMISM. BEFORE proceeding to the particular discus- sion of some of the more popular theories by which it is sought in our day to account for the origin and growth of religion, it is desirable to consider for a little an important postulate which their advocates commonly assume as the basis of their argument. It is usually taken for granted, and often formally asserted by such, that primitive man certainly could not have been superior in intellectual and spiritual capacity to the lowest modern savage races ; if, indeed, he was not inferior to the lowest of them. And this postulate itself is rested on another assumption not yet proved, or provable ; namely, that man originated in a manner exclusively natural, as the result solely of a long process of development, from one or e> 28 RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. 29 more pairs of anthropoid apes. If this may now be assumed as ascertained scientific truth, then the above postulate as to the intellectual and spiritual capacity of the first men, appears to be justified; and it becomes highly probable that since the first men could not have been much in advance of their simian parents, relig- ion may have originated in some such way as is supposed in the theories to be hereafter re- viewed. This assumption is so fundamental to these naturalistic theories as to the origin and growth of religion, that it appears indispensable, as preliminary to any detailed criticism, to con- sider somewhat carefully the question whether this may or may not be rightly taken for granted now as scientific truth, and made the basis of an argument leading to so momentous conclusions. In opposition to this naturalistic postulate, we venture to affirm that the origin of man by a mere process of natural descent from an infe- rior order of the animal kingdom, cannot yet be affirmed as established scientific truth. We 30 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. are, of course, well aware that the contrary is often persistently .asserted, and that by men of repute in the scientific world. But it may well make any intelligent layman hesitate to accept a theory so momentous in its consequences on the whole system- of scientific and religious truth, when it is observed that the argument which is supposed by many to justify the assertion of the origin of man by merely natural processes, is not accepted as conclusive by authorities who are at least as competent to form a trustworthy judgment as any who affirm this. The eminent Professor Virchow of the University of Berlin, as president of a recent gathering of the German and Vienna Anthro- pological Societies, held in Vienna, speaking on this point, used the following words : "When we met in Vienna twenty years ago, . . . there was a general expectation that man's descent from the ape or some other ani- mal, would be demonstrated. . . . This, Dar- winism has not, up to the present time, succeeded in doing. In vain have the links which should bind man with the ape been sought ; not a RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. 31 single one is to be recorded. The so-called " Fore-man/' the Pro-anthropos, which should represent this link, has never yet been found. No man, of real learning professes that he has seen him. . . - Perhaps some one may have seen him in a dream,, but when awake he will never be able to say that he has come across him. Even the hope of his future discovery has fallen far into the background ; he is now scarcely spoken of ; for we live not in a world of imagination or dreams, but in an actual world, and this has shown itself extremely unyielding. ... At present we only know that among archaic men none have been found that stood nearer the ape than men of to-day. ... It is clear that among all unciv- ilised tribes there is not a single one that would stand at all nearer to the ape than to us." 1 In the presence of such testimony as this, from such an authority, one who moreover by no means stands alone in this position, it 1 Translated from the Correspondenz Blatt der deutschen Gesellschaft filr Anthropologie, in the " Journal of the Transac- tions of the Victoria Institute," vol. xxiv, 1890, pp. 258-260. 32 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. should be evident that no one has yet a right to base a theory of the origin and develop- ment of religion upon the assumption of the existence of a kind of demi-man in a bygone prehistoric age, when the existence of such a being has never yet been proved. This were to desert that scientific method, to which theologians are so often, by their oppo- nents on the scientific side, earnestly exhorted to adhere. In the second place, in further criticism of this naturalistic assumption, it is to be remarked that a singular confusion often appears in the argument by which it is supported. It is urged that we are confronted by a large and constantly increasing body of ascertained facts, such as can only be rationally accounted for on the supposition that man has originated through lineal descent from a lower order of the animal kingdom, a statement which we are not in any wise concerned here to dispute. But those who take for granted the truth of this statement, very commonly at once assume, further, that all evidence which RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. 33 tends to prove, or is thought to demonstrate, such a lineal connection of man with some anthropoid ape, is no less evidence of a purely natural evolution. But this assumption is demonstrably false. For the proposition that man was derived from the lower orders of the animal kingdom through a process of descent, and the proposi- tion that such descent, because one factor, was therefore the only factor in his origination, are far enough from being identical. It is perfectly thinkable that man should be genet- ically related to other orders of the animal creation, and that, none the less, his appearance should be due to a supernatural interposition of the creative Power. To prove such lineal descent is one thing ; to prove that this is the whole and sufficient explanation of man's origin, is quite another matter ; and one, we venture to submit, which will be found vastly more difficult. Hence, if any feel constrained to concede that the investigations of the past generation have made it highly probable that man has lineally D 34 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. descended from some inferior order of the ani- mal kingdom, this by no means logically forbids us, as some imagine, still to affirm a direct, supernatural, creative interposition of God, as a co-factor with the natural process, and essential to the origination of man. Perhaps one may be allowed, with the deepest reverence, to draw an illustration from the teaching of Holy Scripture, regarding the holy incarnation. The Church in her creeds has universally recognised the fact affirmed in the Gospels, that Jesus Christ was born of Mary, and was thus connected with our race by lineal descent through his mother. But the affirmation of this natural birth, neither in Holy Scripture nor in the faith of the Church, has ever been regarded as exclusive of the affirmation also of the supernatural conception of our blessed Lord in the womb of the Virgin, so that He was no less Son of God than Son of Man. The Christian doctrine of the holy incar- nation is thus itself a demonstration that, logically, the natural and supernatural are not, in any event, necessarily exclusive the one of the other. Whether the reality of the Incarna- RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. 35 tion be granted or not, the fact of the so wide acceptance of the doctrine as representing a historic fact, is proof that, according to the laws of thought, the co-operation of the natural and the supernatural in the production of a certain new order of being, is perfectly conceivable. Nor is this suggestion of a possible co-oper- ation of a genetic with a creative process in the genesis of man, merely a last resort of despair- ing theologians, in view of the accumulating evidence of some such lineal connection between man and the lower orders of creation. Alfred Russell Wallace, certainly 'one of the foremost evolutionists of our time, who shares with Mr. Darwin the origination of the theory of the origin of species by natural selection, in his latest published work, expressly affirms this as a conclusion to which he has been compelled, on scientific grounds, by certain indisputable facts. He says : " I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily struc- ture with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some form common to man 36 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. and the anthropoid apes. The evidence of such descent appears to me to be overwhelming and conclusive. . . . But this is only the be- ginning of Mr. Darwin's work. . . . His whole argument tends to the conclusion that man's entire nature and all his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been derived from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same manner, and by the action of the same general laws, as his physical nature has been derived. This conclusion appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well ascertained facts. ... To prove continuity and the pro- gressive development of the intellectual and moral faculties from animals to man, is not the same as proving that these faculties have been developed by natural selection. . . . Because man's physical structure has been developed from an animal form by natural selection, it does not necessarily follow that his mental nature, even though developed pari passu with it, has been developed by the same causes only." l 1 " Darwinism," pp. 461, 463. Italics our own. RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. 37 In illustration of this, Mr. Wallace then in- stances the mathematical, the musical, and the artistic, faculties, as facts which compel us to postulate for them some origin wholly distinct from that which may suffice to account for the animal characteristics, whether mental or bodily, of man. He says : " These special faculties we have been discussing, clearly point to the existence in man of something which he has not derived from his animal progenitors something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature. . . . These faculties could not possibly, have been developed by means of the same laws which have deter- mined the progressive -development of the organic world in general, and also of man's physical organism." l The higher faculties in man, he then argues, "point clearly to an unseen universe to a world of spirit to which the world of matter is altogether subordinate." 2 And he thus con- cludes, while insisting with the utmost con- fidence on man's derivation from the animal 1 "Darwinism," pp. 474, 475. 2 Ib. p. 476. 38 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. world by a process of descent, as regards all that pertains merely to his animal nature, that, nevertheless, for the introduction, at suc- cessive epochs, into the world, of unconscious, conscious, and, finally, of intellectual and moral, life, as we see it in man, " we can only find an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit." l These words of Mr. Wallace well deserve to be carefully considered. It is quite time that intelligent men should cease to confound things which widely differ, and recognise the immense difference between evidence of descent as one factor in the origin of man, and evidence of descent as the only factor in the origin of man. And in estimating the value of many fashion- able theories as to the origin of religion, it is of the first importance to keep this clear distinc- tion in mind. We cannot allow men above all, in the name of exact science to smuggle into the premises of their argument a mistaken assumption of the identity of things that differ ; an assumption, which, as appears, according to 1 "Darwinism," p. 478. RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. 39 scientific authority perhaps second to none, is not justified, or is even in contradiction to indis- putable facts. The bearing of all this on all the current evolutionary theories of the origin and growth of religion is evident. When Pfleiderer, for instance, tells us that primitive man " could not have been conscious of his superiority to other animals, nor of his personality, and his spiritual nature " ; and that his religion could only have been " a kind of indistinct and chaotic naturism," he uses language which, however defensible, if man be the result merely of forces resident in organic nature, is without any justification, if such naturalists as Mr. Wallace be right. For if man, although lineally connected with forms of life below him, yet owes his existence to the creative inter- position of a Power from the unseen and spiritual world, then there is not the slightest reason for assuming that the first men must have been of such an exceedingly low order as Pfleiderer and others suppose ; but rather 1 See " Encyclopaedia Britannica," article, Religions, p. 379. 40 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. for believing what all archaic remains of men hitherto found distinctly indicate, that in intellectual and moral capacity, the primitive men were fully equal to their descendants of to-day. Let us not be misunderstood. We are not in the least concerned to maintain that the first men must have been the equals of the modern races in respect of actual attainment. Rational considerations, modern discoveries, and the record in Genesis, all alike require us to deny this. Not only could not the first men build pyramids arid hanging gardens, but, according even to the Biblical record, man at first went naked, was then clothed with skins ; was ignorant of the art of working in metals, as of other arts. Nevertheless, it does not follow from this deficiency in attain- ments for which time was necessarily required, that the primitive man must have been such a semi-idiot as the animistic or the fetish theory of the origin of religion supposes. All the evidence as yet before the world, is clearly to the contrary. RELIGION AND NATURAL DESCENT. 41 Admitting, then, that modern investigation has revealed a multitude of facts which seem to point more or less distinctly to a relation of descent between man and the inferior creatures, we still affirm, without hesitation, that modern science has not thereby advanced a single step toward the proof of a purely naturalistic evo- lution ; and that, therefore, all those theories of the origin of religion which assume such a semi-bestial condition as characteristic of the first men, and from this assumption argue as to what was and was not possible to primi- tive man in religious thought, are essentially unscientific ; unscientific, in that they assume that to be proved, which as yet is not estab- lished as fact, but still remains in the region of pure hypothesis. After this brief examination of the presup- position on which the theories to be reviewed in these lectures fundamentally rest, we may now consider them more in detail. We begin with the animistic and the fetish theories, which may conveniently be treated together. It is a familiar fact that many tribes of 42 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. little or no culture and civilisation, regard with a superstitious reverence and fear, various inanimate objects, such as stones, sticks, shells, etc., in which they suppose a supernatural power to reside. Such objects are called fetishes ; and the regard and rev- erence which is shown to them, " fetishism " or "fetish-worship." This has been supposed by many to represent the most primitive form of religion, still surviving among such peoples. Tiele, however, very properly classifies fet- ishism with what he calls " spiritism," under the broader name of " animism " ; which last he defines to be the belief in souls or spirits, of which "those upon which man feels him- self to be dependent, and before which he stands in awe, acquire the rank of divine beings, and become objects of worship." l So long as these spirits are regarded as dis- embodied, he calls this form of animism " spiritism." But, he adds, these spirits may also be regarded as " taking up their abode, either 1 "Encyclopaedia Britannica," article, Religions, p. 380. FETISHISM AND ANIMISM. 43 temporarily or permanently, in some material object, whether living or lifeless, it matters not; which object, as supposed to be endowed with a higher power than belongs to it by nature, is then worshipped or employed to pro- tect individuals and communities." l Such an object, thus regarded, he defines to be a fetish, and the worship and reverence paid to such objects is fetishism. This fetishism, by Des Brosses and others, in former times has been supposed to represent the earliest form of religion, out of which all other forms have arisen by a, process of natural evolution. Professor Tiele, however, while believing that fetishism exhibits a very early type of religion, does not regard it as absolutely primitive ; but with good reason argues that animism, or the worship of spirits, must logically be supposed to have preceded it. Elsewhere he expresses a belief that man in his primitive stage " must have regarded the natural phe- nomena on which his life and welfare depended, as living beings, endowed with superhuman, 1 "Outlines of the History of Religion," 4th ed. p. 9. 44 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. magical power." l According to this animistic theory, therefore, religion originated in a mis- take of the primitive men, who ignorantly supposed various natural objects to be alive like themselves, and endowed with superhuman power. But even if we should grant this hypothesis of a primitive animistic naturism, in so far as regards the worship of those objects which, if they have not life, yet in the power of movement have a certain semblance of life, still we should be as far as ever from account- ing for the worship of inert objects regarded as fetishes. If one can conceive how ignorant men, seeing objects moving of themselves, might argue with themselves that they must be endowed with an invisible life or spirit, such as they recognised as the cause of their own activities, yet this does not explain an original veneration of such inert, dead objects, as sticks, stones, and shells, which never appear as if endowed with life and power, but the opposite. For the theory of an original animism as the 1 See article Religions in the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," above cited. FETISHISM AND ANIMISM. 45 earliest form of religion, Professor Tiele has argued, in substance, as follows : " 1. The most recent investigations indicate that the civilisation of the primitive men was of no higher type than that of the present savages; nay, it had not even advanced so far ; and in such a civilisation no purer religious beliefs, ideas, and usages are possible, than those which we find among existing communities. " 2. The civilised religions whose history ascends to the remotest ages, such as the Egyptian, the Akkadian, the Chinese, show still more clearly than later religions the influence of animistic conceptions. " 3. Almost the whole of the mythology and theology of civilised nations may be traced without arrangement or co-ordination, and in forms that are undeveloped and original, rather than degenerate, in the traditions and ideas of savages. "4. Lastly, the numerous traces of animistic worship in higher religions are best explained as the survival and revival of older elements." 1 1 " Outline of the History of Religions," pp. 8, 9. 46 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. These assertions have not been allowed, how- ever, to go undisputed. To these and other arguments for the origin and subsequent development of all religions from an original worship either of nature-spirits or of fetishes, based on an ignorant misinterpretation of nat- ural phenomena, stand opposed many weighty considerations. Animism and fetishism alike evidently rest upon an assumption as to the status of the primitive man, which, as we have seen, cannot be scientifically justified. Again, we cannqt safely argue from the case of the modern savage to that of the first men, and infer the beliefs of the former from what we may now see in the latter. The languages of many of the most degraded savages show in a most convincing manner that in them we see, not beings very like the primitive men, but, on the contrary, greatly degenerated types. The Rev. Mr. Comber, in his valuable " Grammar and Dictionary of the Kongo Lan- guage," tells us that in his study of the FETISHISM AND ANIMISM. 47 language he met with " new surprises at every point and turn, as the richness, flexibility, exactness, subtlety of idea and nicety of ex- pression, of the language, revealed themselves." l He tells us, further, that "this wealth in idea and form does not specially characterise Kongo, but is possessed by the whole family of Bantu languages to a greater or less extent." He rightly adds that " the widespread possession of these qualities points to their existence in the parent stem, which must itself have been of a high class." In this he fully agrees with the testimony of the Rev. J. Leigh ton Wilson, who laboured in another part of the great Bantu language area, among a Mpongwe speaking people. As to the speech of these now fetish-worshipping tribes, he tells us that "this great family of languages, if the Mpongwe dialect may be taken as a specimen, is remarkable for its beauty, elegance, and perfectly philosophical arrangement, as well as for its almost indefinite expansibility." Similar testimony is given as to the Santali, 1 Op. cit, Preface, p. xxiii. 48 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. one of the dialects of the degraded aborigines of India, like the Bantu languages of Africa, only reduced to writing by missionaries. An experienced labourer among that people has told the writer that, in the conjugation of the verb, for example, the Santali rivals, if it does not excel, the Greek, in its capacity for dis- criminating the most delicate and refined dis- tinctions of thought. But it is needless to multiply illustrations. The facts are now so well known that most competent scholars recognise them, and admit their force. To the great significance of these linguistic phenomena as bearing against the probable truth of the fetish-theory of the gen- esis of religion, Professor Max Miiller has called attention, reminding the reader that the facts are fatal to the assumption of those who, from the present intellectual and spiritual condition of fetish-worshipping tribes, would infer the condition and capacity of primitive men, and by consequence a like low form for their relig- ion. He says : "All the stories of tribes without language, FETISHISM AND ANIMISM. 49 more like the twitterings of birds than the articulate sounds of human beings, belong to the chapter of ethnological fables; and what is more important still, is that many of the so-called savage languages have been shown to possess a most perfect, in many cases a too perfect, that is to say, too artificial, a gram- mar, while their dictionaries possess a wealth of names any poet might envy. . . . Every language, even that of Papuans and Veddas, is such a masterpiece of abstract thought, that it would baffle the ingenuity of many philosophers to produce anything like it. In several cases the grammar of the so-called savage dialects bears evidence to a far higher state of culture possessed by these people in former times." 1 Mr. Herbert Spencer refers to similar facts in like terms, warning us that we are not per- mitted to assume that in modern savage races we see beings very like the primitive men, because "there are reasons for suspecting that men of the lowest types, now known ... do 1 The Origin and Growth of Religion," pp. 72, 73. E 50 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. not exemplify men as they originally were. Probably most of them had ancestors in higher states." 1 In the presence of such facts as those which have been mentioned, it is obviously of no force to argue that because many savage races now know of no worship except that of fetishes or various nature-spirits, therefore, inasmuch as primitive man cannot have stood higher than these, he could not have had any correct con- ception of God. If there is evidence that savages are degenerate families of men, then the primitive man may have easily been in religious capacity their superior. But even if we should not insist on this, and for the sake of the argument grant the assumption that primitive man could not have been superior to modern savages ; and that hence no religious ideas could have been pos- sible to him other than such as are found among such tribes to-day ; still this would not suffice to prove that either fetishism or animism must have been the primitive form of religion. i "Principles of Sociology," vol. i, p. 93. FETISHISM AND ANIMISM. 51 For, unfortunately for Professor Tiele's argu- ment, it is a fact to which there is abundant unimpeachable testimony, that even among the lowest fetish and demon worshipping tribes, commonly, if not always, we find coexisting with their superstitious religious beliefs and practices, the belief in an invisible personal God, above all spirits and fetishes. The . re- searches of modern travellers, and especially of missionaries, who have lived for years in daily intercourse with such people, have cast in recent years a flood of light upon this sub- ject. Statements such as Jiave been made by Sir John Lubbock and others, to the effect that such and such tribes have no idea of God, have received again and again conclusive refutation, through a careful and critical review of the testimony they adduce, in the light of a fuller knowledge of the facts. The extensive dis- coveries of the past generation have revealed the existence of no tribe so low as not to have been able to form any conception of God. In- stead of this, they have so often reversed pre- viously held opinions to the contrary, that they 52 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. give us rather reason to believe that when all the facts shall have been carefully investigated, we shall probably not find a single tribe, how- ever addicted to the worship of demons and spirits, which has not, along with this, also the conception of a Supreme Spirit, upon whom all things in heaven and earth depend. The de- graded tribes of the west coast of Africa have long with good reason furnished a typical illus- tration of the characteristics of a fetish- worship- ping people. But with regard to these, the missionary, Rev. Dr. J. Leighton Wilson, in his work before quote, but 6 /xoVos ; not as the Only because the All, the only real existence, but as the only true and living God, immanent indeed in all, but far transcending all, in his own eternal per- sonality. LECTURE V. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. IP religion did not originate with fetish or spirit-worship, through a mistaken apprehen- sion of all nature as living, nor with the worship of ancestors, nor with the apprehen- sion, through sense-perception, of the infinite, as defined by Professor Max Miiller, how then are we to explain its origin ? We reply that in the origin of religion, we have to recognise two factors, the one subjective, the other objective. The subjective factor we find in the nature of man. We affirm that in virtue of the very constitution of his spiritual nature, man necessarily believes in the existence of a Power or powers, superior to himself, to which he stands in necessary relation, and by which his destiny is deter- mined. One can hardly express this better than by 151 152 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. saying that man is naturally endowed with a religious faculty. It is not intended, indeed, to distinguish this sharply from the reason, the affections, or the will, as these are distin- guished from one another ; but simply to affirm that in the normal exercise of all these powers, man is naturally, and almost inevitably, constrained to regard himself as in necessary relation to an unseen Power or powers, superior to himself, and conditioning alike his past, his present, and his future. That this belief is due, not to education, or tradition, or any other accidental cause, but to the constitution of man's nature, is demon- strated by the fact that religion, in the sense in which we have defined it, is universal. That/ religion is universal is declared with emphasis by unbiassed specialists like Quatrefages, who has said that " we nowhere find either a great human race, or even a division, however unimportant, of that race, professing atheism." He affirms that two beliefs are practically universal : first, " a belief in beings superior to 1 " The Human Species," 3d ed. p. 483. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 153 man," and therefore " capable of exercising a good or evil influence on his destiny "; and, second, a " conviction that the existence of man is not limited to the present life, but that there remains for him a future beyond the grave." 1 But where these beliefs are found, there we have religion ; religion, then, is universal. It is doubtless true that religion appears under widely different external manifestations. It may be very elementary, almost devoid of rite or ceremony, or it may be connected with an elaborate symbolic ritual. Man may recog- nise God as one, or he may believe in gods many ; or stranger still, he may, as in the original religion taught by the Buddha, decline to affirm the mysterious Power which deter- mines all, to be in any sense a God ; and represent it rather as impersonal and non- substantial, the power of Karma, " action." But whatever form the conception of the Supreme Power may take, whether it be regarded as a personal and almighty Being, 1 "The Human Species," 3d ed. p. 484. 154 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. as by the Christian, the Jew, and the Moham- medan ; or as the spirit or fetish, worshipped by the savage; or as the nameless "Adrishfa" or "Unseen" of the Hindoo, or the still more mysterious and incomprehensible Karma of the Buddhist ; in every case alike, it must be confessed that everywhere and always, man has a religion. This is so manifest, that the denial of the fact, once not uncommon, in our day, after more careful and extensive research, is much more rarely heard. It is commonly admitted that religion is a universal phenomenon, and that exceptions if any exist must be regarded as abnormal. 1 We have, then, to inquire why this should be so ; and how it is that religious conceptions and feelings arise thus universally in the mind and heart of man. t e The deepest reason of this is to be found in lan himself. In the first place, man cannot ~ 4 l Of many illustrations which might be given, we may note the emphatic words of Professor Tiele : " The statement that there are nations or tribes which possess no religion, rests either on inaccu- rate observation, or on a confusion of ideas." "Outlines of a History of Religion," p. 6. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 155 help recognising that he is a dependent being ; dependent, not merely upon other human beings, as his parents, friends, and rulers, but, in com- mon with all of these, dependent upon a Power which is above all men; a Power which man cannot control, and which can effectually dis- pose of all that concerns him, whether for pros- perity or adversity, weal or woe. Nor have men generally been able to content themselves with regarding this power as merely that of material nature, upon the operations of which their physical well-being depends. It is the fact, whatever the reason may be, that even when natural objects have been wor- shipped, they have been regarded by the wor- shipper as something more than merely material objects ; as the symbols or the manifestations of an invisible Power or powers. And if we ask why men so often, as in all animistic and polytheistic religions, should have assumed, behind the wind, the storm, the lightning, and other natural phenomena, a living Power, the answer can only be found in the nature of man. Logically, prior to the consciousness of the 156 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. Non-Ego is that of the Ego. But every man who is conscious of self is conscious of that self as possessed of power. Hence, inasmuch as men know in consciousness that the reason for all the movements of the body is found in an invisible power, the conscious self, which has its fullest manifestation in free volition, they are irresistibly constrained to postulate an analogous invisible power, as also the ultimate cause of all activities of material nature. In this, the so-called nature-religions are not wrong, but right. And so it comes to pass that, naturally, the most cultivated and most debased peoples alike regard them- selves as in a relation of dependence to an invisible Power or powers. And while we may not, with Schleiermacher, make the whole of religion to consist in this sense of depend- ence, we shall rightly regard this as one very important factor, on the subjective side, in the genesis of religion. But man is constrained to believe in the existence of a supernatural Power, not only by his sense of dependence, but by the necessary THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 157 laws of thought. For undeniably all that is presented to our perceptions is presented as conditioned and contingent. And the more that man advances in his knowledge of the universe, the more clear it becomes that this is a universal fact. But this being so, man is logically compelled to believe in the existence of somewhat which is not conditioned, but conditioning, itself ever remaining uncondi- tioned ; a power, not contingent, but necessary, apart from which neither man nor the world could have existence. For of the conditioned, the conditioning is the necessary correlate, such that the former cannot be thought without the thought of the latter; even as the affirmation of a circle carries with it by necessary implication the affirmation of a centre of that circle. In this way, again, man is compelled, no less as a reasoning being than as a dependent being, to believe in an invisible Power, to which he and all the universe stand in necessary relation, and on which the welfare of all depends. And in this fact we have further evidence that the 158 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. origin of religion is to be found in the very nature of man. But this is not yet all. Man universally is possessed of a faculty which we call con- science. In view of now well-ascertained facts, the assertion of some earlier writers, like Sir John Lubbock, that in many savage races the moral sense is wanting, must be declared a mistake. Over against this we may place the deliberate affirmation of Quatrefages, who has said : " Confining ourselves rigorously to the region ] of facts, and carefully avoiding the territory of philosophy and theology, we may state with- out hesitation that there is no human society, or even association, in which the idea of good and evil is not represented by certain acts regarded by the members of that society or association as morally good and morally bad. Even among robbers and pirates theft is re- garded as a misdeed, sometimes as a crime, and severely punished, while treachery is . branded with infamy. The facts noticed by Wallace among the Karubars and Santals show how THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 159 the consciousness of moral good and truth is anterior to experience and independent of ques- tions of utility." 1 Men are not indeed agreed as to what par- ticular actions and feelings should be regarded as good or bad; but this does not affect the present argument, which depends solely on the fact that men universally recognise a dis- tinction in the moral quality of actions. But not only do all men recognise such a dis- tinction, but also therewith an imperative obli- gation to do whatever they regard as morally right, and not to do what they regard as morally wrong ; and, finally, in the heart of every man is heard, so to speak, a voice which signifies approval when he does that which is right, and condemnation when he does that which is wrong ; awakening, moreover, an apprehen- sion of retribution as to follow the wrong doing. Let it be carefully observed that our argument is conditioned by no theory as to the origin of these feelings, but simply on the fact that these phenomena universally appear. 1 -The Human Species," 3d ed. p. 459. 160 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. Now it is most significant, that, whether it be possible to reconcile the fact with certain theories or not, it is the special mark of these dicta of conscience, that they never present them- selves in consciousness either as originating with the man himself, or as the expression of a law imposed upon him by other men. Rightly or wrongly, they are felt to be the expression of the will of a Power above the individual, and above all men, to which every individual stands related, by no choice of his own, but by a necessity of his nature. And thus it is that the conscience, as a faculty belonging to man's nature, becomes a factor in the origin of relig- ion. Man is religious in virtue of his nature as a moral being. One other phenomenon, scarcely less signifi- cant, claims our notice. Everywhere and al- ways it is to be observed that man craves fellowship with the Being or beings, the God or gods, in whose existence he is constrained to believe. To this fact every form of religion bears witness, and in its teaching and practice has in some way or other given it expression. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 161 Thus religion arises out of man's nature as a spiritual being. All these facts, then, man's sense of depend- ence, the laws which determine his thought, the phenomena of conscience, his craving after fellowship with that Power to which he believes himself to be thus mysteriously related, all are practically universal, and demonstrably independent, as regards their origin, of either education or culture. By this, indeed, it is not intended that all men have consciously reasoned their way from such premises to the belief in a supernatural Power or powers, or that they, if asked, could formulate the subjective process of which such belief, and all religion, is the manifested result. But it is meant that this recognition of an invisible, supernatural Power which is common to religion, everywhere and always, so inevitably arises out of the ordinary experiences of man, that practically this belief is universal. But if this be true, then we are warranted in affirming that religion must have its origin, subjectively considered, in the very constitution M 162 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. of human nature. Man is religious simply because he is so constituted that for him to be religious is natural, and to be irreligious or non-religious is contra-natural. For in the whole kingdom of life, whatever we find all the individuals of any class, under normal con- ditions, habitually desiring or doing, we rightly account for such habits by saying that they are due to the constitution of the nature of that order of beings. If the ox everywhere and always eats the green thing of the earth, this is because it is his nature. If the duck everywhere and always seeks the water, this is because this is its nature. So as to the origin of religion. If the subjective phenom- ena which have been reviewed are universal, and have universally given rise to religion, and have found in various religions of men a more or less perfect expression, evidently we are justified in saying, as in the case of the other illustrations given, that religion must have its origin in the nature of man. He is so constituted that, normally, he is a religious being, just as he is so constituted that, normally, THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGIOX. 163 he is a rational being. This fact incontrover- tibly distinguishes man even from all those higher orders of the animal kingdom to which, zoologically, he is most nearly related. Quatre- fages is right in saying that the religious and moral phenomena which we see in man, "iso- late" him from animals. 1 Never has even the most intelligent chimpanzee shown any sign of a tendency to animism or fetish-worship, or made a god out of some dead monkey gone before him, or been discovered clasping his hands in adoration of the rising sun. That men of such standing as the learned Hibbert Lecturer should deny that man has any relig- ious faculty which distinguishes him from the brute, is difficult indeed to understand. It is a striking illustration of the influence which a false philosophy, when accepted, may have, in blinding even a learned and honest man to facts which are irreconcilable with it. None i"The Human Species," 3d ed. p. 459. So Seville : "A people absolutely destitute of any religious notion has never been discovered." "Prolegomena of the History of Religions," trans- lated from the French by A. S. Squire, 1884, p. 201. 164 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. the less confidently, because of such denials, may we affirm that man, unlike the brutes, is religious in virtue of the constitution of his nature. Nevertheless, it has often been strenuously insisted, as in unanswerable contradiction to this affirmation, that not merely individuals, but whole races and tribes of men exist, who exhibit no evidence of any religious belief, feeling, or action. Sir John Lubbock, as is well known, has instanced many such supposed cases in his "Prehistoric Times," and many other writers of eminence have repeated his assertions. Reference has been made to this allegation in a former lecture, but the impor- tance of the question is such that these state- ments deserve a fuller notice at this point. In many instances where investigators have declared that no form of religion existed, the term "religion" has been evidently employed in a very restricted sense, applicable only to its higher forms. Hence because in this or that tribe some have not discovered anything which corresponded to their own elevated conception THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 165 of religion, they have correctly enough, in the sense in which they used the term denied in these cases its existence. With a more correct conception as to what alone are the essential elements in religion, there is no doubt that many of such statements would never have been made. It is, again, of great importance to observe the fact that it is exceedingly difficult for foreigners, even when they have resided for some time among a barbarous people, and very much more so for a casual traveller, to gain accurate information as to their religious beliefs. As a general rule, such peoples are disinclined to profane as they imagine their religious beliefs and practices by disclosing them freely to strangers and aliens. Then, again, the forms in which the religious beliefs and feelings of degraded savage races are expressed, are often so entirely different from anything of the kind familiar to the foreigner, that even when their religious rites are observed, he fails to recognise their real character. Still further, even in cases where 166 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. he has so far gained the confidence of the people as to overcome their natural reluctance to speak to him of such matters, there remains the great difficulty of language. The foreigner uses terms in one sense ; they, in another ; so that it is often only by the exercise of the greatest skill, ingenuity, and patience, that one succeeds in ascertaining the real beliefs of those to whom he is speaking. Finally, it is to be observed that in many cases where earlier investigators have reported that no religion existed, subsequent and more prolonged and careful inquiry and observation have shown such statements to be incorrect. This has occurred so often, that even if a few cases remain in which such assertions are still made without positive disproval, the presump- tion becomes very strong that further research would disclose the existence of religious beliefs and actions in these cases also. 1 1 So Tiele: "No tribe or nation has yet been met with desti- tute of belief in any higher beings ; and travellers who asserted their existence have been afterwards refuted by the facts. ' ' "Outlines of the History of Religion," p. 6. THE TRUE GENESIS OP RELIGION. 167 But it is again objected, that whatever may be said as to races and tribes of men, it must be admitted that many individuals in all races have been sincere atheists; whence it is urged that however common belief in a supernatural Power or powers may be, it cannot be due to the constitution of our nature ; but must instead have arisen from tradition, education, or some unknown adventitious cause. In reply to this, attention may be called first to the fact that the term " atheist," in its most usual application, denotes only those who deny the existence of a personal God, such as the Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan Scriptures describe. But obviously, it is quite possible that a man may deny the existence of such a Being, and yet admit, as very many do, the existence of a Power or powers invisible, by which his destiny is determined ; and also, that his feeling and actions may be deter- mined by that belief. Such, in fact, appears to be the position of many who in our day are called agnostics, as also it is that of pantheists and of orthodox Buddhists. Hence it is evi- 168 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. dent that such persons cannot be rightly re- garded as exceptions to the statement that religion, in the sense in which the term is used in these lectures, is universal. In the second place, even the fact that, besides these, some men are atheists in the strict sense of the word, cannot be justly held to disprove the truth of the affirmation of the universality of religion. There are not a few in the world who are idiots and lunatics; but no one would think of urging this fact as dis- proving the truth of the proposition that man is a rational being in virtue of his nature. Instances of genuine and sincere atheism are so few that they must be regarded as abnormal exceptions to the rule which is practically uni- versal, that man is a religious being. It is, again, of decisive significance that there is no evidence that atheism is ever an original phenomenon, or that it belongs to a very early stage of human development, as that which is natural to man, antecedent to reflection, or to the influences of education and culture. On the contrary, atheism appears most fre- THE TRUE GENESIS OB" RELIGION. 169 quently among the most highly cultivated of our race, with whom it is often the result of an ineffectual effort to resolve the profound moral and metaphysical difficulties which are confessedly involved in the affirmation of an almighty personal God ; while, in other cases, again, one cannot close the eyes to the fact that atheism is loudly proclaimed by men who are evidently resolutely given to courses of life which must inevitably predispose them to silence, or as far as possible ignore, the witness of conscience and the testimony of nature to the existence of a Power which is governing the world on principles of moral law. In any case, as Quatrefages, again, has said, "we no- where meet with atheism except in an erratic condition. In every place, and at all times, the mass of populations have escaped it." 1 Still less is it inconsistent with the affirma- tion of the universality of religion, that a large part of the human race, engrossed in the eager pursuit of various earthly goods, are quite oblivious of the existence of any supernatural 1 "The Human Species," pp. 482, 483. 170 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. Power, or of their relation to such Power; any more than when we see now and then instances of unnatural parents, we regard this as forbidding the affirmation that affection for one's offspring is an attribute which belongs to the nature of man. To determine that which belongs to the nature of any creature by excep- tional deviations from ordinary phenomena, is most unscientific. That which is natural in man's bodily life is not studied to the best advantage in a hospital. In the light of all the facts, therefore, we need not hesitate, on account of such instances, to affirm that religion is so universal that it must have its origin, on the subjective side, in the constitution of human nature. Religion exists because man is what he is ; because he is naturally and normally led to regard himself and the universe in which he finds himself, as dependent on an invisible Power or powers, superior to himself and all that he sees about him, with which Power or powers he feels an instinctive craving to be on terms of friend- ship and fellowship. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 171 Man, then, by nature, has a faculty or capac- ity for religion. Yet that alone would not account for religion. A man may have eyes, but as long as he is shut up in a dark cave, he cannot see. So a man might have a faculty of apprehending God and his relation to Him, but without a revelation of Him he could not have a religion. The phenomena which are presented in the existence and the history of religion would be still inexplicable, except we assume, not merely a natural capacity in man for forming religious conceptions, but also, correlated with these, a revelation of God to man, both original and universal. It is not indeed necessary, in order to account for the facts, to suppose that such a revelation must have been given in a supernatural manner. Even Holy Scripture does not so represent the case. 1 But an objective revelation, in some way, of the existence, and to some extent, of the character, of God, there must have been from the beginning, or the phenomena pre- sented in religion are unaccountable. 1 See e.g. Ps. xix. aiid Rom. i. 20. 172 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. For the fundamental religious beliefs of men are marked by four characteristics ; namely, spontaneity, universality, great intensity, and invincible persistency ; and for each and all of these, any theory of the origin of religion must be required to account, in order to its own vindication. If there has never been an objec- tive revelation of the existence of any such Power as religious faith assumes, these char- acteristics of religious belief are all utterly inexplicable. It has indeed been often objected that the wide acceptance of Buddhism forbids the affir- mation that these four characteristics are essential to religion. This is supposed to dis- prove the assertion that religious belief, as defined in these lectures, is either spontaneous or invincibly persistent. Bat the objection will not bear close exami- nation in the light of history. On the contrary, the history of Buddhism is one of the most impressive illustrations possible of those very characteristics of religious belief which it is supposed by some to disprove. It is indeed THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 173 true that according to the earliest Buddhist authorities, the Buddha appears not indeed to have denied, but certainly to have ignored, the existence of a personal God, the First Cause and Moral Governor of the world. Yet, even so, he was not able to leave wholly out of his system the Hindoo conception of super- natural beings called gods. These were not indeed represented by him as creators or rulers of the world, but they were nevertheless super- natural beings, living and acting in a higher sphere than that of men ; and in admitting these, even though only in the way of tolerance, into a subordinate place in his religious system, the Buddha made a most significant concession to the imperative demands of man's religious nature. But this did not suffice to satisfy the cravings of the human heart ; and so it fol- lowed that the Northern Buddhism, most fully developed in Thibet, despite the authority of the Buddha, elaborated its remarkable concep- tion of an Adi Buddha, eternal, almighty, self- existent, the Author of all being, and thereby furnished one of the most decisive proofs which 174 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. history affords, of the invincible persistency of man's belief in the existence of a supernatural Power, the Cause of the existence of man and of all things. Affirming, then, the four characteristics of religious beliefs above named, we argue that these are unaccountable except there has been, and is, a veritable revelation of a God. This is necessary to account for the spontaneity and universality of religion. It is of course quite true that there is much in the religious belief and practices of different peoples which is not spontaneous, as it is not universal ; and which may be sufficiently explained by the influence of tradition, or example, or education. But when we eliminate all such beliefs and obser- vances, and regard simply that fundamental belief in the existence of a supernatural Power or powers to which man stands mysteriously related, which is common to all religions ; of this common conviction, it is certain that neither tradition, nor the presence or the absence of education or culture, can afford an adequate explanation. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 175 These beliefs, as has been shown, appear antecedent to and independent of argument, alike among the most debased savages, and the most highly cultivated of our race, no less in the most modern than in the most ancient times. Even if we grant that in experience men derive their first religious beliefs from the instruction and example of their immediate parents, it is obvious that instruction and example would fail us as an explanation of the origin of religious beliefs in the case of the first man or men. In these, we must assume the belief to have spontaneously arisen. For religious belief, in the first instance, either there was an adequate ground, in a real objective revelation of the existence of a God, and of man's relation to him, or there was not. It is indeed possible for a man to affirm the latter alternative, and assume that the belief, however it may have arisen out of the nature of the first men, was the result of their extremely ignorant and semi-bestial condition. But if this were so, then as men increased in intelligence, the belief ought to tend 176 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. to disappear; which, however, is contrary to the fact. Finally, if in the face of the admitted phenomena of religious belief, the inference of an objective. revelation of a God be denied, this denial carries with it into every depart- ment of human thought the most destructive consequences. For it is certain that religious belief, once originated, has proved one of the strongest and most ineradicable of all human convictions. It would be impossible to instance any belief common to mankind, which has everywhere and always so power- fully affected human action. It has often prompted individuals and whole nations and ranks of men to the most intense and long- continued labours, to the voluntary endurance of prolonged, and often very terrible, hardships and sufferings. It is not too much to say that the art, the literature, and the politics of the world have been more universally and profoundly affected, both directly and indirectly, by the religious convictions of men, than by any other beliefs held in common by the race. THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 177 And the persistency of these beliefs has corresponded with their intensity. Never, either among the most degraded or the most civilised peoples, has atheism for any time remained the professed belief of even a small part of our race. Even when, in individual communities, as in France at the close of the last century, it has seemed as if now religious belief were about destroyed, it has never been possible to eradicate it ; and repeatedly, after such temporary decline of its vigour, it has reasserted itself with renewed intensity. Now if, notwithstanding this spontaneity, universality, intensity, and persistency of re- ligious belief, we assume that there neither is, nor has been at any time, any revelation to man of the existence of such a Power as religious faith assumes, what then ? Evidently there is but one alternative left us. If for religious belief there is no such objective ground, then it follows that man is so consti- tuted that, with very rare exceptions, he spontaneously believes, and that with the greatest intensity and tenacity of conviction, 178 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. what is false ; and this in reference to the most momentous matter which can possibly come before his mind. But if this be the fact in respect to man's universal, spontaneous, and so persistent belief on this point, it must be granted as quite possible that he should also be mistaken in any or all other similar spontaneous and persistent beliefs. But if this be possible, then, since all knowledge is conditioned ultimately on the assumption of the trustworthiness of our spontaneous and necessary beliefs, how can we escape the logical conclusion that certitude on any subject is unattainable ? From this so destructive and fatal conclusion there is no escape, except by assuming that the fundamental religious beliefs of man have been determined by the fact of an actual revelation, in some way, and in some measure, of the existence and nature of such a Power as religion contem- plates. And we shall only agree with the great majority of mankind, even of its most profound and illustrious thinkers, when we affirm that THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 179 such a revelation, which we are obliged to postulate, in order to account for the phenomena presented by religion, is a perpetual fact. To exhibit this at length, the limits of this lecture forbid. We can only touch upon the subject. In the first place, conscience, of which we have spoken as a faculty, also involves a revela- tion of Grod ; even though it be often obscured to the consciousness, by inattention, prejudice, and sin. For the phenomena of conscience are not only a manifestation of the nature of man, as a being capable of recognising moral law and religious obligation, but, inseparably from this, they also manifest a Being above man, whose will, so far as made known, man, whether it be pleasing to him or not, whether it seem to his present worldly advantage or not, is under an irremovable obligation to obey. For whenever a man does what is wrong, and then instinctively shrinks with dread from the future, lest somewhere in that future he shall meet with retribution for that wrong doing, he thereby in no ambiguous way confesses that he thinks that he perceives, even through the obscurity of this 180 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. earthly life, a Power which will hold him re- sponsible for that breach of law ; a Power from whose reach even death shall not certainly enable him to escape. Thus it follows that from the very beginning of his moral activity, man must have been brought face to face, in the sponta- neous operations of his conscience, with a revela- tion, more or less clear, of the being and will of God ; a revelation which was also a revelation of his character, in so far at least as this, that He must be a moral Being and the absolute Ruler of all men. But the external w r orld has also ever been to man a revelation of the existence of a Power above man, and above all nature. Never, except in rare and erratic cases, have men been able to believe that the sensible world was its own sufficient cause and explanation. To say no more, man cannot well help seeing that the universe reveals a Power which, even if it be immanent in the universe, as it is, is yet in so far distinct from it that in some way the universe must be its product and effect. Even such an extreme evolutionist as Reville is THE TRUE GENESIS OF RELIGION. 181 willing in this sense to admit that the phenomena of religion require us to believe that God has revealed himself to man ; and that man " was so constituted that, arrived at a certain stage in his psychical development, he must become sensible of the reality of the Divine influence. " In this sense," he says, " which leaves perfect freedom to history, we also could accept the idea of a primitive revela- tion/' 1 We find, then, the origin of religion in these two factors : the one, subjective, the other, objective ; the former, the constitution of man's nature, in virtue of which he necessarily be- lieves in the existence of a Power invisible and supernatural, to which he stands necessarily related ; the latter, in the actual revelation of such a Power in the phenomena of conscience, and in the physical universe without us. 1 ''Prolegomena," etc., p. 36. LECTURE VI. THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION: SIN AS A FACTOR. THE history of religion undoubtedly presents us with an evolution, as the popular modern phrase is. Religions have not arisen suddenly and independently of what had gone before. It is true of religious history, as of all history, that the roots of the present are in the past, as those of each past, in a yet earlier past. In many instances, we are able to trace the genesis of a religion out of a preceding religion, historically; as in the rise of Buddhism out of the earlier Brahmanism, or of Muhammedan- ism out of Christianity and Judaism. Nor is Christianity an exception to this law. Though it was, in one sense, a new religion, supernatu- rally introduced through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, of the Son of God, it was yet so related to the antecedent Judaism as without it to have been impossible. The affir- 182 SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 183 mation of a supernatural factor in Judaism or Christianity in no wise requires us to ignore or deny the co-operation of natural causes also, in their origination and development, any more than the recognition of the natural causes involves, as some seem to suppose, the denial of the supernatural factor. Again, in every religion, when it has been once established, we observe a progressive development. No religion has ever remained, in the apprehension and practice of those who profess it, exactly what it was in its beginning. Religions are modified as the years and cen- turies go by, whether in the way of elevation and progress, or, on the other hand, of regress and degradation. It takes little careful reading to discover in the Christian Scriptures, histori- cally regarded, a very manifest progress in the development of doctrine. Only a school of interpretation, now about extinct, will seek to discover everything in Genesis which appears in the Gospels or Apocalypse. The theology of Genesis is very simple and elementary, as com- pared even with that of the prophets ; and 184 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. when it is compared with any of the New Testament books, the contrast is still more obvious. This fact is now so commonly recognised by intelligent Christians, that it might seem superfluous to remark it, except that many of the chief authorities who have written of late years on the history of religion, have so unac- countably misapprehended, and hence misrep- resented, the belief of intelligent evangelical Christians on this point ; assuming that because such maintain that man began his history with a true knowledge of the one living God, they also have intended therein to affirm that the first men enjoyed a full knowledge of all those truths which are now the possession of the church. A striking illustration of this is found in Seville's " Prolegomena to a History of Relig- ion," in which the learned author, contending against the Christian doctrine of a primeval supernatural revelation, urges that "it is infi- nitely hard to imagine that in the beginning of his slow and painful development, man, yet SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 185 plunged in absolute ignorance, was in possession of sublime religious doctrines, such as the most pure inspiration has been able to offer to a cultivated society, rich in accumulated experi- ence." From which he concludes that " the hypothesis of a primeval revelation of religious truth is in contradiction to all that we know as to the extremely miserable and uncultured state of humanity anterior to history." 1 To which argument it is sufficient to say in reply, that no intelligent Christian holds any such extravagant belief as to the degree of knowl- edge of God which was possessed by our first parents as Reville supposes ; nor does the record in Genesis, which such accept as authoritative, so represent their condition. In view of modern controversies, it is, how- ever, important to emphasise the remark that it does not follow that because the religious beliefs of the first men were few and elemen- tary, therefore they must have been erroneous. It does not follow from this admission, that before man could have attained a knowledge 1 "Prolegomena," etc., p. 40. 186 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. of the one true God, he must have been a wor- shipper of nature, or of fetishes, or of shadows or ghosts. As in all other matters of human knowledge, so in religion, it is quite possible that although a man may know very little, he may know that little very accurately. We may then at once admit, subject only to these necessary explanations, that in every religion is to be observed a growth or devel- opment. And so the question arises, What has been the usual order of that development ? Admitting that man is religious in virtue of the constitution of his nature, so that from the first he must have had some religious belief ; admitting, moreover, that the primitive religious belief must have been most simple and elemen- tary, what was the character of that original faith of men ? Was it monotheism, or was it something else ? some form of polytheism, dual- ism, nature-worship, fetish or spirit-worship ? Of these, which is primary, and which are secondary ? * Professor Max Miiller, indeed, as also Reville, strangely insists that this is "an idle ques- SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 187 tion." * The latter tells us that primitive human- ity was " incapable of making any such distinc- tion." 2 But such an assertion, even if true, cannot be proved, till some one shall have pro- duced some decisive evidence that the first man was such a semi-bestial being as it assumes him to have been. For to say that primeval man was not capable of knowing whether he wor- shipped one God, or more than one, is to place him lower in the scale of intelligence than many brutes. It is said to have been shown by a curious experiment, that even the crow can count up to three. A creature, even though having the bodily form of an adult man, who could not distinguish between one and two, either would not be a man ; or, if a man, an idiot. But all the evidence shows that the earliest men whose remains have been dis- covered were as far from being such idiots as we are. The so-called " Calaveras skull," for instance, according to the eminent geolo- gist, Professor Wright, "is in no sense ape- 1 " Chips from a German Workshop," vol. i, pp. 27, 28. 2 "Prolegomena," etc., p. 61. 188 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. like in character, but may well have contained the brain of a philosopher." 1 It is not therefore "an idle question" whether or not monotheism is primitive. We cannot fairly decline to face the question : Was mono- theism the starting-point, or must we regard it as the goal of the religious development of man ? Are henotheism, polytheism, etc.., to be regarded as successive stadia in the progress of man toward the recognition of one personal God and Father in Heaven ? or, on the contrary, do these mark successive stages of departure and de- cline from a pure primitive faith in one personal God? Reville asserts the former alternative, declar- ing dogmatically that " we cannot deny the original polytheism"; 2 and with him substan- tially agree the whole school of naturalistic evo- lutionists. But this denial of an original mon- otheism, as before remarked, proceeds from the assumption that man was developed by slow and 1 "Bibliotheca Sacra," April, 1891, article, Recent Discoveries bearing on the Antiquity of Man. 2 "Prolegomena," etc., p. 61. SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 189 insensible degrees from the condition of an irrational brute ; a theory which such an un- prejudiced scientist as Virchow declares to be not yet established, and which Alfred Russell Wallace even declares to be irreconcilable with certain indisputable facts. Whether, apart from the argument derived from this mistaken assumption, there is independent evidence for the gradual evolution of monotheism, we shall see in the sequel. The question of the nature of the religion of the primitive man is one which cannot be his- torically determined by direct testimony. We can only arrive at a decision of this question by way of inference from facts at present known. But such a method is capable of at least con- ducting us to a conclusion which shall have a high degree of probability. If, in historical investigation, the further back we go, the more, as a general rule, we find monotheism disappear- ing, and the lower forms of religious faith, such as the worship of fetishes, of ancestors, or of nature, becoming more and more prominent, then certainly such facts would tend to show 190 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. that the opinion of those who maintain that monotheism could not have been the original form of religion, was probably correct. But if, on the contrary, in those cases in which we can trace the history of religion, we either find a monotheistic faith more and more prominent, the more remote the antiquity to which we ascend ; or if, again, in the case of other races, although the earliest records reveal no trace of monotheistic belief, we yet find, as the centuries roll by, no tendency to develop it, then certainly we shall rightly assume that monotheism is, far more probably, the earliest form of religious belief, of which all others are more or less ex- treme degenerations. For it is clearly in the last degree unlikely that the direction of development in prehistoric times should have been the reverse of that exhibited in the historic period ; and we may with full confidence argue from any law revealed as operating in the latter, to the existence of the same law in the former period. That the facts sustain the latter of the two alternatives supposed, we shall see abundant reason to believe. SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 191 Inasmuch as in this inquiry we have no historic records which bring us within thousands of years of the beginning of human life, it is evident that the question of the antecedent probability becomes of more than ordinary importance and argumentative value. The whole naturalistic school, of evolutionist writers on religion are wont to assume that the antece- dent probability is decisive against the possi- bility of an original monotheism ; and if their naturalistic theories as to the origin of man be granted, in this they are certainly right. For if man was evolved out of the brute in such a -purely natural and gradual manner as they assume, it would plainly be most difficult to indicate the precise point in his ascent where this developing creature became a man, and an original monotheism would be almost incon- ceivable. But for reasons already fully given, we cannot admit the right to take this assump- tion for granted, or allow that upon the dis- puted hypothesis of a purely naturalistic evolution, any argument as to the nature of man's earliest religion, or as to the order of religious development, can rightly be based. 192 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. Not only so, but we affirm that the phenomena connected with man's consciousness of sin are such as to establish a weighty probability in favour of the opposite view ; namely, that monotheism must be presumed to have been the original type of religious belief, of which all others must be regarded as variously de- graded forms. It is one of the most remarkable character- istics of modern naturalistic theories of the development of religion, that, for the most part, they ignore this universal consciousness of sin, and quietly assume that religious development has progressed under normal conditions, and thus also must have been marked, on the whole, by a progressive elevation and continuous im- provement of man's religious ideas. But this common assumption is in contradiction to most manifest and indisputable facts. Conscience in all ages has steadily witnessed that man's moral relation to the Power with whom in religion he has to do, is not what it should be. All religions agree in taking it for granted that in this relation there is something abnormal, SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 193 which, somehow, through religion, needs, if possible, to be set right. In a word, they testify, always and everywhere, that man feels himself to be a sinner, and, because of this, out of harmony with the Power which rules the universe. About this fact there is no room for debate. One may, if he will, regard this uni- versal feeling as a groundless superstition. But such an individual opinion cannot remove the fact that, as a rule, the great mass of men, and the noblest, purest natures and deepest thinkers, most of all, have sadly recognised a moral dis- harmony between themselves and that mysteri- ous Power which conscience discerns in nature. The truth of this general statement is not affected, nor its significance in the present argument lessened, because in some individ- uals this consciousness of sin appears to be extinct. For it is one of the most constantly observed effects of continued sin, that it tends to produce a certain numbness and deadness of the moral sense. The only wonder is that individuals who have no sense of sin, are not more common than they are. o 194 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. Neither is the bearing of this fact on the question before us affected by the circumstance that very great differences of belief are found among men, as to what specific acts or feelings are to be regarded as sin. For this difference only concerns the question as to what are those particular moral acts or states, because of which the disharmony between man and the Unseen Power exists. All alike, however they may differ on this point, assume the fact that the disharmony exists. Now it is no exaggeration to say that this consciousness of sin and guilt has been one of the most potent factors in the development of religion. Practically, the religions of the world have addressed themselves chiefly to the problems presented by the fact of sin, and the pain and sorrow which is commonly perceived to be a consequence of sin. Hence, to write a history, or elaborate a theory, of the development of religion, and either ignore the phenomena presented in the consciousness of sin, or assign them an influence subordinate and insignificant, thus SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 195 assuming that the development of religion has been essentially normal, is utterly unsci- entific. Such an assumption can only lead to a misreading of facts, and, in consequence, to erroneous conclusions. He who makes such an assumption, and interprets facts accordingly, commits an error no less fatal to any correct result than that of the student who should attempt to construct a theory of physiology, solely from data presented by diseased persons, mistakenly supposed by him to be sound and well. And yet a no less eminent specialist in this subject than M. Reville, introduces into the foundation of his argument this very assumption ; representing it as incon- ceivable that the history of the develop- ment of religion should be "nothing more than an exposition of the degradation and corruption of moral truth." What is this but to assume that man, who is everywhere presented to our observation as morally sick, is morally well ? Incredible, indeed, such a 1 "Prolegomena," etc., p. 35. 196 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. record of a continual tendency to the degrada- tion of religion would appear, if man's moral condition were normal ; but how, if it be abnormal ? What shall we say, if we regard the testimony of conscience, that man is suffering universally from a profound consti- tutional disorder of his moral and spiritual nature ? If this be true, then is it not rather inconceivable that the history of religion should not bear witness to a no less universal tendency to moral and spiritual degradation and corruption ? For it is undeniable that sin universally and constantly tends to modify a man's religious beliefs and feelings for the worse. It ever tends to dull to the consciousness, the voice of conscience, which affirms a moral law, and therewith a personal Lawgiver, not many, but One and Supreme. Sin also begets fear, and the more that the consciousness of sin is developed, ever more and more fear. Sin also is ever manifested in desire for that which the fleshly lower nature of man craves, but the moral law condemns. How SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 197 natural, then, how inevitable, indeed, that sin should powerfully influence the development of religion ; as inclining men always to wrong views of the nature and character of God ! How natural that we should see as we do see many religions which express little else than the con- sciousness of fear and dread ; dread of a great God, or gods, on high, or of malign unseen powers resident in nature ! How evident, again, that, because the consciousness of sin awakens fear of retribution from the unseen Power against whom man has sinned, therefore, inas- much as fear is painful, men will be unfailingly predisposed to look with favour upon such views of God, or of the world, or of both, as, if as- sumed to be true, diminish or remove the ground for fear ! How natural thus that men should ever be inclined to imagine gods like unto themselves, who therefore, as themselves unholy, are not greatly displeased with the sin- fulness of man ! Hence we find many ready to accept an athe- istic or agnostic system, like the early Bud- dhism or Chinese Confucianism ; many more 198 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. accepting pantheism, as in ancient Egypt, Babylon, and, above all, in India, ancient and modern. For in the former case, if a man can accept an atheistic or an agnostic creed, he practically rids himself of the oppressive belief in an almighty Being, personal and holy, and therefore to be feared by a sinner. In the case of pantheism, the same stupefaction of the warning conscience is secured, both logically and historically, in the highest degree. For in ascribing all human acts, in the same sense, to God, pantheism denies His absolute holiness, as in eternal antagonism to man's sin; reduc- ing sin to a necessary, but transient, moment in the evolutionary process of the one only Being ; and by denying free-agency, and by affirming necessity as the law of human life, it consistently shows that no man is responsible for his wrong doing ; a doctrine which is re- peatedly affirmed as dogma in the sacred books of India. Remembering these things, it is easy to understand why pantheism should have been accepted by such a very large proportion of the human family as the essential truth of SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 199 religion. Pantheism is to the pangs of con- science what morphine is to aching nerves. Polytheistic religions often based, con- sciously or unconsciously, on pantheistic as- sumptions have the same effect of dulling the sense of sin. They do this by lowering the character of God, through representing Him by unworthy symbols ; so that as the symbolism be- comes progressively more and more degraded, the moral antagonism between man and God is more and more obscured to consciousness. Finally, sin ever tends to affect for evil the religious development of man, because it lies in the nature of sin, that it tends to the de- basement of moral ideals, and so makes it ever more and more easy for man to imagine a god like unto himself. To all this it is indeed sometimes replied, that, even granting these facts as to man's present sinful condition, and also that sin must modify the religious development, it might nevertheless be true that man naturally tends, as the ages pass, to grow morally better; so that a progressive elevation of man's religious 200 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. conceptions, in the way of a merely natural development, might still be quite possible. Upon this assumption, sin would be like certain bodily diseases, which run a definite and self- limited course, and which naturally tend to the re-establishment of health. But however pleasing such a belief would be, the facts of history forbid us to take this optimistic view. As regards the individual, there is nothing clearer than the fact that the natural tendency of a sinner is not toward moral and spiritual improvement, but the reverse. Every man who really struggles in earnest against sin, just in proportion to the strength of the determination of his will against it, finds that the tendency of his nature is ever against him. But if this be true of every individual, how can it but be true of the whole race, which is made up exclusively of such individuals ? And that indeed it is so with the race, all history bears accordant witness. Not only has the natural tendency been downward and not upward, outside of the influence of Judaism and SIN AND RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 201 Christianity, but even Jewish and Christian history furnishes many humiliating illustrations of this law of tendency to moral depravation. If, now, this be a correct account of the chief phenomena presented in the universal conscious- ness of sin, it is easy to see on which side the presumption must lie, as regards the order of religious development. That man should have begun with some low and erroneous form of religious belief, and then, being the sinner that he is, through a merely natural development, and apart from any supernatural grace, should have gradually approximated, or at last attained to, the purity of monotheistic faith, as repre- sented in Judaism or Christianity, appears in this light to be nothing less than a wholly incredible hypothesis. A presumption of over- whelming force is therefore established that the natural order of the development of religion cannot have been from animism, fetishism, nature or ancestor worship, upwards, toward the recognition and worship of the one living and true God; but that instead, the religious movement, on lines of nature, must have been 202 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. from an original monotheism, downwards, along various lines of progressive debasement of the idea of God and of man's relation to Him. Whether the facts of history, so far as ascer- tainable, are such as this presumption would lead us to anticipate, we have to inquire in the next lecture. LECTURE VII. HISTORIC FACTS REGARDING THE ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. IN the previous lecture it was shown that the phenomena which are exhibited in connection with man's consciousness of sin, are such as to establish the strongest possible presumption against the probability of a gradual improve- ment and elevation of religion through any forces resident in humanity ; so that it is in the last degree unlikely that the order of relig- ious development should have been from an original and primitive worship of spirits, or of fetishes, or of nature, upwards, toward monothe- ism, and not rather the reverse. We have next to inquire whether or not historical facts, so far as known, are such as to sustain this pre- sumption, and so support the hypothesis that the original form of religious faith must have been monotheistic. 203 204 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. We may well begin the inquiry with the order of development in ancient Egypt. The beginnings of Egyptian history are still veiled in mystery, but we shall doubtless be safe if we assume that the first dynasty of the Egyp- tian monarchy cannot be placed at a date more recent than about 3400 B.C. ; not forgetting that some eminent scholars insist on a date one or two thousand years earlier. 1 On the assumption of 3400 B.C. as the lowest possible date, we then have a literature covering a mini- mum period of about three thousand years, ending with the early Christian centuries. The time is certainly sufficiently long to enable us to judge of the general religious tendency of the people ; and as, fortunately, the literature and other monuments of Egypt are not only very abundant, but have much to say regarding 1 Renouf says: "The date of the Great Pyramid cannot be more recent than 3000 B.C." But this is not yet the beginning of the long series of Egyptian dynasties ; and there appears also to be sufficient evidence that man existed in the Nile valley long before the first dynasty. See "The Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religion of Ancient Egypt," by M. Le Page Renouf (Hibbert Lectures for 1879), p. 50. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 205 religious matters, the data for forming an intel- ligent judgment are all that we could ask. From this literature it appears that both monotheism and polytheism coexisted in Egypt from the time of the earliest records. Illustra- tions of the latter need not be adduced. Every one is familiar with the gross idolatry of ancient Egypt, their worship of sacred bulls, and cats, and crocodiles \ of leeks and onions ; of sun, and moon, and stars. But those who have not looked into the matter may well be surprised to find also in this literature, declara- tions of the moral character of God, as the sole, supreme Ruler of heaven and earth, which in many instances might be used without modification to express the belief of the Chris- tian. Thus in the " Maxims of Ptahhotep," the most ancient book in the world, dating from the time of the pyramid-builders, we find such passages as these : "If any one beareth himself proudly, he will be humbled by God, who maketh his strength." 206 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF KELIGION. " If thou art a wise man, bring up thy son in the love of God." " God loveth the obedient, and hateth the disobedient." 1 In the Maxims of Ani we read : " Pray humbly with a loving heart, all the words of which are uttered in secret: He (God) will protect thee in thy affairs; He will listen to thy words." " Give thyself to God ; keep thyself con- tinually for God, and let to-morrow be like to-day. Let thine eyes consider the acts of God ; it is He who smiteth him that is smit- ten." 2 This " God " of whom Ptahhotep and Ani speak, is described even as in the Chris- tian Scriptures, as " the great God, Lord of heaven and of earth, who made all things which are." 3 And to this God the prayer is offered : " my God and Lord, who hast made me, 1 Quoted by Renouf, "Origin and Growth of Religion," etc., pp. 100, 101. 2 Ib. pp. 102, 103. 3 Ib. p. 216. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 207 and formed me, give me an eye to see and an ear to hear thy glories." Such expressions, which are exceedingly numerous, amply justify the strong language of Rouge, quoted by Renouf : " The first charac- teristic of the (Egyptian) religion is the unity (of God) most energetically expressed; God, one, sole, and only ; no others with Him. . . . He has made everything, and He alone has not been made." 2 This understanding of these ancient testi- monies concerning the religion of ancient Egypt is sustained by Renouf, who, commenting on some of the above-cited texts, uses these words : " There can, I trust, be no doubt, who that power is which, in our translations, we do not hesitate to call God. It is unquestionably the true and only God, who is not far from any of us ; for in Him we live, and move, and have our being ; whose 4 eternal power and godhead ' and government of the world were made 1 Quoted by Renouf, "Origin and Growth of Religion," etc., p. 216. 2 Ib> p . 89 . 208 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. known through that Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world." 1 The writings of ancient Egypt thus witness not only to the existence of polytheism in ancient Egypt, but, no less clearly, to the coex- istence with it of a high type of monotheistic belief. Now the question vital to the present argument is evidently this : What, according to these ancient authorities, is the relation of time and succession in which the Egyptian mono- theism and polytheism stand to each other ? According to any evolutionary theory of relig- ion, we ought to find the nature- worship in its various forms, most prominent in the earliest literature ; and then, coming down the centuries, we should be able to observe a gradual evolu- tion of monotheism out of that earlier faith. Is this, in fact, what we do find ? Let us again hear one of the high authorities already cited. Referring to the monotheistic element in Egyp- tian literature, Renouf says : " It is incontestably true that the sublimer 1 Quoted by Renouf, "Origin and Growth of Religion," etc., p. 103. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 209 portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result of a process of devel- opment, of elimination from the grosser. The sublimer portions are demonstrably ancient ; and the last stage of the Egyptian religion . . . was by far the grossest and most corrupt." 1 Rouge*, whom Renouf quotes, agrees with him in asserting this same order as historical fact. He says : " More than five thousand 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 in the last ages arrived at the most unbridled polytheism. The belief in the Unity of the Supreme God and in His attributes as Creator and Law-giver of man, . . . these are the primitive notions, encased like indestructible diamonds in the midst of the mythological superfetations accumulated in the centuries which have passed over that ancient civilisation." 2 The facts thus show that the order of the 1 " Origin and Growth of Religion," etc., p. 91. See also p. 249. 2 Quoted ib., p. 91. P 210 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. development of religion in Egypt was the exact opposite of that which any evolutionary theory of religion would require ; but in perfect accord with the presumption established in the pre- vious lecture, on the ground of the observed phenomena connected with man's consciousness of sin. The order of the Egyptian development was not from the lower to the higher forms of religious belief, but the reverse. It is the most ancient Egyptian literature which exhibits the noblest and purest faith. In that of the earlier dynasties we find the doctrines of the unity, per- sonality, and spirituality of God, as the Creator of the world, "strenuously asserted"; although with this we also may observe manifestations of a tendency to religious debasement. The powers of nature were already worshipped; but in that early day they appear to have been regarded merely as the diverse manifestations of the one Nutar, or Power, from whom all powers proceed. But by the 19th dynasty, or about the time of the Exodus, the conception of the personality of God, as above and tran- scending the world He had created, had largely ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 211 given place to a pantheistic view of God's relation to the world, which then led rapidly on, as always, to the development of a system of nature-worship, and that of a very gross kind ; as of cats, and bulls, and crocodiles, and beetles, the ultimate and most degraded stage . of the Egyptian religion, as it was chiefly known to the Greek writers, and, still later, to the early Christian fathers. Similar was the order of development in the religion of India. The most ancient deity, probably, of the Indo-Aryans, was Dyaus, called more specifically Dyauspitar, lit. Heaven- Father, the original form, as is well known, of the Latin Jupiter, as is Dyaus of the Greek Zeus, all denoting the Supreme God. But already in the earliest Yedic days, according to Professor Max Miiller, Dyaus pitar had become " a fading star," and other deities were coming above the horizon, such Aditi, "the Infinite Expanse"; Varuna, "the Star-lit sky"; Mithra, "the god of day," etc. As time passed on, the number of deities was multiplied more and more ; still, however, for the most part. 212 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. representing natural phenomena. Such were Indra, the god of rain ; Vayu, the god of wind ; the Maruts, or gods of the storm; Surya, the Sun-god ; Ushas, the goddess of the dawn ; and especially Agni, the god of fire, etc. But in that earliest form of the Indo- Aryan religion, each of these chief deities is addressed as if it were the one only Supreme Being; precisely as in old time were Osiris, Ra, and other gods of Egypt. Thus Agni is said to be " the Lawgiver of the Universe "; Indra is declared to be " higher than all "; Agni, Surya, Indra, and Vishnu, are, each alike, styled " king of all gods and men "; 1 the phase of religion which Max Miiller has called henotheism ; and the explanation of which according to the Rig Veda, i, 164, is found in the fact that these are all regarded as simply various manifestations of one Divine Being. " They call him Indra, Mithra, Va- runa, Agni, that which is One, the wise name by different terms." Such is the form of religion which Ebrard, " Apologetik," 2 Bd. 15. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 213 meets us in the earliest Yedic period. In name, many gods appear, generally imperson- ations of powers and objects of nature ; but these are still regarded, not so much as distinct deities, but rather as various mani- festations of a God who is essentially one. Of fetish-worship or ancestor-worship in that early time, we find not a trace, though there is enough of it later. The phenomena of that early Vedic religion have been de- scribed, as beautifully as truly, by Professor Max Mliller in the following language : " There is a monotheism that precedes the polytheism of the Veda ; and even in the invocations of their innumerable gods, the remembrance of a God, one and infinite, breaks through the mist of idolatrous phraseology, like the blue sky that is hidden by passing clouds." 1 The best spirit of that time is eloquently witnessed by the often-cited Hymn 121 of the 1st Mandala of the Rig Yeda, a part of which is as follows, the first line being 1 " History of Sanskrit Literature," p. 559. GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. repeated as a refrain at the end of each verse : "What God shall we adore with sacrifice ? 1 Him let us praise, the golden child that rose In the beginning, who was born the lord The one sole lord of all that is who made The earth, and formed the sky, who giveth life, Who giveth strength, whose bidding gods revere, Whose hiding-place is immortality, Whose shadow, death ; who by his might is king Of all the breathing, sleeping, waking world Who governs men and beasts ... to whom Both earth and heaven, established by his will, Look up with trembling mind ; . . . the only God Above the gods. May he not injure us ! He, the Creator of the earth the righteous Creator of the sky, Creator too Of oceans bright, and far extending waters." 2 Words such as these might then have seemed to give promise of continued progress toward clearer and clearer recognition of the one God and Father in heaven ; but so it was not 1 The words are repeated as a refrain after each line. 2 As rendered by Sir M. Monier- Williams, in "Indian Wis- dom.'' 2d ed., p. 23. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 215 to be. Even in the Rig Veda appear concep- tions which were to develop at last, not into a yet clearer monotheism, but into the most elaborate and consistent system of pantheism which perhaps the world has ever seen. Thus, in a hymn addressed to Aditi, we read : " Aditi is the sky (Dyaus) ; Aditi is the air ; Aditi is the mother and father and son ; Aditi is the collective gods ; Aditi is the five persons ; Aditi is whatever has been born ; Aditi is what- ever is to be born." In the Upanishads, which we may assign to a period immediately following the sixth century B.C., pantheism is fully and explicitly taught, though not always yet with strict con- sistency. Thus, in the Briliad-dranyaka Upan- ishad (II. i. 20), the relation of the universe, visible and invisible, to the Supreme Being, is thus expressed : " As the web issues from the spider, as little sparks proceed from fire, so from the one Soul 1 Quoted by Robson, Hinduism in its Relation to Chris- tianity," p. 18. 216 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. proceed all breathing animals, all worlds, all the gods, and all beings." l In the Mundaka Upanishad (I. i. 7) the same thought is expressed thus : " As from a blazing fire consubstantial sparks proceed in a thousand ways, so from the im- perishable (Spirit) various living souls are pro- duced, and they return to him too." 2 From this, the logical conclusion is the dei- fication of man, and this was affirmed as truth in the first-named Upanishad (IV. 4 : 15) as it still is by the millions of orthodox Hindoos. We read : " When a person regards his own soul as truly God, as the lord of what was and is to be, then he does not wish to conceal from him- self that Soul." 3 Not yet, however, was the pantheistic doctrine accepted without controversy. Out of these Upanisliads, arose, five or six centuries before Christ, the so-called Shad-Darshana, or " Six Systems " of philosophy, which, as regards our 1 Quoted by Sir M. Monier- Williams, "Indian Wisdom," p. 39. 2 Ib. p. 43. 3 Ib. p. 39. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 217 present subject, may be regarded as three. These all agreed on the following points : namely, that soul, as, also, in respect of its sub- stance, the material universe, is without be- ginning and without end ; that consciousness, with its associated phenomena, is conditioned by the connexion of soul with body, and is maintained in most cases through transmi- gration. It was also unanimously agreed that this state of things is necessarily evil, and that hence the summum bonum, the ultimate end of all things and the highest object of all re- ligion, is the loss of personal self-consciousness, and reabsorption in the one Supreme and only Being, if there be one. 1 In the Nyaya and the closely related Vaishe- shika system, the material world is regarded as made by the aggregation of atoms. If we ask how the atoms came together, or are parted again, the answer is, not by the power of God, but by the power of Adrishta, liter- ally, " the Unseen." In the Vaisheshika Shds- tra God is not named, and in the original 1 See " Indian Wisdom," lect. iii, pp. 61-70. 218 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. Nydya Shdstra but once, and then only inci- dentally by an objector to the system. In this case the idea of God, all pervasive in Vedic days, had now become a vanishing quantity; though the later Naiydyika writers still strive to retain it, as when in the Kusmdnjali we read : " An omniscient and indestructible Being is to be proved from the existence of effects, from the combination of atoms," etc. 1 Still, even so, the idea of God was greatly lowered, as the atoms of which the universe is composed, were still assumed to be coeternal with and independent of God. In the Sdnkhya the conception of God has dis- appeared altogether. It is declared that " the existence of a supreme Lord is unproved," and that, "there can be no proof of his existence"; and that, even if he did exist, " he could not be effective of any creation." The existence of the universe is explained by assuming two eter- nal entities ; Prakriti, described as amulam 1 " Indian Wisdom," p. 87. 2 Ib. pp. 97, 98. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 219 mtilam, " a rootless root," and purusha, " the soul." All that exists is derived by a process of evolution from Prakriti, except piirusha, which is regarded as apathetic, inactive, and without qualities, though in close connexion with the former : a theory which, very pos- sibly, is connected closely with another, widely accepted in India in more recent times, that a female principle, in conjunction with a male, constitute the joint cause of the world. But although this dreary atheistic or agnostic system prevailed extensively in India till about the Christian era, and still has its adherents, it was not destined to become the finally ac- cepted philosophy of the Hindoos. In the last- named of the Six Systems, the Vedanta, the pantheism, the germs of which had appeared so long ago as the days of the Rig Veda, was developed into a pure monistic pantheism, which is the religious creed of the great majority of the Hindoos at the present day. The whole system is logically involved in one short phrase from the Chdndogya UpanisJiad : " Ekam evddwitiyam" "one only without a second"; 220 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. a thought which is more fully stated in the line, " Brahma satyam jagan mithyd jivo brahmaiva ndparah," " Brahma is real, the world is unreal ; the soul is very Brahma, and no other." Either of these lines one may hear almost any day from the lips of Hindoos in India, as ex- pressing what to their mind is the sum of all philosophic and religious truth. On this pan- theistic foundation, has been raised the whole immense structure of modern Puranic Hin- dooism. On this principle, any and every form of worship that any one may prefer, is readily justified; whether it be the worship of nature, as in the adoration of the sun, of deified men, .as in the most popular worship of Ram and of Krishna, or that of the linga or phallus, in a word, of the grandest and noblest, or of the most insignificant and unworthy, and most revolting objects ; as image-worship also, which in the Vedic days was wholly unknown. It is true that from time to time, as in the case, e.g., of some of the earlier Nydya teachers, and commentators on the Sankhya, as also in ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 221 later times, such reformers as Ramanand, Ramanuja, and, under the influence of Islam, Kabir and others, individuals have sought to break away from absolute bondage to this pantheistic philosophy and regain the primitive faith in one personal God. But, at the best, such individuals have themselves only succeeded in a partial and imperfect degree, and have never been able to draw any great number of the people after them. These facts as to the order of the develop- ment of religion in India are so well known to every one who has studied the subject, and, in particular, have been so fully admitted by Professor Max Miiller, that we can only account for his assertion that the movement of Indian thought has been through polytheism to mono- theism, by the supposition that he uses the word " monotheism" in a sense peculiar to himself. Monotheism, in the common sense of that word, is repudiated by the Hindoos, almost with one consent. Their own mind on the matter is well expressed by the following words, which are taken from an able antichris- 222 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. tian tract, recently issued by a Hindoo Tract Society in North India : " Every religion in the world has its own excrescences and its incrustations. We have had our own share of them. But amid all our wanderings and errors we have never de- graded ourselves so far as to believe in a personal God ... to such an extent as to make such a belief a necessary article of faith." 1 We have dwelt at considerable length upon the historic development of the Indo-Aryan religion, not only because the facts are so thoroughly ascertained, but because it has been so positively asserted, and by so high authority, that the tendency of the religious thought of India has been steadily toward monotheism ; an assertion which, we repeat, can only be justified by assuming for the term " monotheism " a meaning which, however con- sistent with its etymology, in actual use it never has. If monotheism be the truth, then 1 Quoted in "The Indian Standard," Sept. 1, 1891; in the article " A Remarkable Antichristiau Tract." ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 223 the history of Indian thought has been marked, not by progress, but by regress ; by an invin- cible tendency away from monotheism, through nature-worship, to pantheism. The greatest thinkers of India through the by-gone centuries, have not been gradually ap- proaching the conception of God as one and personal, but have steadily drifted away from it. In the pre-Vedic period and in the earliest beginning of the Vedic age, the Indo-Aryans seem to have still retained a conception, some- what hazy and ill-defined, of one Father in heaven ; and even when worshipping God under the forms and names of natural objects and visible phenomena, they recognised Him as one, and as a personal Power, everywhere manifest behind the visible and material world. But now and for centuries past, the people of India, as a whole, with one consent have identified the Creator with the creature, the Most Holy One with the sinner, and therewith continually justify themselves, not only for every form of polytheism, fetish-worship, idol- worship, or no worship at all, but no less, by a 224 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. logic which on their premises is unanswerable, for the commission of the grossest impurities and the most flagrant crimes. If we have justly inferred from the intima- tions in the earliest Vedic hymns, and earlier pre-Vedic period, that the monotheism which was already then disappearing, was the recognised faith of the people of Iran, we should naturally expect to find some further testimony to this fact in the closely related Zend-speaking people of ancient Persia, from the midst of whom, in pre-historic times, the Indo-Aryans emigrated south-eastward into India. And this expectation is not disappointed. According to Professor Max Miiller, the relig- ion of Zoroaster, still professed by the modern Parsees, was originally " founded on a solemn protest against the worship of nature involved in the Vedas." l It is indeed true that in the form which is most familiar, the form in which the Zoroas- trian religion maintained itself for centuries, 1 But this is strenuously denied by Darmesteter. See " The Vendidad," Introduction, pp. Ixxix, Ixxxi ; "Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 225 not monotheism, but dualism, with an idola- trous reverence for the elements, and especially for fire, has been its most characteristic feature. But in the earliest authorities on the Zoroas- trian religion this dualism is not yet developed. According to Darmesteter, there is no evidence that this dualism was generally accepted by the ancient Persians before the end of the Achamsenian dynasty, about 331 B.C. 1 There is indeed evidence that, before this, the so-called Magi held this dualistic faith, but it had not gained general acceptance. 2 Furthermore, in the Gdthas, which form the most ancient portion of the Zend a vesta, the idea of two creators, one good, the other evil, is expressly excluded : and Ahuramazda is declared to have created all things, the evil as well as the good ; as in the following passage : 3 1 "Sacred Books of the East," vol. iv., pp. xliii, xliv. 2 Ib. pp. xlv, xlvi. 8 Yasna, xliv, 5 et seq. of the Zenda vesta. The translation presented is given in an essay by R. Brown, F.S.A., on " The Relig- ion of Zoroaster," read before the Victoria Institute. A more literal translation, essentially identical, will be found in the "Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxxi. 226 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. "That I shall ask thee, tell it me right, Ahum! Who was in the beginning the father and creator of righteousness ? Who created the path of the sun and stars ? Who causes the moon to increase and wane, but thou ? Who is holding the earth and the skies above it ? Who made the waters and the trees of the field ? Who created the lights, of good effect, and the darkness ? Who created the sleep of good effect and the activity ? Who created the morning, noon, and night ? Who has prepared the Bactrian home ? To become acquainted with these things, I approach thee, Mazda, Beneficent Spirit ! Creator of all beings ! That I shall ask thee, tell it me right, Aliura ! " Elsewhere Ahuramazda is described as "he who created by means of his wisdom the good and the evil mind." But along with those earliest utterances, we find others which exhibit the germ of that dualism which was afterward so fully developed. Thus we read in the Gathas : " Thus are the primeval spirits, who as a pair (combining their opposite strivings), and (yet each) independent in his action, have been famed (of old). (They are) a better thing, ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 227 they two, and a worse, as to thought, and word, and as to deed. And between these two let the wisely acting choose aright. (Choose ye) not (as) the evil-doers ! "* Zoroaster was a monotheist. But were, then, the Iranians in the days when the Gdtlias were written still monotheists? Evidently not; for in these same Gdthas is constantly denounced the worship of the devas, " the priests and the prophets of idols." Already, then, the Iranian branch of the Aryan race had become polythe- ists and idolaters. But, according to these same most ancient authorities, this polytheism was not original. Zoroaster speaks, as it were, as a prophet, even as Mohammed to the Arabian idolaters in a later day ; not announcing a new religion, but calling them back to .an earlier and a purer faith which they had forsaken, 1 Yasna, xxx, 3, x ' Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxxi, p. 29. On this Yasna, Mr. Mills, the translator, remarks that it is the " earliest statement of dualism which has come down to us." Yet these two heads are called, " not two persons, or at least not only two persons, but a better thing, or principle, and a worse one. (The qualifying words are all in the neuter.) It is also noticeable that the name Angra Mainya does not occur in this section." Op. cit, p. 25. 228 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. the worship of Ahum, the " All- Wise Spirit." For the authority with which he summons the people to the worship of this one and living God, he appeals to " sayings of old which Ahum revealed." l And yet, while, as we have just seen, Zoro- aster, according to the Gathas, professed and taught faith in one God, he used expressions which, howsoever intended by him, contained the germs of a new dualistic degeneration of the primitive faith. The " twin spirits " of Ahuramazda, which at first represented only the two sides of the Divine activity, were soon conceived of as two beings, the one, Ahura- mazda, the other, Angromainyus, or Ahriman, 1 The above representations are accepted by learned Parsees as correct. Thug, in a Parsee catechism, prepared, consequent upon the modern missionary activity in Bombay, some years ago, the following questions and answers, among others, are given : " Q' Whom do we of the Zurthosti religion believe in ? "A. We believe in one only God, and do not believe in any besides Him. " Q. What religion f prevailed in Persia before the time of Zurthost ? "A. The kings and the people were worshippers of God ; but they had, like the Hindoos, images of the planets and idols in their temples." See in " Religious Systems of the World," pp. 174, 175. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 229 the Evil One, the Great Serpent. The latter was regarded as independent and self-existent, but as differing from Ahuramazda, in that he lacks foresight, so that he will at last be defeated. To these two, again, were added a multitude of inferior beings, personifications, many of them, of the good or evil attributes supposed to belong to Ahuramazda or Angromainyus ; the Ameslia spentas on the side of the former and an army of demons, Akemano, Taric, and the rest, on the side of the latter. Yet in this new dualism and polydernonism the mind could not rest, and in various sects an effort was made to include the two, the good and the evil principle, in a third, from which they both were supposed to proceed ; especially in an abstraction, Zrvan Akarana, " Boundless Space." But speculations of tHs kind never seem to have gained general accept- ance. If one may accept without qualification the representations of such eminent Parsees as Dhdabhai Naorofi, the modern Parsees must indeed in fairness be described as monotheists. 1 1 "Religious Systems of the World," v, p. 182. 230 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. But none the less does the history of the Zoroastrian religion confirm the general propo- sition, that man shows, as a law of his religious development, an invincible tendency to degen- eration, only arrested or retarded in any suc- cessful degree where we are able to trace the influence of that special line of monotheistic thought represented, in the first instance, in the Hebrew Scriptures, and then in the New Testament and the Quran, which represent diverse descendants of the same original stock. It must not be forgotten that the followers of Zoroaster, through most of their history, first in the first Jewish dispersion, then, in later days, through contact with Nestorian Christianity and with Islam, and, last of all, now with modern Christian missionary work, have been almost from the first exposed to influences which should help them to hold on in an exceptional way to the monotheism of the earliest Gdihas, and so retard the usual degeneration. Unlike the religions of Egypt, of India, and of Persia, that of the ancient Babylonians, in ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 231 the earliest period to which extant records ascend, presents no certain suggestion of a monotheistic faith. 1 The earliest literature which has been deciphered is that of the " Magical Texts." It covers a period extending back for an unknown time prior to the rise of the Shemitic supremacy, about 3750 B.C., in the Euphrates valley, under Sargon I. These texts, so far as published, exhibit among that ancient Turanian people in the lower Eu- phrates valley nothing higher than a supersti- tious animism, with its professional exorcists, who claimed to be able, by the use of various spells and incantations, to deliver men from the malign influence of numberless spirits believed to exist in the various objects of nature. Of the idea of a God, in our high sense of the word, in this literature, so far as published, we have found no certain trace. Among the countless spirits recognised, ap- pear references to the spirits of heaven and 1 Our chief authority for what is said regarding the Babylonian religion, is Professor Sayce. See The Hihbert Lectures, 1879, " The Origin and Growth of Religion, as illustrated by the Religion of Ancient Egypt." 232 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. of the earth, as specially eminent. These seem, then, to have been conceived of separately from the natural objects which they were supposed to animate, and were gradually developed into creative gods. In Southern Babylonia, in this period, about the city of Eridu, on the Persian Gulf, appears the worship of Ea, or Oannes, the god of culture or of wisdom, and in Northern Babylonia, that of Mul-lil, the lord of the ghost world. A god of fire was also specially wor- shipped, who afterward was identified with the Sun-god. As this earliest known period approached its close, a little before 3750 B.C., appear the oldest of the so-called " Penitential Psalms," a litera- ture distinguished by a very marked develop- ment of the sense of sin, though yet without any very clear expression of monotheistic belief. In these, with the " god, known or unknown," frequently invoked, is associated a goddess, whose pardon and favour also is begged ; a cir- cumstance in which, in the opinion of Professor Sayce, we are to recognise the first trace of the rising influence of Shemitic thought upon that of the Turanian race. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 233 The Shemitic political supremacy, which be- gan with Sargon I, introduced a new stage of religious development, in which the earlier ani- mism gradually sank to a subordinate position, and was supplanted by the higher conceptions of the Shemitic nature-worship. In this the Sun-god, variously known in his various aspects as SamaSy or Merodach, or Adar, appears as the head of a divine family, in which he stands forth as omnipotent creator. With him are as- sociated a goddess, after the usual Shemitic fashion, as also the Moon-god, and a host of minor deities, which at a later day are said to be no less than forty-five thousand in number. And this type of religion continued to prevail in the Euphrates valley region until the final downfall of the Babylonian power, in the sixth century B.C. Such, then, was the order of the development of religion among the Babylonians. Earliest of all, we find a worship of spirits, with which natural objects were supposed to be animated ; then gradually, under external Shemitic influ- ence, arose a system of nature- worship, espe- 234 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. cially that of the sun, the moon, and the stars, conceived of later in an anthropomorphic way, and each associated with a female counterpart, or goddess. Connected with this religious development we find, as in India and elsewhere, that a relig- ious philosophy gradually arose. The god Ana (Shem. Ann), originally the god of the visible sky, became first the " supreme lord of the uni- verse," the " one god against whom none may rebel." But this supreme god of that time was only conceived of in a pantheistic manner, and was identified with the universe itself. On the other hand, while some resolved all that exists into the Divine, last of all, others maintained that matter itself was the one substance and primal cause of all that is, even of the great gods themselves. In either case alike, the ten- dency was, not to monotheism, but to monism. Now it is indeed true that extant sources, so far a i,<* yet 4mown, have not hitherto revealed, in the distant antiquity of the Akkadian supremacy in the Euphrates valley, any distinct recognition of God as one, living, and personal; and thus ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 235 they afford us no direct evidence of a degenera- tion of religion from this higher conception to the ancient Akkadian animism. But it is of the first importance to observe that throughout the whole four thousand years or more of Baby- lonian history, there is no indication whatever of any tendency to the evolution of a monothe- istic faith. Instead of this, we find a polythe- ism which, if higher in an intellectual aspect than the animism which preceded it, yet ever exhibits more and more of awful moral degra- dation ; and along with this, as in other lands, here pantheism, and there materialism, both alike excluding the idea of a God, one and personal, as the Creator and Governor of the world. Hence, the facts, when thoughtfully consid- ered, give no support for the opinion which one might hastily form, that Babylonian history, at least, must be allowed to sustain the theory of the development of monotheism out of a primi- tive animism. It is true that the early animism of the early Akkadians was succeeded by forms of religion which, regarded merely from an in- tellectual point of view, were less degraded than 236 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. the religion of the Magical Texts. But even this improvement, of such sort as it was, can- not be ascribed to any native tendency to de- velop a higher form of religion among those Turanian peoples, but only, as Sayce and Lenor- mant have shown, to the influence of Shemitic thought. But even when this became domi- nant, the movement of religious thought was still not toward monotheism, but rather, as in Egypt and India, toward an increasing polythe- ism, justified or excused by a pantheistic or a materialistic philosophy. If, then, the tendency of Babylonian thought, throughout the whole historic period, was indisputably in another direction than to- wards monotheism, it is obviously most il- logical and unscientific to assume that in the prehistoric period the tendency had been the reverse. And thus we are led to recognise in the early animism of the Euphrates valley Akkadians, nothing primitive, but rather an extreme degeneration of religion from an earlier and purer form, such as history compels us to recognise in the case of other peoples, where the historic process can be more clearly traced. OKUER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 237 About 2200 B.C., the date when trust- worthy history begins in China, according to Dr. Legge and other high authorities, 1 the Chi- nese were, as now, worshipping the heaven and the earth, and the spirits of their ancestors. By the name " Heaven," however, he under- stands that they really, in the first instance, de- noted the Supreme God. That it might have been so, we shall easily see when we remember that even among ourselves the word " Heaven " is often used for the Supreme Being ; and that in this we have the warrant, as he reminds us, even of the New Testament ; as in Luke xv, where the prodigal son is made to say : "I have sinned against Heaven." Besides the wor- ship of heaven, the Chinese worshipped other objects in nature, as the earth, the sun, moon, and stars, and also the spirits of their ancestors ; all of which cults have survived to the pres- ent time. But against the opinion of some, that nature- worship was the earliest form of religion among the Chinese, Dr. Legge adduces the 1 "Religious Systems of the World,' 1 London, 1890, pp. 46, 47. 238 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. pertinent testimony of Confucius, that by the ceremonies of the sacrifices to heaven and earth " they worship God." So in prayers addressed to the "Bain Master/' the " Cloud Master," and others, these are declared to be " ministers assisting the Supreme God." * Such expressions as these seem indeed to imply that in early times, as in India the worshippers of Varuna, so the Chinese had still a lingering conscious- ness of the unity and personality of God. But, if one may trust the testimony of missionaries and others who have long lived among the people, the official worship of heaven and earth by the emperor, in modern times, is now, and for a long time past has been, an unqualified idolatry. Such assure us that heaven, as thus worshipped, is not now regarded as a term for God : it denotes the visible heaven deified. That the primitive ancestors of the Chinese may have at first worshipped the one God under the name and symbol of the over-arching heaven, if we may reason from the analogy of religious his- tory among other peoples, is likely enough ; but 1 " Religious Systems of the World," p. 48. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 239 for centuries the idea of God has practically disappeared from the consciousness of the whole Chinese nation. It has been utterly lost in a worship of nature, of spirits numberless, of idols, and of the departed dead. As regards this most popular ancestor-worship, Dr. Legge indeed insists that even the spirit of Confucius himself receives merely the worship of grati- tude for his great services to the nation, and not the worship of adoration, such as is proper to God alone. 1 However, granting that this may have been so in the beginning, even Dr. Legge speaks of the danger that this worship may lead to superstition and idolatry, and gives an example of this in the actual deification of Kwan Yu, a famous warrior of the third Chris- tian century, who has become to the Chinese the god of war. 2 Missionaries, with one accord, assure us that this danger has long ago been universally realised in fact. Whatever may have been the monotheism of the primitive days of the Chinese nation, nothing is more certain than that, at the very 1 "Religious Systems of the World," p. 51. 2 Ib. p. 52. 240 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. beginning of the historic period, it had become, practically, an inoperative belief, if indeed held at all. In later days, as is well known, Con- fucius carefully avoided teaching anything as to the Supreme Being, or the relations of man to heaven. It was enough that the emperor offered sacrifices at the proper time to the spirits of heaven and of earth. If man had any relations to God, any duties owed to Heaven, Confucius ignored them. Professor Beal tells us that, throughout the whole period of more than two thousand years down to about 209 B.C., while there had been much of material and of intellectual activity among the Chinese, there was " never a sign of any spiritual life or aspiration." l Lao Tze had in the mean time appeared, but neither did he, any more than Confucius, speak a word concerning the living and true God. The Tao of which he had so much to say, whatever may have been intended by the word, was not " God." That Tao denoted any personal being is expressly denied. 2 And, 1 " Religious Systems of the World," p. 74. 2 Tims, e.g., Chuang Tzu says: " Tao is impersonal and pas- sionless." Ib. p. 57. See also pp. 59, 60. ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 241 though the writings of the " Old Philosopher," and some few of his disciples, contain some sen- timents which are admirable in their moral character, yet Taoism, destitute of moral power, has degenerated until all agree that it repre- sents little else to-day than a confused agglom- eration of superstitious beliefs in evil spirits, and various magical arts for their exorcism. Prac- tically, this most ancient of all existing nations gives one of the most impressive proofs to be found in all history, that in humanity is no innate tendency toward monotheism, but rather a most persistent and inveterate inclination away from the very thought of God, to the most debased and superstitious forms of re- ligion. In the whole four thousand years covered by authentic Chinese history, we thus search in vain for any evidence of a tendency to advance toward higher and purer conceptions of divine things. If Dr. Legge is right in his belief, that, according to the Chinese authorities, monothe- ism was really recognised in the earliest times, then it is certain that from that faith they have B 242 GENESIS AND GKOWTH OF RELIGION. utterly fallen away. If the ancestor-worship was not at first, as Dr. Legge thinks, idolatrous in character, it seems, without doubt, to have long ago become so. If, on the other hand, as many of the best scholars in China think, Dr. Legge is mistaken in the interpretation of the Chinese classics, by which he sustains his contention for their original monotheism, it is still certain that, during the whole period of trustworthy Chinese history, that people have shown not the slightest tendency to develop a monotheistic religion, but, on the contrary, like other races, a constant inclination to re- ligious debasement. Such, then, are the facts with regard to the peoples of culture. We find among them, with the single exception of the Shemitic people of Israel, no instance either of a nation which has retained an original monotheism, or which has gradually risen from some lower faith to a monotheistic religion. If this be true of the nations of culture, it is no less true of barba- rous tribes. In a multitude of instances, the traditions of such degraded peoples remarkably ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 243 confirm the testimony of cultivated races to an original faith in one God, living and true, the great God above all gods. Of this fact, only a few illustrations can be given. Among the abo- riginal tribes of India, the most numerous and important are the Santals. These are at pres- ent worshippers of demons, an extremely de- graded people, without an alphabet, and without a literature. Their worship chiefly consists in various rites intended to propitiate a multitude of evil spirits, with whom they suppose them- selves to be surrounded. But their tradition, already referred to, 1 witnesses that it was not al- ways so. They say that at first they worshipped the one God, who in the beginning made one man and one woman; that the Evil Spirit, Marang Buru, appearing to their first parents under the form of a great mountain, persuaded them to make a drink of the fruit of a certain tree, by which they became intoxicated. Be- cause of this, God was angry, and they came under the power of Marang Burn and the other evil spirits under him, to whom, therefore, they 1 Sup. p. 61. 244 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. must now present their offerings, instead of to God. The closely related Kolhs have in like manner retained the memory of a primitive faith in one invisible God, whom they call Sing Bonga, who created all things. But he is regarded as practically far away, and their worship is chiefly rendered, like that of the Santals, to a multitude of evil spirits. On the other side of the world, the ancient Peruvians, and the still more ancient and abo- riginal Aimares, had preserved the tradition of a primitive monotheistic faith. They had this quaint tradition. Because God was all alone, he longed for some one to love him. And so he made Kuru, the first man. And Kuru had a son, and the son died. And God said unto Kuru : " Thy son shall rise again from the dead ; eat not therefore of the fruit which grows from his grave." But Kuru disobeyed this command of God. And God said unto him : " Because thou hast not obeyed me, thou shalt have toil, and thou shalt die ; and all men shall die with thee." ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 245 The fetish-worshipping negroes of the West Coast of Africa, in like manner, confess as prim- itive, a faith in one invisible God, the Creator and Ruler of all, who at first held communion with their fathers, as he does now no longer. They call him Kopong, or Onjang Kopong, a word apparently identical with the word Ku~bong, for " God," used by the aborigines of Australia, and the word Bonga, " God," among the Kolh aborigines of India. Indeed, the full name, Onjang Kopong, has the very same meaning with the phrase Sing Bonga, " Shining Spirit," which the Kolhs use to denote the Supreme Being. As all know, many traditions and religious usages of the American Indians tell, in like manner, of a Great Spirit, who is above all, sometimes, indeed, confounded with heroes of olden times, but often, again, distinctly referred to as the invisible Being who has made all that is. Thus, the Chippewas pray to Manedo, called by the Delawares Manitowa Manitou, who, they say, is the Creator of the world. Besides him, we are told, they worship neither sun, nor 246 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. moon, nor any god. To multiply examples is needless. With the single exception, then, of the She- mitic people of Israel, there is no instance of any of the peoples of antiquity, whether cultured or uncultured, gradually rising from the wor- ship of nature, of fetishes, or of ancestors, to that of the one living and true God. Where among any ancient people we find indications of monotheistic belief, these are most conspicu- ous, not in the latest, but in the earliest period of their history. The history of religion exhib- its, as a general law, a tendency to fall away from the purity of monotheistic faith, wherever in an earlier time it has been held. Hence, the hypothesis that man began his religious life with some low form of religion, from which, by a normal process of natural development, mono- theism has been at last evolved, is not sustained by facts. These point to a conclusion which is the exact reverse of this ; a conclusion which, however irreconcilable with modern theories of evolution, is in perfect harmony with the pre- sumption already established by the considera- ORDER OF RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT. 247 tion of the potency of sin as an omnipresent factor in the development of religion. The only inference which is justified by the facts thus far reviewed is this : that man began with the knowledge very elementary, no doubt, but, none the less, correct of God, his Creator, as a Being, one and personal like himself ; and that animism, polytheism, pantheism, atheism, and all other forms of religion or religious phi- losophy, must be regarded as various forms of degeneration from that primitive faith. LECTURE VIII. SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. CONCLUSION. IN the previous lecture it has been shown that in the Indo-Germanic and Turanian races there is no evidence of a general tendency to the evolution of a monotheistic faith, but rather the reverse. In those cases where monotheistic conceptions have found expression in the litera- ture of a people, as in Egypt, India, and Persia, these have been chiefly characteristic, not of the latest, but of the earliest, stage of their relig- ious development. The tendency throughout the whole historic period, in every such case, has been to fall away from monotheism into nature-worship of various forms, ancestor-wor- ship, polytheism, fetishism, and idolatry. And if among the educated classes the idea of the unity of the First Cause of the universe has been attained or preserved, it has commonly been under the perverted forms of pantheism 248 SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 249 or materialism, in which TO povov has been substituted for 6 /loVos, an impersonal substance, acting under the laws of necessity, in the place of a personal God, working in nature and in providence as an almighty free agent. In other instances, again, the earliest records of a people, as, e.g., those of the Akkadians of the Euphrates valley, and perhaps the Chinese, disclose no certain evidence of the existence, in the most ancient period of their history, of a monotheistic belief, but, instead, either a wor- ship of ancestors, as among the latter, or of various elemental spirits, as among the former. Still, it has appeared that such cases in reality give no support to the theory of a naturalistic evolution of a monotheistic religion : for the reason that, throughout their whole history, extending, in the case of the peoples mentioned, over thousands of years, no tendency, however slight, has been manifest, toward the develop- ment of a monotheistic belief, but, instead, a progressive lapse into forms of religion ever more and more debased and corrupt. Hence, inasmuch as, in the absence of evi- 250 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. dence to the contrary, it must be supposed that the law of religious tendency must have been the same in prehistoric times as since, we have therefore been led to conclude that the suppo- sition that man must have begun with some extremely low and superstitious type of religion, from which, by slow degrees, in a purely nat- ural way, under an eternal law of progress, he has advanced, at last, in many instances at least, to the faith in one personal God, must be rejected as irreconcilable with such facts as have been presented. If we may legitimately infer the unknown past from the past which is known, the inference seems unavoidable that not animism, or fetishism, or some vague type of nature-worship, but a simple form of mono- theism, must have been the primitive faith of man, of which all other forms of religion ex- hibit various degrees of degeneration and de- basement. But it has been maintained that to this general law as to the order of the develop- ment of religion, at least one exception must be admitted, so important as to nullify the SHEM1TIC MONOTHEISM. 251 force of the above argument. It is said that in the Shemitic race, at least, we have an undeniable example of the gradual evolution of a monotheistic faith from an original low type of religion ; so that the assertion of a universal law to the contrary is thereby dis- proved. For, it is argued, since a natural evolution of monotheism has certainly taken place in this great division of the human race, within historic times, it is quite possible that such a law of development may have prevailed universally in prehistoric times ; so that there is nothing to forbid our supposing that the religious life of man may have begun with some very low form of belief, from which he gradually rose until he attained such sublime conceptions of the Supreme Being as are expressed, for example, in the most ancient religion of Egypt. By such writers it is often claimed that this has been, indeed, the special glory of the Shemitic race, as contrasted with others ; that it has been endowed with a peculiar genius for religion. This is said to have 252 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. been its distinguishing characteristic, as truly as a genius for art was that of the an- cient Greeks, and a genius for law and gov- ernment was that of the ancient Romans. Renan, among others, has affirmed this, with characteristic assurance, as one of the great race contrasts, in such words as the fol- lowing : " The Indo-European race, distracted by the variety of the universe, never by itself arrived at monotheism. The Shemitic race, on the contrary, guided by its firm and sure sight, instantly unmasked Divinity, and with- out reflection or reasoning attained the purest form of religion that humanity has known." 1 Again : " When and how did the Shemitic race arrive at this notion of the divine unity, which the world has admitted on the faith of its teaching ? I think it was by a primitive intuition, and from its earliest days. . . . The Shemitic race . . . reached, evidently 1 " Studies of Religious History and Criticism," authorised trans- lation, Amer. ed., p. 115. SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 253 without an effort, the notion of the Supreme God." 1 These are fine words, but is the assertion true? Is the Shemitic monotheism rightly explained as a mere natural product of an exceptional race genius? This is the question to which we address ourselves in the present lecture. Or, as it has been felicitously put by Professor Ebrard : " Is the one God a product of Israel, or is Israel a product of the one God?" 2 We at once admit the Shemitic monotheism as a fact. And the fact is the more signifi- cant, when we call to mind that only as preached, in the first instance, by Shemitic prophets and apostles, has monotheism ever become to any extent a victorious power over heathenism and heathen philosophy. Among non-Shemitic peoples monotheism has only successfully maintained a supremacy in so far as these have come more or less directly under the influence of Shemitic thought, as 1 " Studies of Religious History and Criticism," authorised trans- lation, Amer. ed., pp. 115, 116. 2 " Apologetik," 2 Bd. 306. 254 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. expressed either in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The monotheism of ancient Egypt, of the primitive Aryans in India and Persia, as we have seen, was unable to maintain itself successfully against the inborn tendency of man to debase the ideal of religious faith. Shemitic monotheism alone has shown itself a conquering and transforming power in the history of the world. Again, whether or not we attribute to the Shemitic races a special religious genius, of which their monotheism is the product, it is to be admitted that among them, as Principal Fairbairn has well shown, a higher conception of the Divine nature seems to have originally prevailed than among the Indo-Germanic races. This is conclusively shown by a comparison of the oldest names used in each race to designate the Deity. While these names among the Indo-Germanic races were commonly derived from the forces and phenomena of material nature, the earliest and most univer- sal names of God among the Shemitic peoples designate the Deity instead by moral and SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 255 metaphysical attributes, rightly imputed to the Supreme Being. As a familiar example of the former may be taken the Sanskrit word deva, from the root div, " to shine," thus literally meaning "the shining one," whence have come the Latin deus, the Old German Tio, etc., etc., to which may be added the other Yedic name of deity, dyam, "the heaven," which appears also in the Greek Zeus, and the first syllable of the Latin Ju-piter. In contrast with a large number of names of this character may be noted the old Assyr- ian Ilu, Heb. El, from a root meaning " to be strong," thus denoting the Deity as "the Mighty One " ; Eloah, plur. Elohim, Ar. Allah, from a root signifying "to tremble," and so "to fear," thus denoting God as the proper object of fear and of worship. So, in the Hebrew Scriptures we meet with such com- pound appellatives as El Elyon, " God the Most High," a term which has also been found in a letter sent to Egypt from a priest-king reigning in Jerusalem, after the manner of 256 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. Melchizedek at an earlier day, about one hundred and fifty years before Moses. Again, we have El Shaddai, designating God as the " All-bountiful One," the great Giver of all, and Yahveh, "He who is," or "who will be," the Self-existent One. Marked by the same char- acteristic are the names common in the She- mitic heathenism, such as Badly " Owner," " Lord " ; Molech, " King " ; Adonis, " the Lord," etc., etc. This general statement of the common failure of the non-Shemitic races to attain such conceptions of the Deity as the Shemitic terms for God express, must be qualified by at least two or three conspicuous exceptions. Of these, the chief are the old Egyptian Nutar, as a name of Deity, meaning, precisely, "the Power," never used in the plural number, 1 and Nuk pu nuk, nearly equivalent to the Hebrew Yahveh ; and the old Magian word, Ahuramazda, " the All-knowing Spirit." Still in none of these cases did such conceptions ever obtain that exclusive dominance in religion as in the case of the Shemitic races. 1 See Renouf : "Origin and Growth of Religion," pp. 98-100. SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 257 Of these Shemitic names for God, such as are common to all the Shemitic peoples point back distinctly to a time when they had not yet become scattered, and in their primitive home together held that high conception of El, or flu, God, as " the Mighty One," or Mohim, the Supreme Object of fear and worship. In these most ancient names of God there is nothing to suggest that they at first denoted some dead ancestor, or a ghost, or some object in physical nature. They indicate a primitive monotheism, and that of a high ethical type. But was this Shemitic monotheism due merely to a natural and ineffaceable race-char- acteristic, in virtue of which they alone, so early in their history, found their way up quickly from a worship of nature, of ghosts or fetishes, to the exalted conception of El Ely on ? If so, then we should expect to find evidence of this tendency in the historic re- cords of the race. Of this, however, there is no evidence, but, instead, of the contrary. Among all of the Shemitic peoples alike, his- tory bears witness to the operation of the same 258 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. invincible tendency to religious degradation which we have seen to exist in the other great branches of the human family. As regards the early Shemites of the Euphra- tes valley, when they first come before us, in the reign of Sargon I, 3750 B.C., they are already polytheists, and throughout the whole thirty- one hundred years of Assyrian history, from Sargon I to the time when Shemitic empire finally went down under Cyrus the Great, there is not the slightest evidence of any tendency to monotheism. Notwithstanding the many high-sounding names of God on the lips of the people, bearing silent witness to the pure faith of an unrecorded antiquity, these Euphra- tes Shemites not only showed the same ten- dency to religious degeneration as their Indo- Gerinanic and Turanian neighbours, but they exhibited this in a peculiarly aggravated form. Already, when in prehistoric times the clans who peopled Arabia left the Shemitic race- centre in the Euphrates valley, they appear to have carried with them that worship of the heavenly bodies which we find prevailing when SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 259 authentic Assyrian history opens with Sargon I. As for the section of the race which w r as left behind, it was their evil pre-eminence over their Akkadian neighbours that in their con- ception of God they emphasised the idea of generation over that of creation, and first in- troduced into the conception of the Deity the idea of sexual distinction. And this, again, became, as all know, the most prolific source of those unutterable abominations per- petrated in the name of religion, because of which, in later da}^s, when the deadly evil had reached Canaan, God, according to the Heb- rew Scriptures, not without just reason, com- manded the Canaanites to be extirpated from the earth. Thus it was precisely these ancient Shem- ites, whose religious genius, and sublime in- tuition of the one God, Renan calls upon us to admire, who debased the conception of God to a degree which, so far as we know, had never been reached before, and even since has been never exceeded. It was their infamous distinction that in their idolatrous madness they, 260 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. first, declared the most atrocious cruelties and the most horrible and unnatural lusts to be precisely that kind of service with which Deity was specially pleased. It is certainly with abundant reason that Ebrard describes this old Shemitic religion as "a demoniac, Satanic crime against the innate moral law r ? and there- with a fundamental destruction of conscience, and perversion of the knowledge of God ; " l or, more vividly still, speaking of its Phoenician development, as a " wilful repetition of the pri- meval fall, a fall from a condition of simple sinfulness into a diabolic, demoniac obduracy, an infamous revolt against God, and against conscience." 2 And out of the indescribable depths of that polytheistic nature-worship into which the Euphrates Shemites so early sank, they never arose. Among them we search in vain for any trace of the alleged Shemitic tendency to a pure monotheistic religion. With the Arabian Shemites, although, so far as we know, they never descended to such an abyss of religious debasement as those whom i " Apologetik," 2 Bd. 173. 2 Ib. 177. SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM, 261 they left behind in the Euphrates valley, the case, as regards our argument, was not essen- tially different. Above the worship of nature to which they early gave themselves, through four thousand years or more, they never rose. Then, indeed, Muhammed appeared, preaching among them the almost forgotten truths of the unity and personality of God, and the Arabians followed him. But the monotheism of Muhammed, so far as one can judge from the Quran and the Ahddis, must be ascribed in a great degree to Jewish and Christian influence. Nor was even he able wholly to eradicate the venerable system of idolatry which opposed him ; but, as in the case of the famous black stone, the Kaaba at Mecca, he was constrained to allow something to remain as a necessary concession to the ancient Shemitic heathenism. Elsewhere than among the Arabian Shemites shall we then have to look, for that monotheistic tendency for which we seek. We turn last of all to the Hebrew race. Here, at least, it is insisted, we shall find one brilliant illustration of that natural evolution of monotheistic re- 262 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. ligion from a lower form of faith, for which we have thus far sought in vain. But what are the facts ? Is there historical evidence to prove that the Hebrews were distinguished from other branches of the Shemitic race by a natural tendency to monotheism, which is the sufficient explanation of all that is most distinctive in their religious history ? For the answer to this question, we must inquire of the Hebrew Scriptures. We appeal to them, in this instance, not as inspired, but simply as presenting a historical record of the Hebrew nation from the days before Abraham to the end of the Babylonian captivity. In estimating the value of this testimony, it is safe to assume, on the principles which govern human nature, that the writers of the several books of the Old Testament are not likely to have given us an unduly unfavourable picture of the religious history of their nation. If a large part of these records were written so very late as the modern radical criticism supposes, at a time when, after the Babylonian captivity, the nation as a whole had become emancipated SIIEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 263 from polytheism and idolatry, all the more we should be led to anticipate that, through a spirit of national pride, they would rather be inclined to represent the religious history of the nation in as favourable light as possible. In view of this consideration, all the more significant it appears that the Jewish historians, with one accord, should have represented the religious history of their nation in very dark colours. Most extraordinary, in the light of the facts, is the explanation which Renan gives of the monotheism imputed to Adam and Eve, that with the Israelites monotheism was " such an incontestable truth " that, when describing primitive men, they " could only imagine them monotheists " ! Instead of finding it so difficult thus to think of their ancestors, they unani- mously represent the history of their nation and of the family from which it sprang, as from before the days of Abraham, marked by an almost invincible tendency to lapse into the most horrible and debasing forms of polytheism and idolatry. In this respect, they were no whit better than their heathen neighbours. 264 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. While their records represent Noah, the first ancestor of the post-diluvian peoples, as a believer in EloKim, the one living God, we are expressly told that by the time of Terah, 2200 g0 B.C., and we know not how long before, the ancestors of the Israelitish nation were wor- shippers of other gods. 1 There can be little doubt that Abraham himself, living as he did, in Ur of the Chaldees, at that time the chief seat of the worship of Sin, the moon-god, was brought up by his father Terah as a worshipper of the moon. Nor does the record attribute the change which came over Abraham to his religious genius, but to one and another mani- festation of that Uu 9 known indeed by name to his Shemitic neighbours, but worshipped in that day, so far as we know, by none around him. Called in some mysterious way by God to leave the idolatrous surroundings of his early life, we are told that he went down, under Divine guidance, into Canaan, where the iniquity of the Amorites was "not yet full," and where still, at least in the case of Melchizedek, the 1 Josh, xxiv, 2. SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 265 worship of El Elyon, the Most High God, apparently had still here and there an adherent ; and there made his home until his death. But if monotheism, under the extraordinary influence of this patriarch, continued in the line of his immediate posterity until, when Joseph was the prime minister of Pharaoh, they went down into Egypt, yet their records state that their descendants, instead of advanc- ing to the more perfect knowledge of God, lapsed readily into the idolatry of their heathen neighbours ; a fact which is attested by their ready acceptance of the worship of the golden calf, set up almost as soon as they left Egypt, at Mount Sinai, in imitation of the Egyptian JLpis-worship. Nor did the remarkable events of the Exodus under their great monotheistic leader, hinder the Hebrews from persisting in the practice of their polytheistic idolatry until that whole generation had perished in the wilderness. Nor did the " monotheistic genius " yet show itself when they arrived in Canaan. Com- manded to exterminate the idolatrous tribes 266 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. whose iniquities had then come to the full, and under no circumstances to contract alliances with them, we learn from the books of Joshua and Judges that they not only did not obey this command, but through the days of the judges they found the surrounding heathenism so congenial and attractive, that they again and again forsook the worship of the one living God for that of Baal, Molech, and Ashtoreth. Under the kings, the same inveterate inclina- tion to idolatry continued to assert itself. If, under David, monotheism reached a temporary ascendency, yet, by the end of Solomon's reign, a new decline from the worship of the one God began to appear; and in the reign of his son Rehoboam, with the secession of the ten tribes under Jeroboam, the old calf-worship was form- ally established as the religion of the new state. From that time onward to the catastrophe under Hoshea, the history of that part of the Hebrew nation presents one unvarying record of an abandonment, ever more and more com- plete, of the worship of the only God for the cruel and licentious worship of Baal and Ash- SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 267 toreth, and other of the old Shemitic nature- gods. Nor did Judah as a people prove an excep- tion to this law of religious degeneration. If now and then monotheistic kings, supported by fearless prophets, sought to bring the people back to the sole worship of Yahveh, their suc- cess was only temporary, and, as Jeremiah charges, unreal and superficial while it lasted. And so, finally, as in 721 B.C. the kingdom of the ten tribes had gone down under Shalma- neser of Assyria, in 588 B.C. that of Judah also fell, under Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Now it is submitted that this record of more than fifteen hundred years of Hebrew history, is a conclusive refutation of the supposition that the monotheism which at last asserted itself in Israel can be rightly attributed to a racial ten- dency, in that direction. The whole history, from the days of Terah and Abraham, bears unvarying testimony to the fact that, as with other branches of the Shemitic race, so with Israel, the race tendency was not toward mono- theism, but toward a polytheistic nature-worship, 268 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. and that of an exceptionally horrible and revolt- ing kind. We may, therefore, without hesitation, affirm that not only is it not true that the Shemitic people, as a whole, have exhibited a peculiar monotheistic genius, and have thus been an ex- ception to the world-wide tendency to fall away from the knowledge and worship of the one living God, but the fact is the reverse. It is just the Shemitic race who have furnished, per- haps, one of the most appalling illustrations of this law of human nature which is known to history. The facts of their history bear testi- mony to a special race proclivity to the grossest and most debasing forms of idolatry, which ap- pears only the more impressive and significant when we recall the fact that, as their primitive names for God reveal, they seem at first to have had a conception of the Deity so much higher than that which is revealed by such names among most other ancient peoples. Of the non-Shemitic races, some, indeed, never fell so utterly away from the truth concerning God as did, especially, those Shemitic inhabi- SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 269 tants of the Euphrates valley ; others, indeed, at last reached the same depths of religious debase- ment ; as is witnessed in the incredibly revolting ceremonial of the Asioamedha, or horse-sacrifice of ancient India, as prescribed in the Yajur Veda, chap, xxiii, Mantra 18, about the third century B.C., or in the unutterable abomina- tions of the goat-worship practised at Mendes in Upper Egypt. But these all reached these uttermost abysses of religious corruption more slowly. It was the peculiarity of the religious development of the Shemites, whose religious genius Renan so extols, that, from a height in the beginning so much above other nations, they more swiftly than any others descended to a debasement of the idea of God and of his worship, such as many other races never reached, and below which, probably, no race has ever yet sunk. No one who is familiar with the facts will wonder at the remark of Professor Ebrard, that " sin in its highest po- tency is Shemitic corruption." The conclusion from this is evident. An adequate cause of the development of the He- 270 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. brew monotheism cannot be found in the Hebrew national genius, but only, as the Hebrew rec- ords continually assert, in the supernatural in- working, in individuals of that selected nation, of the Spirit of the one living and true God. It is not the peculiar glory of Israel, more than of any other people, that by their own excep- tional national genius, they arrived at the con- ception of the one personal God, and gave it to the world. Rather is it the glory of the one God, that, notwithstanding the Shemitic-Hebrew tendency to the grossest polytheism and idol- atry, a tendency even stronger among them than among the Indo-Germanic races, He yet, through repeated chastisements and un- deserved deliverances, and especially by rais- ing up and endowing with supernatural gifts a succession of witnesses for Himself in the midst of a corrupt nation, brought Israel, despite itself, to show forth His praise, and be- come, in a sense solitary and unique in history, a witness for Himself, that He, Eloh\m, and Jehovah, the Eloliim of Israel, was God and none else beside Him. SHEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 2*71 And, finally, if we look at this argument in the light of the history of Israel and of the church from the return from Babylon to the present time, we shall find that it appears all the more conclusive. For not to speak of the prophets it is quite impossible to account for Jesus of Nazareth, in the light of this history, as the consummate product of religious evolution in Israel. But into this most important line of argument our limits forbid us to enter. We must content ourselves with affirming that the exception to the general law of religious de- generation from monotheistic faith, which has been asserted in the case of the Shemitic race, and especially of the Hebrew nation, is not established by the facts of history. We must, therefore, regard the fact as practi- cally universal, that mankind, for whatsoever reason, exhibit a native inclination, more or less pronounced in all races and all ages, to fall away from monotheism, wherever it has existed ; on the theoretic side of religion, inclin- ing to pantheism or materialism ; on the prac- tical side, into creature-worship, self-worship, 272 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. and various forms of polytheism and idolatry. The operation of this innate tendency in man has now and then, indeed, been interrupted or retarded, through the influence of commanding personalities, proclaiming anew the fundamental truths of religion ; such as Zoroaster, Moses, Isaiah, or, in modern times, a Huss or a Luther. But all the labours of such witnesses for God, have never been able to eradicate this tendency away from Him. Even Christianity has not been exempt from this law of religious degrada- tion, but in most lands has illustrated the same ancient and invincible inclination of man- kind to the debasement of the idea of God, and the worship of the creature more than the Creator. Finally, we affirm that the fact of this ten- dency, universally exhibited throughout historic times, is utterly irreconcilable with any suppo- sition but that monotheism was the original faith of man ; and that all other forms of relig- ion and philosophy only exhibit various lines of declension from the purity of the primitive faith. For to assert the opposite hypothesis, SIIEMITIC MONOTHEISM. 273 and make monotheism the goal of the develop- ment, involves the unwarranted assumption that the law of the order of religious development in prehistoric times, was the reverse of that which has prevailed everywhere throughout the whole historic period. The assumption takes for granted the existence of a native tendency in man to religious elevation, while the testi- mony of history exhibits the opposite tendency as a fact practically universal. Such an as- sumption condemns in advance every theory of the origin and growth of religion which is based upon it. We venture, therefore, notwithstanding the many names of high repute which may be cited on the other side of this question, to believe that on scientific grounds one can fully justify the biblical representations of the monotheism of the first men, and of the origin of all heath- enism, in the natural aversion of all sinful men from God ; because of which they did not like to retain Him in their knowledge, and therefore worshipped and served the creature more than 274 GENESIS AND GROWTH OF RELIGION. the Creator, who is " God over all, blessed for- ever." And, last of all, in the light of history, we must add that the great, unique phenomenon of the Hebrew monotheism, as a conquering power through the ages, is inexplicable and unaccount- able on merely natural grounds. No adequate cause for it can be found in Shemitic nature or in Hebrew genius. It only receives a satisfying explanation when it is recognised as due, even as the Holy Scriptures continually assert, to the supernatural grace and special providence of the one living God, working redemptively in history through chosen individuals of a chosen race and nation, for the final deliverance of our fallen nature from the supremacy of sin and the dominion of the curse. And the more clearly that we see this, with the deeper emotion shall we be able to join in the great doxology which the contemplation of God's dealings with the world through Israel, brought from the lips of the Apostle Paul : " the depth of the riches both of the wis- dom and the knowledge of God ! How un- SHEMIT1C MONOTHEISM. 275 searchable are his judgments, and his ways past tracing out ! For of Him, and through Him, and unto Him, are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen." BY THE SAME AUTHOR. THE LIGHT OF ASIA AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. A Comparison of The Legend, the Doctrine, and the Ethics of the Buddha with the Story, the Doctrine, and the Ethics of Christ. By S. H. KELLOGG, D.D. Toronto. $2.00. There is reason to believe that a large class even of Christian people have a most exaggerated idea of the excellence of the great non-christian religions, and the extent to which their teachings agree with those of the gospel of Christ. This re- mark applies with special force at present to the case of Bud- dhism, in which, for various reasons, very many intelligent people of every variety of religious opinion have of late years come to feel a very special interest. . . . However admirable many things in the Buddhist and other ethnic religions may seem to some, the writer himself has seen too much of the practical working of these heathen systems to be deeply in love with them. . . . That such mistaken notions as to the relations between Chris- tianity and Buddhism widely prevail, is often forced upon our attention, and that errors on this subject are at present doing- no little mischief in unsettling faith and misdirecting practice is scarcely less evident. Observations of these facts, and fre- quent conversations with men in different parts of the world who have had special opportunity to form a judgment in the matter, have led the writer to feel that there might be room for a book which should, in a more thorough and systematic way than any which has been presented to our notice, deal with the various questions which have been raised with regard to the re- lations between Buddhism and Christianity. From the Preface. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 1 THE LIGHT OF ASIA AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. A Comparison of the Legend, the Doctrine, and the Ethics of the Buddha with the Story, the Doctrine, and the Ethics of Christ. By S. H. KELLOGG, D.D. $2.00. CONTENTS. PREFACE. NOTES. CHAPTER I. Buddhism and Modern Unbelief. CHAPTER II. The Comparative Historical Value of the Buddhist and the Christian Scriptures. CHAPTER III. The Life and the Legend of the Buddha. 1. The Life. 2. The Legend. CHAPTER IV. The Legend of the Buddha and the Story of the Christ. CHAPTER V. The Doctrine of the Buddha and the Doctrine of the Christ. 1. Introductory. 2. The Doctrine concerning God. 3. The Doctrine concerning Man. 4. The Doctrine concerning Sin. 5. The Doctrine concerning Sal- vation. G. The Doctrine concerning the Last Things. CHAPTER VI. Buddhist Ethics and the Ethics of the Gospel. 1. Excellencies of Bud d hist Ethics. 2. The Postulates of the Two Sys- tems. 3. Law in the Two Systems. 4. The Motives in the Two Sys- tems. 5. Practical Working in the Two Systems. CHAPTER VII. Ketrospect and Conclusion. Index of Topics. " There is no other hook in the English language which fills exactly the place of this hook, and the American reader will appreciate Pro- fessor Kellogg's important work none the less because it comes from an American scholar rather than from a German or an English one."- Sunday-School Times. " There is no subject as to which the public have been made the victims of so much poor sentimentalism as in the talk about Buddhism which has grown into a fashion since Mr. Arnold gave us his poem." - Independent. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. THE SOTERIOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By William Porcher DuBose, M.A., S.T.D., Professor of Exegesis in the University of the South. 12rao, $1.50. This is a re-examination of the Christian doctrine of Salva- tion in the light of the facts of human nature and of the teach- ing of the New Testament. It is in no sense polemical, neither advocating nor combating any special theory of the Atonement. It is a candid study of the question de novo, conducted with some degree of independence of the letter, but with devout and thorough sympathy with the spirit of Catholic thought on the subject. In its general scope it deals with (1) the nature and meaning of "Salvation," (2) the work of salvation as actually accom- plished for humanity by the Son of Man, and (3) the means of Salvation in the positive institutions of the Gospel. The work as a whole is a fresh, and to some extent novel, presentation of a great subject which, while necessarily old, must nevertheless be always new. "... The Church owes a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. DuBose for bringing out into clear light the New Testament meaning of the word [salvation]. Its devout spiritual tone and earnestness will lead many readers to more honest and real thoughts of the meaning of salvation, whilst its original and fresh treatment of certain aspects of great theological mysteries will stimulate thought. . . . The spirit in which Dr. DuBose has undertaken his task cannot be improved upon. . . . The style and expression also are alike admirable." Churchman. "It is a great satisfaction to take up a thoroughly made book like this, with the entire plan laid out, and every part complete and fitted to its place. ... He takes hold of his subject with a firm, manly grasp, and discusses it vigorously. ... We find Dr. DuBose eminently suggestive; a strong, intelligent, and honest reasouer, who grapples manfully with the difficulties of the subject, and is always to be read both with respectful attention and with profit." Independent. "The work is scholarly, clear, and able." Boston Traveller. MACMILLAN & CO., 112 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 3 JUST PUBLISHED. 12mo. $1.50. THE CENTRAL TEACHING OF JESUS CHRIST. A STUDY AND EXPOSITION Of the Five Chapters of the Gospel According to St. John, xiii. to xvii. Inclusive. THOMAS DEHANY BERNARD, M.A., Canon and Chancellor of Wells, AUTHOR or THE PROGRESS OF DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. BAMPTON LECTURES, 1864. ... In ranging through the literature of the subject, I did not find that there is any book which does precisely what is here intended. Certainly the student has abundant aids, both exegetical and homiletical. . . . But I doubt whether there is any one book which at once covers the ground and is conter- minous with it; one that treats it as a whole in itself, in the way both of interpretation and reflection. If there be no such book, it is fit that there should be one, and of a kind suited for reading rather than for reference. 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MAY 1 19 0^81962 UwV> w n %4 ^^ S ^ , .-r REC'D LD SEP 2 7 '64-1 PN LD 21-100m-2,'55 (B139s22)476 General Library University of California Berkeley 22353 371514 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY