of A 016*0 I 224 West Broadwa Glendale, Calif. 912( 244-0828 THE WAYS OF THE GODS p ASADENA HOME FOR fHE /w. The Ways of the Gods by Algernon Sidney Crapsey Author of "Religion and Politics," "The Rise of The Working Class," and other books. THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS 150 Lafayette Street, New York MCMXXI Copyright, 1921, by A. S. CRAPSEY New York All rights of translation reserved Second Edition TO THE MEMORY OF ADELAIDE CRAPSEY SCHOLAR AND POET Who, being dead, yet speaketh NIGHT WINDS The old, Old winds that blew, When chaos was, what do They tell the clattered trees that I Should weep? ROMA JETERNA The sun Is warm to-day, O Romulus, and on Thine olden Palatine the birds Still sing-. THE GRAND CANYON By Zcusl Shout word of this To the eldest dead! Titans, Gods, Heroes, come who have once more A home! AUTHOR'S NOTE The Author in sending this book to press does so with a deep sense of obligation to Dr. Nathaniel Schmidt, Professor of Semitic Languages at Cornell University, for his careful and corrective reading of the manuscript, which is greatly improved by his critical chastisement. This labor of love does not, however, involve his learned friend in any respon- sibility as to the accuracy or sanity of his book. That responsibility belongs to the writer alone. As the book is not an abstract treatise in theology, philos- ophy, or history, but is rather a relation of the Author's per- sonal intellectual and religious experiences, he (for greater simplicity and directness) when speaking of himself has used the personal pronoun I. ADVICE TO READER Read one chapter at a sitting, preferably aloud, and so taste the language; when you have in this way finished a book, then re-read that book, silently, with the mind and so master the thought; when you have in this manner gone through the volume then re-read as a whole and so make the book your own. -> ~' NOTE TO SECOND PRINTING. The author takes advantage of this second issue of his book to express his high appreciation of the reception of his work by the Press of the country. He is especially indebted to Mr. Coblentz of The New York Herald and to Mr. Gore of The Detroit News for the full and lucid presentation of the nature and purpose of the WAYS OF THE GODS to their readers. He wishes especially to acknowledge his obligation to Professor D. S. Muzzey of Columbia University for calling atten- tion, in his exhaustive and illuminating review published in the November Standard, to certain errors which have escaped the eyes of the various readers of manuscripts and proof sheets. These errors were made known after the printing of the pages of the present issue. In one of these errors the author has confused the number of the year with that of the century. On page 374 the date should be 1304 instead of 1404. On page 316 the date of the fall of Constantinople should be 1453 instead of 1483. In giv- ing on page 271 the year 476 as the time when the Roman empire ceased to exist, the author had in mind the empire of the West of which Rome was the capital, not the empire of the East of which Constantinople was the seat of gov- ernment. As the book clearly sets forth the Eastern Empire, which was in reality not Roman but Byzantine, lingered on in shameful existence for a thousand years when it, in turn, ceased to exist with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Other errors to which the Professor calls attention, if they be errors, are errors of judgment and not of fact. Of such the critic is kind enough to say that they are slight blemishes, in no way affecting the general accuracy and value of the book. No author could wish for a kinder fate than to come under the knife of the learned, genial, kindly, just Professor Muzzey. The critic in The Nation charges that the author has not quite established his theses. He says, Symbolize your God if you will by an algebraic formula in which economic conditions are fully represented, there will always remain in your formula the unknown quantity X. The author is indebted to his critic for giving him the opportunity of making clear that the prin- ciple of economic determinism does not and cannot account for the Divine Principle, but only for its manifestations. It does not pretend to eliminate the unknown X, but only to tell how the unknown X has been transformed into known Xes by the various generations of men. To the reader who doubted the statement that there are eleven thousand rooms in the Vatican, the author has to say that his doubt is well founded. Eleven thousand seems to be a popular phrase in Italy and other Catholic countries for a large but indefinite number as for instance the Eleven Thousand Martyred Virgins. The author does not know how many rooms there are in the Vatican, nor how many martyred virgins there were; but he knows that in either case there were what "Lo the poor Indian" would call a heap rooms a heap virgins. The author is far from claiming infallibility or finality for his book. All that he has claimed or tried to do is to give his readers a clue by which they can find their way through the mazes of the religious history of the Western World. THE AUTHOR. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE AUTHOR'S NOTE xi PROEM xiii BOOK I. THE GODS OF THE HOUSE xix I THE GODS OF THE HOUSE i II THE MANES 5 III THE LARES 10 IV THE PENATES 16 V NEW GODS FOR OLD 19 BOOK II. GODS OF THE GREEK DYNASTY 23 VI THE GOD OF SPACE 25 VII THE GOD OF TIME 31 VIII THE CITY GOD 35 IX THE GODS OF THE LEISURE CLASS 40 X THE TWOFOLD DESTINY OF ZEUS 45 XI ATHENA : GODDESS OF THE IMPLICIT REASON 49 XII PHCEBUS APOLLO: THE GOD OF THE EXPLICIT REASON.. 54 XIII APHRODITE : GODDESS OF DESIRE 59 XIV ARES : THE GOD OF WAR 65 XV DEMETER : THE MOTHER OF SORROWS 68 XVI HADES : GOD OF THE DEAD 73 XVII DIONYSUS : GOD OF MADNESS 77 XVIII THE FALL OF THE GREEK DYNASTY 81 BOOK III. THE ROMAN GOD 85 XIX Divus CESAR : GOD OF THE ORGANIZATION 87 BOOK IV. THE HEBREW GODS 95 XX RISE OF THE SEMITIC DYNASTY 97 XXI THE WAR GOD OF BENE-!SRAEL 104 XXII JEHOVAH : THE FRIEND GOD OF ABRAHAM 108 XXIII THE BARGAIN GOD OF JACOB 112 XXIV THE GOD OF THE WORKING CLASS 117 CONTENTS CHAPTER PACE XXV THE TENT GOD OF BENE-!SRAEL 123 XXVI JEHOVAH THE RIGHTEOUS 128 XXVII THE GOD OF THE TEMPLE, JEHOVAH THE HOLY 134 XXVIII THE GOD OF THE BOOK 139 XXIX THE GOD OF INSPIRATION 144 XXX JEHOVAH: CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 150 BOOK V. THE DEGRADATION OF THE GODS 155 XXXI THE DEGRADATION OF THE GODS i5/ BOOK VI. THE GOD CHRISTUS 165 XXXII A NEW GOD COMES TO ROME 167 XXXIII JESUS AND THE RESURRECTION 172 XXXIV THE MAGDALENE TRADITION 175 XXXV THE PETRINE TRADITION 181 XXXVI THE CHARACTER OF PETER 182 XXXVII PETER PROCLAIMED JESUS MESSIAH 184 XXXVIII PETER DENIES JESUS 187 XXXIX PETER'S FLIGHT IN DESPAIR 189 XL PETER'S RETURN IN JOY 191 XLI PSYCHIC PROJECTION 192 XLII THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD 194 XLIII CHRISTUS, THE WAR GOD OF THE SPIRITUAL ISRAEL 198 XLIV CHRISTUS, THE TENT GOD OF THE SPIRITUAL ISRAEL 202 XLV CHRISTUS, THE SON OF JEHOVAH THE RIGHTEOUS 208 XLVI CHRISTUS, THE SON OF THE HOLY ONE OF ISRAEL .. 213 XLVII THE WORSHIP OF CHRISTUS IN THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH 218 BOOK VII. THE GODS OF THE GREEK DIALECTIC 225 XLVIII THE GODS OF THE GREEK DIALETIC 227 XLIX THE COMING OF THE ABSOLUTE 230 L CHRISTUS, THE SON OF THE ABSOLUTE 237 LI THE DIVINE PERSONALITY OF CHRISTUS, SON OF THE ABSOLUTE 242 BOOK VIII. GODS OF THE LATIN LAWYERS 249 LII THE CELESTIAL CESAR 251 LIII GOD ALMIGHTY : CREATOR OF HEAVEN AND HELL 256 LIV THE WRATH OF GOD 263 CONTENTS CHAPTER XI PAGE BOOK IX. THE MEDIEVAL GODS 269 LV THE ECLIPSE OF CHRISTUS 271 LVI MARY : THE GODDESS OF CONSOLATION 278 LVII THE EXPLOITATION OF THE GODS 285 LVIII JOSEPH COMES TO HIS OWN 291 LIX THE GODS BREAK LOOSE 296 BOOK X. GODS OF THE MODERN WORLD 303 LX The DISRUPTION OF PROTESTANTISM 305 LXI THE CRYSTALLIZATION OF CATHOLICISM 311 LXII THE RETURN OF PAN 316 LXIII THE VISION OF THE INFINITE 318 LXIV THE VISION OF THE ETERNAL 323 LXV THE MAKING OF MAN 326 LXVI THE GOD OF THE MACHINE 332 LXVII THE GOD OF THE MARKET 339 LXVIII THE GOD HUMANUS 349 LXIX THE SERVICE OF GOD 359 LXX THE DAY OF JUDGMENT 368 PROEM It came to pass many years ago that, in the course of my travels in Italy, I chanced to be in the City of Flor- ence of a Sunday. I rose betimes in the morning and made my way to the Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, that I might join with the people of the city in their customary acts of worship, and at the same time steep my soul in the mem- ories of Savonarola. When I reached the Piazza, del Duomo the day was dawn- ing. That, to me, most wonderful of city squares was con- secrated by the morning light. The great cathedral, with its blocks of alternate black and white marble, was unlike any other church I had seen in the world. Embodying the combined genius of Arnolfo di Cambio of the thirteenth century, and of Brunelleschi, of the fifteenth, its history was the story of the transition from Gothic architecture to that of the Renaissance. Brunelleschi's dome of the Duomo in Florence inspired Michaelangelo to hang in the sky of Rome the more wonderful dome of St. Peter's. But while I reverenced the sublimity of the Duomo and greatly admired the Baptistery, with its bronze doors by Ghiberti, I fell in love at first sight with the Campanile of Giotto. This dream of form and color, seen for the first time in the holy hour of dawn, inspired my soul with sensations of delight that were painful in their intensity. As I stood in silent worship before this product of human genius, it seemed to me a thing of life. It was the soul of the artist immortalized, Giotto existent in his work! So lost was I in admiration of this bell-tower that I forgot for the time why it was that I had come to the Piazza, del Duomo at this early hour in the morning. I was reminded of my purpose by the chiming of the bells calling the people to worship. xiii xiv PROEM When I entered the interior of the Cathedral it was dark and empty. I stood for some moments in that gloomy void and peopled it with sharp-faced Florentines, who crowded its floor space and climbed into its window niches, on such a morning as this in the year of the plague, 1497, to listen to the preaching of Fra Girolamo Savonarola, of the Order of St. Dominic, at that time the ruler of Florence. How quiet was this house of God on the day of my visitation in contrast with the stress and the storm of those ages of Faith ! Then the God of this church was alive, and the voice of His prophet was heard in His house. Now the God of this Church was a-dying, His house was forsaken, and His prophets were silent. There was no open vision. As I walked through the wide spaces of the Cathedral I saw little clusters of people, mostly women, kneeling at the various side altars where priests were celebrating the mys- teries of the church. One of these altars seemed more popular than the others ; it attracted a larger number of wor- shippers, many of whom were men. Being of a democratic turn of mind, with a desire to belong, if possible, to the majority, I joined myself to this greater company. At first I thought it was the priest who gave interest to this altar. He was an aged man of benign countenance, who, having spent his days in prayer and meditation, radiated holiness, blessing all who came within the sphere of his influence. But on looking from the face of the priest to the face of the altar I found another, and to my mind, a more cogent reason why this altar was more popular with the people, and especially with men, than any other altar in the Cathedral. My eyes, lifted to the facade of the baldachin over the altar, read in letters of gold the words: "Ite ad Joseph;" and on reflection I concluded that it was not the priest but the divinity that gave popularity to this shrine. For of all the divinities whose altars to-day crowd the Catholic churches of Europe, none is more popular than St. Joseph. As I knelt before this altar in the Duomo of Florence, I recalled that in other churches in Europe I had seen the same PROEM xv evidence of this saint's favor with the people that greeted me here. As, for instance, in the Church of Saint Roche in Paris, the most fashionable and active of all the churches in that city, the Chapel of St. Joseph was more rich in votive tablets than any other chapel in the church, not even excepting that of the Blessed Virgin. On these votive tablets the powers of God, in all their fulness, were ascribed to St. Joseph. One tablet thanks St. Joseph for saving the giver from ship- wreck, another for the delivering from sickness; a mother is thankful to Joseph for raising her daughter from the bed of death ; a father for bringing his son home from the wars. Whatever a people might expect from its God that, accord- ing to votive tablets in his chapel in the Church of Saint Roche, the people of Paris had received from St. Joseph. When Mass was celebrated in St. Joseph's chapel, the other chapels seemed deserted in comparison. Mary, his betrothed wife, did not seem to be so sought after as was he. When there was a drought the people prayed to Joseph for rain ; when there was a flood the people called on Joseph for fair weather ; to all intents and purposes Joseph is to-day the active God of the common people in Northern Catholic coun- tries ; he has relieved the other gods of the necessity of listen- ing to the prayers and attending to the wants of the man of the street and +he woman of the house. This popularity of Joseph is of comparatively recent origin ; it is only since the Reformation that his festivals have been festivals of the first class, and only in our own times that his cult has reached its present dimensions, so as to rival, if not obscure, the cult of the Virgin. As I came out of the dim religious light of the Cathedral into the open day of the street my mind was busy with the problem of this popularity of Joseph. For I perceived that this fact was not isolated, but was related to the general religious history of the human race. The experience of Joseph was the experience of all the gods : in favor to-day, neglected to-morrow. One god going, another god coming. xvi PROEM The spiritual history of the race is nothing else than the history of this passing of the gods. Everywhere are forsaken temples and broken altars. Fanes once famous and the resort of millions are now buried under tons of earth, being brought to our knowledge by the labors of the antiquarian, while the names of the gods who once dwelt in those temples, long forgotten, are now slowly deciphered by the painstaking scholar. As I dwelt on these things I could not but wonder at this passing of the gods: "Is it," I asked myself, "the fickle- ness of man that is the cause of this strange phenomenon, that we change the fashion of our gods as we change the fashion of our garments, putting them on and off as the whim takes us, or is there some deep underlying reason compelling this change? Are both men and gods creatures of a Fate that gives to each his day and when his day is done bids him depart? With this thought in mind I began to read once more the history of the gods, hoping to find in that history the clew to this mystery. I was not disappointed. I found, or, at least, I think I found, a necessary rela- tion between the life of a god and the life of his people. The god of a given people is the embodiment of the economic conditions of that people, and the economic conditions de- termine the social and political institutions of a people. Hence it is that under certain economic conditions, with their attendant social and political institutions, a given god has sway over the religious life of a people. When these economic conditions change, this god disappears, and a new god takes his place. This principle is most perfectly illus- trated in the religious history of the Western world, where the gods have followed one another in an orderly succession : their going and coming determined by the industrial develop- ment of the people and the consequent changes in social and political organization. It is my purpose in the pages that follow to trace this history of the gods to its natural causes; to show why in 'PROEM our day, for instance, the popularity of Joseph is growing, 1 that of the Virgin declining. In order to do this, it will not be necessary to go back to the gods of the period of savagery and early barbarism. We can with profit limit our investigation to the gods of the Western world in the his- toric and the immediately pre-historic periods. After a brief account of the domestic gods of the Western people, the Manes, the Lares, and the Penates of the Romans, we will follow the history of the various Greek dynasties, tracing them as far as we may to their source in the early life of the Aryan people. We will mark the decline of the Greek gods before the oncoming gods of Syria and the East, and their final overthrow by the god of the Hebrews. We will study in turn the transformation of the Hebrew god by the Greek Dialectic, the outcome of which was the Christian God of the Trinity. We will trace the rise in Christendom of the cult of the Virgin and the saints down to our own day, when all these gods are in the melting pot, and the god of the future is in the process of casting. 1 "Prior to the I2th century the devotion of Joseph was not a public cult. He began then to attract the worship of such eminent persons as S. Bernard of Clairvaux, of S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Gertrude. In the next age this cult was promoted by men zealous for the reformation of the church, among whom were Peter d'Ailly and Jehan Gerson. It was only under the pontificate of Sixtus XII (1471-84) that S. Joseph was placed on the Calendar of the saints and honored with a festival. From that time the devotion acquired greater and greater popularity, the dignity of the Feast keeping pace with this steady growth. At first only a festum sim- plex, it was soon elevated to a double rite by Innocent VIII (1484 94) and declared by Gregory XV in 1621 a festival of obligation and raised to the rank of a double of the second class by Clement XI (1700-21). A wonderful and unprecedented increase of popularity called for a luster to be added to the cult of the Saint. Accordingly xviii PROEM one of the first acts of Pius IX, himself singularly devout to St. Joseph, was to extend to the whole church the feast of the Patron- age (1847) and in December 1870 acceding to the wishes of the bishops and all the faithful, Pius IX solemnly declared the Holy Patriarch Joseph patron of the Catholic Ch/urch and enjoined that his feast (19 March) should be celebrated as a double of the first class (but without octave on account of Lent)." The Catholic En- cyclopedia, Vol. VIII, pp. 505-6. A feast, double, of the first class is the highest honor that can be paid to a Catholic divinity, by this honor Joseph was made the equal of Mary, and second only to Jesus. The eminent scientist St. George-Mivart, himself a Catholic, saw in this growing cult of Joseph a preparation on the part of the Cath- olic church for the acknowledgment of the natural paternity of Joseph. St. George-Mivart died excommunicate. BOCK i THE GODS OF THE HOUSE As man emerged from savagery and lower barbarism into higher barbarism! and civilization, he changed gradually, but radically, his method of getting his living. Having in his earlier periods domesticated fire and brought under his hand the more timid and useful of the animals, he mastered the rudiments of agriculture so that it was no longer necessary for him to wander far and wide in search of food. He had but to settle upon the land, to build him a house, and there a man might live year after year, with his wives and his children, his men servants and his women servants, his oxen and his asses, his horses and his dogs, his cattle and his sheep, and so far as his living was concerned, never go beyond the confines of his own fields. The common labor of his household applied to the land gave him and his family an abundant and a constant food supply. He harnessed his oxen and his asses to the plow and by their strength turned the furrow in the field. His horse and his dog were his companions in the hunt, which became the amusement of his leisure rather than the business of his life. In return for his care and protection, the cattle yielded him milk and butter and meat for his table; the sheep gave him of its wool for his clothing; he gathered from his fields a harvest of wheat and lentils and roots; his hillsides were planted with his orchards and vineyards, so that he, with his household, could eat and drink and be merry all the days of his life. His fields were his wealth, his house was his castle, and there the man of the house ruled as the lord of the house and the land. It was during the later period of barbarism and the earlier period of civilization that man became conscious of his pater- nity; it was not until he became a farmer that he became, 1 2 THE WAYS OF THE GODS in any true sense of the word, a father. Prior to the institu- tion of the family man was simply the male of the species; his relation to the female was instinctive and temporary. He was not conscious that his union with her was productive of a child ; he did not have for that child responsibility or affection. In the earliest period of human development the children were the children of the mother, not of the father; for that was the age of mother-right, when descent was traced through the female line. The male performed his function, then went his way and forgot it; the female bore in her womb the seed of this encounter, brought it forth in her pain, and nursed it at her breast. It was her child, and she could never forget it. But when man ceased to be a wanderer, settled upon his land, and lived year by year in close intimacy with his woman, he became gradually conscious that her children were also his children, and the mysterious process of reproduction engaged his attention and stirred in his soul feelings that found expression in the religion of the house, than which no religion has been more enduring, or has influenced more powerfully the history of mankind. The religion of the house was the binding force of the family ; and the family is that institution by means of which man passed from sav- agery and lower barbarism into higher barbarism and civil- ization. The family, in its nearer perfect form, is the achievement of the Aryan race; and largely because of the creation of this institution the Aryan race has the leadership of the world. In the family the Aryan evolved an economic institu- tion that gave him mastery over his food supply, which developed his social instincts, and in which he exercised the powers of government. The conscious union of a man and a woman for the pro- creation of children was not the cause of the family, it was the consequence. Man was conscious of his dog and his horse long before he was conscious of his wife, who was first his slave and then his consort. The woman had dis- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 3 covered the uses of fire, had tilled the. field, and had tamed the animals while man was roving as a warrior and a hunter in search of excitement and food. Finding his food no longer in the forest, but at the fireside, he settled down, appro- priating the woman and her discoveries to his own uses. Improving upon the methods of his woman, the man mas- tered the art of smelting iron, made a coulter for his plow, fashioned an axe, a spade, a shovel, and a hoe; put these in the hands of his women and his slaves, and by means of their labor, under his directing eye, secured for himself (and, incidentally, for his dependents) food and clothing and shelter and a place and a name in the earth. The man had to defend these his possessions against all comers. The land and the women and the children and the slaves were organized for defense as much as for production. The field was trenched ; the garden was walled ; a watch was kept day and night, to guard against the assault of the wandering tribes that continually threatened the existence of the family. The family was an armed force of which the head of the family was the commander, as well as an industrial establishment of which he was the superintendent ; thus being welded into unity by a common interest and a common danger. Obedience to the head of the house was a necessity, if the house were to stand. A divided house was a fallen house. It was under such conditions that the idea of property was developed and established its sway over the mind and heart of man. The land was his land, the women his women, the children his children, the slaves his slaves, the cattle and the sheep his cattle and sheep. To extend the area of his land, to increase the number of souls under his hand, was the consuming ambition of the head of the family. Not only did man in evolving the family change his mode of living but he modified in the profoundest manner his view of life itself. His life was no longer limited by the fact of his death ; his ownership did not cease with his decease. When he died the landholder did not lose his grip upon the land. If he did not any longer dwell on it, he dwelt 4 THE WAYS OF THE GODS in it. He had in it his grave, and from his grave he ruled the land with a new and mystic power. From being the man of the house he became the god of the house. Ancestor worship is that form of religion which has pre- vailed wherever property in land and the possession of wife and children have made of the man a landowner and a house- holder. Man under these circumstances extended his per- sonality in space over land and in time through his children. His desire for land was the outcome of his will to power, his desire for children of his will to live. His children, the seed of his loins, were his support and defense while on the earth, his servants and suppliants while in the earth. In the thought of the ancient the death of the father did not remove him from the family circle. His tomb was the sacred table of the family, his spirit the guardian spirit of the house, his worship the unifying principle of the family life. As the years went by, and as one after another the heads of the family went down into the grave, so did the number of the gods of the family increase. Every family was in the keeping of a host of divinities who were the guardians of its peace and the objects of its worship. To them the living head of the family made obeisance as he passed over the threshold, to them he made oblation when he sat down to meat, for them he kept festival and holy day, and none but he and his house could share in the sacred rites of this household religion. These House Spirits were called by different names in different lands, but whatever that name, the conception of the gods was the same. By the Greeks they were called demons and heroes ; among the .Latins they were known as the Manes, the Lares, and the Penates. And while these divinities had in their keeping the general interests of the family and might be called upon for any purpose, yet there was among them a sort of rude division of labor, so that each class was responsible, in a way, for a given guardianship of the family life. The Manes were the keepers of the blood; the Lares were the keepers of the gates ; the Penates were the keep- ers of the fire and the store. It was the duty of the Manes to THE WAYS OF THE GODS 5 preserve the sanctity of the marriage bed, of the Lares to secure the integrity of the family estate, and of the Penates to keep alive the fires on the hearth and to watch over the contents of the cupboard. CHAPTER II The Manes "Nothing," says Dr. Hearn in his interesting and valuable 'History of the Aryan Household/ "was farther from the minds of archaic men than the notion that all men were of one blood, and were the creatures of an All-Father in Heaven. The universal belief of the early world was that men were of different bloods ; that they each had fathers of their own ; and that these fathers were not in heaven, but beneath in the earth. They had a strong and practical con- viction that they lived under a Divine protection ; that this protection extended to themselves and all the members of their household and that its influence, not only did not defend but was usually hostile to others. Those others had in like manner their own gods, who naturally favored and protected them as household gods ought to do. The House Father of old cared little whether the universe had one author or many authors ; his practical duty, his hopes and fears centered upon his own hearth. Profoundly religious, indeed he was, but his religion assumed a different form from that with which we are familiar. In its origin, its objects and its results it was entirely domestic." 1 The primary concern of the House-Father was the con- tinuance of the house. As he could not live forever in the house, he must have a son to take his place when he was gone. It must be a son and not a daughter; for in the ancient Aryan family the female had no rights of inheritance; she 1 "History of the Aryan Household," Wm. Edw. Hearn ; Lon- don, 1879. 6 THE WAYS OF THE GODS could own nothing, not even herself. Until the House- Father had provided an heir for his estate he had failed in the most signal of his duties. To perform this function prop- erly required the careful selection of the woman who was to be the mother of his son. With this woman he must have exclusive rights of cohabitation. She must be his and his only, guarded with jealous care, in order that the man might be sure that the child born of this woman was his child and so the due and lawful heir to his property and his government. This necessity on the part of the House Father, to give an heir to his house, gave rise to all the sanctities of mar- riage and to the enforced chastity of the family woman. The ancient Aryan man did not marry, as we say, for love, nor yet for companionship ; his marriage was not a pleasure, it was a duty ; it was not so much the concern of the man him- self as it was the concern of his house. By his marriage he could make or mar the fortunes of his house. In his wife he must find qualities that would be for the advantage of his son who was to be born of her. Her blood must be pure (for was it not the blood of his unborn son and heir?) ; her family must be equal or superior to her man's, that his son might not be ashamed as the child of a low-born woman ; her dowry must be rich, in order that the estate of the son might be increased by her wealth. The ancient Aryan knew nothing about eugenics as a science, but he practiced it most sedulously as an art. He did not choose his wife as the idle pastime of a summer night, but he selected her with all the care with which a racing man chooses a brood-mare for his prize stallion. The marriage of the head of the house was a religious duty "not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly and in the fear of the gods." 2 Marriage under these conditions was a sacrament. The Manes of the House were present at its celebration ; the sacred cake was broken and eaten in the presence of the 2 Marriage Service, English Prayer Book. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 7 Divinities; the marriage bed was blessed by the Spirits of the Fathers, and when the child was conceived it was these same gods who gave life to the seed, safety to the womb. Children so begotten were not so much the children of the individual man and woman as they were the children of the house; this was especially true of the first-born son and heir. When the woman had given to the house its future lord and master she had in that house the place of honor second only to that of the House- Father ; she became the House-Mother; and if not quite the equal of the man, yet first among his servants and dependents. The Manes of the House became her protectors for life, and her children rose up and called her blessed. It was this conception of the family as a divine institution tracing its descent through a long line of holy ancestors that made chastity the cardinal virtue of the family woman. The unchaste woman corrupted the blood of the family, broke the line of its orderly descent, introduced the child of a stranger into the family circle, deprived the House-Father of his right to have his own seed succeed him in the house, and, more dreadful still, this disloyalty of the woman made profane the sacred rites of the domestic religion. It was intolerable to the Manes of the House, who were the keepers of the blood, that the bastard seed of a stranger should sit before their sacred fires, break the sacramental bread, and pour out the holy oblation. The same feeling of horror was excited in the family by the discovery of such a profanation of the family altar as would stir the heart of a pious Catholic upon learning that the holy bread of which he had eaten at the altar had been blessed by some intruding, unconsecrated man. There was no punish- ment too dire to be visited upon the woman who by her unfaithfulness so disgraced her Lord, shamed her children, defiled the family blood, and blasphemed the Manes, who were the Keepers of the Blood. Such a woman was burned with fire, she was stoned with stones, she was whipped naked out into the wilds, to be torn and devoured by the beasts. 8 THE WAYS OP THE GODS So it came to pass that pride, and love, and fear combined to secure the chastity of the family woman. Before the institution of the family, chastity, in the modern sense, was not held in high esteem. During the tribal period the men and the women, within certain restrictions, were free to each other. Except during the love period, jealousy was unknown. Tribal men would freely lend their women as an act of hospitality to the stranger visiting them for a night; nor during the tribal period was this freedom pro- ductive of evil results. It was while this freedom existed that man evolved from the quadramana into the human. Then sexual selection was the controlling force, and no question of either family or property kept the lover from his mate. Only after the institution of private property, with its right of succession to the lawful heir, was established did the chastity of the woman become of any concern to the man. And then it was only the chastity of his own women that he cared for. For himself, the man, after the institution of the family, claimed and maintained that freedom which had been the equal privilege of both sexes during the tribal period. It never so much as entered the mind of archaic man that he and his woman were subject to the same standard of morals, nor did the archaic woman have any such notion. The man lived freely with his concubines under the same roof with his wife, and she saw in this no reason for jealousy, no de- rogation from her honor. During the whole of the family period the family woman has not been ignorant of the fact that her man resorts for his pleasure to women outside the pale of the family. She is not as a family woman concerned for the virtue of the woman of the lower class. In the days of slavery the slave woman was the natural prey of her master; and wherever slavery prevails the women of the master class have no regard whatever for the virtue of the slave woman. These slave women are property, their children are property; marriage in any true sense of the word is for them out of the question. The millions of quadroons, mulattoes, and negroids in the South are abiding THE WAYS OF THE GODS 9 witnesses to the impunity with which the free man con- sorted with the slave woman. The family as an institution made the chastity of the family woman the cardinal law of the family life, because upon this depended the due and lawful succession of the family property. The male offender against this law of the family was condemned, not because of his sin against morality, as we call it, but because of his violation of the rights of property. St. Paul puts the sin upon this basis when, in speaking of the male offender, he says: "Let no man go beyond and de- fraud his brother in this matter." So all ancient morality views adultery as one man's violation of the property rights of another man. By this nefarious act the offender robs his neighbor of his most sacred possession, he steals into the most secret place of the family and appropriates to his seed the right to succession in the family property and the priv- ilege of participation in the rites of the family religion of another man. The man who would do this has always been considered deserving of death, and the injured husband has al- ways had the right to kill him on sight. But the Manes, the Keepers of the Blood of each family, have no regard for the blood of any other family except their own, hence it is that the injured husband has always been the ridicule of his fellow husbands. In our day the Manes, the Keepers of the Blood, have fled the house. The man is no longer the master of the house: his woman has become his equal; she is demanding that he shall be as true to her as she to him, not necessarily because she loves him, but because she has the same prop- erty rights in him that he has in her. This change in the attitude of woman is fraught with consequences that are revolutionary in their character. It is destructive of that relationship of the woman to the man which was basic to the family as an institution. The Manes were the spirits of dead men whom the woman was required to worship even as she was compelled to obey her living lord and master. The modern woman is refusing to obey any man who is living, nor will she worship any 10 THE WAYS OF THE GODS man who is dead. With the granting of domestic, social, and political equality to women, the house band is broken, the unity of the family is shattered, the Manes of the family are dismissed, and some other institution than that of the family (as it was conceived by our fathers and believed in by our mothers) must take the place of that ancient form of social order as the keeper of the virtue of the man as well as of the woman. CHAPTER III The Lares The family as we know it to-day bears little or no relation to that ancient institution of which the Lares were the Keepers of the Gate. With us the basic principle of the family is sex; with the ancient it was property. With us a family, in the popular mind, is composed of a man and a woman and children; with the ancient the family consisted of a man possessed of land and house and slaves and women and children. A landless man could not, urider the ancient custom, be a family man. In the estimation of archaic man it was land and house and slaves and cattle that gave sig- nificance to wife and children. It was because he was a man of property that the ancient desired a son to inherit his estate; and in order to secure a son and heir, he married a wife. The sequence in his mind was: first property, then a son, then a wife. The family in the beginning was an organization for the taking and holding of property; or, in other words, it was an industrial establishment, corporate in its character, having for its purpose the maintenance of the members of the house- hold. The property of the family was by family custom vested in the oldest living agnate, called the House-Father, thus making him a corporation sole. The House-Father, THE WAYS OF THE GODS 11 being the owner, was the ruler of the house, and his owner- ship with its right to rule passed by succession to his eldest son. The source of the wealth which gave the family im- portance was: first the land and then the slave to work the land. It was this appropriation of land by each family in sever- alty that revolutionized society, substituting the family for the tribe as the industrial, social, and political unit. This revolution was not accomplished without violence. In the beginning the only title a man had to the land which he occupied was the right of possession, and this right might be, and was, called in question by every other man. In those days, as always, might was right, and the stronger man was ever on the watch to seize upon the land and slaves and women and children of the weaker man. It was, there- fore, to the interest of each landholder to appropriate only so much land as he could defend. Outlying land was a source of danger. In those early days the title to land was possession and use. Because it was to him the source of his life, because its cultivation gave him occupation, because upon the land he built his house and in the land he made his grave, there- fore the land to the archaic man was sacred ; for not only was it the home of the living, it was also the place of the dead. And it was the dead ancestors in their graves who really possessed the land and, as the Lares, were the Keepers of the Gates. The belief of the ancient man in the ghosts of his fathers, with their unknown power to help and harm, was better than a title deed to secure each man in the possession of his land. Every man feared the Lares of every other man. The earth in those days was peopled with a host of spiritual be- ings, unseen, unheard, smiting with the pestilence, and kill- ing with the plague. If any untoward accident befell a man, or sickness came to him after he had trespassed on his neighbor's land, then he, as well as his neighbor, ascribed his misfortune to the wrath of the Lares of that land. Thus each man had a wholesome fear of the ghosts of his neighbor. 12 THE WAYS OF THE GODS He was ready to fight his neighbor, whom he could see, but not his neighbor's ghosts, whom he could not see. In the good old days every house was haunted and every field be- witched, and it was the haunt and the bewitchment that was the safety of the house and the land. Domestic religion was the keeper of domestic wealth and life. It was the fear of the Lares that gave sacredness to property and made of theft and trespass not only a crime but a sacrilege. During the tribal period property in land was un- known and impossible. Then the hunter had the freedom of the wood and the fisherman the freedom of the stream ; every man lived upon the immediate product of his own labor, and his gods were the gods of the sky and the wood and the water. Barbarians of the lower order and sav- ages have little or no sense of property. The Negro in the South did not consider stealing a sin ; coming, as he did, a barbarian into the midst of civilization, he had no conception of that sacredness of property which is at the foundation of the civilized family and state. This sacredness of property was religious in its origin. It existed for centuries before it gave rise to the civil laws that are now its security. The State, having for its main function the protection of the rights of private property, was not the cause, it was the consequence of those rights. Long before the reign of law we had the reign of Lar. Each House-Father, absolute Lord and master of his own house and land, was under the protection of his Lares; the fear of them, and the dread of them was upon all the coun- try-round about. If his lands were seized by a stronger man than he, his Lares were expelled from the land, the graves of his ancestors violated, and he and his household weie either killed or reduced to slavery. It was this powerlessness of the individual household to protect its property that gave rise to the State. The City State was an organization of House-Fathers for mutual de- fense : a wall, which property-owners of a given neighborhood combined to build, behind which they could find safety in times of danger. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 13 The family was the unit of the State; the heads of the families were the citizens of the State. Neither the women nor the slaves had anything to do with the affairs of the City. The family did not merge into the State; it retained all its ancient rights and privileges. The House- Father was still the master of the house and of the land, still absolute ruler of the women and the children and the slaves of his house. The State did not and could not, in its earlier period, exercise jurisdiction over the family. Chil- dren and women and slaves were judged by the House- Father as they had been before the days of the civil law. The State at the first did nothing but give the force of law to the family customs and privileges already existing. This relation of the family to the land, and of the House- Father to the family, classified ancient society as master and slave, patron and client, patrician and plebeian. The House-Father was the superintendent of an indus- trial organization in which the slaves were the workers. These laborers on the land were given in return for their labor just enough to keep them alive and at work. When a slave was unprofitable because of age, or sickness, or bad temper, he was put to death. In the days of the family the power of the master over the slave was unre- strained except by self-interest. A House-Father could reduce his own children to this servile condition; he could even sell his wife into slavery. The master of the house was kept in check only by the Spirits of the House ; if by his violence he threatened the existence of the house, the house might restrain him or put him to death. But while the Lares, the Keepers of the Gates protected, in a measure, the wife and the children, they left the slaves exposed to the cruel mercies of the master class. Slave insurrections, which were of conatant recurrence, bear wit- ness to the intolerable condition of the working class un- der the family rule in the ancient world. That some mas- ters were better than other masters is undoubtedly true, but all masters were bad, the slaves being the judges. This classification of society gave to the master all the bene- 14 THE WAYS OF THE GODS fits cv . .g from the common effort of the family. He had honoi in the State and leisure for the school. He became an educated man, and his education gave him additional power over the slave. He was the priest of the family religion. The Lares were his Lares, the Keepers of his Gates, and he could, not only threaten the recalcitrant slave with the lash, but also could scare the soul of the trembling wretch out of his body by the fear of the wrath of the Lares of the House. As priest of the house the master had over the slave the power of a god. In every household there were not only wife and children and slaves, there were also a number of hangers-on, de- pendents upon the bounty of the house, whom the Romans called clients: poor relations, freedmen, and the children of freedmen. The importance of a master of a house was gaged by the number of these hangers-on. They came to him early every morning to pay their devotions, they fol- lowed him about in public, they were his satellites, and were under the protection of his ancestral spirits ; the Lares took no alarm when the client stepped over the threshold. Clientage in some form was common to the family in Greece and Asia, while in Rome it assumed the proportions of a vast abuse. By the automatic action of the rights of property, families themselves were classified as firsts and seconds, in Rome as patrician and plebeian, in England as nobility and gentry. The first families, the patrician and the nobles, are those who come first in order of time and appropriate the best land. Having the advantage of the years over newcomers, the ancestors of the patrician are held in higher esteem. The chief reliance of the old families is, necessarily, upon their ancestry, these families being important because they are old. The man of new family, even though he be a Cicero or a Burke, is held in mild contempt by the most witless scion of the older families. The Lares of the Nobles are a multitude, the Lares of the newcomer can be counted on the fingers. The class-struggle between the old families and the newcomer has made the history of the world. It ruined the Grecian THE WAYS OF THE GODS 15 cities, it disrupted the Roman State, it was productive of civil strife in England, and brought about the great cataclysm of the French Revolution. With the institution of the family, there came into existence a class of out-family men and women : runaway slaves, prod- igal sons, remnants of broken families, men and women without land, without house, without Manes, without Lares, having no place at any family altar. These were by pro- fession outcasts, vagabonds, beggars, thieves, and harlots. These out-family folk overran the world ; they were the pests of the ancient as they are the danger of the modern house ; they made up the armies of the conquerors, and in these out-family hordes were generated plagues that swept over the ancient world, destroying thousands upon thousands oi family lives. The Lares of the House had for these outcasts a singular and a deadly hatred ; for were they not the natural enemies of the house, preying upon its substance and corrupt- ing its blood? Private property in land, the basic principle of the family, was the fruitful cause of poverty, with the wretch- edness and degradation that always follow in its camp. That same poverty is to-day destroying the family and changing the face of civilization. Private property in land has, in the course of time, passed out of the keeping of the family Lares into the care of the civil law; what a man had once to do for himself society now does for him. The Keepers of the Gates are no longer the Lares but the lawyers. Land tenure has passed far away from the simple principle of occupation and use, and is entangled and strangled in a vast and complicated legal system most unnatural and unholy. No Lares keep the gates of the modern landholder, for the land is no longer sacred : it is a commodity to be bought and sold in the market ; it serves the base uses of speculation. The outlying field is no longer a danger, it is a source of wealth. Millions of acres of the best land are kept out of use and held for a rise in the market. The Lares of the archaic world, if they still haunt the 16 THE WAYS OF THE GODS earth and hover in the air, must look down in sad, bewildered wonderment upon the modern world, which to them must seem a mad world, wherein all sane principles have been driven out by crazy notions. Here are millions upon millions of landless men with wives and children combining to secure the title of a few landlords to their land ; these landlords doing nothing with or for the land but to take from it rents and profits. These two things, idle (land and starving people, condemn the world as it is and call for a new race of Lares to visit the vengeance of the gods upon these pro- faners of the land. CHAPTER IV The Penates The hearth is the heart of the family life. To keep the fire alive on the hearth is the bounden duty of the family gods. We of the modern world have lost altogether those conceptions that made "hearth" and "altar" sacred words. Domestic religion sanctified domestic life. The Penates, who were the Spirits of Ancestors, were the Keepers of the Fire and of the Store. It was a long time after man had learned the uses of fire before he lost for it his reverential wonder. Its flame was his light in the darkness, its heat his protection from the cold. Fire has always been worshipped by man, as it is written : "Our God is a consuming fire." Fire is alive ; it leaps and whirls, it jumps and dances. When men wish to celebrate they build a fire. There is nothing man dreads more than fire, there is nothing man loves more than fire. It is for him both creator and destroyer. It was the domestication of fire that changed man from a savage, living upon roots and raw flesh, into a civilized being, feasting on roast beef and baked potatoes. It was the cap- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 17 ture and taming of fire that made possible the home and the family. Because of this, the Penates, the Keepers of the Fire, are the best beloved of the family gods. With them the family was intimate as it gathered around the hearth when the day's work was over; they were present when the House-Father and the House-Mother gave bread and meat to the children and the slaves, and after the dinner was over the Penates inspired the members of the household to speak words of love and wisdom one to another. The husband could have a secret from his wife, the wife from the husband, but to the Penates all secrets were open. The light of their fire penetrated to the marrow of the bones. All profanation of family life was an offense to the Penates, to be punished by the heat of fever and the cold of the chill. While the family slept, the Penates watched ; all through the night the dull glow of their life was seen in the slow- burning brand lying in the ashes, that kept the fire alive on the hearth. If that fire died out, the Penates were disgraced, and the family shamed; for the life of the fire once gone was not easily restored. In these days of matches and elec- tricity the smouldering brand has lost its usefulness and, therefore, its sacredness. A match is more marvelous than a burning brand, electricity still more wonderful than a match, but for some reason they neither move us to awe nor win us to love. The burning brand, the open fire, and the chimney corner were the creation and the haunt of the Pen- ates. Our modern improvements have improved these lovely gods out of existence. The Penates were not only the Keepers of the Fire, they were also the Guardians of the Store. It was their duty to inspire the cook with skill to make delicate dishes for the family table, to watch the meat before the fire, to scare the rats from the cupboard. In the archaic world the gods were more useful than ornamental. The men and women of that world would laugh our gods to scorn and think of them with pity, gods shut up in churches, having nothing to do but to listen to the droning of prayers and the confessions of sins; gods who pass their dreary existence away from the warmth 18 THE WAYS OF THE GODS of the hearth, the smell of the cooking, the chatter of the maids and the stir of the family life! A god upon a great white throne, with cherubim and seraphim bowing before him, may have power and dignity, but for comfort and good-fellow- ship one must go to the god who sits by the fire, inhales the odor of spices, and the flavor of the bread and the cake and the meat that are cooking in the kitchen. Such a god can understand the tribulations of the cook and the annoyances of the mistress ; he knows by experience that fire burns and ginger is hot in the mouth. All other religion is cold and formal beside this intimate religion of the hearth. It might be supposed that since the Penates were the gods of the hearth, the Keepers of the Fire and the Store, that they were more properly goddesses, and that it was the spirit of the ancestress, not of the ancestor, that ruled the roast. But not so. The ancient family had no ancestress, only ancestor. Archaic man when he established the family did not grant the right of divinity to the woman. In the estimation of the male the female was not possessed of a soul to survive death. Life was in and from the male, and to the male belonged the guardianship of life. Man vitalized, woman organized. Man as the vitalizer survived ; woman perished with the organization. Archaic man did not reason philosophically, he took his stand on fact, he saw that he could fulfill all his functions save one (and that, so far as he was concerned, was a minor one) without woman ; while without man woman could not accomplish the purpose of her being. In the thought of the man woman was made for man and not man for woman. It was his right to rule, her duty to obey. Man was as much the lord of the hearth as he was the keeper of the Gate ; he was both Lares and Penates, ruling without the house and within the house both in life and in death. The institution of the family made the subjection of the woman the unalterable law of the family life. As it is writ- ten : "Her desire shall be to her husband and he shall rule over her." The doctrine of the domestic equality of woman is so foreign to the conception of the family that it makes THE WAYS OF THE GODS 19 of that venerable institution a ruin incapable of restoration. We may have some other form of social life and call it a "family," but that ancient organization known to our fore- fathers as the family is passing away before the growing demand for woman's rights. Her rights to personality and to property are as fatal to the family as is her right to vote. In this world purse is power, and if the woman is the keeper of the purse, she is in just so far the keeper of the man. And for the woman, in any sense, to be the keeper of man outrages every principle upon which the family is based. CHAPTER V New Gods for Old All over the world, even in India, China, and Japan, household worship, with its altar and its gods, its priests and its sacrifices, is rapidly passing away. In Europe it survives as the cult of a decaying aristocracy, expressing itself in pride of birth ; in America it has never found foot- hold. In the modern world the family has long since lost all knowledge of its divine origin ; or, if it retains a belief in its divinity, it bases its faith not on the assumption that this or that particular family can trace its descent from some ancient divinity, nor does it ascribe divinity to its ancestry as a body, but it is divine because the family is an institution ordained of God. Its divinity is not a matter of blood; an- cestry has nothing to do with it. The religious sanction of the family in the Western Chris- tian world rests upon the assertion that it was a creation of God in the time of man's innocency, when in the Garden of Eden, God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and took of his rib and made of it woman and brought her to man and decreed that a man should leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife and they twain should be 20 THE WAYS OF THE GODS one flesh. If one does not believe in the reality of this transaction in Eden, then for him the family has no religious sanction whatever; it is the outcome of social development, maintained as a social convenience. If one does believe that God in the beginning made man, male and female and joined one male to one female in holy wedlock, then one must hold that all families are equally ancient, equally divine, and the family of the king takes no precedence over the family of the hod-carrier. Either of these theories is fatal to the aris- tocratic principle of society, and as no other theory is pos- sible in the modern world, aristocracy is everywhere giving place to democracy. The family as an institution is essentially selfish : the wel- fare of the household being the only thought of the household gods. When the family was the social, political, and eco- nomic unit of the State, the laws were made in the interest of the family and not of the community as a whole. Laws of primogeniture and entail still hold in England, disinheriting the younger children in favor of the eldest son. This self- ishness has been productive of untold evil in the world. The family has reduced the out-family elements of humanity to slavery and serfdom, and condemned the mass of men and women, in all ages since the family was instituted, to pov- erty and ignorance. I To this day the family, even in its modified form, is a hindrance to social development. I Each family looks upon its own things and not on the things of others. This selfish attitude of the family man to the outsider is exemplified in the attitude of the modern employer to his working people. Once I was taken by an employer into his factory, and there I saw a girl sitting on a bench, pounding a machine with her foot, an occupation she had been steadily engaged in for nine hours. In this work she had spent the strength of her womanhood ; growing old and hopeless and haggard before she was twenty. The man for whom this girl was working did not give the girl a thought beyond the paying her wages. Leaving the factory, we went to the house of this man, where his own girl came to meet him, fresh, lovely, full of the joy of living, and she told, and her father 21 listened to, the story of her day's pleasure. She was his daughter, the other woman was his slave. He would have been broken-hearted had his daughter been compelled to take the place of the woman in the mill. It is this essential selfishness of the family and the family gods that has roused against the family and its gods that anger of the greater gods; which has driven the Manes from the chamber, the Penates from the hearth, and the Lares from the gate. All the forces of the modern world, religious, political, and industrial, are working the destruction of the family religion. We can no longer worship our remote ancestors, for we are greater gods than they. They were in the be- ginning rudimentary men, low browed and light-brained; their instincts were fierce ; their manners were brutal ; their customs foolish. We may owe them gratitude for being our ancestors and giving us the chance to live; we may look back upon their lives with pity, but not with admira- tion. / We no longer reverence the ancients because they are ancient. To have lived ten-thousand years ago is not an advantage, it is a handicap.J Our worship is not for our ancestry, but for our posterity. ' Our gods are not dead, they are yet to be born. Man waits \S to-day for superman and longs for the manifestation of these ' sons of the gods. Modern religion has ascribed a separate soul to each indiv- idual of the household, has unified these souls, not in the household soul but in a greater Oversoul, who has no regard for family ties. All the great leaders of modern religion. f Buddha, Christ, St. Francis, renounced the family in the interests of humanity. Religion to-day has shattered the family into fragments; it has set the father against the son and the son against the father, the daughter against the mother and the mother against the daughter; it has freed the wife from subjection to the husband, making her his equal in the presence of the gods. Political influences are to-day antagonistic to the integrity of the family, which is no longer the unit of the State. The powers of the State have invaded the household and de- 22 THE WAYS OF THE GODS stroyed its government; the House-Father has been compelled to abdicate; the law of the State has superseded the law of the house ; a man has no longer the ownership of his wife or his children or his servants; these are all the free citizens of a free State. The head of the family to-day has duties but no privileges ; he must pay the debts of his wife, but she is not responsible for his obligations; he must support his growing children, but they owe no reciprocal duty to his declining strength. Though the head of the family has still testamentary right over his property, every day sees that right limited more and more by the civil law. Primogeniture and entail no longer buttress the family, except in England. Income and inheritance taxes assert the right of the community to ap- propriate to its uses the family wealth. The family survives in the modern world a mere ghost of its ancient self; having the same name, but not being the same thing. By far the most potent of all the enemies of the family is the modern system of industry, which has taken from the family its occupation, removed its hearth, stilled its wheels, put out its fires. The work of the family is no longer done in the family, by the family, for the family; its baking, its brewing, its spinning, its weaving, its sowing, and its reaping are not the work of the family, but of the community upon which the family is dependent. Each indi- vidual is related, economically, not to the family but to the community. The boys and the girls must go out of the home to earn their living. Household religion is gone, be- cause household life is gone. The gods of the churches have broken down the altars of the Manes, the gods of the city have removed the gates of the Lares, and the gods of industry have put out the fires of the Penates on the hearth. BOOK II GODS OF THE GREEK DYNASTY CHAPTER VI The God of Space In the history of the religious life of the Greeks the gods succeed one another, after the manner of kings. There are divine dynasties as well as human, each having its day, then passing away to give room to its successor ; these dynasties being coeval with given stages in the industrial, social, and political development of the people. The first of these dynasties is that of the god known to the Greeks as Ouranos, to the Latins as Uranus, and to the Hindoos as Varuna. This god had little or no influence on the life of the Western world during the historic period; for the Greeks he was only a starting point; for the Latins nothing but a name. To find him in his prime, we must go back to the time when the Aryan race was emerging from middle into higher barbarism and was substituting the life of the shepherd for the life of the hunter. In thinking of the religions of Europe we must remember that none of them is indigenous to the soil. All the gods worshipped in the Western world are from the East, because the races of men who during this historic period have inhabited the continent of Europe are of Eastern origin. Man came into Europe from the East and brought his gods with him. Middle Asia is the birthplace of the gods, because it is the birthplace of the Aryan and Semitic races. The Aryan people, who are now dominant on the earth, developed their racial character on the northern slope of the Persian hills. That region was rich in pasture land, and man soon found that it was easier to get his meat by raising it in the fields than by hunting for it in the forest; so from a huntsman he became a herdsman and a shepherd. This 25 26 THE WAYS OF THE GODS change in occupation necessitated changes in his habits of life and opened up to him new vistas of thought. Man's attitude toward the beasts became defensive as well as of- fensive. He discovered that many animals were worth more to him alive than dead: the living cow gave him milk and butter and cheese for his eating; the living sheep wool for his clothing. It was a great step towards a higher life when man, in his own interest, began to assume this defen- sive attitude toward the beasts of the field. This bred in him a feeling of affection and a sense of responsibility. The relation of the shepherd to the sheep gave rise to thoughts and feelings which have made a lasting impression on the mind and heart of humanity. The shepherd was the lord of the sheep, and his relations to his flock were symbolic to him of his relations to his god. The best a shepherd / / could say of his god was: "The Lord is my Shepherd." In that saying he expressed all the watchfulness, all the anx- / iety that he exercised and that beset him in his care of his sheep. He needed his sheep, and his sheep needed him ; in like manner, he needed his god, and his god needed him. The shepherd life changed the relation of man to the in- animate as well as to the animate world. This life classified animals as domestic and wild, as the friends and enemies of man ; it distinguished nature as heaven and earth, the one the home of man, the other region of the gods, the one familiar and subject to man, the other mysterious and be- . yond the power of his will. Not until he became a shepherd 1 | did man see the sky. The fetich gods of the savage are all of the earth, stones and stocks of trees it is only as he emerges into barbarism and has domesticated animals and comes out of the gloom of the cave and the forest into the pasture that man can look up into the sky and can find in it the inspiration of his hope and the reason of his fear. It was the shepherds, keeping watch over their flocks 1 by night, to whom this god of the sky was first revealed. It was in the night that they saw him and feared and wor- shipped him. We who never see the sky at night, or, seeing it, feel ourselves in no near relation to it; we, to whom the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 27 sky is infinite space in which whirl infinite worlds, can have no notion of the thoughts of the primitive shepherd, as he lay upon his back, looking into the sky on the hills of Persia, twenty-thousand years ago; for to him there was no sense of space and no conception of the infinite. The sky was as near to him as the earth, and the stars were not so far away as tops of the mountains. What he saw in the sky was not the mighty play of impersonal forces but the action of beings like himself, having body, parts, and passions, moved, as he was moved, by love and hate, by hope and fear. As he watched the sky through the long night, he saw it move over his eye, carrying in its motion the moon and the stars ; slowly bringing the various groups of stars from the dark- ness of the east and dropping them one by one, as the night went on, into the darkness of the west. The primitive shepherd knew nothing of the revolution of the earth on its axis ; indeed, it was a long time before he was aware that the stars were the same stars night after night and season after season ; he saw the moon from a rim of light grow to the full and then become a rim of light again and go out into the darkness, and it was always a new moon to him. Out of these thoughts of the shepherd was the god Va- runa made, Varuna, who belongs to the earliest period of Aryan development, to the pastoral age, just as it was suc- ceeding to the forest age, when man was ceasing to be a hunter and becoming a keeper of sheep. Then, as always, man reasoned from the known to the unknown. He accounted for the sky by ascribing to it the attributes of his own nature. The sky was to his archaic mind nothing but a bigger man ; the earth was his wife, and the moon and the stars were his children. Every night his children were born, and every night, as fast as they were born, he thrust them back again into the dark places of the earth, much to the discomfort of his long suffering wife. The stories told of Varuna, or, to give him his most familiar name, Uranus, bear the impress of the untutored mind from which they came. In that early time man, still 28 THE WAYS OF THE GODS a savage, was savage to his wife and children ; for he learned \ ; to love his sheep long before he came to love his wife and t his sons and his daughters. Domestic tragedies in ancient times were not exposed in the law courts, they were enacted within the precincts of the home; the wives were tortured, children enslaved, and when desperation was born of cruelty, husbands and fathers were killed. It is such a story as this that attaches itself to the god Varuna : He is a tyrant in the home. Gea (the Earth) who is his wife, outraged both as a wife and a mother, stirs up her children to rebellion; one of whom, at her instigation, mutilates his father Sky and separates him forever from his mother Earth ; so that she can have no more children by him. These outre stories of Uranus and Gea reflect, as we have learned, the state of the savage mind that gave them utter- ance and the conditions of savage life that made them credible. We must remember that these stories were believed in their day as firmly as we believe the stories told us in our churches ; for Uranus and Gea were the gods of the shepherd world as surely as Jesus and Mary are the divinities of the Christian world. The story of the mutilation of Uranus and of his exile from the embraces of the earth come naturally at the end and not at the beginning of his reign as a god. In the mythology of the East we find him recorded as the chief god of the Aryan people. In his worship of Uranus the Aryan mas- tered the conception of space. The name of this god in the Sanscrit means "extension," "spread out." In looking at the sky man discovered that, while he could see it with his eye, he could not reach it with his hand; thus he became aware of a world beyond his finger-tips, and the sense of dis- tance was acquired, while "far" and "near" became thought in the human mind. The sense of space never came before the experience of space; it is an acquisition made in space itself. When first born we do not have it; since as children we cry for the moon. "Far" and "near" at first are only "big" and "little" to us. Yet we come to the knowledge of space so early that we think we have always had it ; and THE WAYS OF THE GODS 29 only by experimenting with the very young are we able to convince ourselves that once we thought that all the world was well within our reach. It was this growing sense of distance that caused the de- cline of the power of the god Uranus. Men came to see that the stars were farther away than the tops of the mountains. Little by little the sky has receded from the earth. At first Earth and Sky embraced at the horizon, and one had but to walk to the edge of the earth to lay his hand on the rainbow. Night after night the Sky came down and lay with the Earth in the darkness. Then the Sky was lifted until it was just beyond the tops of the mountains, and Olym- pus was the stepping-stone from Earth to heaven. But later the sky was withdrawn above the clouds, and the gods were miles away, sitting upon the circle of the heavens. But not until Giordano Bruno lifted up his eyes did man see infinite space as the home of infinite worlds. We never stop to think how recent our conception of the sky is, how absent this notion was from the mind of man through all the ages down to the present, nor how difficult it is even for us to entertain this thought and give it reality. The great mass of people never think of the sky as far, far away, it is always very near to them, and still the home of their god. Uranus, though he had very little to do with the development of the life of the Aryan people after their migration into Europe, was not lost to them. The stories that were told to his discredit were gradually either explained away or forgotten. In the Greek language he gave his name to the sky and to this day we are compelled to think of him when we tell of One who came preaching the kingdom of heaven, for is not this in the Greek, 'H ^aacXeia TOU Oupavou the kingdom of Uranus? We still look to the sky in hope and fear ; from it comes the light of our eyes ; from it falls the early and the later rain; from it the great god Uranus still sends down his snow like wool and scatters his hoarfrost like ashes ; out of it come lightning-flashes of wrath and rolling thunders of displeas- 30 THE WAYS OF THE GODS ure; in it are gendered the tempests that uproot the trees of the forests; from it fall the waters that flood the earth when the windows of heaven are opened. The shepherd on the Aryan hills, in his worship of the sky, has made us forever his debtors ; for in his crude imaginations we have the beginning of astronomy, and the seed-thoughts of theology and philosophy. Uranus, the god of the shepherds of the East, is still the greatest of gods ; in him are all poten- tialities, out of him all worlds are born, into him all worlds die. He is the maker of the day and the keeper of the night. V Darkness and Light to him are both alike. ) It is our misfortune that we seldom or never see him. With the shepherd life has gone the shepherd's intimacy with Uranus. Having no occasion to watch, we never wake to see the heavens as they manifest the glory of their God. What man of us has ever lain awake all night and watched the Great Bear go down into the darkness below the horizon ; who of us has seen the Moon gliding in and out among the stars, hastening across the sky, like some lovelorn maiden to her tryst, until she has become to us the symbol of the mis- tress of our heart, to whom we liken her? saying of that mistress: Your darksome hair up-gathered from Your thoughtful brow. Is like the wreathed cloud above the Moon Which all night long as she her stately journey makes among the stars, Follows after, Shadowing her way. Who of us has ever seen the storm gather and the rain fall, as the grey cloud follows the black? House-dwellers that we are, blinded by the daylight, revelling or sleeping by night! we never know the beauty nor the terror of Uranus, who dwells in the light unapproachable and broods in the impenetrable darkness. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 31 CHAPTER VII The God of Time Chronos, the god who mutilated and deposed Uranus, was not of Aryan origin, nor is there any trace of him in the religious life of the Aryan people until after their migration into Europe and their settlement in the peninsulas of Greece and Italy. His history is obscure, and the etymology of his name uncertain. Because his cult prevailed over the cult of Uranus, he was under the law of succession, held by the early mvthologists to be the son of the god who preceded him ; but this relationship cannot be established. Chronos intrudes himself between Uranus and Zeus, who are both Aryan gods and, according to the laws of mythology stand in the relation of father and son. We can account for Chronos only by the conjecture that he was god of the people who were in possession of the land at the time of the first migration of the Aryan tribes into Southern Europe. These people were of Semitic stock, com- ing from Syria and the regions south and east of the Mediter- ranean Sea; but whatever their origin, they had established a mode of life based upon agriculture as the chief source of their food supply. The rich, contracted valleys of Greece and Italy, with their abundance of sunshine and rain, made those countries almost of necessity farming countries. The live stock was no longer the main source of wealth ; the cattle and the sheep being subordinated in this agricultural system, to the field and the orchard ; for the land was too limited and too valuable to be put into pasture. The corn and the vine and the olive gave man bread and oil and wine, and these, in that semi-tropical climate, were more whole- some as food than was the flesh of animals. Animal food, of course, had its place in the economy of this people, but, as in all tropical and semi-tropical countries, it was con- sidered less essential than a vegetable and fruit diet.y In this region religion was rustic in its character, and had to do with sowing and reaping and gathering into barns. 32 THE WAYS OP THE GODS Of this religion Chronos was, undoubtedly, the chief deity at the time of the Aryan migration. Chronos was a god of vegetation. His sign was the sickle, which he used to mutilate Uranus; his principal festivals were at the Spring and the Autumnal equinox, and if human sacrifices were offered to him, that rite was but a survival from savage times and indicative of the thought that the blood and sweat of man must be given to the soil, if the soil were expected to yield of its life to the service of man. That he was the god of the farmer is evident from the fact that the Romans recognized him as the prototype of their god Saturn, who was the god of the rustic, presiding over the industries and securing, by his favor, the prosperity of the farmer. At the time of the Aryan invasion these southern farmers were farther along in the course of human evolution than were their northern conquerors. The agricultural life has in it more educational possibilities than the pastoral ; since the agricultural life is a settled life, which gives more time for thought than does a roaming one. A farmer must neces- sarily be a more or less close observer of the courses of nature ; he must be weather-wise ; must adapt himself to times and seasons. His life is governed by sequences. He must sow, and then he must wait for the harvest before he can reap. This mode of life makes a man conscious of what we call "time." The sense of time is so instinctive with us, after we reach consciousness, that we think of it as intuitive rather than experimental, a form of thought antecedent to experience rather than a view of the world acquired by experience. This relation of the sense of time to the nature of man has been, is, and always will be the bone of contention with philosoph- ers. The schools of Locke and Kant will dispute till the end of time as to whether time is an inborn faculty or is dependent on experience and education. That the sense of time is from experience we may infer from the fact that young children have little or no sense of time and very aged men lose such sense entirelv. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 33 The order of nature separates time into periods of light and dark, following one another in regular sequence. The shadows slowly shortening to the westward until the mer- idian, and then as slowly lengthening to the eastward until the sunset must have suggested to man the sundial and the division of time into morning and evening, as well as into day and night. But even so simple an instrument for the marking of time was not possible until man's life was reg- ulated into periods of work and rest. It is the plowman, not the hunter nor the herdsman, who watches the after- noon shadows grow longer, for the reason that the length- ening shadows mean to him cessation from toil. The occupa- tion of the hunter or the herdsman may be dangerous or tedious, but is not toilsome. Time and toil became associated in the mind of man when he put his hand to the plow and the hoe, the sickle and the flail, and began to work at a daily task for so many hours a day. Not until man went forth to his work and to his labor until the evening did the evening mean anything to him. It was on the farm that the sense of time was fully developed. We also owe to agriculture the division of time into months and years. We have calendars to tell us the name of the day and the name of the month, yet we give no thought to the marvel of that simple contrivance ; never con- sider how impossible it would be to order our lives if the ! days and the months had no names ; hardly meditate on the fact that there was a time when the articulate calendar had no existence and men had to be satisfied with the broad dis- tinction of day and night, seedtime and harvest, summer and winter. The division of time is religious in its origin. So won- derful is this division that men have always ascribed it to their gods. New moons and sabbaths are holy unto the Lord, f It was during the early agricultural period that the founda- tions of Chronology were laid ; great religious festivals mark the seasons. The lives of the gods are manifest in the phenomena of vegetation. The god is forever dying and 34 THE WAYS OF THE GODS forever coming into life again. Buried in the ground and left to rot, he rises from the ground into newness of life and brings joy to a desolate earth. The annual renewal of life in the vegetable world deeply impressed the mind of the primitive farmer; for to him it was a manifestation of the great mystery in which was concealed the life and the pur- pose of his god. \It was his god who blossomed and fruited in the summer, his god who died and went down into dark- ness in the winter, and rose again from the dead in the springtime. ) Of this religion of the fields Chronos was the ruling deity when it came in conflict with the religion of the migrating Aryan shepherds and herdsmen, who worshipped Uranus, the god of the pasture. These hardy men from the North found no difficulty in making a conquest of these farmers of the South, taking from them their lands and reducing them to slavery. But while they could subdue the men, they could not displace the god of the country. It was not possible to live the pastoral life in the contracted valleys of Greece and Italy. Agriculture offered an easier way to obtain a richer living. The conquerors of the land became the owners of the land, while the people of the land as slaves cultivated the land, the masters reaping the fruits of their labor. This is no speculation, it is a grim fact that has been repeated over and over again in the history of the world. After a conflict more or less severe and prolonged between the agricultural and the pastoral mode of life the agricultural prevailed. Uranus, the god of the pasture, was dethroned and banished, and Chronos, the god of the fenced field, reigned in his stead. During the reign of Chronos the institution of the family came to its perfection. During this period the family based upon the land, rooted in the soil, was consecrated by the lapse of time. Each landholder was lord and master within his holding, and was succeeded by his oldest living agnate. Chronos did not supplant the household gods of the Aryan people; he merely supplemented them. As the god of veget- ation he was the common god of all the farmers, and the cele- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 35 bration of his festivals promoted a community spirit that tended to modify the selfishness of family life. The stories that are told of Chronos illustrate the rudeness and the cruelty of that early period of human history. His fear of his children, his disregard of his wife, his consuming ambition to live and rule are characteristic of the man of the time in whose image this god was made. The story of Chronos is the story of man's mastery not I only of the earth but of the sky. He was the youngest of the Titans, those fierce children of Uranus and Gea who rage in the air, over land and sea. The destructive forces of the wind and rain were, in the person of Chronos, subdued to the uses of man ; he was the wind blowing, not as a gale but as a breeze ; the water falling, not in floods but in showers. He was the incarnation of the growing intelligence of man getting the best of the non-intelligent forces of nature. Aris- totle and other Greek writers traced the name of the god of the field to chronos, the Greek word for "time," but modern philologists dispute this, and refer the name~to the root from which we have the verb chronizo, which means, "to do," "to accomplish." It matters not which of these derivations is correct, or whether both of them are true, the name of Chronos will be forever associated in the mind of man with the thought of time. He is the Ancient of days ; the Keeper of the Golden Years. The treasures of the past are his, and all we can say of the future is that "Time will tell." T CHAPTER VIII The City God The story of the dethronement and banishment of Chronos by Zeus is, with some minor differences, a repetition of the story of the treatment of Uranus by Chronos. Having been 36 THE WAYS OF THE GODS told that he is doomed to be dethroned and exiled by one of his children, Chronos strives to cheat his destiny by swal- lowing his children as fast as they are born. Rhea, his wife, does not approve of this method of disposing of her offspring, so when Zeus is born she hides him in a cave in Mount Ida, and gives old Chronos a stone to swallow in the place of his son. Zeus, growing rapidly to manhood, rises in rebellion against his father Chronos, compels his sire to disgorge first the stone (which is ever after sacred), then, one after another, Poseidon, Hades, and Hera, the brothers and sister of Zeus, who seem none the worse for having dwelt so long in the interior of their father. Zeus, having driven Chronos into the remote parts of the earth, organizes his brothers and sister into a heavenly hierarchy, begets gods and goddesses and divine men and women innumerable, and reigns as chief deity over the destinies of the Hellenic people during the whole of their historic existence. Long before Zeus had ceased to be worshipped as a god, the Greeks had lost their place and power in the world. The true history of Zeus, as of all the gods, is not written by the poets in the sacred books, but is to be deciphered by the critical faculty in the life and language of the people. Zeus, an Aryan god of the purest blood, was not born, as the poets say, on Mount Ida; he had his beginning on that great watershed of gods and men, the northern slope of the Persian hills. The root of his name has produced the greatest words that have ever been spoken by Aryan men; for from that root has come such words as "day," "dawn," and "div- inity." Zeus, before he became the reigning god of the last Greek dynasty, was known to his worshippers as Dyaus, the root of his name was div or duy, which is the root of all the words that we use at the present time in connection with the day. Dyaus, in Aryan mythology, was second only to Uranus or Varuna. Varuna was the god of the sky as the shepherds saw it at night; Dyaus was the god of the bright sky in its morning glow and noonday splendor. The root idea of the name Dyaus is brightness, the gleam of gold and THE WAYS OP THE GODS 37 the splendor of brass. This god presided over the life of man during his hours of activity. He was not as Varuna, the god of mystery, breeding fear in the darkness; he was the god of the daylight, making all things clear to the eye of man. During the hours of Dyaus, the work of life was done ; the cows were milked and driven to pasture ; the fields were ploughed ; the seed was sown ; the harvest was reaped. Within the house the women baked the bread, spun the thread, weaved the cloth, and made the garments for the use of the household. Of all the gods there was none greater than Dyaus the god of the daylight, who filled the heavens and flooded the earth with his glory. This god became more and more powerful in proportion as man employed the daylight to study and improve his manner of living. It was under his guidance that man passed from higher barbarism into civilization. Thus is Zeus the god of civilization, expressing the thoughts and feelings that have dominated the civilized man from the earliest period of reclamation from savagery down to the present. In the early days of Dyaus human society was organizing itself along the lines it has followed ever since. The family, with its subjection of women and enslavement of the work- ing class, was in process of establishment: the leisure class was developing. The heads of families, the masters of women, children, and slaves, lived upon the labor of these subject classes. Labor was falling into disrepute, to escape from the necessity of labor was becoming the ruling ambi- tion. No longer were the heads of families shepherds, or farmers, or woodmen. Organizing unconsciously for mutual profit, they built for themselves cities and established the state, of which they were the rulers, the statesmen, the politi- cians. Fighting was no longer left to the impulses of the people ; it was organized into war. The soldier was gradu- ally differentiated from the industrial worker; and the heads of families and their sons were the captains of the armed force that defended the city from without and held in sub- jection the slave population within. Having mastered the process of smelting iron, man had a sword for his hand, 38 THE WAYS OF THE GODS a sharpened tip for his spear, and thus were the bow and arrow, in a measure, discarded. Fighting was reduced to a science ; war was practiced as an art. These conditions of civilization were far advanced when the second great Aryan invasion swept down over southern Europe. The earlier Aryan emigrants had forgotten their fatherland, had mingled their blood with the Semite and the Basque, and worshipped not the gods of their Aryan fathers but the gods of the country in which they lived, when these, their younger brothers, came down upon them, took from them their lands, dethroned their gods, and enslaved their persons. This later migration of the Aryans was not tribal, it was clannish. The clan (the tribe was antecedent, the clan pos- terior to the family) was a cluster of consanguine families moving as a body to seek for themselves new and better land ; their purpose was conquest and settlement. These emigrants brought with them their customs and institutions, political and religious, which they substituted for those already ex- isting in the territory that they conquered and appropriated. European civilization is Aryan because Aryan men brought the elements of that civilization with them and planted it in Europe ; for the same reason American civilization is European. The principle of that early civilization was the ownership of land in severalty by the family, the subjection of all the members of the family to the House-Father, the enslavement of the working class, and the exaltation of property as the end and aim of the social organization. Property in the sources of wealth and property in the labor of men became, by the processes of civilization, the privilege of the few and the poverty of the many. The religion of this early ruling class expressed itself in the worship of light and power, or rather of light as power. The powerful man in an organized society is the intelligent man, the man who sees. V Napoleon is physically the least of the soldiers of France, intellectually he commands them all. Zeus is the god of the social order, because he is the god THE WAYS OF THE GODS 39 of light as power. He is the one who sees what is to be done, and does it. 'The Aryan man has from the beginning worshipped this god of light as power, and his god has given him. dominion in the earth./ Historically Zeus presided over the beginnings of Western civilization. He was the greatest of the city or political gods who, in the worship of mankind, succeeded the family gods and the nature gods. It is true that Zeus never became the city god of any particular city; but that was because he was the common god of all the cities of Greece. In him Grecian civilization was unified. To find him as a city god pure and simple, we must go westward into Italy and study his character as he presided over the greatest of the city states from its foundation to its fall. The titular god of the city of Rome was Jupiter Capitolinus. Now "Jupiter" is none other than "Zeus-piter" 1 or "Zeus- father." He centers in himself the attributes of the nature gods and the household gods ; as a nature god he is Jupiter Pluvius and Jupiter Tonans, having command of the rain and being the maker of the thunder, as Jupiter Capitolinus, he has the guardianship of the city. City life in the ancient worlds was simply the enlargement of domestic life, and was essentially religious in its constitu- tion. Each city was in the keeping of the city gods. It was the duty of these gods to protect their city against the gods of other cities. Each city, like each household, had its own divinities who cared only for the welfare of their particular community and were hostile to all others. Each god must fight for his own against all comers. Religion i in those days, as always, was a principle not of unity but of separation. There were gods many and lords many in com- petition for the worship of men, and nothing was more de- lightful to a god than to have his worshippers go out against the worshippers of other gods and beat them on the field of battle. It was religion that gave intensity to ancient city life and made patriotism a sacred duty. The 1 Piter or phiter, the Aryan word for "father." 40 THE WAYS OF THE GODS separation of religion from politics would have seemed an unpardonable sin to the citizen of the ancient city state, the last blasphemy of the gods, their exclusion from their rightful place in the economy of the state. These divine beings were as much a part of the life of the city as were the men and women who thronged its streets; without them nothing could be done. All the business of the state was sacred, because it was transacted in the presence and under the guidance of the city gods. The priests of the gods were the magistrates of the city, leading its armies and making its laws. In the earlier period of city life, as in the earlier period of the family life, the head of the city, like the head of the house, was pontifex maximus, high priest of the city religion. Our division into Church and State was unknown to the ancient world ; for at that time the state was the church and the church was the state. , The gods were so intimate to the life of the city that the fortune of the one was the fortune of the other. When the city was taken the gods were dethroned, the ancient city gods passing away with the civilization of the ancient city state over which they presided. CHAPTER IX \ The Gods of the Leisure Class The Olympian gods, of whom Zeus was the primate, were essentially the gods of the ruling, leisure class, for the benefit of which class civilization exists. The great mass of the people have from the beginning had little or no share in the benefits that have come from the political organization of society. The ruling classes, being at the place of advantage, have always appropriated the wealth that has been created by the organization. The laboring classes have always been the lower classes, supporting civilization as an underground THE WAYS OF THE GODS 41 foundation, but having no share in the security, the light, and the beauty of the superstructure. Whether as the slaves of the ancient world, the peasant serfs of the middle age, or the wage-worker of the modern world, this class has always been without the pale of society. It serves but it does not sit at the social table. It is questionable whether the process of civilization has not been for the hurt rather than to the advantage of mankind as a whole. The right to leisure, which is necessary to the development and enjoyment of life, has been appropriated by one class .and denied to the other. The very name "working class" is significant. It has always been the ambition of man to get rid of the necessity of working for his living. The savage laid upon the woman the labor of the field and the house, keeping for himself the lighter, more leisurely occupation of hunting and fishing, and the excitement of war. Civilized man has exploited the uncivilized elements of humanity and lived upon the fruits of their labor. The ruling class has for the working class feelings of indifference, contempt, and hatred. As long as the working class is submissive, patient, and willing, the ruling class has for it indifference and scorn ; when it is restive and rebellious, hatred born of fear. \\ This relation of the classes was more explicit in the ancient civilization than it is in the mbdern. In the ancient civiliza- tion this relation was the expression of a religious principle: the gods were the gods of the master class; the subjection of the women and the children and the slaves was divinely order- ed; he who rebelled against that order rebelled against the gods. All the characteristics of civilized man are seen in the lives of the Olympian gods. The cultivated intelligence, the grow- ing sense of beauty and order, the desire for cleanliness, the love of freedom, the self-assertion, the religiosity, the rapacity, the callousness, the contempt for poverty and weakness, the insatiable appetite for pleasure, the disregard of the moral order, the imperviousness to ideas, which have been from the first the characteristics of the ruling class of the Aryan, were also the salient features of the gods whom he worshipped. ,' 42 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The Aryan man of the ancient state had the advantage of his descendant in the modern world, he had not come under the bondage of an alien religion. His religion and his life were both of a piece. If he pursued a maiden for her beauty, was not Zeus known far and wide for his amours? If he tor- tured a slave for thinking of freedom, did not Zeus, for the same offense, chain Prometheus to the crag? If he ran away with his neighbor's wife, was not that the favorite sport of the gods of Olympus? If he went out on a foray and brought back as spoils the goods and the souls of his enemy, did he not enrich his god and impoverish the god of his defeated foe? \We find the character of Zeus manifested in all the men whom the Aryan race has loved most to honor. He is the prototype of Alexander, of Caesar, and of Napoleon ; his court rivals in splendor and in license the court of Louis XIV before the days of Maintenon ; he patronizes the arts and the sciences, with all the liberality of Lorenzo the Mag- nificent. \\ These gods of the leisure class were the promoters of science, the patrons of art, the protectors of letters, and the upholders of religion. When we think of what they and their worshippers have accomplished for humanity, we are compelled to acknowledge that they are worth the price that mankind has paid for their services. Without the leisure class and their gods man would not be the master of life that he is. It is not work but leisure, not restraint but freedom, that has enabled him to evolve those higher faculties that express them- selves in science and art, in letters and in organized religion. The gods of the leisure class are not poets, but they patronize poetry; they pay blind Homers in pennies to sing of them in the halls of their devotees ; nor are these gods prophets, but they are the unfailing support of the priests, who live in their temples and eat of their sacrifices..! The gods of the Greek dynasty are the gods of the intel- ligence but, with one exception, not the gods of pure reason. Both they and their worshippers are hostile to originality. In the course of its history the Greek people produced two men of the highest order of genius in the region of pure reason, THE WAYS OF THE GODS 43 but neither of these men was in favor with the ruling class: /, Socrates, the greater of the two, charged with corrupting the youth and depraving the religion of the city, was put to death by the rulers of Athens ; while Rato, his disciple, was cast into prison by Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse. It is to be said, however, for the Greek gods of the Olympian dynasty, that they are not alone in their hatred of innovation, a feeling common to all gods. The gods are the creation of past achieve- ment crystallized into the present order. In fighting innova- tion they are fighting for life. Whoever would change exist- ing conditions must always first wrestle with and overcome ' the gods, for gods always belong to the conservative party. The gods of the Olympiad, being the gods of the leisure class, protected the interests of that class at the expense of the other classes of society. Zeus was the god of the House- Father, to whom he gave power over the women, the children, and the slaves. The women and the children shared with the House-Father, in a measure, in the favor and protection of the gods ; they were essential to the continuance of the house and to the permanence of the existing religion. The House-Father could not by his neglect or his cruelty impair the integrity of his family without incurring the wrath both of the gods of the house and the gods of the city. i Religion protected the wife and the children against the unrestrained strength of the man. But the slave, either taken in war or purchased with money, was outside the pale of divine protection. Instead of ab- horring slavery, the gods delighted in it. The captive slave was the spoil of the war, the reward of the triumphant god over the defeated god, and the ancient god had no pity for weakness. Poverty was a crime visited with enslavement or death. In archaic times the exploitation of the weak by the strong was practiced without limit and without remorse. It was the divine order. "Vae victis !" was the cry of the gods as well as of the men of that primitive age. Prosperity was a sign of the favor of the gods, adversity of their dis- pleasure. The master class saw in the misery of the lower class the visitation of the wrath of the gods. His religion 44 THE WAYS OF THE GODS made him callous to the sufferings of his fellow-men. Cruelty was practiced as a function of religion. To this day the master class of the Aryan people has exploited the lower class in the name of his gods. His mastership is a divine right; the subjection and misery of the lower class a divine ordering. Without that subjection and misery the master class could not exist, and with the existence of the master class is bound up the existence of civilization. Slavery in some form or other is the sacrifice that the gods of civilization have always demanded as a condition of their favor. In imputing to the gods of the Olympiad a disregard of morality, I have perhaps done them an injustice; for morality is a relative term, the morality of one age being the im- morality of another. Moreover, the gods, like the kings, have always been above the law and, like the kings, can do no wrong. The Olympian gods had, it is true, little regard for our modern standard of morals; but they had a morality of their own and that of a very high order. The virtue that they practiced and rewarded was the virtue of self-expression, bodily perfection, intellectual clearness; beauty of form and clarity of speech were the essence of their life. Ugliness was a sin, intellectual slovenliness a crime. Their great moral conception was expressed in the words To xaXdv, that which is beautiful and good and proper. As a con- sequence of its morality, the Olympian religion developed the human form in comeliness, so that its beauty was the inspiration of the highest sculptural art to which the genius of man ever has or ever can attain ; and it evolvetl the one perfect language ever used by man for the expression of his thoughts. The European Aryan, for reasons that will appear later, came under the power of an alien god, was subjected to an alien morality, and has for centuries been in rebellion against this alien god and a violator of this strange morality. From time to time, as in the days of Leo X, of Louis XIV, and of Queen Anne, Aryanism, under the name of Paganism, openly and flagrantly set at naught the gods and the morals of the dominant religion. In our day the Hellenic conception of THE WAYS OF THE GODS 45 religion is profoundly modifying the Hebraic and, with an element neither Hellenic nor Hebraic, is combining to form a new conception of religion and to give new shapes to the gods. CHAPTER X The Twofold Destiny ot Zeus In the course of history the conception of Zeus in the minds of the people was changed both for the better and the worse. As time went on he became the god of the school;; and the god of the pothouse. Each of these changes was detrimental to his popularity and destructive of his influence as a god; for the reason that the philosophers in the schools refined him beyond the reach of the common mind, while the priests in the temple and the poets in the pothouse de- graded him below the level of the common conscience. From a very early period there was a tendency on the part of thinking men to put Zeus in a class by himself; for while the other divinities were gods, Zeus was, par excellence, The God. In him the divinities were unified. Homer calls Zeus "the father of gods and men." Monotheism is not so much a revelation as it is a logical necessity. The Hebrew prophet was not more monotheistic than was the Greek philosopher. Zeus, in the mind of the great thinker, became the Supreme if not the sole God in the physical universe, just as Jehovah, in the mind of the Hebrew, was greater than all gods. While Zeus was the father of gods and men, he was not, as in Christian theology, "the Creator of heaven and earth, the Maker of all things visible and invisible." Greek thought was incorrigibly pan- theistic ; the world was ever older than gods or men. The substance of God, in the language of the schools, is antecedent to the person of God. "In Greek theology the universe was 46 THE WAYS OF THE GODS not the work of a pre-existing divinity, but rather the divin- ities were themselves evolved out of the pre-existing universe." 1 But while Zeus was a creature born in time, he was, in the mind of the Greek, the Perfection of Creation, the First-born of the Godhead. The representations of Zeus, in the Pheidian period, are expressive of personal dignity, religious solemnity, intellectual power, moral restraint, and emotional poise. He is the ideal of Greek manhood as that ideal existed in the minds of such men as Plato, Pericles, and Pheidias. It is doubtful if man has ever surpassed this conception of divinity incarnate in humanity. At this point in his history Zeus had ceased to be the god of the leisure class and had become the god of a higher humanity; though he was still the god of the leisure class, in so much as this ideal of man was the ideal of the leisure class in its best estate and this artistic presentation the work of the leisure class. But in the Elian Zeus the leisure class is becoming conscious of something greater than itself. The eyes of Zeus are open to see all that concerns the life of man. His image of gold and ivory on the plain of Elis has for its background ages of human achievement. This god is be- coming too great to be the god of the leisure class only, he must, if he is to continue, become the god of all the world. And that is his destiny. Epictetus, the Greek slave, preaches him as the god of a common humanity to the senators of Rome. Philosophy refines Zeus into Theos and places him outside the bourne of time and space, in a region purely metaphysical. He ceases to be a person ; he becomes a prin- ciple. He is an object of thought rather than an object of worship, and has lost his place among the gods of the people But if Zeus was thus the victim of the philosopher and the theologian, he suffered more grievous wrong at the hands of the poets and actors. The poets recorded the escapades of the god, in his earlier period, in incomparable verse and made them immortal. By reason of this, the scandals of Olympus became the tittle-tattle of the street and were rolled 1 "Cults of the Greek States," L. R. Farnell; vol. I. p. 48. THE WAYS OP THE GODS 47 under the tongue of every Grecian man and woman. In erotic poetry, and on the stage, Zeus was exploited as the god who was guilty of the rape of Europa and of the seduction of Leda. His domestic quarrels were the delight of both gods and men, and he barely escaped the fate of the henpecked husband. These stories of the earlier period did not in that period injure Zeus in the estimation of his worshippers ; for they were in accord with the customs of the time. The Olympian gods of the poet are made in the fashion of the men of the later barbaric and the earlier civilized period. In that era the rape of women was an approved method of marriage, and their seduction not a crime but a virtue. In barbarism and early civilization women are wealth. They not only minister to the pleasure of man, they have also economic value; by their labor in the house and the field they increased the riches of their master, and they had an exchangeable value ; a man could trade his surplus women for gold, or silver, or precious stones. As a man does not care for that which costs him nothing, he set greater store on the women who resisted his advances and compelled him to rape them by his strength and purchase them with his money. The costly woman is always the desirable woman. In his earlier period the devotees of Zeus admired him for his virility and had a fellow-feeling with him in his efforts to reduce to subjection his wife Hera. Here, again, the poet reflects the opinion of his time. In the earlier period, while the Aryan is still migratory, the woman must live in the open and be on quasi- equality with man. The angry jealousy of Hera, resulting, as it did, in constant domestic broils, was the daily experience of the Aryan chieftain, and he thought none the less of the god because of the nagging of his wife. When he heard tell that Hera by her jealous fury had disturbed the peace of Olympus, the Aryan man shrugged his shoulders and re- marked : "J us t like a woman !" and let it go at that. But with the passing of time came the changing of custom. The rape and the seduction of women were no longer a sign of manly virtue. Among the leisure class refinement had 48 THE WAYS OF THE GODS made the coarseness of the earlier age intolerable. The mys- teries of the human body were no longer exposed to vulgar sight, the clothing of the body brought with it the sense of shame. What men and women had once spoken of openly they now veiled behind the decent phrase. What in the earlier period was ordinary speech and action became in the later time vulgarity and obscenity. There are certain func- tions of human living that demand the strictest privacy, and the man who performs these in the open or speaks of them without disguise is a vulgar, obscene fellow, unfit for polite society. It is also the misfortune of the gods, even more than of men, that the follies of their youth are the plague of their age. Their gaucheries, preserved by the poets, lower them in the esteem of each succeeding generation, as men and women grow into the decencies and refinements of life. And when, as in the case of Zeus and the other Olympian divin- ities, these stories are dramatized and become the staple of the theater ; when the gods become the laughter of the pit and the derision of the gallery; when they are used to excite the vulgar passions and to satisfy the prurient imagination, then these gods cannot long survive the ridicule and contempt of the chaste and the sober-minded. Sooner or later a moral reaction is sure to sweep them out of their heaven and con- sign them to the darkness and damnation of perdition. / This was the fate of Zeus. When the great moral reaction came, the Zeus of the philosophers and the schools could not save the Zeus of the poets and the playwrights. As a result of that moral reaction, Zeus lost his primacy, and the title of Supreme Being in the Western world passed to the god cf an alien dynasty. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 49 CHAPTER XI Athena: Goddess of the Implicit Reason Next in importance to Zeus in the religious history of the Greeks was Athena, the titular divinity and the name saint of the greatest of the city states of the Grecian civilization. In Athens Grecian civilization flowered, fruited, and seeded, and from thence the seeds of that civilization were scattered far and wide on the winds of chance, to reproduce its thoughts, its feelings, its culture, in the uttermost parts of the earth. Culture is native to Athens ; there the human intelligence first became conscious of itself, and the cultivation of that intelligence for its own sake the serious occupation of the higher order of man. It was in Athens that men were first called philosophers, lovers of wisdom ; and of wisdom Athena was the embodiment and the patron. She was symbolic of pure reason ; her mind was soul ; she was intuitive in her processes of mentality ; she did not think, she felt. Athena was the wisdom of the Greeks manifesting that conception of life which was the soul in the body of Hellenic civilization. Her wisdom was manifested by the method she used to acquire her supremacy in the city of her choice. As the story goes : When the city of Athens was not yet founded but was a plan in the minds of the gods, Poseidon contended with Athena for the patronage of the city. It was decreed by the judges that the protection of the city should be in the keeping of that divinity who should bring to the cradle of the infant community the most useful gift. Poseidon, the god of the sea, came first, bringing as his gift a horse, and after him came Athena with an olive tree. When Pos- eidon saw the little gnarled tree in the hands of Athena he laughed it to scorn, and all the gods laughed with him. "Is not this," cried the Sea God, "just like a woman? Do you not know, O daughter of Zeus, that the Grecian men have been of old hunters and fighters? on my horse this city will ride forth to the conquest of the world !" And all the gods answered : "Amen." 50 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Then Athena courtesied in the presence of the gods and said: "What you say, O son of Chronos, is true: Grecian men have been of old fighters and hunters, they rode on horses in the chase of flying men and beasts. But what men have been, men will not be. Human nature changes. Here on this hill a new civilization is coming to the birth. Here men will cease to fight, and learn to think. They will burn the oil of the olive in their lamps, and through the long nights will study the wisdom of the gods. This City will make conquest of the world ; men of all ages and all countries will bow in her courts, drawn thither not by the renown of her wars, but by the glory of her arts. She will light with the oil of the olive the torch that will enlighten the world ; men will learn from her the folly of war as a means of ascend- ency of man over man. Let us leave to coarser natures the physical conquest of the world, while we are content to rule in and over the thoughts of men. Because of this, O Holy Gods, I bring to the cradle of this new-born civilization the leaf of the olive as the symbol of peace and the oil of the olive as the source of light." Then all the gods rose up and bowed before Athena and by unanimous vote, Poseidon alone objecting, proclaimed Athena the patron of the city, which was called after her name. So runs the story of the foundation of Athens. Let him who has faith in the gods believe. But this wise goddess knew that man does not change his nature in a night. Only little by little does he put off the old man and put on the new. As he had been a man of war from his youth, a hunter and a fighter by the habit of ages, it was not to be expected that he would at once disarm and expose himself without a weapon to the insolence of his enemies. The new civilization of the spirit must grow up under the protection of the old civilization of the sword. Be- cause of the hardness of the hearts of men, the violence of war must be. So Athena, being practical as well as the goddess of pure THE WAYS OF THE GODS 51 reason, recognized this necessity of war for the time being and took it, with all the other interests of Athens, under her protection ; thus becoming the war goddess of the Ath- enian worship; her sign, the helmet and spear. When the safety of her city demands it she does not hesitate to put on her helmet and take up her spear. Men think it strange to-day that women are militant. As if they had not always been militant, fierce fighters for the safety of their young! In the migratory days, if the men were defeated in battle, the women died in defense of the camp. Caesar in his wars with the Germans had to reckon with the women as well as with the men. They were ready to kill and be killed until the last one perished on the field of battle. In the course of the Gallic wars Caesar killed over a million men and women, the number of women being almost equal to that of the men. In our day women are fighting for political, social, and industrial equality with every weapon upon which they can lay hand, and the men are powerless because they do not dare to kill the women. They cry : "These women are furies !" and the women answer them : "You are right, we are furies ; we have always been furies in defense of the rights of our children. You men have built up a civilization based upon violence. You have reduced women to subjection by viol- ence ; as it suits your convenience you use her or leave her, you make of her your slave in your factories, growing rich upon her unrequited labor. It is by violence that you main- tain the inequalities and inequities of your civilization, and by violence we will destroy them." In this contention the women have the approval of the goddess Athena, who, when the battle was going against her side on the field of Troy, did not hesitate to leap upon the chariot and drive into the midst of the fray and win a victory over Ares, the god of war. In the person of Athena, woman is a ruler in the state : she sits at the council board, where she discusses and decides questions of war and peace. The saying that woman's sphere is in the home is true of her as of all women, because the city is her home. The notion that you can take a woman and shut her up in a house, away from the general life of the 52 THE WAYS OF THE GODS state, is the thought of men in the times of their degeneracy. In all great crises of political history the women, with the men, conduct the affairs of State. The greatest periods in English history are the ages of Elizabeth, Anne, and Victoria. Athena was not a virgin goddess in the sense that Artemis and Mary were virgin. Her womanhood is but an accident not of the substance of her nature. She is in reality neither male nor female, but the blending of both in a perfect hu- manity. She is a woman because womanhood is the stronger element in human nature. Athena is not a lover of men because she is a lover of man. She is not and cannot be the mother of a family, because she is the mother of a city, the nurse of a civilization. She is the goddess of the dawn, ever fresh and pure and strong. She lies alone at night and goes forth alone in the morning. She is the prototype of that great company of women who, in all ages, have risen above sex into a sexless humanity; who have fed from the fountains of their love not the children of their womb but the children of their time; who have been mothers but not wives, and of whom it is written : "More are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord." As an object of worship, Athena inspired the noblest art by which man has ever wrought to the glory of his god. Her temple, the Parthenon, stands to this day unsurpassed and unsurpassable, the brightest expression in the form of building that man has given of his conception of the divine. This temple has nothing of the extravagance (shall I say?) of the insanity of the architecture of the Gothic period; its keynote is serenity. The mystery of life is subordinated to the mastery of life. Here is so much of the mystery that we have mastered. Here is the length of it ; here is the breadth of it ; here it stands on its rock foundation ; the sky is over it ; the earth is beneath it ; the sky may be deeper and the earth wider but this much of space we have made our own. Here we have built a house for our god, this is our place in the universe, and with it we are content. Beyond us greater worlds may lie, but neither the fear of them nor the hope of them can disturb our serenity. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 53 Dr. Farnell in his interesting and valuable work, "The Cults of the Greek States," tells us that the origin of the name Athena is unknown. He deprecates any effort on the part of philologists to trace it to any language antecedent to the Greek, holding all such efforts misleading and harmful to true scholarship. This position of Dr. Farnell is the antithesis of that taken by Max Miiller and his school, who were apt to find all the gods of the later age in the records of the earlier periods. The study of the Sanscrit and the mastery of the sacred literature of India gave these scholars, as they thought, the key that opened the door to a better understanding of Western religion. Doubtless there were many fanciful and extravagant uses of this method, and relations were found where relations did not exist. But for all that I think the philologist has been helpful to the mythologist, and to discard this aid altogether is going from one extreme to the other. Notwithstanding the criticism of Dr. Farnell, I am inclinea to identify the A-thena of the Greeks with the Ahana of the earlier Sanscrit period. Ahana was the breath of the morning, springing from the brow of Dyaus and blowing away the mists that hide him from the earth. I am fond to think that when the Aryan migrated from East to West Ahana went before him, and after marching all the night over the land, or rowing over the sea, when morning came and he saw the great rock, which is the Acropolis of Athens, and felt upon his brow the cooling breeze, he bowed his head and worshipped, saying: "It is Ahana." And there he ouilt his city, consecrating it to the freshness of the dawn. When the day of Grecian civilization declined and the night came on, when the temple of Athena was broken down, her altar deserted, her name forgotten, the goddess did not cea c e to be, she only changed her form. Losing the last vestige of sex, she reappears the most mysterious of the gods of the succeeding age known as To Hagion Pneuma, The Holy Air; the Spirit of the Living God, proceeding from Him as the Breath of the Eternal Morning, for the inspiration and the purification of the children of men. 54 THE WAYS OP THE GODS CHAPTER XII Phoebus Apollo: The God of the Explicit Reason Zeus, the father of gods and men, had many sons, of whom Phoebus Apollo was by far the most distinguished. Like many another notable person, he was born out of wedlock. Leto, his mother, was not the wife but the mistress of Zeus. Inflamed by her beauty, the god compelled her submission. In this, as in all like cases, the woman paid. Hera, the wife of Zeus, discovering the intrigue, determined that the ill- begotten brat of this woman should not be born within the precincts of Olympus, nor upon any land under the sky. In jealous rage she stirred up Python to pursue Leto from coun- try to country. The dread of the anger of Hera compelled the people to refuse to the expectant mother the hospitality that she so sorely needed. She fled from the devouring dragon until she came to Delos, an island that until then was hidden under the water, floating from place to place ; but taking pity upon the victim of the gods, it rose above the water, fastened itself to the bottom of the sea, and gave asylum to the laboring woman. There, after a nine days' travail, Leto was delivered of twins, Apollo and Artemis, divinities of the Sun and the Moon. As soon as he was born, Apollo was fed by Thetis with the nectar and ambrosia of the gods; when he had eaten he grew apace into manhood, asserted his divinity, and pro- claimed his mission, which was to teach to men the ways of his father Zeus. Setting forth upon this enterprise, the earth welcomed him with the blooming of flowers and the singing of birds. Men came to his shrine with offerings, and the gods welcomed him to Olympus. He was received by the celestial company into the ranks of the major gods, and from that moment he sat at the right hand of Zeus his father, and from this throne reigned over the religious life of the Greeks. This is the story of the origin of Apollo as it is told by the poets. Just how much truth there is in it I cannot say, THE WAYS OF THE GODS 55 nor do I care to unravel its symbolism and make plain its hidden meaning. But this we know: Apollo was a god of the middle period of the Greek mythological age. He did not come with the Aryan from the Sanscrit land, nor was he found by them in Greece at the time of the first and second invasions. Therefore, he is either a product of Greek inven- tion or he is an importation from Syria and Egypt. "" Some say that he is the Sun god and only another name for Helios, while others assert that he is not the symbol of any of the physical phenomena of nature but is wholly spiritual, a de- cided advance on all the gods who came before him. The greater number of authorities are inclined to the Sun-god theory, and my own thought goes that way. Nor does this derogate from the spirituality of the god; for what is the Sun but the spirit of fire, forever burning and never con- sumed? Apollo is the Sun as the regulator of life, the des- troyer of evil, the giver of health, the revealer of mysteries and the teacher of the truth of fact, as against Athena, who is the inspirer of truth of feeling. But let one take which- ever theory of the origin of Apollo that may commend itself to his judgment, yet one must agree, I think, with Dr. Smith when he says, concluding his article, in the "Dictionary of Mythology," relating to Apollo : "Whatever we think of this and other modes of explaining the origin and nature of Apollo; his worship, his festivals and his oracles had more influence on the Greeks than any other god. It may be safely asserted that the Greeks would never have become what they were without the worship of Apollo; in him the brightest side of the Grecian mind is reflected." In Apollo the gods are lifted above the passion of man for woman. Whatever children he had, if any, are not the children of his loins but the children of his soul. Asclepios is sometimes called the son of Apollo, but Apollo had neither wife nor mistress, and Asclepios was his son by spiritual generation. 56 THE WAYS OF THE GODS It was the mission of Apollo to destroy evil in the world. He brought to light the secret murder and adultery and visited upon the offender the consequences of his crime. The wrath of Apollo was the dread that staid the crime. It was, however, the pleasure of the god to prevent rather than to punish crime, to forestall rather than to cure sickness. In him was the healing power of the Sun-light in which if a man lives, he can be neither sickly nor wicked. But far more important than the prevention or the punish- ment of crime, of far more consequence to the world than the forestalling or cure of sickness, was the gift of prophecy pos- sessed by the god. It was this that gave him his power and place in Greek religion. His oracle at Delphi was consulted by the Greeks, both in private and public affairs. Nothing of importance was done without first hearing what the god had to say about it. Statesmen waited on this oracle, mer- chants sailed at his word, and lovers mated at his bidding. We may laugh at his oracular speech and say that each man received from the god the answer that he wanted for his question, but our laughter is the laughter of fools. In waiting for the oracle of the gods, man waited for his own second thought, and so waiting, was the wiser. In Apollo man ad- vanced from impulse to reason as a guide of action. The god prophesied of things to come, and by his prophesy made his future obedient to his present. Only he laughs at Apollo who has never listened to the voice of the god, telling him what to do and what not to do. The god may sometimes make a mistake, but it is better to suffer the mistakes of the gods than the consequences of our own folly. The Del- phic oracle may require interpretation, but to interpret the thought of a god is better than to trust to one's own shal- lowness. The sign of Apollo was the lyre. He was the god of harmony and melody, the principle of order in the world. The universe in which man lives is harmonious ; it is in tune with itself. Its motions must be rhythmic, if life is to be happy. Harmony is more than the basis of music, it is the eternal song sung by the morning stars. Music, like the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 57 soul of gods and men, is neither in time nor in space, but it measures time and is heard in space. When the soul is fully developed, it is a note, or a half-note, or a quarter-note in the eternal score that the god of music is writing to tell all the joy, the pathos, the passion of living. Apollo is the god of order, in contradistinction to the god of law. Law and order are not words, as some suppose, identical in meaning. Law is from without, order is from within; law is command, order is habit. When there is law there is as yet no perfect order; where there is order there is no need for law. In the great unconscious nature of the gods order prevails and habit rules. We speak of the laws of nature, and by so speaking create a confusion of tnought, as if there were somewhere in nature a Congress assembled, with its Senate and House of Representatives, making laws for nature to obey ; or some Tsar issuing hia ukase commanding the obedience of the world. But that is riot the system that obtains in nature. Nature knows no laws. She is the creature of her habits , sne follows custom, and custom is the source of order. Law may lead to order, but it is not order until custom has made the law unnecessary. In human society are many laws ami little order. Human society will be at unity with itself when justice, mercy, and truth are the habits of society as har- monic movement is the habit of the waves of sound. Not until men do not need government can government be suc- cessful. When Apollo reigns in the heart as well as in the ear, then and then only will human society be a harmony and not a discord in the ears of the gods. Apollo was to the Greeks the god of the explicit reason in speech as well as in music. It was his art to make music audible and speech understandable. Athena was the god- dess of the pure reason, Apollo the god of reason expressing itself in thoughts and explaining its thought in language. It was the devotion of the Greek to this god of the explicit reason that has given him his place in the life of the world. The demand of Apollo was for cleanness and clearness of thought; so cleanness and clearness of thought was the ab- 58 THE WAYS OF THE GODS sorbing passion of the Greek thinker. In his struggle for the attainment of this virtue, he elaborated the one perfect language ever spoken by man ; he studied the order of think- ing and formulated it into a science. Grammar and logic and geometry are by-products of the Grecian passion for intellectual clarity. Socrates, the greatest of the Greeks, was the prophet of clarity ; with his keen dialectic he dissected the sophistries of the men of his time and compelled them to think clearly, if they would think at all. This passion of the Greeks for intellectual clarity has made the world their debtors till the end of time. When we invent the telegraph, the telephone, we go to the Greeks for the name of our invention. So essential to human thinking has the Greek made his language and his literature that it is to- day necessary to culture. One who has had no acquaintance with the speech of Plato and St. John is wanting in one of the elements that go to make up the equipment of the cul- tured man. One may get along without it, but one would get along a great deal better with it. However, even if one cannot read the language, one has it to-day within one's reach and one is greatly to blame if one is not acquainted with the mode of the Grecian mind. Chapman's Homer is better than no Homer at all, and Jowett's Plato is almost equal to Plato himself. One must not forego Grecian culture, even though one cannot read Greek. It is true that the Greeks cultivated the explicit reason at the expense of implicit reason, they became more attentive to the form of thought than to the substance of thought. This passion for clarity led them to explain their explana- tions until their method of reasoning was its own destruction. The Greeks were always on the verge of the great discoveries of modern science. As early as Pythagoras they had asserted the rotundity and revolution of the earth, they were acquainted with the phenomena of electricity. They failed to follow these lines of discovery because their itch for argument hindered the cultivation of the powers of observation. But what of that? Has not the Greek, in cultivating clarity, in giving us logic and grammar and music and sculpture and THE WAYS OF THE GODS 59 architecture, done enough for us? If he had gone on and made all the discoveries that have been the glory of our time, what, pray, would have been left for us to do? Let us be content with what he did, and thankful for what he did not do. The sculptors of Greece made Apollo the embodiment of the notion that man is a spiritual being, his body the crea- tion of his soul. When we look at the Apollo Belvedere we are impressed by the mentality and spirituality of the figure; the wide forehead, the deep eyes, the firm jaw, and square chin are indicative of intellectual power under the control of a strong will, directed by a high moral purpose. The physical elements are everywhere subordinated to the mentality and spirituality of the man. But there is nothing of Eastern ascetism in the figure. The body is full, strong, and graceful, under control, but not enslaved. The soul oi Apollo was not afraid of his body. In him we find that per- fect balance, that sane mind in a sound body which was the ideal of the Grecian religion. Take him for all in all, Apollo was about as fine a god as men have ever worshipped. He was of the Emersonian type, calm, equable, sure of himself, and sure of the universe. We need in our day to cultivate the worship of Apollo, to mould the crudeness of our sub- stance to the perfection of his form, to bring into our mighty but noisy and vulgar civilization the harmony of his lyre and the melody of his lute. CHAPTER XIII Aphrodite: The Goddess of Desire Primitive religious thought, or feeling, differs from the modern in nothing so much as in its attitude toward the great fact of reproduction. Man living in the Eden of innocent unconsciousness was naked and not ashamed ; he had not yet 60 THE WAYS OF THE GODS come to think of his origin as degraded and dishonorable ; ne saw that in Nature sex relationship gave rise to wonderful and beautiful phenomena. This relationship gave fragrance and color to the plant, plumage and song to the bird ; beard and strength to the man, fairness and gracefulness to the woman. The cycle of changes consequent upon the advent of reproductive power are so wonderful that they could not escape observation. Primitive man looked upon and wor- shipped this secret force of nature as divine. In phalic worship, its coarsest physical elements and func- tions were the direct objects of adoration. That which with us is hidden out of sight and never so much as mentioned was to the primitive man as open to the view and as much a matter of remark as eating and drinking. He may have been, and doubtless was, less delicate, less refined than are we, but it does not follow that he was less virtuous. Re- finement and virtue are often in inverse ratio to each other. The court of Louis XIV was most refined, but the less said about its virtue the better. In the earlier period of human history, as in the animal world, the male element was the controlling element in sexual selection. It is the male bird that has the plumage and the voice ; it is the lion and not the lioness that has the lionine strength and beauty. True, in many species the male and female differ so slightly that we never think of one more than the other as embodying the principle of sex, but this is the exception not the rule. When we think of sex in the animal world we think of the cock, the bull, and the stallion, not of the hen, the cow, or the mare. And, without doubt, this was true in the primitive times of man. Man served little or no other purpose in savage and early barbarian times than that of the male of the species. Nature used him for purposes of propagation only. He was as useful and as use- less as a cock in the barnyard, as a bull in the pasture. His relation to reproduction was accidental and momentary ; he was free to roam and live his own life, which he did, and as a consequence he developed his individuality, his physique, and his mentality faster than woman. Manly strength, with THE WAYS OF THE GODS 61 its perfection of form, is antecedent to womanly grace and beauty. It is so to-day: the boy is a finer looking creature at twelve or thirteen than is a girl at the same age; and in the working class the men as a rule are better looking than the women. The reason for this is that the woman could not in the natural order (and cannot to-day in the working class) live her own life. She is the economic factor in reproduction: she must feed her young at first with her blood and then with her milk and then with the labor of her hands. Her motherhood absorbs her individuality and arrests her develop- ment. If any one doubt this, let him look at the average woman and the average man ; at the workingwoman and the workingman. Among the civilized people of the higher class this relation of the male to the female has suffered a subtle and radical change. It is the female and not the male that we think of when we have in mind the phenomena of sex. In the ruling and leisure class woman is sex, and she is little else: the end of a princess is to be a princess, to marry a prince, and give birth to a prince. Until recently the life of a woman of this class has been considered wholly as relative to man. The sex idea dominates her life from the beginning to the end; she is a virgin, or a wife, or a widow, or an old maid, or spinster, and never simply a woman. As a consequence of this change, the woman in the upper class has been differen- tiated from the man in a manner unknown to the earlier stages of society. This radical change is the result of economic conditions; the same conditions that have brought about the accumula- tion of wealth and the establishment of the leisure class. Womanly grace and beauty are the products of leisure; to this all the poets bear witness. The shepherdess, who is the type of rustic beauty, has a leisurely occupation ; Blousy- Linda the bar-maid, with her red cheeks and her short-lived beauty, belongs for the time being to the more leisurely of the working class. It is, however, in the leisure class itself that the beautiful woman is at home and prized. Her delicacy 62 THE WAYS OP THE GODS is in direct proportion to the care that is bestowed upon her and her freedom from care ; her hands must not be calloused by toil, her back must not be bent by burdens, nor her feet blistered by travel. If one stops to consider, one will find that one always associates womanly beauty with a life of leisure. The ancient Greek religion expressed this fact in the wor- ship of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty. Aphrodite had nothing to commend her but her beauty ; she was born without travail from the sea-foam, flowers sprang up tor her without the labor of cultivation; she is drawn in a chariot by doves; she has nothing to do the livelong day but to be beautiful. Cupid, her boy, is naked; her mother does not have to clothe him. All that is told us of Aphrodite reminds us of the life of the woman of leisure class in all periods of civilization: she is really the product par excellence of civilization. She lives by the exercise of her sex power. No sooner does Aphrodite come into the presence of the gods than every man god desires her and every woman god hates her. Ares, the war god, is caught in the meshes of her beauty. TTera and even Athena are wild with jealousy. Aphrodite is the goddess of desire, she is love for the .pleas- ures of love; in her the pleasure is separated from the duty. Men choose her not as the mother of their children but as the companion of their idle hours. Man departed most widely from nature when he made the pleasure of love the end of love. Nature inspires desire only at the mating season. The function of sex is strictly limited to reproduction. Man, through the conscious exercise of his powers, has been able to overcome nature ; and it is this fact that has made the life of man the shameful thing that in some respects it is. When in any great function of nature the pleasure attendant upon the function is separated from the purpose of the func- tion, disaster follows. When one eats for the sake of eating, or drinks for the sake of drinking, then we have the glutton and the drunkard. Only man can be guilty of these vices, and far more disastrous is the separation of the pleasure of loving from the function of reproduction. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 63 The worship of Aphrodite, the goddess of desire, is always dangerous to man. The Greeks so recognized it. They married Aphrodite to Hephaiston, the lame blacksmith of Olympus, to show that pleasure must be subordinated to duty. When Ares is caught with Aphrodite by Hephaiston all Olympus laughs in derision. Her amours are entertaining but not ennobling. As the goddess of beauty Aphrodite is the inspiration of artists, as the Venus di Milo testifies ; as the goddess of desire she is the dread of the moralist, who sees in her the wreckage of life. Her worship is not that of sex power but of sex pleasure. It was this worship of sex as the source of pleasure that was the canker worm of ancient civilization ; it led to unnamable vice, to the corruption of youth, and to the degradation of age. Wherever civilization accumulates wealth, and gives rise to a class of idle rich, there this disease of civilization is engendered. Every man and every woman is in danger of infection. With us, in our highly congested civilization and crowded cities, this evil is threatening the very fabric of our social life. But there is a true as well as a false worship of Aphrodite. A woman has a right to be beautiful, beauty is the desire of the gods. The love of beauty is in every star and every snowflalce. Theologians find in man's sense of beauty the proof of the existence of God ; ugliness being always associated with the devil, beauty with the Divine. In desiring beauty, woman desires a good thing. Civilization may well pride itself on the production of the beautiful woman, she is indeed the goddess under whose feet the flowers spring up, and at whose coming the birds sing. We want not fewer beauti- ful women but more. Life should be so ordained that beau- tiful women should be not the exception but the rule. We have no natural right to shut young girls up in factories and in stores and condemn them to lives of ugliness. Beauty should be the right of many, not the privilege of the few. It would seem after all these ages that some plan of living might be devised that would make it possible for all men 64 THE WAYS OF THE GODS to be vigorous and all women to be beautiful; with our improved means of production there might be sufficient lei- sure for all to grow in grace and loveliness. The world as it is to-day is a horror of ugliness. The ancients may have sinned in their worship of beauty, but we certainly sin in the tolerance of its opposite. We love ugly buildings and ugly streets and ugly men and women. I live on the banks of a lovely river, which the gods went out of their way to make beautiful, a river we have made hideo.us beyond all recog- nition by the cinder heaps from our breweries, and the purity of whose waters we have defiled by our sewage. Even if it is dangerous, we need a revival of the worship of beauty for beauty's sake, that we may escape from the ugliness of our own creating. The worship of Aphrodite is the declaration on the part of the Greek religion that nature has associated pleasure with the functioning of life. Eating and drinking and loving are all pleasurable, or ought to be. It is wrong to deny these pleasures to millions of living creatures; there is something rotten in our social state when multitudes of women are denied the pleasures of love, or must enjoy them secretly, as if they were a crime. We are still far from social perfec- tion when such things are possible. We do not want Venus worshipped in the world again ; but we do want the worship of love. Love which romanticism makes the basis of marriage is impossible in the modern world, only because economic conditions make it impossible. When both men and women are economically independent then love for love's sake will be possible again. The mar- riage relation and the love relation should be coeval. Chil- dren born of a loveless union had best never be born at all. All our children should be like Leonardo da Vinci, love children. In all that relates to the regulation of the man to the woman and the woman to the man we are at the beginning of a new evolutionary era which, as we are wise or unwise, will lead to a lower and a meaner, or to a higher and a nobler, way of living. We cannot afford any longer to hate, despise, THE WAYS OF THE GODS 65 and 'gnore the method of our birth. The worship of Aph- rodite has in it an element of truth : desire is desirable. Children should be born of desire on the part of both the man and the 'woman, or they should not be born at all. Our world is overcrowded with the feeble spawn of loveless unions. It would be better if the quantity were less, and the quality improved. Ares: The God of War It is to the credit of the Aryan religion, in its best estate, that it held the God of War in low esteem. This divinity has attained to the first rank only in one branch of the Aryan people, and that the most barbaric. In Greece and Rome during the classic period the war god was subject to the control of the divinities that repre- sented the civil, intellectual, and emotional interests of the city. Neither Zeus nor Jupiter was primarily a god of war. They, as rulers of the State, were consulted as to the safety of the State, and war was made with their consent when the interests of the State demanded war; but war for war's sake was abhorrent to these mighty gods. Ancient civilization was necessarily militant; for it was engaged in a constant struggle with antecedent and sur- rounding barbarism, and with lower forms of civilized life. The lower civilizations of Asia were a constant menace to the higher civilization of Greece; the barbarians were always at the gates of Rome. But neither Greece nor Rome, though constantly at war, "ever loved war for its own sake ; war was necessary, but it 'was regarded as a necessary evil. Goldwin Smith advanced 'the paradoxical proposition that the Romans were successful in war, not because they were the most warlike, but because 66 THE WAYS OF THE GODS they were the least warlike people of their age and vicinage. The Roman went to war not as a pleasure but as a duty, not as a pastime but as a business; his wars were wars with a purpose. It was not the army of the Roman, it was his civil organization that gave him preeminence and the mas- tery of the world. The Greek civilization was short-lived because it unduly, and perhaps unwisely, subordinated the fighting man to the philosopher and the artist. Its great men are its thinkers, its poets, its sculptors, and its architects, not its generals. It was perhaps well for the world but bad for Greece that Socrates is more famous than Themistocles, Plato than Mil- tiades. The triumph of Greece over Asia is the triumph of the higher intelligence over the lower; nor was it the brute strength of the Macedonian soldiers but the high spirit of Alexander that gave him the victory on the fields of Issus and Arbela. Caesar was the greatest pure intelligence that ever applied itself to the problems of war, and yet war was not Caesar's forte; he was essentially a man of the council chamber, the study, and the forum. He could write and speak better than he could fight. He never lost an opportunity to make a blunder in war, but when he made a blunder he had the intel- ligence to see it before his adversary could take advantage of it and to utilize his mistake to the destruction of his enemies. Both in Rome and in Greece, during the classic period of their history, war was undertaken with reluctance for pur- poses of state, and regretted as hindering the development of the higher life of the people. All this is reflected in the religion of the period. Ares, the God of War, does not hold a place of dignity in the Olympian dynasty; he is there on toleration only; no beauti- ful myths surround his birth; he is the prosaic, lawful son of Zeus and Hera, the product of a loveless union. His parents dislike him because of his rude manners and his savage turn of mind. To the Greek, Ares represents the horrors of war, the slaughter of men, the rape of woman, the burning of cities, the wasting of fields. He is huge, and as 67 foolish as he is big. Aphrodite ensnares him, and Hephaiston takes him in the snare. He is the ridicule of Olympus as he struts about in his helmet, dangling his sword. While Athena is the goddess of war as subordinated to civic necessity, inspired by moral purpose and directed by intelligence to a speedy and just conclusion, Ares is the God of War for war's sake. He is a swashbuckler, a jingo of the jingoes, to him war is pastime, the piping times of peace a weariness. On the field of battle he gloats over the dead ; on the night of the battle he rapes the women of the vanquished ; he applies the torch to the houses of the cities, and tramples down the growing grain. Ares is war as a destructive force; Athena war as a corrective, regenerating force. Athena is with Caesar civilizing Gaul, Ares is with Gengis Khan devastating Europe; Athena fights at Salamis; Ares at Borodino. The only branch of the Aryan race that has given the chief place to the God of War is the Teutonic, in which are found the last invaders and the present occupants of northern and middle Europe. The Teuton, when he entered upon the con- quest of the Roman Empire, had a vigorous, native intelli- gence in a low state of cultivation. While his kindred, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Latins had made their home in the regions of the earth most favorable to the progress of mankind, regions where were the great water courses, the open sea, rich valleys, and fruitful hills ; where the sun was bright and the skies were blue; where the summer was long and the winter short, it was the fate of the Teuton to lose his way in the hypoborean forests of the north, where he struggled for existence with the darkness and the cold, and competed with the wolf and the bear for his place in the sun. This northern forest held the Teuton in its savage grasp almost down to our own times. He was at the beginning of our era without letters, without art, without science. The men of the Teutonic people were war-men ; when there was no war these war-men or Ger-men had no occupation except to eat, which they did to gluttony, and to drink, which they did to drunkenness. 68 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The chief god of the Teutons was naturally the War God, called Woden, or Goden. By day this god was out killing ; at night he was at home eating and drinking. This is the god of their fathers who still rules the heart and guides the life of the Teutonic people. War for war's sake is at this writing engaging the thought and consuming the energies of Europe. The civilization that the Teuton acquired from the Greeks and the Romans, the religion that he adopted from the Hebrews, the gods of culture, and the Prince of Peace are swept aside by the fierce strength of the German war god. Woden is in his Valhalla, drinking the blood of his enemies from the skulls of the slain. Ares roars ; Athena weeps. CHAPTER XV Demeter: The Mother of Sorrows The myths of the ancient world, though the work of the primitive imagination, are, like many a modern novel, founded on fact. Myth is history written in hieroglyphic. The story of Demeter is reminiscent of the fact that the human race owes the institution of agriculture to the woman. She first discovered the power of the seed, invented a plow, and cultivated the land. All early religions put agriculture in the care of a goddess and not of a god. To woman, civil- ization owes three of its greatest achievements: the domes- tication of animals (except, perhaps, the horse and the dog), the capture of fire, and the institution of agriculture as the chief source of food supply. But for these achievements, the human race would never have passed over from savagery into barbarism, from barbarism into civilization. Demeter was not as Rhea, the goddess of the earth, she was the goddess of the plowed field. She was Mother Earth : Earth prepared for and fructified by the seed. She gave mother love to the children of her bosom. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 69 "Her care brought the gentle rain and kept off the blight. The poppies which dotted the fields with color were her gifts, but the harvest time was the time of her glory. In the stand- ing grain and the gathered sheaves she was present; over the cutting, the threshing, and the grinding of the corn she presided ; the first new loaves of bread were consecrated to her. So closely was she identified with the grain that in all the worship of the farm she took first place." ' But if the harvest was the time of her glory, it was also the beginning of her sorrow. By the harvest the children were taken from her, and after the harvest she was widowed and childless, her fields were desolate, and the fountains of her life were frozen in the hills. Then Demeter, clothed in sackcloth, was like Rachel in Rama weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted because they are not. As the story goes, Persephone, her daughter, was, without her knowledge, given by Zeus to his brother Hades, the dread lord of the underworld. "One September day when the youthful Persephone was gathering roses and lilies, crocuses and violets, hyacinths and narcissus in a lush meadow, the earth gaped, and Hades, lord of the dead issuing from the abyss, carried her off on his golden car to be his bride and queen in the gloomy subter- ranean world." '' Then the yellow-haired Demeter seeks her daughter far and wide among the haunts of gods and men. After a long and fruitless search the Sun-God tells her of the rape of her child. Then the mother's grief is turned to wrath. She curses the earth with barrenness, and the race of men are perishing with starvation. The gods who depend upon the worship of men for their existence compel Zeus to force Hades to restore Persephone to her mother. The grim god obeys, but as his bride departs, Hades gives her a pome- "Fairbanks," Mythology of Greece and Rome," p. 171. 2 "The Golden Bough," Frazer, Vol. I, p. 36. 70 THE WAYS OF THE GODS granate seed that possesses the magic power to compel her to return to him and spend in his house the third part of her time every year. In this myth we have not only the story of the seasons, the anxiety of the spring, the glory of the summer, the sad- ness of the autumn and the grief of winter, but we have also, as in a parable, the tale of a woman's life in its relation to her children. Her children are her tragedy: she conceives in pain, she rears them in anxiety; she gives them of her life, and after all the toil and travail they are snatched away from her by death, carried away in marriage, or lost in the adventures of life. Until recently a woman had no right in her children which the man was bound to respect. Although she had borne and bred them, they were not primarily hers but her husband's. Zeus acted after the manner of the Aryan man when he gave Persephone to Hades without the knowledge or consent of Demeter. To secure the simplest right in the life of her child, Demeter had to become militant, to turn herself into a fury, and force from the god what was due her as a goddess and a mother. Not only does the mother suffer from the hardness of the man, but she is sore wounded in her love by the children themselves. Love descends more readily than it ascends. The love of God for man is greater than the love of man for God, the love of the parent for the child stronger and warmer than the love of the child for the parent. Mother love sur- passes all other love in its intensity and duration. It is the highest form of love; it is sacrificial love, that gives for the sake of giving. The fabled pelican feeding her young with her breasts is typical of this love. I knew such a human pelican once: a woman widowed, with five children, whom she fed and clothed, and, dying, left money in the bank to provide for their education. And when we came to bury her, she had no breasts ; she had literally given them to her children to eat, she had starved them off her bosom. The tragedy of mother love is that it never can be ade- quately returned ; each mother in turn can give it to her THE WAYS OF THE GODS 71 children, but because of this fact, because these children must in turn give to their chidren, they cannot give to the parents. Love is the gift of the earth to the plants, not of the plants to the earth. The children must live their own life; they must blossom, fruit, and seed, and then pass on, leaving the earth to mourn. The mother cannot keep the children, for the children will not be always children ; they soon become as their mother, women grown, with desire for children of their own. It is the refusal to recognize the fact that one's children are no longer one's children, but men and women in the world, that is the cause of much unhappiness. I am sure that Per- sephone, though she loved her mother, was not altogether unwilling to go away with Hades and live with him as his bride and queen. But the woman's life, even when her children are grown and gone, is not necessarily devoid of interest and affection. What she formerly gave to her home she can now give to the world ; and from the world she can receive affection to fill her vacant heart. This principle is illustrated by the story of Demeter and Eleusis. In the course of her wander- ings Demeter came to the plains of Eleusis, where a farmer, not knowing who she was, took her in, gave her bread and wine and shelter, and when she departed, in return for this hospitality, she made the plains of Eleusis a miracle of fer- tility. And there every year, through all the Grecian period, the mysteries of the goddess were celebrated, and she was beloved and honored more than all the gods. Demeter was not only the mother of Persephone, she was also the goddess of agriculture. She had a public as well as a private function to perform. The prosperity of the world was in her keeping. The notion that woman is not a factor in business is so false as to be ridiculous. From the beginning she has been the mainstay of industry. The factory system of our day is the outgrowth of the home industries of the earlier periods. Many evils of our modern life are due to" the fact that men are trying to do the work that properly belongs to the woman. 72 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The industrial life is the sphere of the woman ; she has the genius to turn the raw material to human uses. As long as women were in control of the operations of industry the work of the world was inspired by religion. Prayers were said and hymns were sung at the cutting of the grain and the grinding of the corn. Now that men have charge there is ribaldry and cursing and the absence of God. Our modern official religion is the religion of the male world. Its God is a father in the sky not a mother on the earth. The earth has been treated by this sky-father as the woman has been treated by the man. It has been the servant of his will, not the equal partner of his life. He sits aloft in his glorious ease, while she travails in pain and degradation below. It is his province to command, her duty to obey. But this male world is in process of passing away. Mother Earth is asserting herself. She is saying to Father-God : "I, too, am divine. My earth is as holy as your heaven; my sorrows as sacred as your joys. I claim my place as youi equal in the house of the gods. My word must be as your word. I will work with you, but not under you." This rebellion of the earth-mother against the sky-father, of woman against man, is startling the universe. The women have the matter under their control. If, like De- meter, they go on strike, if they refuse to be with men at bed or board, to cook the food or sew the garments, if the}' go in mourning and refuse to eat bread or drink water until men grant them an equal place in the world, then there is no help for it : the man must yield to woman her right to full partnership in all that pertains to the common life. The woman is more than a woman, she is a person. She is of the substance of divine humanity. Her sex life is tem- porary, her human life is eternal. She is both a mother and a goddess. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 73 CHAPTER XVI Hades: God of the Dead The consciousness of death came to man little by little. We cannot believe that in the lower animal world there is any comprehension of death, in the human sense of the word. That some vague notion of death haunts the animal mind may be possible ; for when a cow dies in a pasture the rest of the herd is startled and gathers round the dead body and makes a sort of lamentation ; but as soon as the carcass is removed, the lamentation ceases and the incident closes. The animal does not reflect on death as universal to all living things. The anticipation of its own death has, probably, no place in the animal mind. With man, however, it is different. With the cultivation of his faculties of memory and foresight, with his powers of abstraction and generalization, he has come to know death not as an incident but as a law. He comes to the conclusion that it is appointed unto all men once to die. He reckons with his own death as with a certainty. He buys his burial place, he makes his will, he sets his house in order as one who must die and not live. The day and the hour of his death he may not know, but the fact of it he cannot doubt. Religion has always had much to do and to say about death. Indeed, in the modern world at least, if it were not for death there would be little or no call for religion. Our God is more especially the god of the beyond ; he rules in the regions of the dead. As soon as the facts of death engaged the thought of man he began to construct a system in which death should not be the finality that it seems to be in nature. If a man die, shall he live again? was a question answered in the affir- mative by mankind in general ; the Hebrew in doubting and denying it was the exception. The relation of death to the bodily form puzzled the ob- server. At first death leaves the body unchanged as to its 74 THE WAYS OF THE GODS form and substance. The body is glorified by death. In "The Giaour," Byron expresses this view of death in the won- derful lines: He that hath bent him o'er the dead, Ere the first day of death is fled. The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress. (Before decay's effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers) Have marked the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that's there, The fixed yet tender traits that streak, The languor of the placid cheek. And but for that sad shrouded eye. That fires not, wins not, weeps not now, And but for that chill changeless brow Where cold obstructions apathy Appalls the gazing mourner's heart As if to him it could impart The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon Yes, but for these, and these alone, Some moments, aye, one treacherous hour He might still doubt the tyrant's power. So fair, so calm, so softly sealed, The first last look, by death revealed. This aspect of death gave rise to the belief in the contin- uance of the body. Death could change, it could not destroy. So, in all early religions we find a firm belief that the life of the body goes on after death. It could no longer live on the earth, but it could live under the earth. When the body was buried, the means of life, such as food and weapons, were buried with it, that it might not suffer the want of these things in its new dwelling-place. In all early religions the continuance of life after death is associated with burial and the grave. The dead are held to be conscious in the grave. They are either happy or miserable there, happy if their descendants visit their graves with offerings, miserable if they are neglected. Their life THE WAYS OF THE GODS 75 in the underworld is the shadow of which life in the upper- world is the substance. To live on in the grave was, in the ancient thought, better than not to live at all ; but it was a pale and shadowy existence, not to be desired. To the vivid imagination there was a horror in the notion of this life in death that made death a terror. What might not take place in those dark and silent chambers? Again Byron has ex- pressed the thought of the ancient mind better than any modern poet: It is as though the dead might feel The icy worm about them steal, Without the power to scare away These cold consumers of their clay. We, who have outgrown these conceptions of our fore- fathers, do not know how great our deliverance is. We still associate our dead with their place of burial ; we still bring flowers to them and think our presence at their grave a con- solation to them, but we are freed from the horror of thinking of them as alive and conscious. For us they are transformed into the clean earth ; they have enriched with their sweetness the mold and are alive again in the growing grass and the blooming clover. But with the ancients the dead were con- scious in the grave, having power to come out and visit the living with their blessing or their ban. But if the fate of the buried body was sad, that of the un- buried corpse was terrible; it was as a child without a home, a man without a country. Claudio cries, in "Measure for Measure" : To be imprisoned in the viewless wind, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world. This was the fate of unburied souls that went shrieking by the windows as the mad winds carried them away from human habitations up into the mountains, or out into the sea. But if they wefe properly buried, in the sepulchre of their 76 THE WAYS OF THE GODS fathers they had their share in the family life, food was placed for them on their tombs and libations were poured out to them at the table. Gradually the liberty of the dead was enlarged. They were supposed to be free to leave their graves and go to some common meeting-place in the hollows of the earth. This was considered in the way of a relief from the terrible mon- otony of the grave. Here were the Elysian fields. Here the dead could gather and talk over old times, but there was nothing going on in that region of peace; no struggle for existence called forth the energies of the will ; no demand was made upon the muscles of the body. All was still with an eternal stillness in that abode of the dead, only shadows talking with shadows of that which had been but never would be again. In that realm of shades, Hades, son of Chronos and the brother of Zeus, was god and king. This god is himself the shadow of his brother on Olympus. He has no history. His rape of Persephone does not belong to him in his character as keeper of the gates of the grave but rather as the god who dwells in the inner parts of the earth where the gold and the silver and the precious stones are kept, as in a vault, for the enrichment of those to whom they are given by the gods of the rich. He gives them that hard, lifeless mineral wealth in which the rich have always delighted. As the husband of Persephone he may be associated with agriculture, but that is the province of his wife, not his. She must be released from his power in order to exercise her own. So Persephone lives a third of the year with her husband under the earth, and two-thirds with her mother above the earth. From Hades, the King of the Dead, a later religion derived its notion of Satan, the ruler of hell. But the idea of the ancient world is, in the modern cult, degraded by a cruel and foul imagination. The home of Hades is changed from a place of monotonous rest to a place of actual torment. Satan is not the son nor the brother of the high gods, he is the enemy of God. Death is not the complement of life, it is the wages of sin. This Satan, the ruler of hell, is, in this THE WAYS OP THE GODS 77 modern religion, one of the mightiest of gods. His dominion is eternal over the souls that he has won for himself. In the "Inferno" and the "Paradise Lost," Satan is more inter- esting than God and, in a way, greater than God ; for he defeats the purposes of God, and makes himself and his hell necessary to the existence of God. In this modern concep- tion of religion one might almost dare to say that if there were no hell there would be no God. But of this more hereafter. Goethe, the poet of the great nature religion of our own times, has said : "Death cannot be an evil, because it is universal." Death does not defeat God ; it is a part of His plan. When a man dies, he passes away not from but into the source of life. While he lives, he is life individualized ; when he dies, he is life universalized. And so it is written in the Vulgate : Esto fidelis usque ad mortem, Et dabo tibi coronam vitse 1 CHAPTER XVII Dionysus: God of Madness The Aryan religion, as it was developed by the Greek genius, was essentially sane. The cult of Athena and the cult of Apollo were the recognition, under the form of religious worship, of the pure and applied reason. Devotion to these gods was manifested in august ceremonies, in processions, in athletic games, in an architecture severe in its simplicity, in a sculpture that for the greater part represented the human figure in repose, or if in action, as is the case of the Disk Thrower, it is graceful, dignified action. In the Apollonian 1 Be ye faithful unto death, And I will give thee a crown of life. 78 THE WAYS OF THE GODS cult emotion is restrained and directed by reason. Sanity is required by those who enter the temple of the Sun God, in whose clear light errors are dissipated and truth made plain. The cult of Apollo satisfied the Greek in the vigorous period of his expansion. As long as he lived an active, ob- jective life, so long did Apollo and the Muses content his religious instinct. But with the development of the Greek civilization, subjecting as it did the many to the rule of the few, confining (as was its custom) the woman to the seclusion of the house, a vast population was brought into being, whose pent-up emotions, finding no outlet in the religion of reason which the men of the ruling class had set up, gave themselves over without restraint to a religion of madness. The cult of Dionysus, the God of Madness, competed with the cult of Apollo, the God of Reason, and swept within the circle of its influence the women and the slaves, making of the women furies and of the slaves drunkards. This cult, in my judgment, is of Eastern and Semitic origin. Two distinct types of religion have always contended for supremacy, one we may call the Aryan type, the other the Semitic type. The Aryan type is ceremonial, the Semitic type orgiastic; the one moves in the outer world of fact, the other in the inner world of feeling; the one expresses itself objectively in creed and ceremony, the other subjectively in weeping and praying. In the one a man, to be truly religious, must be himself; in the other he must be beside himself. The one gives us a poet reciting the deeds of the gods ; the other the dancing dervish filled with the power of the gods. Dionysus, the God of Intoxication, is the representative of the orgiastic element in the Greek religion. He is the god of the wine and of fermentation. He is also the god of the generative forces; who inspires lust and is heard in the bellows of the bull in the time of heat. In the celebration of his festivals men and women threw off the restraints of the acquired reason and gave themselves over to primitive passions. Breaking out of their homes, women rushed off into the forests and threw aside their shame with their cloth- ing. Slaves had the courage of their animalism and, in de- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 79 fiance of their servitude, became freemen in the realm of drunkenness and lust. Dr. Farnell has set forth the character of this cult so clearly in his "Cults of the Greek States" that I quote him at length for the benefit of my reader. Says this scholar : "Such was the religion which played a conquering part in the large area of the Mediterranean, assisted at times by the proselytizing zeal of religious brotherhoods and penetrat- ing many of the citadels of the Hellenic cult, and which was not wholly obliterated by the forms and dogmas of Chris- tianity. We can understand the power of its appeal : its orgiastic dance and revel gratified the primeval passion that is still strong in us for self abandonment and for ecstatic communion with the life and the power of the earth ; through divine possession induced by the sacrament or the vertigo of the sacred dance, the votary assumed the power of the nature god, to work miracles, to move mountains, to call forth rivers of milk and wine; the religion promised immor- tality and release from bondage to sanity and measure and appealed to the craving for subnormal moods, blending the joy of life on the mountains with a fierce lust for hot blood ; a lust half animal, half religious." J In all periods of history, man has sought for intoxication induced by alcoholism, opium, or religious emotionalism, in order to escape from the restraint of his conscious self. In times of over-civilization, of public or private calamity, men seek salvation by abandonment ; they get drunk ; they drug themselves; they give way to wild fantastic feelings. With men this form of deliverance is found most frequently in intoxication. The man breaks out, goes on a spree, lets go his hold on sobriety, decency, honor, and sanity. All men, especially men of parts, are liable to these outbreaks. Men like Fox and Webster react against their high mentality and fall into low brutality; being drunk with thought, they sober up by being drunk with wine. 1 "Cults of the Greek States," vol. V, pp. 107-108. 80 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Women are more apt to find relief from pent-up life in religious ecstacy. They are the easy prey of the revivalist, who intoxicates them with his verbiage and takes possession of them through his animal magnetism. The souls of men and women during a revival are excited to frenzy by descrip- tions of hell, and relaxed to languor by voluptuous portrayals of heaven. Christianity, so far from ignoring these primitive passions, cultivates them. The ritual of the Catholic Church is a blend of the orgiastic and the ceremonial. It makes a powerful appeal to the emotions as distinct from reason. The Novena, the pilgrimage, the wonder-working power of the saints and the Virgin are possible only because women as a whole, and man in a measure, are worshippers of Dion- ysus rather than Apollo. The Unitarian depends upon the pure ethic of the Gospel, and his churches are empty; the Catholic makes his appeal through the sensuous ceremonial of the Mass, and his churches are crowded five times a day. The precepts of reason will never control the conduct of men unless they are aided and abetted by the emotions. Hope and fear and joy and sorrow are the drawing forces of human life. Man is forever either fleeing from fear or indulging in hope ; he is falling into sorrow or rising into joy. The terror from which the soul is forever trying to escape is the terror of stagnation. Self-consciousness is always in danger of becoming consciousness of self, and that way madness lies. When consciousness lies stagnant in self it genders ennui, loathing, paralyzing fear, from which it must escape to pre- serve its vitality. To avoid this disaster, men seek the com- pany of their fellows, read books, go to the theatre, get drunk, fall into diverse sins. A German professor has said that con- sciousness of self is the great mistake of the universe. How- ever that may be, it certainly is the dread of man. In the day he drives it out by work and by play, and in the night he drowns it in sleep. Man is that paradox who is most himself when not himself. Man must lose himself in his occupations, or he will lose himself in his cups. Paul bids him: "Be not drunk with wine, but be intoxicated with the spirit." THE WAYS OF THE GODS 81 There is the madness of God as well as the madness of the brute. Man may rise above himself as well as sink below himself. Religion cannot exclude Dionysus from the temples of the gods. It may subordinate Dionysus to Apollo, if it can; but it will have Dionysus whether or no. Grape juice is no substitute for wine, because in grape juice there is no intoxication. If our temperance reformers would be success- ful, they must make life as inspiring as wine. Men have been so intoxicated with the spirit of humanity that they have been as drunkards, beside themselves, oblivious to the restraints of consciousness. Then we have St. Bernard so drunk with the spirit that he walks all day on the shores of Lake Leman and never sees the water; we have St. Francis talking to the birds as if he were a silly man befuddled by his drink ; we have the Greek philosopher running naked through the streets, intoxicated by a thought. Man must worship at the shrine of both Dionysus and Apollo. He must be sane, but not too sane. A little mad- ness now and then is granted to the sanest men. CHAPTER XVIII The Fall of the Greek Dynasty The charm of the Greek religion is found in its variety. The fertile imagination of this branch of the Aryan race has made the world its debtor for all time. It has peopled the sky and the earth and the seas with divinities. The constel- lations in the sky were the children of the god Uranos; the waves of the ocean were the horses of Poseidon ; the crimson clouds of the dawn were the steeds of Apollo; the freshening breeze of the morning was the breath of Athena ; the noonday clouds were the chariots of Zeus, who rode the storm, flashed in the lightning, and bellowed in the thunder. In the night Uranos walked with his children ; in the day Chronos played with the hours. 82 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The Greek mind had an almost fatal facility in this power of personification. There was nothing in nature so great that the Greek thought could not mould it into the fashion of a man and call it a god ; nothing so little that it did not seem to him divine. Beside his major and his minor gods he had nymphs and satyrs and dryads innumerable. Every fountain had its Arethusa, every mountain stream its Alpheus. In its variety the Greek religion was a counterpart of nat- ure, as nature was manifested in the mountains and valleys, in the fountains and streams, in the bays and islands of the Greek peninsula and archipelago. This land with its moun- tains separating valley from valley, with its deep seas dividing land from land, was the natural home of individualism. Each projection into the sea stood alone; each valley was a world by itself. Athens and Sparta evolved distinct and antagon- istic civilizations. It is this variety that gives to Greece its abiding beauty and interest. It is this which is the source of its weakness, the reason of its short-lived glory. This lack of unity was the cause of the early decline and final subjection of Greece to a civilization lacking altogether variety and beauty, but having strength and unity. The Greek civilization was in its political and religious life without any unifying element. Zeus was never quite the God but only a god. He was first among equals, but any wor- shipper could prefer to him the least of the gods of Olympus and still be orthodox. During the whole of the later period the foreign cult of Dionysus rivaled in popularity the purely Grecian cult of Apollo. This itch for variety was the mother of an insatiable curiosity. As St. Luke said : "The Athen- ians had no other desire but to hear or tell some new thing." Any god was welcome, so only he was a new god. This lack of unity in religion was but the reflex of the unity that was wanting in the political life of the country. The city states of Greece were each independent and contin- ually at war with one another. There was a brief period of unity under the leadership of Athens to resist the Persian invasion ; but when this danger was past the two most im- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 83 portant city states of the Hellenic civilization, Athens and Sparta, engaged in a war for supremacy, in which neither prevailed, but in which both were exhausted. Weakened by division, depleted by fratricidal strife, the Greek city states came easily under the dominion of the half barbarian province of Macedon. But even the Macedonian monarchy did not supply to Greece the lacking element of unity. Had he lived, Alexander could not and would not have unified Greece ; he was himself without a sense of essential unity. His mind was set upon conquest not upon unification. When he died his empire fell to pieces at once, and it was left to another and a greater genius to unify the Western world. The Greek mind sought vainly in philosophy for a principle of unification. One school after another set itself to the solution of^this problem. But fire and water, earth and sky, mind and matter, were, in the Greek thought, separ- ated by impassable gulfs. The flux of Heraclitus was a process, the absolute of Plato an abstraction, neither of which could become a principle of unity strong enough to reduce the chaos of the world to subjection. Philosophy could not then and cannot now give unity to life. It has been the his- tory of philosophy that each system is antagonistic to every other system, so that in philosophy we have all the variety, all the beauty, and all the weakness of the Greek civilization. The Greek gods lost their hold on the life of the people as a consequence of this vain effort at unification. No one of them was able to prevail over the other. As we have seen, the poets immortalized the sins of their youth and condemned them to a futile old age. If Apollo possessed a clean record and an eternal youth, he was, as all gods are apt to be, hand 1 - icapped by his own infallibility. His oracles at Delphi and elsewhere had committed him to so many statements and positions that the critical reason had little difficulty in dis- crediting his wisdom. It was this critical reason that played havoc with all the divinities of Greece. Some of them it argued and some of them it laughed out of existence. The gods were an offense to the serious and a jest on the lips of the gay. 84 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The Greek civilization, in its later period, was lacking in seriousness because it was wanting in unity. Anything like settled convictions are impossible to the ultra-curious mind. The desire for the new leads to the constant uprooting of the old. One phase of religious faith has hardly time to make itself heard in the market-place before it is drowned out by the noise of a fresh arrival. In all periods of transi- tion we find this lack of seriousness. One form of religion is so constantly discrediting other forms that they all fall into the like contempt. This fate befell the gods of the Greek dynasty. They fell from their thrones, the civilization over which they presided passed into a new civilization under the dominion of a new religion in which the principle of unity was paramount. We turn away from the gods of the Greek dynasty with reluctance. Some say they were no gods, only the imagina- tions of men ; but what are the imaginations of men but the reflection of the living God? The soul of man is a deep, still lake over which the Infinite broods and in which the Infinite is reflected. The reflection changes with the changing times. By day the mirrored waters of the soul reflect the round disk of the sun, by night the pointed stars ; now a cloud passes over the surface and is reflected in the deep, now the blue of the sky and the blue of the lake are one, and there are really two skies looking and smiling at each other. To say that a god is imaginary is not to assert that he is unreal ; it is only to say that he is incomplete. No body of water can reflect the sky as a whole. The gods of the Greek dynasty may be dead as individual deities, but they are alive forevermore in that vision of God which is forever haunting the soul of man. BOOK III THE ROMAN GOD CHAPTER XIX Divus Caesar: God of the Organization The Greek religion of the imagination was in the course of human events brought into subjection to the Roman re- ligion of practical politics. The Romans as a people were lacking in the poetic faculty which creates a rich mythology, but they were past masters of all that relates to the business of daily life. Their genius for affairs gave them the leader- ship of the Mediterranean world. The marvelous success of the city of Rome is the open secret of history. Rome was successful because the city of Rome was the god of the people of Rome, a god whom they worshipped with an absolute devotion. In Rome the city state became self-conscious, self-centered, self-aggran- dizing. When we first meet with the Roman people they do not impress us with a sense of their coming greatness. They are a group of Aryan shepherds and herdsmen who have come into Italy, probably, by the way of the sea, and settled on some low-lying hills on the river Tiber, seventeen miles from where it empties into the Mediterranean. These intruders are in the last stages of higher barbarism. They have flocks and herds that feed upon the fertile plains that lie about their settlement; in a rude way they cultivate the soil and live a simple pastoral and agricultural life. They are an unwarlike people, being content if they can defend themselves in the possession of the land which they occupy. The social organ- ization of these shepherds is that of the family and the clan. Each family owns the land which it tills in severalty. The authority of the house-father as the lord of the family is recognized by custom and sanctioned by religion. The 87 88 THE WAYS OF THE GODS women are the property of the men, but arc not shut up within the confines of the house; for a pastoral and agricul- tural people must make use of its women as workers in the pasture and in the field and grant them the liberty demanded by their occupation. Whatever government there might have been outside of the family was of the most primitive character. It consisted of the leadership of the heads of the leading families in war and in council. The families had not as yet developed through the clan into the state. The clans were, in all probability, jealous of one another and without any center or principle of unity, except kinship. The religion of this people was in keeping with their social and economic development, it was the crudest form of an- cestor-and-nature-worship. The gods of these hill tribes could hardly be called gods ; they were devoid of personal character and personal history. The hearth and the door and the organs of generation were the direct objects of wor- ship. Religious feeling was centered upon the phenomena of reproduction. Professor Carter, in his valuable monograph "The Relig- ious Life of Ancient Rome," says : "The essential feature of this religion was its social char- acter. Religion was not a personal matter, nay, it could not be, because the very concept of personality was in its infancy. There was no individual initiative or volition in the whole matter. Man did not choose his god any more than he chose his parents. He was born into a circle of gods ready- made for him just as he was born into a set of human rela- tionships. The fulfillment of his duty to those gods was a normal and natural function of his life... In the intensity of the struggle for physical existence these powers of reproduc- tion must be propitiated, that man and beast and mother earth might bring forth plentifully after their kind. This physical note, the instinct of propagation is dominant in all the early religion of Rome." ' 1 "Religions Life of Ancient Rome," Carter. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 89 To this day there is this vein of coarseness in Italian life, jokes at weddings and the like that are vestiges of the thought that inspired the ancient religion. These hill tribes did not in this early period rise to anything like a definite worship of the higher powers of nature as such. No Uranos carried his children stars in their sight, no Chronos played with 1 the hours; all such sentimentality lay outside the comprehension of these plain folk who had no use for a god who could not be of use to them. That such a people should have been reserved for a sublime destiny is, as I have said, the open secret of history. Their character was their destiny. They saw that living was de- pendent not on gods far away but on powers that were near- est to man. The gods were to be found in the fire on their hearth ; in the loins of the man and the womb of the woman ; in the corn in the ear and in the wine in the vat. If these gods were propitious, what mattered if the others were pleased or no? This people would never have entered upon the career that made them famous, if they had been left to their own devices. They were without any principle of unity, without any urge of ambition. About five-hundred-and-fifty years before the present era they had the good fortune to be beaten in war and brought under subjection by a people much farther advanced than themselves in all that relates to the social, religious and po- litical life of mankind. It is singular fact of history that Rome was not founded by the Romans. The creation of the city was the work of the Etruscans, a people of mixed race that came from the north who for a time were the dominant people of the Italian peninsula. The Romulian gens of the Etruscan nation were the leaders in the work of subduing the hill tribes on the Tiber. They crowded the people into a common center, built a wall, set up a king, and called the name of the city which they founded Roma, being as it was the city of the Romulians. For a period the Etruscan kings reigned in Rome. The tribes or clans were unified in a common citizen- 90 THE WAYS OF THE GODS ship. The unity of the city found expression in the worship of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Capitolinus. In due time these kings, having made of the clans a city, giving them a name and a place in the earth, were dethroned and exiled ; and that wonderful political organism known as the Roman Republic came to its birth. The name of the new organization was indicative of its character. It was a respublica, a public thing, which re- duced all private things to subordination. It was the organ- ization demanding the absolute submission and devotion of the individual. In the Greek civilization the emphatic word in politics was demos, the people. The city in theory ex- isted for the sake of the people, not the people for the city. In Rome the emphasis was laid upon the city; it was not the people who gave importance to the city; it was the city that gave dignity to the people. Romanus sum was the proud boast of every Roman. Rome was, thus, to a Roman his god in whom he lived, moved and had his being. The household gods were worshipped at the family altar ; the old divinities of the field had their temple and their sacrifices, but all other religion was anaemic when compared with the red-blooded religion of the State. In Rome patriotism was a passion, compelling a man to forsake father and mother, wife and children, house and land, even life itself, at the call of the State. This spirit of patriotic devotion was developed and deep- ened by the history of the city. Rome was from the begin- ning to the end of her career engaged in a struggle for po- litical existence and political extension. She had at the first to maintain her independence by a life-and-death grapple with the Etruscan kings. The story of Lars Porsena and Horatius at the Bridge has been recited in every red school- house since Macaulay wrote his swinging lines celebrating that event. The poetical narrator has caught the very spirit of Roman religion in the words of Horatius to the Consul as he goes out to hold the bridge against the coming of the Tuscan: "To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late." To die soon for the State is better than to die late for self. Men die ; Rome lives. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 91 From the first the Roman had a profound belief in the eternity of his city. No sooner had Rome been delivered from the Etruscan dominion than she had to consolidate and secure her safety by incorporating into her policy and citi- zenship the towns of Latium. From the beginning it was the policy of Rome not only to conquer but to assimilate. Little by little, for her security, she extended her borders until they embraced first Italy and then the Mediterranean world. Up to the close of the second Punic War every conflict in which Rome engaged was primarily a struggle for existence. After the second Punic War the city entered upon its career of extension, which lasted until the reign of Trajan, in the II Century A. D., when the city entered once more on the struggle for existence, which ended in her transformation from the city of the Caesars into the city of the Popes. Throughout her entire history the primary business of Rome was politics. Rome was never an artistic, a literary, or a commercial center; she did not develop artists or poets, nor philosophers, nor merchants; the products of her civil- ization were politicians and lawyers. Government being her province, she was the mother of jurisprudence. Until Caesar, Rome never produced a general of the first rank, and even Caesar was more of a politician than a soldier. As a conse- quence of this devotion to politics Rome evolved a vast po- litical organization adequate to the government of the world. The Civil Wars of the Republic were struggles within the city for the control of this world-embracing political machine. After the expulsion of the Etruscan king, the government of Rome reverted, as nearly as it could under the new con- ditions, to the old ways of the Aryan clan. The business of government was in the keeping of the House-Fathers, the heads of the old families. The Consuls were chosen from the House-Fathers to execute the laws. The real power was in and with the Senate, which was composed wholly, at first, of the heads of the old houses. The internal history of Rome is a story of the ceaseless effort on the part of the people to limit the power of the patricians and to make the government of Rome popular 92 THE WAYS OF THE GODS instead of aristocratic. The popular party triumphed, but only by clothing its leader with all the powers of government which it had taken from the aristocracy. When Caesar, the leader of the popular party, defeated Pompey and the aristo- crats on the field of Pharsalus, then Caesar was the master of Rome and the god of Rome. The death of Caesar did not for a moment arrest the revolution, of which he was the embodiment, and by which the constitution of Rome was changed from that of an aristocratic republic to an imperial democracy. The revolution was not so much political as it was religious. The worship of Rome was intensified, and was trans- formed into the worship of the Caesar. Julius was deified, a month in the year was made sacred to him, and all the emperors after him took his name and shared in his divine personality. The worship of Rome in the days of the republic and the worship of the Caesar in the days of the empire was the real religion of the Roman people. Not that Rome was neglectful of the other gods, far from it. She gave most punctilious attention to every minutia of ritual which the worship of the least of the gods demanded. The Roman would worship any god and every god in the hope that such god would be of assistance to Rome in her warfare with the world and helpful to his party in Rome in its struggle for supremacy. During the second Punic War the Romans were told that if they would bring the Mother of the gods from Syria, she would by her presence drive Hannibal out of Italy. She was sent for at once. Publius Scipio, as the best man in Rome, received her sacred stone with divine honors, the chief of the matrons of the city became her servants, and Hannibal was driven out of Italy. The Roman never hesitated to appropriate a god wherever he could find one ; he consulted the oracle of Apollo at Delphi ; having no sacred writings of his own, he appropriated the Sibylline Books ; his gods being without personality or his- tory, he identified them with the gods of Olympus and clothed them in the poetic garments of the Greek mythos. Cicero THE WAYS OF THE GODS 93 boasts of this religiosity of the Roman; speaking in the Sen- ate, he said : "O Conscript Fathers, boast of ourselves as we may, yet we must confess that the Greeks surpass us in the arts, the Gauls are more robust, the Carthaginians are more adroit, but we, Conscript Fathers, surpass all people in our belief that the affairs of men are in the keeping of the gods and in our devotion to the worship of the divinities." And it was even so. But religion in Rome was essentially political ; the gods were conciliated in the interests . of the State. "The religion of the Romans," says Walter Pater, "was not something to be known, not something to be be- lieved, not something to be loved, but something to be done at a certain time, in a certain place, after a certain way." What Romans really worshipped was Rome and all the gods as tributary to Rome. During the later Republic and the early Empire Rome brought all the gods from all the countries round about and placed them in the Roman Pantheon. There, separated each from his own land and his own people, these gods crowded to- gether, higgledy-piggledy, one upon another, humiliated and forgotten, lost all interest in their own divinity and so slowly faded away. The real god that superseded them all was Divus Caesar: the God of the Organization. This god was no figment of the imagination, living beyond the sky ; he was a dread reality, present in every open place and in every nook and corner of the Roman world. He could reward and punish ; at his word men were cast down; at his word the)'- were lifted up. At a whisper of Tiberius in Capri men died in the palaces of Rome or were exiled to the regions of Sythia. The Caesar spake the word in Rome and villages were laid waste in the fens of Ely and a city was founded on the banks of the Thames. The terror of the Roman organization was in its compre- hensiveness. It embraced the whole of the then known 94 THE WAYS OF THE GODS world and looked after every detail of life. There was no escape from it except by death, and even after death the god of the organization could wreack its vengeance on the children of the man whom it hated. And the blessings of the organ- ization were as effective as its curses. It could and did give peace to a distracted Europe; it conferred the glory of its citizenship and the benefits of its civilization upon a bar- barian people; its laws were the common protection of the rich and the poor; it made of the peasant a citizen, and of the provincial an emperor. For more than five centuries Rome presided as a god over the destinies of the Western world. The image of her Caesar was at every crossroad, to burn incense upon the altar of her Cassar the one necessary act of devotion. The worship of this God of the Organization always has been and is now the worship of the majority. Other gods of courtesy there may be, but the God of the Organization is the real god. He has continuity and ubiquity. He can reward and punish ; and whether he be Imperial or Papal Rome, whether he be Tammany Hall or the Old Guard, in- carnate in Caesar, Pope, or Boss, he demands and receives the obeisance of men as the price of their peace and prosperity in the earth. CHAPTER XX The Rise of the Semitic Dynasty The God of the Organization can buy or enforce the wor- ship of the lips, but he cannot attract the worship of the heart ; for though men may fawn upon him for his favors, or crouch before him in their fears, they can never love him. The worship of the organization is death to all idealism and to all inspiration. Under bondage to this Moloch, men can- not think with their own minds, love after their own desires, nor act in accordance with their own judgment. If they are organization men, then the organization thinks for them, loves and hates for them, and tells them what to do. Life and organization are necessary to each other, and yet they must be always in conflict. Organization seeks to stifle life and life to destroy organization. Organization limits life, and life outgrows organization. The vast and perfect organization of the Roman world arrested the development of life. After the brief efflorescence of the Augustan period the Roman world entered upon a decline that ended in death. What little originality the Roman mind possessed was forbidden exercise. The watch- ful jealousy of the organization stamped out anything that had the appearance of genius. In the II Century there was a brief afterglow of intellectual activity that found its man- ifestation in the writings of Tacitus and in the meditations of Marcus Aurelius; but after that came the darkness. The God of the Organization held the soul in thrall ; the fear of him and the dread of him were upon all the Roman world. Men did not seek distinction, for distinction meant death ; only the obscure were safe, and they because they were be- yond and beneath the care of this grim god who ruled as prince in the city. 97 98 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The old civilization of the city-state was sick unto death. It had, like all organizations, within itself the cause of its destruction. The industrial system was based upon a gross injustice, the city-state was the organization of the leisure, propertied classes, whereby they might secure for themselves the benefits accruing from the social order. They were the consumers of what others produced; they lived upon the un- requited labor of their slaves. These slaves were men and women of their own or kindred race, taken in war or born in servitude, who were allowed to live only as they served the purposes of their masters. These slaves had no interest whatever in the organization which their masters had set up; they were the victims offered daily upon the altars of its luxury, its lust, and its cruelty. From the beginning of civilization this class was outside the law ; it had no rights ; only duties. The helots of Sparta were whipped and massacred as a part of the education of the youth of Sparta. The City of Athens sent its slaves, naked, into its silver mines and kept them there, deprived of the light of the sun and the love of women, until they died. Crassus of Rome inflicted the like cruelty upon thousands of slaves whom he worked to death in his mines in Sardinia. The industrial system of ancient civilization was wasteful of human labor and human life. Slave labor is always the most uneconomical kind of labor, a slave is hardly ever worth his keep. The old civilization was dying, and its gods were dying with it. Down in that underworld of slaves a new religion was gendering and coming to the birth. In the slave class virtues, which to the master class were not virtues but vices, were in course of evolution. The slave, if he is to exist, must be obedient and patient and long-suffering; he must not give railing for railing but, contrarywise, blessing. The slaves must help one another to bear the miseries of their slavery ; they must have their songs in the night; they must wash each other's wounds with water, having no oil or wine. Hav- ing food and raiment, they must be therewith content. He that hath two coats must give to him that has none. ' The THE WAYS OF THE GODS 99 slave must live for the day; the morrow is not his. All the virtues of humanity and mutuality are slave virtues, engen- dered in slave quarters as means of protection against the fierceness of their masters. They are as lambs in the midst of wolves; they must be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.. The god of the master class cannot be the god of the sub- ject class. The sacrifices of the one are the abomination of the other. The master thinks of humanity as degradation ; to the slave it is salvation; the master cannot be pitiful and be a master; the slave must be pitiful, if he is a slave. If he pity nothing else, he will pity his own bowed head that dares not lift itself for fear of an insult. Everything in the slave's life is antipathetic to the master, so that they cannot bow before the same altar nor eat of the same sacrifice. So it came to pass that while the god of the Imperial or- ganization was receiving the adoration of the higher and leisure classes, another god was calling forth the enthusiastic worship of the subject and working class. This god, like themselves, was a child of poverty and obscurity; he came of a people to whom bondage was a birthright; whose his- tory is one long story of captivity, exile, disfranchisement, and endurance of contempt. When history first takes notice of this people, they are a band of Semite shepherds, wandering in the desert regions of North Arabia. In that arid land they have a bitter struggle for existence. Their life is necessarily limited to the barest subsistence ; they live in tents ; they eat the wild fruits ; they drink water. They have never developed through the tribe into the clan and state. Their men are polygamous, their women subjected and despised ; male children are desired as sources of strength, and the son of the concubine is on a level with the son of the wife. They have no government except a loose chieftainship and a reverence and recognition of the rights of age. Their religion is animistic; they worship stones and meet with their gods in mountain places and in groves. They offer human and animal sacrifices to their deities, and devote 100 THE WAYS OF THE GODS themselves to the service of their gods by mutilation. When they emerge into history they have only one distinctive char- acteristic and that is their tribal consciousness. The tribe and not the family is the unit of organization. The tribe had its legendary origin in the remote past in the enforced or voluntary migration of its putative ancestor from the plains of Mesopotamia into the highlands of Syria. They are the children of Abraham, taking their tribal name, however, not from Abraham, but from his grandson Jacob; who wrestled and prevailed and became a prince with God. Because of this, these wandering Bedouin shepherds called themselves the Bene-Israel (the sons of Israel) and as Israel- ites are they known to this day. - The tribal consciousness of Israel was even more intense than the civil consciousness of Rome. Through the vicissi- tudes of thirty centuries it has been the dominant factor in their lives. Because of this devotion to the tribe, this people were never able to evolve into the city-state. While they have produced some great statesmen, yet as a people they have no genius for politics. With a marvelous power of tribal persistence and tribal expansion, they have never created a nationality. From the beginning of their history down to the present day they have been wanderers on the face of the earth ; strangers in a land that is not theirs. Their tribal consciousness has been their sole bond of unity, and has preserved them from the disintegrating forces to which all other tribes have yielded up their tribal existence, a con- sciousness that has been brought into conjunction with the consciousness of a hundred other races and lived with them without losing its own identity. The Jew may be a Babyl- onian, an Egyptian, a Greek, a Roman, a Portuguese, a Ger- man, a Russian, a Pole, as circumstances determine, but he is everlastingly a Jew; as much a son of Israel to-day as when he wandered in the deserts of Arabia, five thousand years ago. / His religion was the creation of his tribal consciousness. He unified his tribe in his God and his God in his tribe. There was one Israel and one God of Israel. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 101 This unification of the tribe in the God did not come with- out a struggle. The religion of the Israelite, in common with that of the Semitic people, was animistic and orgiastic. His gods were sacred stones and sacred trees ; he worshipped the new moon, and sanctified the first fruits of the harvest. His worship was orgiastic rather than ceremonial ; in his re- ligious frenzy he danced himself drunk; he cut himself with knives, and lay all night naked on the ground. But from the earliest period there was one God greater than all other gods, and that was the tribe God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. By a gradual process of elimination and assimilation this God absorbed all other gods and became the one god of Israel. There is no event in the spiritual history of the human race of equal importance with this evolution of the one god out of the tribal consciousness of Israel, an event more pregnant of future consequences than the building of Athens, more significant to human destiny that the founding of the City of Rome, was the concentration of the affections of the Bene-Israel upon the tribe God, to the exclusion of all other gods, so that he only was God and there was no god beside him. It must not be supposed for a moment that these Bedouin shepherds were monotheists in the same sense that President Eliot is a monotheist ; for they were not, in any true sense, monotheists at all. Their God was not the only god, he was their only god ; while the nations had many gods, Israel wor- shipped only one. And this made all the difference between the religion of the Jews and the religion of the Gentile ; their religious emotions were diffused, his were concentrated ; they had a god for each separate function of life, he gave all the affairs of himself and his tribe into the keeping of the one God. But if Israel had only one God, he demanded that this God should have only one people. God is no more the god of Israel than Israel is the people of God. If God is jealous of Israel, Israel is equally jealous of God. This god has no existence or business apart from this people; he must give to 102 THE WAYS OF THE GODS them all his time, all his thought, all his care, all his love. He must fight their battles, give strength to the loins of their men, open the wombs of the women, bless their fields, build their houses, and keep their cities ; he must raise up their leaders, write their laws, and anoint their kings. The God of Israel in his prime was no idle god in a far-away heaven ; he was a present god, busy all day with the affairs of his people and watching over them all the night. \ It was no sinecure to be the God of Israel ; he had to be up and awake and on duty twenty-four hours in the day.J It is one of the wonders that make human history so interesting that in the deification of this tribal consciousness of Israel we have the germ and the plasm of the religion of mankind up to the present time. \Who would ever so much as dream that out of the tribal egoism of a desert people such a god could be born? Yet it is even so. The two underlying religious principles of this desert people are basic to all religion.J The first of these is the supreme importance of Israel to the universe; for him the world was created and because of him it was to be destroyed. His life is the one thing that gives value to all that is ; his righteousness is the safety of the city; his sin its destruction. Let him pass away, ^and chaos will come again ; the earth will be without form, and void and darkness brood once more on the face of the deep. This intense egoism, this unfaltering belief in his own prime importance, has always been a characteristic of the Jew. It has made him the problem and the fear of the nations ; he will push and push and push, and nothing can hold him back. He believes, with a sublime faith, in himself and in his people, and this belief is of the essence of his soul. The second basic thought in the mind of the Israelite was his dependence on some power outside himself for the suc- cessful issue of his life. All things were against him. He wandered in the desert where there was no water, he lived in a land where there was no corn ; he stood in fear of Moab and Amelek and all the hill tribes of Syria ; he was exposed to the heat day by day and the frost by night ; he had no child THE WAYS OF THE GODS 103 in his house, because his wife was barren. It was this sense of the hostility of the world about him that compelled this sore bested man to seek in the very heart of that hostility for a friend and an ally. It was out of this sense of aliena- tion that the Israelitish conception of God was born. He believed in his own indomitable soul, and with that soul he penetrated behind all forms, modes, and shows of life, into life itself and made of that life his ally and his friend. And these, that were the basic principles of the Israelite, are the foundations of all religion. Without the supreme sense of the importance of human life, religion cannot endure for a moment.J When once man comes to believe that he is a temporary phenomenon passing away like a shadow, his existence as the flight of the bird leaving no pathway; when he thinks that what he does and what he does not do will not matter a thousand years from now, without a sense of his infinity and eternity, man cannot hold to religion. " It is this sense of the importance of the life of man to the universe that has made man a religious being. In the man the universe centers, and from him it radiates. When a man has lost altogether his grip upon the importance of his own life and on human life in general then his energies flag, his spirit droops, his soul disintegrates, his breath expires. In proportion to his egoism is a man religious or lacking in religion. But his egoism, if it is to prevail over a hostile world, must ally itself with a greater ego than itself. He must be in partnership with the great ego that is hiding behind the little egos and is the ruler of them all. He must say : "I and the Father are one." He must lay hold of the secret force of the universe and wrestle with it as Jacob wrestled at Jab- bock, and never let go until it blesses him, and makes him a prince 'with God. The only possible religion is and must be based on a partnership between God and man. It was this egoism that gave the Israelite the leadership of religion in the Western world. He made himself partner with God in the business of life and in all transactions banked upon the unlimited ability of this partner to make up for his lack. 104 THE WAYS OF THE GODS It was this devotion of Israel to one God and the equal devotion of the one God to the one people that gave him his place in the world. The Greek had a genius for art, the Roman for politics, and the Israelite for religion. In the competition for religious supremacy at the close of the classic age the obscure god of this obscure people prevailed over all the gods of Greece and Rome. The Aryan dynasty gave place to the Semitic line of gods, of whom there are ! three who have attained to the rank of Major Gods. These are Jehovah, Jesus, and Mary. Jehovah is the spiritual ancestor of Jesus. His history is the story of the evolution of the War God of the Bene- Israel into the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is the First Person in the Holy Trinity of Christian theology. CHAPTER XXI The War God of the Bene-Israel In studying the evolution of religion, we have in every case to rely for our knowledge of its beginnings not upon authentic history, but upon myth and legend. This fact has nothing to do with the accuracy or extent of our knowledge, but only with the character of our evidence. Myth and legend are sometimes, and, indeed, generally, far more reliable sources of information in all that concerns the real life of a people than is the so-called authentic historical record. In myth and legend we have the naive account which the people give of themselves. In history we have this same people pre- sented to us through the medium of the mind of the historian. I The folklore of a people is more valuable than their records; it is to the historian what fossils are to the geologist. Give us the stories that the shepherds tell at the camp-fire and we can reconstruct the life of a vanished people ; the rude pic- tures carved on the stones of a cave are witness to an age THE WAYS OF THE GODS 103 of the world. The mind of the historian is biased ; the myth- maker and the teller of legends only repeats what he hears. Schultz, in hs "Old Testament Theology," says: "When we read the myths and legends of a people we have our ear on the heart and our finger on the pulse of that people." The myths of a people record their infancy, their legends tell the story of their childhood, while their history is the record of their adult life. The myth is the story of the world as Dame Nature whispers it in the ears of a baby; legend is the same story as it is told to boys by boys around a camp- fire; history is that same story delivered by a professor in a classroom. In the life of the Israelitish people we find a woeful lack of mythology. When we first meet with them they have either passed out of their babyhood or they never had any. They have nothing to tell us of how the gods began and how the gods behaved. Their stories of creation are not their own but are borrowed very late in their career from a people richer in mythology than themselves. We are accustomed to think that the Bible is full of stories which we can tell to children ; and it is rich in stories that boys delight in, stories of slaughter and adventure, but not one single story that ought to be told to a boy under twelve, and hardly one that is fit for a girl to hear. But if the Israelitish people were lacking in myth, they were wonderfully rich in legend. The tales told at their camp-fires have become the imperishable literary treasure of the world. It is the story-telling genius of early Israel that has made of the heroes of Israel the heroes of mankind. Alexander, Caesar, Washington, and Napoleon, each is the heroic figure of a given people. Moses, David, and Jesus are the heroes of humanity. So marvelous is the story-telling genius of this people that they have made the minor char- acters of their history, a Doeg and an Abiathar, more familiar to us than our next-door neighbor. 106 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The unification of their tribal life in their tribal God has given to their history a dramatic power and unity that is without parallel. Jehovah is the Hamlet of their play. He makes his entrance on their stage as the War God of the Bene-Israel. He has all the implacability of the desert, and all the fierce- ness of the Arabian sun at noon. His hatred for all other tribes is evidence of his love for Israel. He makes war on Amelek from generation to generation; he slaughters Moab while Moses holds up his hand, and will not let the sun go down until Joshua has killed the last of the fleeing Canaanites. He gives command to kill all the men, but to keep the women and children as slaves. This War God of the Bene-Israel is far more savage than Ares or Mars, and has nothing of the joviality of Woden. War with this god is no pastime; it is a bitter struggle to the death of the tribal god for tribal existence. He cannot indulge in the pleasures of the table or the bed ; he must leave wine and women alone that he may be fit to fight the battles of his people. The War God of the Bene-Israel has neither wife nor child; he is a lonely god, marching before his people by day and standing sentinel for them by night. This lonely god, without father or mother, without wife or children, was destined to play a great part in the spiritual life of the Western world. This loneliness, at first an accident of his career, became in the course of his evolution of the very essence of his nature. v It abstracted from the God of Israel the phenomena and the scandal of sex. It made of him a male god and a bachelor god, to whom woman was an abomination. Any association of Jehovah with the notion of sex was blasphemy to Israel. The influence of that attitude of the War God of the Bene-Israel toward woman upon the religious life of the Western world has been tremendous. It has in a measure separated God from the world ; made of him not a father but a creator; it has introduced every kind of confusion into Western theology. To this day it is blas- phemy to think of God as a generator of life, as a father in any true sense of children; and all because Jehovah the War THE WAYS OF THE GODS 107 God of Israel had no use for women because they could not fight and no time for women because he had to fight. ! It was undoubtedly necessary for the due development of religion that the phenomena of sex should for the time being, be abstracted from the idea of God. Man, after coming to consciousness, has so mismanaged this great function, in his effort to regulate it, has so involved it in foulness, making of it a shame, instead of glory, that he had to lift his god out of all relation to this region of experience, in order that he might have for his god a respect that he could no longer have for himself. It was this freedom of Jehovah from all the confusion and corruption of sex that made him acceptable to a sex-weary world. The War God of the Bene-Israel has carried his warlike qualities with him through the whole course of his evolution. He has changed the mode of his warfare but never ceased from his battles. He is the principle of evolution in the universe, that fierce figure crying: "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, And thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon!" And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stayed Until the Nation had avenged itself of its enemies. That fierce god, I say, is still with us, sitting, like Caesar, in his lonely car, directing the course of the battle that rages in the universe for higher and better life. What we call peace is only a change in the region and the method of warfare. 108 THE WAYS OF THE GODS CHAPTER XXII Jehovah: The Friend God of Abraham In the good old days before the Higher Criticism had come to disturb the minds of the simple, the Bible, to the ordinary reader, was one book beginning at Genesis and ending at Revelation. Each verse and chapter and book was supposed to be in its proper place in the order of time. It was known that the various books were written by different men, Gen- esis by Moses and Revelation by John ; but that did not impair the unity of the Book, for, after all, Moses and John were only the penmen of the books bearing their names. ( The real author of all the books was God. The Bible as a whole was his autobiography, the history of his dealings with the chil- dren of men, as told by himself. ' In this naive way the simple mind accounted for that dramatic unity which the Bible displays. The Bible begins with the creation and ends with the last judgment, and Jehovah occupies the middle of the stage, in both the first and last act, as creator and judge. There is no question as to this dramatic unity in the Bible. We have in it a continuous story of the evolution of the idea of God in the mind and soul of the Israelitish people. But this evolution is not nearly so orderly as it seems on the sur- face. The evolution itself was not in a straight line, but, like all evolutions, was spiral in its motion and constantly returning on itself. The notion of God as a Creator and Judge did not enter into the mind of the Bene-Israel as they wan- dered under the leadership of their war-god in the mountain defiles of Arabia. Such notions were far too abstract and recondite to find lodgment in their uncultivated minds. It was not until toward the end of their history, after they had come in contact and been impregnated with the thought of the highly developed civilization of Egypt and Babylon, that some unknown poet wrote the sublime poem of creation with which our Bible opens, and some priest living in Babylon compiled the story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man out of the myths of the land of his captivity. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 109 The earliest legendary lore of the people of Israel is to be found in the Books of Judges and Joshua and scattered here and there in Genesis and Exodus, without regard to historical order or logical setting. The story of Abraham, for instance, is much later in point of time than the story of Samson. The legend moves upon a much higher plane of thought and feeling. Samson is just the kind of man whom a half-savage desert tribe would deem a hero; he is the embodiment of brute strength, directed by brute cunning. Everything about him is outre and monstrous. Abraham on the other hand, is an Oriental gentleman, of fine manners and moderate speech, a man of vision, a seeker after God. Whether Abraham holds the place in the relation to Israel that is assigned him in the legend is open to grave doubts. If Israel had a founder, then Israel himself is entitled to that , honor. This people are well called the Sons of Israel, they are in every respect the children of their father; the same egoism, the same subtlety, the same patience, the same sub- lime faith in the main chance, are seen in the parent and the offspring. Abraham is a man so different in character that I am inclined to the belief that he is some stranger, coming from without the tribe, who recast the religion of Israel, giving it elements lacking to its original form, and moulding its savage principles to the uses of advancing civilization. But, how- ever this may be, whether he was the founder of the tribe as the legend says, from whose altitude of thought and feeling the tribe rapidly descended until it reached the level of Jacob, or whether, as I surmise, he is some wayfaring man, joining the tribe of Israel and by his life and teaching, profoundly modifying its constitution and religion, or whether his is only an ideal evolved by the best thought of Israel as it passed from lower into higher barbarism and civilization, let these things be as they may, yet to Abraham we owe that God than whom none has been so ennobling to the spiritual life of man. To Abraham God revealed himself in the guise of a friend. It was the companionship of God that Abraham valued ; other 110 THE WAYS OF THE GODS men sought after the gods because they were afraid of them, or because they wanted the gods to do something for them. Abraham left his land, his kindred, and his father's house, not knowing whither he went, only that he might enjoy, un- disturbed, the company of God. When he comes to the mountains of Lebanon he is not afraid of their wild defiles, nor does he shun their steep ascent, for they are the ante- chambers of Jehovah, and he calls the name of that place Jehova Jireh, "as it is said to this day, in the mount of the Lord it shall be seen." This conception of God as a friend was impregnated with the loneliness of the shepherd life and the austerity of the desert. Driving his flock from oasis to oasis, through the sands, hiding them from the noonday heat in the shadow of some great rock in that weary land, watching over them by night when earth and sky were as still as a stone, the soul of the man was impressed with the awful loneliness of the univ- erse ; the stars and the grains of shifting sand, each one by itself, with no one to speak to in all the wide, wide world. And the soul of man alone in this terrible stillness with its pent-up thoughts and heart-breaking emotions ! It was out of this infinite loneliness that the friend God came. Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw him walking across the desert toward the place where he sat under the oaks of Mamre, and when he saw him Abraham rose and made haste and ran to meet him and brought him in and made him sit in the shade of the oak at the tent door; he brought water for his feet and oil for his head ; with eager hospitality Abra- ham ran to the herd and found a calf of a year old and killed it and made savory meat for his guest. And sitting there, cross-legged, this God talked with Abraham as a friend with his friend. And of all the gods there is none like him, none so welcome to the soul of man. God the Creator, God the Saviour, God the Judge, God the Wisdom, God the Power, may be all very well, but as for me, I would give them all for one hour with God the Friend, just some one to speak to in this vast void of life ; some one to sit with me in the door of my tent and pass with me the time of day. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 111 Loneliness is of the very warp and woof of human life. Each one of us is born alone and dies alone ; each conscious- ness is wrapped in eternal secrecy, not the wife of the bosom, nor the child of the loins can dispel the silence that reigns in the soul. We talk of things and things and things, but of our very inner self we cannot talk, for we ourselves do not know ourself well enough to talk to ourself. And if we talk, who can hear? There is an ocean of silence between \ soul and soul, just as there is an ocean of darkness between star and star. Is this silence to which we listen the silence of hate or the silence of love, the silence of hope or the silence of despair? Is there in it one friendly voice that can speak to us and dispel this loneliness that is driving us mad? Has our soul a soul- friend in the universe that can share its joys and soothe its sorrows? It was to find this friend that Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees and wandered "lonely as a cloud" through the hills of Syria, and counted his wanderings as nothing if his Friend God walked with him by the way and sat with him at eventide in the door of his tent. This Friend God has done more to comfort the soul of man than all the other gods put together. When once we have seen him, we can never be the same afterwards. He is within us and yet without us. We sit in our soul and look in his face. He is not our god, he is our guest ; we wash his feet and anoint his head and give him savory food. We do not ask anything of him, only companionship, only to know that he is there. Each soul must make friends with this god for himself. He is not to be found in temple or in church ; he is not the God of the creed nor of an organization. To ask a priest^ to pray to him on our behalf is a blasphemous doubt of his friendship. We cannot buy his friendship with gifts of money nor with flattering word. It is friendship for friendship, or it is nothing. "My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God. When shall I come to appear before the pres- ence of God?" 112 THE WAYS OF THE GODS CHAPTER XXIII The Bargain God of Jacob In primitive religious thought the relation of a man to his god was organic. This relationship was founded upon the principle of generation. Nowhere in archaic thought do we find the gods creating; everywhere we behold them gener- ating. The gods themselves are generated out of the forces of nature and they in turn generate divine men. The Eupat- ridae of Greece and the Patricians of Rome trace their des- cent from a god as easily as an Englishman derives his origin from a Norman who came over with the Conqueror, or an American from one of the prolific passengers who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower. If one did not have at least one god or goddess growing on one's family tree one had little to bolist of in the way of ancestry. Caesar was a god by inher- itance as well as by acquirement ; he had no less a personage than Venus for his greatest great-grandmother. The deifica- tion of ancestors, which was the universal custom of the ar- chaic world, made divine paternity an essential article of faith in the religion of that world. The household gods were the fathers of the house, and the city gods the progenitors of the founders of the city. This relationship by generation made the people secure in the love and favor of the gods. In taking care of his people a god was taking care of his own. This house was his house and these children were his children, not by legal right but by process of nature. The house was founded upon his bones, and the children generated by his blood. For such a god to neglect his people was a disgrace to his divinity. Men called on their gods as children call on their parents, knowing that gods, like parents, have nothing else to do than to answer the cries of their children. As one reflects upon this archaic belief, one cannot but wonder at its subtlety and essential truthfulness. When man looked out upon his world and took note of its ways he saw THE WAYS OF THE GODS 113 that generation was the law of life; he saw that the fishes of the sea, the birds of the air, all creeping things, and beasts and cattle and men and women were each and every one of them like poets, born and not made, each new life proceeding from an antecedent life. There was no beginning and there was no end, but an eternal round. The gods as well as men came each into being by this process of generation. Thus did the human mind, before it was sophisticated, anticipate the last analysis of science and see in generative evolution the process by which all things have come to be as they are. It is a distinct decline from this high plain of thought to that conception of the relation of a man to his god which has ruled so long in the religion of the Western world. Ac- cording to our way of thinking God did not generate man, he manufactured him. Man did not spring out of the loins of God, he was simply the work of his hands. There was no divine urge, no secret love in the universe demanding the conception and birth of man. No antecedent courtship of force with force, of passion with passion, had brought man to the birth ; he was never born at all, he was just made. The gods having nothing else to do said: "Go to! let us make man !" and they made him. Man was the creature and God the creator, and between these two there was no organic relation either of origin or affection. This notion that man is the creation of God's hands has in the modern Western world utterly supplanted the archaic notion that man is the child of God's loins. The conflict that has raged for the last five-hundred years between science and religion is occasioned by this funda- mental difference in the conception of the universe. The war is waging between the archaic theory of generative evolution and the later theory of creationism. The one theory declares that God is a father, the other that he is a manufacturer; and between these two theories there can be no compromise. The creationist theory came naturally to the Israelitish thinkers of the IX Century B. C. They had from the first eliminated the notion of generation from their conception of God. Abraham was their father, not Jehovah. Not for 114 THE WAYS OF THE GODS one moment do they conceive of Abraham as in the same class with Jehovah ; Abraham is a man, Jehovah is a god, and a man is not a god nor a god a man, nor did the Hebrew thinker ever confuse the one with the other. If for the sake of completeness he carries the generations of Abra- ham back to Adam, there all generation stops, for Adam is not generated, he is made. The abstraction of the phe- nomenon of sex from the conception of God by the Israelite has put man and God into worlds as distinct as the world of the potter and the world of the pot. But this theory has never been satisfactory; it does not account for facts. The pot cannot talk back to the potter, but man has always talked back to God. It is of the very essence of a god that a man should be able to reason with him. The great thinkers of Israel could never hew straight to the line of their theory; they constantly veer away from the thought of God the Creator to the conception of God the Father. In order to reconcile these two theories, they affirm that while Israel is not God's son by generation, he is God's son by adoption. The relation between man and God is not a natural ; it is a legal relation ; it is a matter of a bargain and sale; it is a chaffering in the market, a contract between parties of the first and second part. This legal relation of man to God finds naive expression in the story of Jacob at Bethel, g Jacob, having cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright, found it expedient to leave home until his brother's anger had time to cool.." And Jacob went out from Beersheba and went towards Haran, and there were no Pullman cars in those days, nor hotels by the way. And Jacob lighted upon a certain place and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took one of the stones of the place and put it under his head for a pillow and lay down in the place to sleep. "And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth,... and behold the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. And, behold, the Lord stood above it and said: 'I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father and the God of Isaac; the 115 land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed...' And Jacob awaked out of his sleep... And he was afraid, and said: 'How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven....' And Jacob vowed a vow, saying: 'If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to yj my father's house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God.... And of all that thou shalt give me 'Stii'ety I will surely give the tenth unto thee.' " * In this classical passage we have set forth that contrac- tual relation between man and God which has so powerfully influenced the religious thought of the Western world. Jacob makes his bargain with God ; it is so much for so much, and true to his racial instincts, Jacob gets the best of the bargain. We find implied in the contract the inveterate belief of the ancient world that the existence of the gods is dependent uporr the worship of man. No worshipper, no God ! Here is a god without a worshipper. Esau has already forsaken him X and gone over to the gods of his wife, who was of the daughters of Heth. Jehovah's hope for future existence rests entirely with Jacob. Jacob takes advantage of his god's necessity and drives a hard bargain. If God will take care of him, he will take care of God : and of all that God gives him he will give God a tenth. This contract . of Jacob with Jehovah has given to the re- ligion of the Hebrew its distinctive place in the religious his- tory of the world. Israel were the people of the covenant, and Jehovah was the God of the covenant. You do your part, I will do mine. You worship me, and I will take care of you. This Bargain God of Jacob is not nearly so noble a divinity as the God of the House, or the God of the City. The House God cared for the house because he loved the house, the City God because he loved the city; but in the contract between 1 Genesis, xxviii : 13-22. 116 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Jehovah and Jacob there is no word concerning love, it is a matter of business. Jehovah needs a worshipper and Jacob needs a god ; they meet and strike their bargain, and they both live up to it. Jacob worships Jehovah, and Jehovah blesses Jacob. This contractual conception of religion, sordid as it seems, has been the pregnant, moving thought of the most successful religion known to the human race. It rests religion not upon necessity but upon freedom. I may not choose my father, but I may choose my god. It is this element of free- dom in the religion of the Western world that has given it its expansive power ; the gods cannot sit down and take their ease ; they are not hereditary gods holding office for eternity; they are elective gods chosen by the people and rejected by the people. Unless the gods meet in a measure the expectations of the people the people vote them out of office and choose new gods in their room. On the other hand, the people cannot presume on the favor of the gods as children do on the softness of the parent. The god of the contract is not to be trifled with, he knows and you know the terms of the covenant, and if you break it, that is the end of the relation between you and your god. The terms of the contract being made by mutual consent may be changed by the same authority. This fact gives to a religion based upon covenant a progressive element that prevents its stagnation. As man increases in wisdom he can make new and greater demands upon God ; as the heart of man softens and enlarges, God can ask of that heart a greater, holier worship. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 117 CHAPTER XXIV The God of the Working Class According to its legendary history the Bene-Israel, driven by famine, went down into Egypt and, with the consent of the rulers, settled in one of its outlying provinces. The rapid multiplication of this people and their solidarity made them a constant menace to the integrity of the kingdom of the Pharaohs. As to-day the Russian fears the active mind of the Jew, so in the earlier period, according to the story, the Egyptian Pharaohs felt uneasy in the presence of the same prolific, intelligent, and acquisitive race. This people was subjected to persecution then, as now ; we are told that their male chil- dren were killed at the birth by order of the king and the adult male population was employed by the government in the brick-yards, where they were exposed to unwholesome conditions and to destroying hardships ; being whipped and starved by their task-masters. This mode of treatment did not arrest the increase of the people. It is the characteristic of Israel that the more you persecute him the more he thrives. The only effect of the policy of Egypt was to inflame the anger of these slaves against their masters, intensify their tribal consciousness, and consolidate their tribal organization. The real and ac- cepted rulers of Israel at that time, as so often again in their history, were not the princes of Egypt, but the Elders of Israel. The tribes seem to have maintained their organ- ization intact throughout the long period of their Egyptian bondage. As a consequence of their oppression, this working class in Egypt was in a chronic condition of unrest; agitators moved secretly among them, stirring their minds to rebellion, recalling to them the days of their freedom, when they had fed their flocks and kept their herds in the land of Syria. After their hard day's work was over, they gathered in their meeting-places and heard from the lips of their Elders the 118 THE WAYS OF THE GODS story of that land which was theirs, because their God had promised it to their father Abraham and to his seed forever. Thus this downtrodden people were fed upon the hope of deliverance, and their spirits were kept alive. It only needed some fresh infliction, some fouler insult, some bolder leader- ship, to set this mass of slaves moving away from their cap- tivity out into freedom. These necessary conditions of successful revolt were not long in coming. The killing of the male children at birth, the increasing arrogance of the slave-masters, prepared the fuel for the burning, and at last the fire was kindled. According to their legend, one of their number had been lifted by accident out of his slave environment and incorpor- ated into the free, ruling class. Educated in the palace of the king, this born slave was instructed in all wisdom of the Egyptians ; he was reckoned as the son of Pharaoh's daughter and was entitled to and exercised all the privileges of this princely estate. At this time the religion of Egypt was highly organized and exceedingly attractive. The worship of the generative forces of nature, incarnate in the Sacred Bull Amon, was re- fined by ritual and rationalized by doctrine. Nature worship was practiced in the adoration of Isis, Osiris, and Horus, in whose history we have the eternal story of birth, marriage, and death told in hieroglyphic. In the worship of the Sun- god Ra, noble aspirations of the Egyptian soul found expression. The Egyptians of that age had attained to a cul- ture and civilization not unlike our own ; they were a military power of the first rank, engaged extensively in commerce; their cities were numerous and populous, and they were oc- cupied in building temples and tombs which have ever since been the wonders of the world. They believed in a future life, conditioned upon the resurrection of the body, and mum- mified their dead that the body might be ready for use when the tombs were opened and the graves gave up their dead. If we may believe their legends, this man of Israel, of the sub-tribe of Levi, was in this civilization, but not of it. As he grew to manhood in the palace of the Pharaohs he looked THE WAYS OF THE GODS 119 out on all this seething life, with its multiplicity of gods, with its swarming priests, with its proud princes and oppressed people, and condemned it all as vain and unworthy. His heart was not in this life of splendor, he felt within that heart the call of his blood. Visiting the brick-yards, his indignation was aroused at the sight of the cruelties inflicted on his people, and seeing an Egyptian beating an Israelite, he killed the Egyptian and hid his corpse in the sand. Return- ing and finding two of the Hebrew slaves quarreling, he re- buked them with the noble words : "Sirs, ye are brethren. Why do ye wrong one another?" With this the slaves twitted him with the murder of the Egyptian, upon which, fearing for his life, despairing of his people, he fled the land of Egypt, went over into the region of North Arabia and became, as his fathers had been before him, a keeper of sheep. When this man escaped into the wilderness he became a man without a people and a man without a god. The gods of Egypt had found no lodgment in his life, and the God of Israel was a dead god, forgotten out of mind. During their long sojourn in Egypt the Bene-Israel had neglected the worship of their War God, Jehovah ; they had no use for him because of the unwarlike character of their lives. They were held together by their common oppression and their Elders repeated to them from generation to generation the legends of their fathers, and they knew their God, not as their god, but as the god of their fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses, the son of Amram of the tribe of Levi, knew these legends by heart, and he brooded over them in the wilderness. As the heart of Moses had not been in the palace of Memphis, so it was not in the wilderness of Zin ; it was all the time with the children of his people, bearing their griefs and shar- ing their sorrows. He grew from a young man into an old man, but he never forgot the iniquity of Egypt. The indig- nation of his heart against that iniquity was as hot at seventy as it was at thirty. Then his heart becomes a human volcano in which are pent-up the explosive forces of religion. The 120 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Lord God of his fathers meets with him; the old name Je- hovah, almost forgotten, is revived in his memory. He re- ceives command from that God to go down into Egypt and lead his people out of bondage into the land of promise. Thus did the God Jehovah declare himself to be the God of the Working Class, and thus was Moses constituted a div- inely inspired labor leader. This labor leadership of Moses is not to be compared with modern labor leadership, from which it differs not in degree but in kind. It was essentially religious and unselfish. His first mission was to the working class itself. He went into the brick-yards and preached the doctrine of divine dis- content, he stirred the hearts of these laborers with a burning sense of their wrongs and inspired them with a hope of deliv- erance. No labor agitator of modern times can compare with Moses in the effectiveness of his propaganda. He recalled the Israelites to their ancient religion, he made them choose between Pharaoh and Jehovah, he fired them with a fanatical zeal, he made their tasks hateful to them, and out of this erstwhile mass of patient laborers raised up a band of earnest war-men. And when he was called before Pharaoh he pitted his God against all the gods of Egypt. No syndicalist, no direct ac- tionist of modern times, is in the same class with Moses in the fierceness of his sabotage. 1 He literally kicked Pha- raoh into the Red Sea. But before this final outrage he turned the dust of Egypt into lice, its air into flies, its water into blood ; he smote its young and old with boils, he killed its cattle with the murrain, beat down its growing grain with the hail, and by his religious magic slew all the first-born of Egypt in a night. This labor leader was uncompromising: he would listen to no terms; and when Pharaoh said: "The people can go but not their cattle," Moses answered : "Not an hoof shall be left behind.". Leaving Pharaoh, this man went down to the brick makers *Sabot, a wooden shoe; sabotage, the act of kicking with that shoe. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 121 and led them out_pn strike, and when Pharaoh followed after, both he and his army were drowned in the sea. Such is the story of the most successful labor strike in history. It ended forever the bondage of Israel to Egypt and made of these slaves a free and aspiring people. The salient fact of this history is that the god Jehovah is the God of the Working Class ; he espouses their cause in opposition to the ruling leisure class ; he has no regard whatever for the con- stitution of the kingdom of Egypt; the vested rights of the Pharaohs in the labor of his people is to him a vested wrong, to be wiped out in blood. As the Egyptians have robbed the Israelites, so in turn, by the command of Jehovah, the Israel- ites spoil the Egyptians. Having chosen the working class for his people, the god Jehovah has remained true to them to the present day. As the old Greek dynasty was the dynasty of the gods of the leisure class, so this Semitic dynasty founded in Jehovah is the dynasty of the gods of the working class. Jesus and Joseph as well as Jehovah are born of the working class, are the advocates of the working class, are the leaders of the working class. The trouble with the labor movement in the modern world is that it is without spiritual inspiration, without religious leadership. It has no god. It is not a struggle for spiritual but for economic betterment; it is not a question of the sover- eignty of labor but of the wages of labor. It is a series of small compromises secured at great cost. The labor leaders for the most part have no outlook; they have not had the training of Moses in the palace nor in the wilderness ; they are mere opportunists, men of their day drifting with their time. They do not know that their gods have been stolen from them and are used against them. They need a Moses who will stand before the Pharaohs of the world in the name of the Lord God Jehovah, and claim the rights of labor as inalienable, divine rights, not to be voided by time, not to be hindered by vested interests, not to be strangled by law, but that forever a man shall have the right to enjoy to the full the product of the labor of his brain and his hand. 122 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Fine rhetoric! we may say. Yes, it is fine rhetoric; but the book that Christians call their Bible is choke-full of such rhetoric; and unless they can stomach it they must disgorge it and abjure the God whom they worship and deny the Holy Name by which they are called. ' We shall see later that the Western world is brought face to face with the alternative of either rejecting its gods or revolutionizing its economic system. It professes to believe in the Jehovah-Jesus, God of the Semitic dynasty, and this is the God of the Working Class, who is on the side of the poor as against the rich ; on the side of the weak as against the strong; on the side of the oppressed as against the op- pres^or. When labor hears again the voice of its God and enters upon the struggle for its rights, not in the timorous, half-hearted manner of the past, but moving en masse/urged by a mighty religious impulse, from the present basis of prop- erty-right to the new basis of human right, with the God of the Working Class in the forefront of the army/- then old things will pass away and all things will become new. We are in the midst of such a revolution to-day, and one of its early results will be the restoration of the Jehovah-Jesus, God of the Working Class, to his leadership of the labor movement. This conception of God is the outcome of the age-long struggle of the working class against the social arrangements that have kept it in bondage. When the working class is redeemed, the work of the Jehovah-Jesus God will have been accomplished. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 123 CHAPTER XXV The Tent God of the Bene-Israel That the religious life of mankind is profoundly modified by changing economic, social, and political condition is ex- emplified in the account of the exodus of the Bene-Israel from Egypt, their journeys in the Wilderness, and their settle- ment in Palestine. It is not necessary that we accept the details of that story as historical ; it is all the more valuable because it is legendary. It tells of a tragic effort to organize the tribes of the Bene-Israel into a nation and to give them a stable form of government. After crossing the Red Sea these fugitives were in all the disorder of flight: loosely arranged according to tribes, but without any center of unity or principle of coherence. The only authority to which the people as a whole gave heed was that of Moses their leader. This man, during the earlier period of the migration, was sole king and judge in Israel. What little government there was Moses administered; not only was he responsible for the general welfare, he was also called upon to settle every little dispute between man and man. After a weary march through the desert Moses would go out and stand in the midst of the camp, and all the people would come to him to settle their quarrels. It was impossible that one man could do justice to himself and to the people under such a strain. This one-man government was absurd and futile, and it only needed some disinterested person to come that way and point out this absurdity and futility, to bring it to an end. Fortunately for all concerned, Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, came from Midian to visit his now famous son-in-law. He had at first very little pleasure from his visit, for Moses was so busy all day long and far into the night that he had no time to sit down in the tent door and talk over old times. One evening, when Moses had been gone all day, he came to his tent and lay down on the ground from utter exhaustion. Jethro looked at him and asked : 124 THE WAYS OF THE GODS "Moses, what have you been doing all day?" And Moses answered : "I have been judging the people." "And how do you judge the people?" "I go out and stand in the midst of the camp, and all the people come to me for judgment." "What, all the people?" "Yes; all the people." "With every little thing?" "Yes, with every little thing." "But why do you try to do all this?" "Because I am the only man in the camp that can do it." "Excuse me, Moses," said Jethro, "but you are the only man in the camp who cannot do it. You are a great prophet and a great leader. Upon you rests the safety of all this people. If you wear yourself out as you are doing, you will break down, and the people, without leadership, will be lost in the Wilderness. What you need is organization. Appoint captains over tens and captains over fifties and captains over hundreds and captains over thousands, and let these captains judge all the minor matters, while you reserve to yourself the decision of the important questions that concern the well- being of the whole congregation." Moses sat up and said : "Jethro, you are right. I will do it." And he did ; which shows that even a prophet of God can learn wisdom from a simple man. Moses had been trying not only to act for Jehovah but also to usurp the functions of the Elders of Israel. His mode of personal government had no warrant in the past history of the people. In modern phrase: "it was unconstitutional." From the beginning each sub-tribe of the Bene-Israel had been ruled by the Elders of that tribe, the only principle of unification recognized by all the sub-tribes was the tribal god. Jehovah, who was both judge and king in Israel. From the earliest period the Bene-Israel had lived under a loose theoc- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 125 racy and followed such leaders as were from time to time commissioned by Jehovah to meet a special occasion. It was this theocratic form of government that Moses reestab- lished in the Wilderness, giving to it a new spirit and a new symbol. The people of Israel were arranged according to their tribes; the settlement of all disputes within the tribes were com- mitted to the Elders of that tribe. These men resumed once more their constitutional function of judgment, Moses acting as a court of appeal in greater matters. A*nd from this time Moses sedulously refused to be anything more than the spokesman of Jehovah. The God of the tribe was the king of the tribe. This god was no longer far away in the moun- tain, his presence was with his people ; wherever they went he went ; when they marched he marched ; when they camped he camped. The tent of Jehovah was in the midst of the tents of Israel. The tribe of Levi was taken to be the body-guard of the great king. The tribe of Joseph became the two tribes of ManassHi and Ephraim. The twelve tribes in marching and in camping were in a hollow square : three tribes to the North, three tribes to the South, three tribes to the East, and three tribes to the West, and in the midst of that square was the tent of Jehovah, guarded day and night by the men of Levi. And all the movements of the people were regulated by this divine pres- ence. When the tent of Jehovah was taken down the people took up their journey; when the tent was set-up the people rested. Not in all the religious history of the world is there a more significant symbol than this tent of the God of Israel in the midst of the tents of Israel. There was no image in that tent, only a light burning; it was the invisible, inaudible spirit of Israel, the soul of the people, that was symbolized by the tent. Israel was not unified in anything, it was unified in itself. The people pressed upon the people and became one in their union with their tribal God whom they had chosen as their king. This principle of government is universal : true government is not external to a people ; it cannot be made out of hand ; 126 THE WAYS OP THE GODS it is a growth. Each people grows its own government as each body grows its own skeleton. Government is the product of the soul of a people : as a people think so are they ruled. With changing thoughts come changing forms. We see various kinds of governments in the wprld to-day, each expressing the spirit of its people ; some are crustacean (such as the Empire of Russia and the Republic of the United States), and grow their bones on the outside, and some are vertebrates (like the English) and grow their skeletons on the inside. Every government is expressive of the soul of the people in its present stage of advancement. Violent changes are never lasting. "My Lords and Gentlemen," said Chief Justice Hale to the Lords and Commons of England, when, after the death of Cromwell, there was talk of bringing back the king, "my Lords and Gentlemen, the laws of England have always run in the name of the King, Lords, and Commons, and that the laws of England may be the more easily administered I give my voice to the bringing back the king." And they brought back the king, even so sorry a king as Charles II of unsavory memory, because the soul of England had made the king essential. And it is so even to this day : England is unified in the crown as Israel was unified in the tent. The tent of Jehovah in the midst of the tents of Israel made so profound an impression on the imagination of Israel, and through Israel upon the religious imagination of the Western world, that it has always been used as the symbol of the presence of God in the midst of his people. When One came of whom men said: "He is God in the flesh, God in the midst of His people," they 'harked back to the Wilder- ness and said of Him words that will never die: Kou d Xoyoa crap s'ylveTO xal ejxiq In this manner the tented Jehovah led his people through the wilderness and gave them the land of their fathers. With 1 And the word was made flesh and was tented among us. John 1:14. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 127 their settlement in that land, they changed their mode of life; they were no longer shepherds and herdsmen, wandering from place to place, they were farmers dwelling each man under his own vine and fig tree. The people no longer lived in tents, they built themselves houses. But while the people lived in houses Jehovah still dwelt in his tent which was pitched in Shiloh. The conservatism of the God did not keep pace with the advance of the people, it never does. When every institution is changing, religion is the last to change. It was, however, discovered in time that the old theocratic ^-" government was not adequate to the new conditions. The people of Israel, in dealing with the settled governments about them, could no longer trust to the sporadic leadership of men raised up for the occasion, so they demanded a king who could go out before them to battle. After a bitter resist- ance and warning, the prophet Samuel, who represented the old order, gave them their king, first Saul and then David ; but the King did not reign in his own right; he was the vicar of Jehovah, who was still and must always be king in Israel. Both king and people held tenaciously to the theocratic con- ception of government. Saul was overthrown because he displeased Jehovah, whereupon David was chosen as a man after Jehovah's own heart. When David took the stronghold of the Jebusites on Mount Zion and called the name of it Jerusalem and made it the seat of his government, he, toward the end of his career, reproached himself with the thought that while he dwelt in a house of cedar, Jehovah still lived in a tent, and he was minded to wipe out this disgrace and build a house for Je- hovah in Jerusalem. At first the God refused to change his manner of life ; but, after persuasion, consented, and David made preparation for the building of a house for Jehovah, a house that Solomon completed and dedicated ; and from that time Jehovah made his home in Jerusalem. This change of residence from the tent to the house was significant of past economic, social, and political changes and of such changes to come. The people of Israel had radically altered their mode of life: they were agricultural and 128 THE WAYS OF THE GODS not pastoral. A passion for their land had in a measure taken the place of a passion for their people. Jehovah be- came the God of the Land more than the God of the People. In that land he ruled, in that land he must live. When once his house was built in Jerusalem, then that became his per- manent place of residence, All of the gods of the ancient world were confined to their cities; no god ever went abroad to visit for any length of time ; for he was the god of his city, and if he left his city, he lost his divinity. In the case of Jehovah, this identification of the God with the city was absolute ; it was disastrous, as we shall see, to the unity of Israel, but it was of advantage to the religion of Israel as a whole. What the tent had been the city be- came; it was the center of unity, the principle of coherence. The tribes that severed their connection with the holy city were lost; the tribe of which that city was the center was saved. Jehovah The Righteous It is the weakness of the theocratic form of government, whether in church or state, that the divine sovereign can never reign in person. He must always rule through a vicar, and, whether this vicar be king or pope, he is, too frequently, apt to be but a sorry representative of his celestial Lord. Men of godlike mould are few and far between. They are seldom or never born in the purple, nor do they easily ac- quire office in the existing order. Princes, whether of church or state, are often commonplace, of mediocre ability, and lacking initiative. Great leaders of the people, men of divine stature like Jesus and Lincoln, are more frequently found in the ranks of the people. The greatness of humanity is in the mass, seldom in the class. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 129 The theocracy established by Moses was no exception to this rule. As long as Moses lived, Israel might well be- lieve that it was under the direct government of its God ; for Moses in the intensity of his will, in the clearness of his intelligence, in the justice of his rule, was all that might be expected of a god. He did his best, and a god can do no better. After the death of Moses, Joshua carried on the tra- ditions of his administration. Joshua was an heroic leader of the people, sagacious and successful in war, wise and just in peace. When he had subdued the Canaanites and other hill tribes of Palestine and appropriated their lands, he divided those lands equitably among the people, man by man and family by family, taking for himself only his por- tion, no less and no more than was allotted to the humblest man of Israel. After the death of Joshua the people of Israel, being without leadership, were the easy prey of the Philistines and the Sidonians, from whom they were from time to time delivered by such heroes as Gideon and Jephtha, men who might well be looked upon as representatives of the power of Jehovah. With the establishment of the kingdom, all this was changed. The anointed of Jehovah might be any weakling' born in the palace. The first three kings had a certain meas- ure of greatness which might entitle them to be considered the visible representatives of the invisible king. Saul, in physical proportions, in religious enthusiasm, in generosity of soul, was a man not wholly unworthy to sit in the seat of judgment and rule in the name of Jehovah. But he was lacking in firmness of will. He would and he wouldn't; he allowed Samuel to browbeat him and David to outwit him. These defects were fatal to his rule. A god must never be a weakling and he must never be a fool ; and what a god must not be, his vicar cannot be ; and, as Saul was both weak of will and feeble of understanding, he was rejected by Jehovah. David, who succeeded him, was chosen by Jehovah for those qualities of mind and heart which mark the natural 130 THE WAYS OF THE GODS leader: unflinching purpose that knows when to kill and when not to kill ; ability to seize every opportunity and make the most of it ; the faculty of making and using friends ; a relig- iosity that approves itself to the crowd, and withal a genius that embodies and expresses the soul of a people. It is not without cause that David is one of the heroes of humanity who are chosen of the gods to do their work in the world. In his private life David was an Oriental ; he despised women and used them for his pleasure ; the only one he ever loved was the wife of Uriah the Hitite. And it was just this one love that Jehovah condemned, being as it was a viola- tion of the property right of Uriah in the person of his wife. The reign of David was the golden age of the Kingdom of Israel, and the best that Jehovah could promise after that reign was that a son of David should sit upon his throne forever. Solomon, the son and successor of David, was a love child, the son of Bathsheba, an adulteress ; but that did not prevent Jehovah from giving him a wisdom that has immor- talized him in all the lands of the East. To him are ascribed all the wise sayings of all the wise men for generations before and after him. He was a naturalist, a philosopher, and a poet. He has the credit of writing the one love story in the Bible and of producing the greatest essay of pessimistic phil- osophy ever given to the world. We need not believe that the Song of Solomon or Koheleth are the work of Solomon ; we only need believe that men thought them his work and in keeping with his character. In his private life Solomon was an Oriental despot, with his harem of three hundred wives and a thousand concubines. The expenses of his court were a great burden upon the people, and the temple that he built in Jerusalem absorbed the wealth of the nation. Before Solomon died, the northern tribes were in a state of revolt. The removal of the Ark of Jehovah to Jerusalem ; the exaltation of the tribe of Judah as the custodians of the Ark above the other tribes ; the subjection of the priests and the Levites to the king, together with the exactions of the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 131 tax-gatherers and the insolence of the officials, kept the whole of the north country in a state of chronic discontent. The contemptuous rejection by Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, of the petition for reform, caused Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, to raise the standard of revolt, to cry : "To your tents, O Israel !" and make of revolt revolution. The ten tribes seceded, and only the tribe of Judah and the little tribe of Benjamin were left to the House of David. For a time the tribal God Jehovah was claimed by each of the rival factions. But unity of worship was lost with unity of tribal life. In spite of the denunciation of such men as Elijah and Elisha, the northern tribes gradually drifted away from their loyalty to Jehovah and adopted the gods of the surrounding people, being finally swept into captivity by the Chaldeans, thus losing their tribal identity. The effect of all this upon the fortunes of Jehovah is man- ifest. He had ceased to be the God of Israel and had become the God of the Jew. The little tribe of Benjamin was merged with the greater tribe, and only Judah was left of all the tribes of Israel to keep alive the worship of Jehovah. Never was a god in greater danger of extinction. That the cult of Jehovah survived this disaster and in due time absorbed all the cults of the Western world, so that Jehovah is to-day the chief God of the reigning religious dynasty, is owing to a concatenation of circumstances so wonderful that it is not strange that men have ascribed the glory of Jehovah to the power of Jehovah. The first of these circumstances in importance is the evolu- tion of Jehovah from the Tribe-God of the Bene-Israel into the God of the Moral Order. This evolutionary process was largely the work of a single great thinker, one of the greatest that the human race has produced, Isaiah, the son of Amoz, who found Jehovah the Tribe-God of Israel and left him for all time the God of the Moral Order of Humanity. This poet and statesman, Isaiah, lived in the middle of the Eighth Century before our era. He was, according to tradi- tions, of royal blood, closely related to the throne. When he entered upon active life, the king in Jerusalem was Uz- 132 THE WAYS OF THE GODS ziah, a prince who had raised his little kingdom to an im- portance that it had not known since the days of David. In the midst of his successful career Uzziah was smitten with leprosy and had to retire to the lazar house. He was suc- ceeded by Jotham, his son, who, during his reign of sixteen years, continued the tradition and, in a measure, the successes of his father. Then followed the wicked reign of Ahaz and the weak reign of Hezekiah. During all this time the most important personage in Jerusalem was Isaiah, a prophet who, by his genius, wrought a lasting revolution in religious thought, giving to God a new character and a new mission. The times were perilous. The two civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates were struggling for the mastery. The little Kingdom of Judah lay between these contending powers; its existence was at the mercy of Babylon and Egypt; its politicians were trying to play off each of these powers against the other. There was an Egyptian and a Babylonian party in the city of Jerusalem. The city itself was the prey of wicked and weak kings, of idle and licentious princes, of corrupt judges and of grafting politicians. With the storm- cloud of Babylonian invasion darkening the East, the women of the city were walking the streets adorned with rings and anklets, with bosoms exposed and mincing as they walked. Society was in process of dissolution; from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot there was no soundness in it. Upon this scene of disgrace and danger Isaiah entered, and so wrought in it that out of that chaos emerged a new order for mankind. Isaiah was a religious genius. Jehovah the God of Israel was to him the great reality; the people of Judah were the people of Jehovah, and the city of Jerusalem the city of Jehovah. But the Jehovah of Isaiah was not the old War God of the Bene-Israel. He was not primarily the Tent God of Moses or the City God of David. Isaiah saw in Jehovah the God of the Social Order. He gave him a new name, a name which, however perverted, has ever since been the name of the God whom the Western world has professed THE WAYS OF THE GODS 133 to worship. This new name in the Hebrew is Zadek, Je- hovah Zadek, which in English is Jehovah The Righteous. Isaiah ascribed all the evils in Jerusalem to the forsaking on the part of the people of the worship of Jehovah-Zadek. It is almost impossible to give to the modern legalized mind any conception of what Isaiah meant by Zadek. We trans- late it Righteousness, and we confound righteousness with legality. We say what is lawful is right, whereas the very opposite is true. Ever since laws have been made it can be asserted as a general principle that what is lawful is wrong. Throughout the greater period of human history in the West- ern world human slavery has been lawful, but never for one single moment has human slavery been right. \ In England to-day, in all Europe and in America, land monopoly is lawful, but never for one moment has land monopoly been right. As I write these words the Mexican peons are waging what, I trust, is successful warfare, against the damnable wrong of land monopoly. Ever since the evolution of the Aryan family the law has denied to woman personal and political rights, and this denial is a wrong against which the women are rightly rebelling. All through history the weaker elements of society have been exploited by the stronger and the greatest means of exploitation has always been the law. It is hardly too much to say that the most powerful agents of unrighteousness have been the courts of law. Such courts condemned Jesus to death and sent Dred Scott back into slavery. Jehovah The Righteous condemns legality in the name of righteousness. He is the God of the Working Class, the God of the Slave, the God of the Poor, the God of the Widow, the God of the Fatherless. Isaiah, the prophet of Jehovah The Righteous, asserts that society exists to defend the rights of the weak against the aggressions of the strong, the liberties of man against the usurpations of property. Jehovah The Righteous condemns the principle upon which civilizations rest. No man has any right to say that aught he possesses is his own. If he be faithful to God he must hold all that he has in trust for 134 THE WAYS OF THE GODS the community. Both in earning and in spending, the wel- fare of society is first, the welfare of the individual second. So long as there is an ignorant man, an overworked woman, a hungry child in the city, so long is Jehovah The Righteous angry and Jerusalem without peace. Isaiah made the worship of Jehovah The Righteous to consist in doing righteousness. He had no patience with the ritual of the temple, with the new moons and the sabbaths. All this was to him so much blasphemy of Jehovah The Righteous, who cries in immortal language : "To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me. saith the Lord. I am full of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts, and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he-goats. When ye come to appear before me who hath required this at your hands to trample my courts. Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me . . . Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth . . . Wash you ; make you clean, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the father- less, plead for the widow." Of all the gods whom men have worshipped none is greater, none can be greater, than Jehovah The Righteous, the God of Isaiah, the God of the Social Order. CHAPTER XXVII The God of The Temple : Jehovah the Holy His removal to Jerusalem and his long residence in the temple brought about a decided change in the character and habits of Jehovah. He became more and more the God. .of the temple and less and less the God of the people. In the majestic presence in the temple we hardly recognized the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 135 homely God, who, without ceremony or state, came and sat in the door of Abraham's tent. This god, in becoming a sovereign, has ceased to be a friend. Nor do we see in him anything of that ruggedness that was his habit in the wilder- ness, when, after a hard day's march, he slept on the ground ; nor does he shock us with that fierceness with which he pursued the Canaanites until the going down of the sun. City life has refined the god and given him a new name. Men speak of him now with bated breath, not as Jehovah of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; but as Jehovah Kodesh, Je- hovah the Separate, the Holy One of Israel. Under this name God is beginning to have an existence of his own, apart from the life of his people. Even though Israel perish, the Holy One endures. The Sons of Levi are the caretakers of his temple, but they are no longer the guardians of his person. He has mightier servitors to wait upon him in his new estate. "Cher- ubim and Seraphim veil their faces before him and cry : Holy, Holy, Holy ! (Kodesh, Kodesh, Kodesh !) Heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to Thee, Jehovah Most High." In this exaltation of Jehovah we see the effect of surround- ing and sophisticated civilizations upon the simplicity of Is- rael. In former days when Abraham met with God and God called him and said : "Abraham," Abraham answered him and said : "Here am I." Here we have a simplicity and directness that is lost in the later era God is no longer a shepherd meeting a shepherd; He is a mighty potentate, a celestial Pharaoh, or a Tiglath-pileser, sitting enthroned in the midst of his courtiers, unfamiliar and unapproachable. Isaiah does not meet Jehovah as Abraham did in the tent door, nor even as Elijah did in the cave of Horeb, but in the sacred temple, with the lights burning before the altar, in the hush of the priests murmuring their inaudible prayers. In that darkness Isaiah sees the throne of Jehovah high and lifted up, in that silence he hears the seraphic anthem and the call of his God. This notion of holiness is not peculiar to the religion of 136 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Israel. It is an element natural to all religion. It has its origin in a fear that men have of the unknown and the dan- gerous. It is only an elaboration and refinement of the prin- ciple of taboo, or negative magic, by which primitive man sought to protect kings and gods from profanation, and to hedge himself away from a too great nearness to royalty and divinity, which was dangerous to his peace and safety. Those men are safest upon whom gods and kings do not look. If kings and gods could come and go among the people as beasts and hinds do, without restriction or ceremony, then that familiarity that breeds contempt would lead the people to despise the god or king who made himself so common. To avert this danger, men set apart places as sacred to their gods ; kings surrounded themselves with ceremony, wore robes of state, and moved in an atmosphere of etiquette. Neither a king nor a god can safely engage in any of the common tasks of life: a king may not cut wood nor draw water; a god must not be a carpenter nor a bricklayer. Holiness did not, in the primitive religions, necessarily include what we call purity. The temple prostitutes, both male and female, are called in Hebrew Kodesh and Kodesha. It is true that from the beginning the use of the temple for impure rites was an abomination to the Hebrew. This was owing to the fact that Jehovah was aloof from all that per- tained to sex, and because of this aloofness, the Hebrew con- ception of holiness came to include chastity as an essential quality. In Christianity this quality was supreme, so that a holy man or holy woman was a man or woman who had made and kept a vow of perpetual chastity. But in itself holiness is simply separation, dedication to a special use. Priests are holy not in and of themselves, but by reason of their consecration. Places are holy not because they are different from other places, but because they have been set apart by the thoughts of men to special uses. The worship of The Holy One of Israel has divided the life of men into the sacred and the common. One day in seven is sacred, the other six are the common days of the week. On the common days you may sing or dance, on THE WAYS OP THE GODS 137 sacred days you must go softly and walk in the bitterness of your soul. The men who do the common work of life, who plow and sow and reap and build, who marry and are given in marriage, are common men. The men who wait upon God, who stand before his altar and break his bread are holy men, reverend men, right reverend men, and most reverend men. This division of human life into the sacred and profane, while it has been useful in a way, has, on the whole, been detrimental to the proper development both of the gods and of men. A holy god is a god apart ; the sphere of his influ- ence is circumscribed ; he cannot go down into the market, lest his holiness be contaminated with the vulgarity of trade ; he cannot mix in politics without loss to his reputation. A holy god may not marry nor be given in marriage, for that is to be in the place of the breaking forth children ; he may not indulge in scientific pursuits, lest he become involved in the impurities of nature. Under the restrictions placed upon him by his holiness, a god can only assume the role of a preacher who preaches an abstract righteousness of which the world is not worthy, and which the world, in consequence, lets severely alone. Such a god may be an object of worship, a narcotic for spiritual insomnia ; he may inhabit beautiful churches and marvelous temples, but his seclusion has cost him his liberty. He can no longer make the clouds his chariots, nor fly on the wings of the winds. He can no longer walk in the garden in the cool of the day nor consort with the camel-drivers of the desert. I myself have been a reverend man, and I know how irksome it is. It narrows outlook, curtails opportunity, and impoverishes life. But if the gods and priests of the gods suffer from this specialization, upon the common man is entailed a greater loss, a more far-reaching disaster. As the god tends to be- come imprisoned in his holiness, so the man is apt to be en- meshed in his commonness. Since he cannot walk day by day with gods and heroes, he is content to walk with fools and knaves. Since goddesses cannot visit him, he satisfies himself with silly women. Business and politics are corrupt 138 THE WAYS OF THE GODS because the fear of the gods is not in them. Jehovah-Kodesh sometimes sadly interferes with the work of Jehovah-Zadek. A man connot do much work in the world who is afraid of defilement. "Every battle of the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in blood." A battle-field is not a savory place. A man or a woman may sometimes have to risk virtue as well as life in the struggle for betterment. But while holiness has thus been detrimental to a rounder development of the conception of God in his relation to him- self and to man, yet to lose that idea altogether would be disastrous. Jehovah-Zadek is a definition of religion in terms of social righteousness ; Jehovah-Kodesh is a definition of reli- gion in terms of personal integrity. A god must be in the world, but not of it ; in politics, but not a politician ; in busi- ness, but not a business man. Personality must always be above and greater than en- vironment. A man of the world is always less than a man : the world rules him when he should rule the world. It is this fear of merging personality into environment that drives men into the wilderness and makes of them anchorites. Even a god can only escape from this danger of submergence by withdrawing himself from phenomena. To think of him as god we must think of him as abstract. It is well both for gods and men to go apart from time to time into a secret place and rest awhile. But the great god and the great man is the one who can at the same time be Jehovah The Right- eous and Jehovah The Holy, who can be busy in the world and silent in soul. John the Baptist came neither eating nor drinking; Jesus came eating and drinking, so much so that men called him a "gluttonous man and a winebibber ; a friend of publicans and sinners." Men since then have seen in John a prophet; but in Jesus they have seen a God. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 139 CHAPTER XXVIII The God of The Book In the Sixth Century before our era the religion of Jehovah suffered a change revolutionary in its character and far-reach- ing in its effect on the religious life of the Western world. Toward the end of that century Jerusalem, the City of Je- hovah, after a long and cruel siege, was taken by Nebuazar- Adan, General of the King of Babylon ; the temple of Jehovah was defiled, the walls of the city were broken down, its gates burned with fire, and its people carried captive to Babylon. According to all precedent, this debacle should have been the end of the career of Jehovah as a god. Unable to protect his city against the violence of the stranger; compelled, in his impotence, to see his temple profaned and his altar dese- crated ; powerless to save, this god had to stand by and see his young men slain at the head of the streets and the virgin daughters of Zion violated within the courts of the sanctuary. The fall of Jerusalem was the apparent defeat and disgrace of the God of Jerusalem; the ruined city was evidence to all who passed by of a ruined god. That the religion of Jehovah should have survived this disaster, and out of this calamity should have devised the means whereby that religion became not only the religion of the Jew but the religion of the Western world, is a marvel of history so striking that one cannot wonder that this marvel has been ascribed to the direct action of Jehovah himself. Because he was able to do this thing he has lifted himself far above all the city gods of the ancient world, and to-day instead of being, like the ruck of city gods, known only to scholars as the obscure deity of a little hill town of Syria, he is hailed and worshipped as the God of the Whole Earth. How did he do it? The means were as simple as the effect was wonderful. He transformed his character from that of the God of the City into the form of a God of the Book. 140 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Of all the achievements of humanity next in importance after the evolution of speech, is the invention of writing. Beginning with small pictures cut in stone, and on the bones that lay in his cave, man began to make an outward record of the thoughts of his mind. The lion that he had seen with his eye he reproduced with his hand. This, which at first was an amusement of his idleness, he soon found to be useful. It was an assistance to his memory. The beast that he killed yesterday he could picture to-day and look on to- morrow. And not only could he keep before his own eye the image of what that eye had seen, but he could also show it to others, by means of this picture-writing he could con- vey the thought of his mind to the mind of another. That other might be far away out of the reach of the sound of his voice ; yet by means of his picture the picture-maker could send his message to the mind of his friend or his enemy ; he could send his thoughts of peace in the form of a dove, and his feeling of hatred in the guise of a serpent. As a consequence of this effort on the part of man to record and convey his impressions, we have the picture-writing of Egypt, and, as an improvement on this, the phonetic alphabet, .1 marvel so great that it has ceased to be marvelous. The phonetic alphabet, as" the name implies, was an inven- tion of the Phoenicians as a sort of shorthand picture-writing to be used in commercial transactions. It is based upon the principle that while the human voice is capable of only a limited number of elementary sounds, yet, by the combina- tion of these elements, an unlimited number of words can be and are produced. So we have letters, representing these elementary sounds, and by combining the letters we have words that transform sound into sight, and so have a written as well as a spoken language. This invention enabled a man to reveal and express his thought with a fullness and accuracy impossible in picture-writing ; and from that time to this man has not only been a builder of cities but also a writer of books. It was this contrivance that Jehovah made use of, after his city was destroyed, to keep his hold on the worship of THE WAYS OF THE GODS 141 his people and his name alive in the earth. Just before and - J during the captivity in Babylon the legends of the god and \ the people of Israel were reduced to writing by men whose gift for story-telling has been unrivalled in the history of narration. During that period great thinkers, such as Isaiah the elder, Micah, and Jeremiah, had spoken in the name of the Lord, and their words had been written upon tablets by ; the scribes, and so preserved for future generations. Sing- ers had sung psalms in the temple of Jehovah, on the hills of Judah, beside the river of Babylon and in the streets of the city of their captivity, and these hyms had been gathered into the song-book of Jehovah. On the Sabbath Day the captive children of Jehovah gath- ered in a common meeting-place, and these books were read in their ears by ministers appointed for the purpose. The books were sacred and the hearing and the reading an act of worship. We of to-day can have no conception of the effect of this reading upon the minds of the hearers. In those days books were not printed, they were written ; they were not published, they were read. Every book was divine ; every word inspired. The effect of this innovation upon the religious life of the people was revolutionary. It changed radically the mode of man's approach to God. The old form of worship by means of animal sacrifice gave place to the hearing of the word. When we think of primitive religious v/orship, Jewish and Gentile, and remember that every temple was a slaughter- house; that the priests of the Greek gods were called butch- ers ; that when one came near a house of worship, one heard the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep, and within the house one was sickened by the smell of fresh blood and burning flesh, it is easily seen how great was the change from such a worship as this to a worship which consisted of read- ing and hearing a book. It is not to be inferred that those who were at the first engaged in this mode of divine worship were conscious of the revolution that they were effecting. Far from it. Their songs are songs of bitter regret that they cannot sacrifice 142 THE WAYS OF THE GODS their offerings of blood on the altar of their God in Jerusalem. Their city and their City God were still the object of their passionate devotion. They hardly thought of their new form of worship as worship, but only as a reminder of a worship they had lost. So soon as they could, a remnant of this people returned to Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, and restored the sacrifices. But the greater number remained in Babylon and were men of the synagogue and not men of the temple, and in the synagogue the center of worship was not the altar, there was no altar there, but the reading desk. .' From the time of the Babylonish captivity begins the dis- persion of the Jew. The Jews ceased to be an agricultural people, they became merchants and money lenders. Then, as now, they congregated in cities, resisting assimilation, maintaining their tribal organizations, meeting in their syna- gogues to hear the word of their God. Jehovah was their God and Jerusalem his city, then and there only could the sacrifices be offered on his altar. The self-exiled Jew in Alexandria and Rome could go to Jerusalem only now and then ; some never visited the sacred shrine, and since he could not offer a calf of a year old, he had to offer the calves of his lips; as he could not eat of the meat of the sacrifice, he had to feed on the word of his God. So it came to be a saying: "Man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God doth man live." So the change came about. In all the cities where the Jews sojourned the stranger entering their place of worship was astonished to find that place without an image and without an altar, only a man standing up to read, only a people sitting to listen. Little by little the ancient Hebrew language was forgotten and in its place came the Greek or the Arabic, so that the stranger was able to hear in his own tongue the marvelous words of God ; and they who came once came again ; and thus the word of the Lord was preached in every city and the revolu- tion in religious worship became not local but universal. The Jews divided their sacred writings into three classes: THE WAYS OF THE GODS 143 the Torah or the Law; the Prophets, and the Sacred Writ- ings. In the Torah or the Books of the Law were found the rules by which the Jew disciplined his life ; in the Prophets was written the history of his people, and in the Psalms their aspirations. So that in this collection of books the Jew had a method of discipline, a philosophy of history, and a means of culture. And so superior to all others in existence at the time were these essentials of human development that the Jew forced their use, for these purposes, upon the Western world. The books of the Hebrews became in due time the rule of discipline, the philosophy of history, the means of culture to the Mediterranean world and to all the people who have derived their civilization from the Mediterranean basin. Europe and America, even to this day, profess the religion of Jehovah, the God of the Book. In this Book God is set forth as the judge, the ruler, and the teacher of men. God as judge is both the maker and the interpreter of the law. As it is written, there is One lawgiver. These laws are statutes and ordinances, com- mandments and decrees issued by Jehovah for the govern- ment of the people. They are not merely principles of gov- ernment, they are specific acts of legislation, regulating the most minute affairs of life down even to the way of washing pots and kettles. As we are told by high Jewish authority: "The Torah contains rules and regulations which should govern the life of man and lead him to moral and religious perfection. Every rule is expressive of a fundamental, eth- ical, or religious idea. Those regulations in which human intelligence is unable to discern the fundamental idea are, through belief in their divine origin, vouchsafed the same high religious importance ; and the ethical value of submis- sion to the will of God where its purpose is not understood is even greater. In observing the Law man's good intention is the main point." l Mewish Encyclopedia, vol. xii, p. 133. 144 THE WAYS OF THE GODS r*^"*" . The will of Jehovah is the basis of morals. What Jehovah nils is right because he wills it. Jehovah has spoken; man [must obey. This divine basis of morals is of the essence >f the religion of Jehovah, The God of the Book. Its effect for good and for ill upon the religious life of mankind will be seen as we watch the progression of this god from a local to a wider dominion. CHAPTER XXIX The God of Inspiration It is greatly to the advantage of the religion of Jehovah in its competition with the other religions of the world that its god is the God of the Working Class. This fact has given to its literature a cultural power far surpassing that of any other literature known to history. The holy books of the Jewish people are the vade mecum of a civilization. Their study is not the occupation of the scholar, it is the em- ployment of the artisans, "the mean workman," as Bishop Andrews calls him, and of the poor. This literature is not only explained by professors to classes, it is expounded by preachers to congregations. It is the handbook of worship and the guide of life to the multitude. Its words are read at the consecration of the new-born child, at the marriage of the bride to the bridegroom, and at the burial of the dead. (The place this literature has held in the Western world is^Wv, no mere accident; it is popular because it is the literature of j the people, written by the people for the people. Js The literature of Greece, the only literature that can com- pare in cultural power with the literature of the Hebrew, is the literature of the leisure class, written by the leisure class, for the leisure class. The Homeric poems alone, of all the writings of the Greeks, make any appeal to the common man ; and even Homer is the poet of heroes and not the poet of THE WAYS OF THE GODS 145 common men. The interest of the ordinary man in the "Iliad" is the glimpse it gives him into the life and doings of gods and divine men. He reads of all this with the same avidity that the chambermaid reads of the duchess; it stirs his imagination, it does not move his heart. As for the great tragedies of the Greek poets, they, even more than the tragedies of Shakespeare, are caviar to the public; they, too, have primarily to do with gods and princes, with prob- lems of fate as exhibited in the lives of the great. The philosophers of Greece, who correspond in a way to the prophets of Israel, addressed themselves consciously to the leisure, cultured class. For the workingman, whether a slave or a free artisan, these philosophers had a profound contempt. The mass of the people, who did the world's work, were no more to the philosopher than were the beasts of the stall. Aristotle argues the necessity of slavery from the fact that without slavery there can be no philosophy. The slave must work that the philosopher may think. All education, in the Grecian world, is the product of a leisure secured to the leisure class by the unrequited toil of the workers. Our word "school" is derived from the Greek word crxoXiQ, which means "play" or "leisure." As a consequence of their com- plete alienation from the working class, the Greek philos- ophers have never made the slightest appeal to that class. The Greek religion perished because the Greek thinkers could not interpret that religion in the terms of the common life. They were busy spinning out of their brains their theories of the universe, never once asking what the people might be thinking on these same problems. Thus, while the indirect influence of Greek thought upon the intellectual life of the Western world has been very great, its influence on the moral and spiritual life has been almost nil. Even when the Greek writers do deal with the common life of the common people, it is always from the leisure-class point of view. In the pastorals of Theocritus, in the "Ec- logues" and "Georgics" of Vergil, we have that picture of pastoral life that has become classic. It is the picture so popular on Dresden china of the shepherd piping, not to his 146 THE WAYS OP THE GODS sheep but to his love. In this conception of shepherd life the sheep are nothing but the background of the shepherd's love-making. He drives them to pasture, not that they may feed, but that he may sigh. Classical poetry knows nothing of the life of the shepherd as shepherd. It is a song about a shepherd, not a song of a shepherd. And this, in a measure, is the fatal defect of classical literature in general ; it is not vital to human experience. How different is the pastoral poetry of Hebrew literature from that of the classic! Here we have a song not about the shepherd, but a song of the shepherd. We learn to our surprise that the shepherd is not at all occupied with thoughts of love, as the classic world supposed, he has a love but it is not for a woman, however fair; it is for the sheep. It is to the sheep he pipes, to call them in and to call them out; he leads the sheep into the green pasture, that they may feed ; and beside the still waters, that they may drink; when they pass through the valley of the shadow of death his rod and his staff are there to comfort them. David was a shepherd, and as a shepherd sang of the shepherd's life. Because of this, the shepherd song of David (if it be his song, and whether his or another's, it is the song of a shepherd) is in the heart and on the lips of millions, while the pastorals of Theocritus and Virgil are not known outside of a little circle which finds amusement in their trifling. And this vitality is characteristic of the whole of Hebrew literature when that literature was in its golden age. Isaiah and Jeremiah differ essentially from Sophocles and Euripedes. The Greek poet celebrated the misfortune of a king; the Hebrew poet the calamities of the people. The Greek poet sang a song about suffering; the Hebrew a song of suffering. The threnody of Jeremiah over the desolation of Jerusalem is not the conscious expression of an imagined emotion ; it is the unconscious cry of a broken heart. The literature of the Hebrew is the literature of pathos, because the Hebrews are a pathetic people. And that liter- ature makes its appeal, because of its pathos, to the universal heart of man ; for man's life is pathetic even to tears. It is THE WAYS OF THE GODS 147 as Father Hall says in the story of John Inglesant: "Only the infinite pity is commensurate to the infinite pathos of human life." "The voice said cry, and I said, what shall I cry? All flesh is grass and all the goodliness thereof as the flower of the field, the grass withereth and the flower fadeth. In the morning it is green and groweth up, in the evening it is cut down, dried up and withered. The days of our age are three- score years and ten and though a man be so strong that he come to fourscore years, yet is their strength but labor and sorrow, so soon passeth it away and we are gone. ... In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and great weep- ing, Rachel weeping for her children and refused to be com- forted because they are not. . . . Ye will bring down my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. . . . As a sheep before her shearers is dumb so he openeth not his mouth ; the walls of Jerusalem are broken down and her gates burned with fire. ... I have trodden the wine press alone and of the people there is none with me." All the pathos of life is summed up in such sayings as these ; the death of children and the weakness of age ; the shortness of life and the futility of life; unrequited toil and innocence condemned ; exile from home and home defiled ; the ingratitude of children and the indifference of a people ; a city corrupt and, because corrupt, a city desolate ; the lone- liness of the great and the greatness of loneliness ; words that break the heart and hearts that break the word. All of this pathos of life comes from the lips of this pathetic people doomed from the first to a life of hardship and of suffering; wandering shepherds in a desert where there was no water; strangers in a land that was not theirs ; the children of bond- age condemned to build the tombs of the Pharaohs ; lovers of a land that they could not possess ; carried captive to Bab- ylon ; kneeling three times a day with their faces toward Jer- usalem; praying to a god silent and distant, a god who seems to have put them in the wine vat that he might trample them in his anger until his feet are purple with their blood. 148 THE WAYS OF THE GODS And what shall we say more? Is not this a people who have been robbed of their birthright ; whose Holy Books have been stolen from them and turned against them ; are they not the children of the Ghetto who have been hunted like dogs from their kennels ; people of the yellow gaberdine who are spit upon and take it patiently because sufferance is the badge of all their tribe? Is not this people a people apart in their sufferings, that through them a suffering humanity might give adequate expressions to the emotions of its broken heart? But hark! how through all this threnody there sounds the note of defiant hope. Israel, in spite of its shame and suffering, still is and ever will be the people of God. And God, for His name's sake, must care for the people. He can- not let the people perish, lest His name be a reproach to the heathen. Israel's sufferings are God's opportunities. They do not suffer alone, God suffers with them. In all their affliction He is afflicted, and the Angel of His Presence saves them. Who is this that cometh from Edom with dyed gar- ments from Bozrah? He that is mighty to save. Israel is marked as God's people, not in spite of his sufferings but because of his sufferings. "He is despised and rejected of men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. My servant is more marred than any man and his visage than the sons of men. Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by, was there ever sorrow like unto my sorrow? Surely the Lord hath afflicted Him and put Him to grief." But after defeat is victory; after shame, honor; after slav- ery, deliverance; after death, life. "A way shall there be and a highway, and the redeemed of the Lord shall come to Zion with songs on their lips. He shall restore the waste places. He shall build up the tabernacle of David that is broken down. He who now goeth on his way weeping, bearing good seed, shall doubtless come again with joy and bring his sheaves with him. The Lord even the most mighty God hath spoken and called the world from the rising of the sun even to the going down of the same." THE WAYS OF THE GODS 149 The literature of Israel has taken captive the common peo-' pie, because it is expressive of the life of the common people. It voices the experience, the thoughts, and feelings of the working class. It speaks of the life of those who go forth ' to their work and to their labor until the evening, who bear the burden and heat of the day, who suffer the injustice of unrequited toil, who endure the ignominy of obscurity, who work without reward and die without fame, who sow that others may reap, and die that others may live. They are the rank and file of the soldiery of whom Napoleon said : "What are a hundred thousand men to me?" the rank and file of the industrial army of whom one dies for every floor that is laid in a modern building; slaves of the mine, who are suffocated by gas and burned by fire damp ; stokers in boiler rooms, famishing in the heat while the passengers are dancing on the deck; women bearing ten children and burying eight. This is humanity enslaved and exiled, who, with Paul and Silas in their prison, sing of Christ the Lord arisen. These are prisoners of hope, always despised and never ashamed ; always defeated, but never destroyed ; children of the slum living apart, children of the shoddy clothing spit upon by those whom they serve, ever patient, even hopeful, working day by day for a bit of bread, and by their surplus product making possible science and art and government and law and religion. It is because of this that, while the dialogues of Plato and the tragedies of Sophocles and the songs of Pindar are the delight of the scholar, the Psalms of David and the Prophecies of Isaiah, the Lamentations of Jeremiah and the story of Ruth, are the consolation of the Cotter's Saturday Night. Jehovah has triumphed over the other gods, most } , of all because he is the God of Inspiration. He is the Holy | Air, the breathing of which is the common right and the * source of the common life. 150 THE WAYS OF THE GODS CHAPTER XXX Jehovah: Creator of Heaven and Earth If we accept Burke's definition of the sublime, we shall not find in human writing greater sublimity than is revealed to us in the opening chapter of the Hebrew Scriptures. In that chapter and to the end of the third verse of the second chapter we have a Hymn of Creation that, in grandeur of conception and in beauty and simplicity of language, ranks among the highest achievements of human genius. Thought and language can hardly go beyond the work of this Hebrew poet. As a thinker he anticipated later philosophy and fore- shadowed modern science. In the opening words of this hymn all mysteries are sug- gested, the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal meet and mingle. In order to grasp the meaning of this writer in its fulness one must read him in his own tongue, no translation does him justice. Our English rendering fails to convey accurately the meaning of the Hebrew words. We read : "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," but we do not have in mind the god nor the creation that was in the mind of this poet. Brought up, as we have been, under another theological influence, our God is a God apart from the universe, and crea- tion is the making of something out of nothing. Neither of these thoughts was in the mind of this author. In his day that dread abstraction whom we call God, sitting in his lonely heaven, was not yet conceived by the thought of man. The mind of man was hovering in those days between pol- ytheism and pantheism, between the worship of the forces of nature as many, and the worship of the force of nature as one. The poet's writing is evidence of that transition : the gods are plural, their act is singular. The act of creation celebrated in this poem is not the mak- ing out of nothing, it is rearrangement of already existing THE WAYS OF THE GODS 151 material. The word God is in the plural, Elohim, and means literally "the strong ones"; the word Bara translated "creat- ed," means "to arrange," "to shape." So we may render the verse in this wise : In our beginning the strong ones arranged the heavens and the earth. Before that the earth was a wilderness and a desolation ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And from this point the writer goes on to describe pro- gressive rearrangements, or creations, passing successively from lower to higher forms of life. This ancient poet gives us in vivid language the most ab- stract thought that the human mind can entertain. Spinoza expresses this thought by the words : natura naturans, nature naturing, eternal energy energizing in time and space. All that we are, all that we see and hear, all that we feel and think are nothing else than this natura naturans, this eternal energy energizing in time and space; and time and space are nothing else than his eternal energizing. Reduced to its low- est philosophical denominator, this is pure pantheism ; it is say: "God is the world and the world is God." Out of this conception a philosophy may be formed, but not a religion. The pure reason may comprehend, but the common mind cannot take in anything so abstract. All our mythologies and all our religions have been unconscious efforts on the part of the mind to resolve this abstraction into con- crete forms, to cut out from this abstraction gods nearer the heart and life of man. In the chapter in our Bible immediately following this Hymn of Creation we have an effort, and that most success- ful, to reduce this Infinite to finite proportions. Jean As- true, a French physician (1684-1766) was the first biblical student to call attention to the fact that there are in the book of Genesis two accounts of creation, differing essentially one from the other. Scholars tell us that the second account of creation is the earlier in time, and that the Hymn of Creation is an interpretation by a later writer of the primitive account. 152 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Beginning with the fourth verse of Chapter II, we have this second account opening with the words : These are the generations of the heaven and the earth in the day of their making by Jehovah Elohim of the heavens and the earth. The difference between this and that other conception of creation at first is very slight, but it is a difference that is divergence leading into new regions of thought and feeling. First, and most important, the tribal god of the Hebrews has become identified with the Creator of the universe, no change that I can recall, in human thinking, can in practical importance, be compared with this identification of Elohim with Jehovah by this unknown Hebrew thinker. It lifted the War God of Israel to the throne of the universe. The word, translated "create," is no longer the concrete word Bara, "to cut," "to fashion," it is the more abstract word Asoth, "to do." In this conception the manifold uni- verse of sun and moon and star, of land and water, of creep- ing thing, of bird and beast and man, is the handiwork of a personal Being who is none other than Jehovah, the God of Israel; and because he made all these things they are his to do with as he wills. Not only in this second account of creation has the Creator become identified with Jehovah, but the purpose of creation is clearly defined. There is not, as in the Hymn of Creation, a development from lower to higher forms of life; here the highest comes first, creation does not end it begins with man. Before man no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up, for Jehovah Elohim had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. Having made man, Jehovah then made of his rib a woman and planted a garden eastward in Eden and placed the man in the garden. After this Jehovah made the fishes of the sea, the fowls of the air, the creeping things, the beasts, and the cattle. In other words, in this second account the world is made for man and not man for the world. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 153 Strange as it may seem, this conception of creation, which when we analyze it, seems not only childish but grotesque, has held in thrall the minds of the Western world for nearly two thousand years. For centuries it was not so much as questioned, and to-day it is held in millions of minds as the sufficient explanation of the existence of man and of the world. The reason for this astounding phenomenon is that we have in this conception a definite answer to a pressing question. Men are as children asking questions, and they will not, indeed they cannot, rest until their question is answered. It makes no difference what the answer is, so only it is an fanswer. /Therefore, one of the reasons for the spreading of / 'Judaism in the world was this definite reply to the cry of | man's heart for some explanation of his origin and destiny.J Of these things the Aryan religion could tell him nothing. Zeus was not the creator of the world nor the maker of man. The gods were as men, subject to fate, they came and they went, they rose and they fell, and men saw in them nothing but a repetition on a larger field of the changes of this mortal life. It was this void in the understanding that was filled by the declaration that Jehovah made man for his own pur- poses. The Hebrew prophets gave to Jehovah a character that appealed to the heart and the conscience of man, made God a friend and a Saviour as well as a Creator, and so gave to this conception a dominion that still endures in defiance v > of reason and knowledge. This answer is, moreover, of all answers most congenial to the nature of man. It placed this world in the center of the universe, the sun and moon and the stars moving over it to give light by day and by night; it made of man the beginning and the end of the life process ; it made of the Jew and of the Christian (taken over from the Jew) the cen- tral figure of history. We have in this conception of creation the tribal consciousness of the Jew, making out of that con- sciousness a world in which a Jew can live. The Jew traces his descent in the main life from Adam to Abraham and from Abraham through Israel to himself. 154 THE WAYS OP THE GODS In all the manifold movements of the world he sees the Prov- idence of Jehovah, working for his preservation, purification and exaltation. The Jew made of his tribal consciousness his religion ; out of it he fashioned his God, with the help of his God he placed himself in the center of history, and he has stayed there. His God has become the God and his re- ligious history the religious history of the Western world. And all because he has been definite in his statements as to God and himself. And it is this, as it appears to me, conception of crea- tion, to the exclusion of the more sublime idea of the Hymn of Creation, that has been cherished by the religious thought of the Western world. It inspired the genius of Dante and Milton, it called forth the profound reasoning of Aquinas and Scotus, it has been the basis of theology from Paul to Newman. To keep this world in its place, human thinking has been condemned as evil and thousands of the best and bravest have been exiled, imprisoned, beaten with rods, and burned at the stake. And the reason for all this is that this conception has been a protection for man in the presence of the infinites and eternities that frighten his soul. BOOK V THE DEGRADATION OF THE GODS CHAPTER XXXI The Degradation of The Gods From the battle of Chceronea, in the year 338 B. C, to the battle of Pharsalus, in the year 48 B. C., the world of which the Mediterranean Sea is the center was in process of cen- tralization. /The battle of Chceronea put an end to the De- mocracy of Greece, the battle of Pharsalus finally extinguished the liberties of the Republic of Rome. J Alexander of Macedon, the son of Philip, following up the victories of his father, destroyed the autonomy of the city states of Greece, subjecting Athens, Thebes, and Sparta to the dominion of Macedon, and then, with Greece as his background, taking in Egypt by the way, entered upon his marvelous career of conquest in Asia, making of Western Asia as far as the Indus an appanage of Europe. The successors of Alexander, the Seleucide in Antioch, and the Ptolemies in Alexandria, made the Greek language, thought, and custom native to Syria and Egypt. Alexandria rivaled Athens as a seat of learning, and Antioch was, for a time, the commercial capitol of the Grecian world. All the lands of Western Asia and Northeastern Africa became, as Wales is to-day, bilingual. Greek was the language of the court and the school, the native tongue was used in domestic intercourse and in rustic places. The unifying influence of Greek culture became more potent after the Roman conquest had incorporated the Grecian world into the political fabric of the Empire. Politically impotent, in pure intellect the Greeks were so much the superior of the Romans that, without intention or effort, they brought the Roman mind into sub- jection to Greek culture. 157 158 THE WAYS OF THE GODS After the Roman conquest the whole Mediterranean world was bilingual. Greek was the language of letters, Latin the language of law. Every one who was at all in the world had to know and use these two forms of speech. The Greeks were everywhere lecturing and teaching, the Romans were everywhere ruling and judging; so that a man had to talk with the Greeks and plead with the Romans, if he expected to know anything, or do anything, or be anybody. Greek thought overarched the Mediterranean world as does the sky ; Roman law lay under it as does the earth. When Caesar, on the field of Pharsalus, put an end to the misrule of the Roman oligarchy he carried the principle of centralization to a point beyond which it could not go. Caesar was the center and Caesar was the circumference of the Roman world. When Caesar died he left to his grand-nephew Octavianus Caesar, a boy of nineteen, the inheritance of the world. This youth, the most consummate politician history has ever known, completed the centralizing work of his great uncle, and, after a reign of more than half a century, left the Roman world so crystallized that it was able to withstand the as- saults of time for five centuries. During this period of centralization the creative energies of the human soul, being exhausted, ceased to operate, and a period of crystallization set in, not only in politics but in every department of life. The great men of the Roman world were not poets nor philosophers, they were lawyers, and law- yers never create, they only codify. The Roman people had the gift of organization beyond all the people of the earth. They could not originate, but they could arrange, and by the perfection of their arrangement they could stifle all fur- ther origination. The Roman must have everything where he can put his hands on it and make use of it. There must be no blurred outlines to his thought; no mysteries beyond his reach. The Roman language has the simplicity, the def- initeness, of the Roman people. The Romans, having possessed the world, proceeded to organize it; and to that end evolved the Roman law, which THE WAYS OF THE GODS 159 remains to this day the basic law of the Western world. The source of law is the Caesar, the purpose of law the maintenance of the peace and prosperity of the Empire. This made the government of the world definite: If you are in doubt appeal to Caesar. When Caesar speaks, the matter is closed. Nothing more simple can be thought of! This passion for definiteness possessed the whole world at that time. Everything must be set in order, finished, and done with. The limits of the world were closely defined. The Roman world consisted of that portion of the earth's surface that lay round about the middle sea. It extended in the East to the Indus, in the South to the desert, in the West to the Ocean, in the North to the forests; within these con- fines lay the civilized world as it was known to the Graeco- Roman of the day. To the East were people whom the Roman did not consider it worth while to conquer, to the North were the hyperborean forests, the haunt of wild beasts and still wilder men ; to the South were the trackless sands ; to the West the trackless waters, to the Northwest lay Britain the ultima Thule of the Roman world. What lay beyond the western waters and below the southern sands the Roman did not know, nor did he care to know. The Roman mind is so constituted that it does not care for what it does not know. It is, as a mind, seldom or never haunted by the unknown. The earth of the Roman was a half sphere, hollow under- neath, resting on pillars. If one went too far to the east or too far to the west, one would fall off, so one would better stay at home than to try to wander to the confines of the earth. The sky was considered to be a solid sphere in which the heavenly bodies were placed as a jeweler places stones in a setting. This sphere was manifold, crystals within crys- tals moving in cycles and epicycles over the earth. The sun made its circuit through the signs of the zodiac once a year. These motions of the sun and the planets were explained with great minuteness by the astronomers of the day. If one could not understand the astronomers, that was one's own 160 THE WAYS OF THE GODS fault and one for one's safety had best leave the stars alone and devote his attention to women, they were less dan- gerous. The languages, Greek and Roman, were finished and in the keeping of the grammarians. This age had no Homers, but it did have a Quintilian. Thought was in bondage to logic and must not presume to use any other method than that laid down. Aristotle was the supreme authority in the world of thought; Ptolemy in that of astronomy. There was no such thing as geology or biology known to the Graeco-Roman mind. The historian was an analyst, without critical faculty to dis- tinguish myth and legend from sober fact, and so, to our great advantage, preserved for us the tales of shepherds as of equal value with the speeches of statesmen. Such was the Graeco-Roman world in the days of its crys- tallization, perfect as a crystal and dead as a crystal. There was in that world no place for the gods; Divus Caesar, the God of the Organization, was equal to the task of managing the organization, and the management of the organization was all that the situation called for. The Graeco-Roman civiliz- ation was unimaginative, uninspired, unoriginal. Its poets were dead, its philosophers were dead, its thinkers were dead, its gods were dead, and it lived on the imagination, the ra- tiocination, and the emotion that had come down to it from a greater and a living past. The household gods still received their libations, but the household itself was no longer sacred, the Pater-familias was a man-about-town and the Mater-familias a woman of pleas- ure. Hosts of slaves swarmed in and out of the houses, hardly known to and hardly knowing their masters. The old Italio-Greek gods were worshipped and laughed at in turn. The religion of the city was gone with the freedom of the city, and the gods of the cities were pensioners upon the bounty of Divus Caesar. These gods might be and were the official gods of the State, so long as they did not interfere directly or indirectly with the affairs of the State ; the worship of them THE WAYS OF THE GODS 161 was encouraged as necessary to the safety of the state, and if they could do nothing else, they could keep the people quiet. Gods from all the world came flocking to Rome to share in the benefits of Imperial protection and Imperial bounty. Mithra from Persia and Isis from Egypt were more popular than either Jupiter or Juno, the one, Mithra, with the sol- diers, and the other, with the women of fashion. Vulgarity was the keynote of the religion of the day. The proselyte of Mithra stood under a butchered bull and bathed himself in its blood. A devotee of Isis (a wealthy lady) was easily per- suaded to occupy the couch of the goddess, while in the dark- ness some lusty priest played, to her satisfaction, the part of the god Anubis. Love philters and charms, blest of Venus, were sold on the corners of the street; fakirs with drums preached salvation to gaping crowds ; gods were a cheap and a plenty ; one could buy a god for an as * and sell a god for an as on any day in the week in the cities of the Roman Empire. Jehovah, the God of the Bene-Israel, had fallen into the same state of degradation. The means he had devised to keep his name alive after the loss of his city had been his temporary undoing. As the God of the Book he was subject to the dangers of the book. He was liable to misinterpreta- tion, to misunderstanding, to the loss of personality and vit- ality. He was no longer a living god, but a written god. If one wanted to find Jehovah in those days of degradation, one did not seek him with Abraham in the defiles of Lebanon; nor wrestle with him in the night, as did Jacob at Jabbok; nor turn aside to see him, as Moses did at the burning bush ; one went, instead, to the synagogue, not to find Jehovah, but to hear tell of him ; not to listen to his voice, but to hear what some prophet of old had said about him. In those days there was no open vision. God was not a living person, he was a recorded memory. He was not a free god going before his people; he was a god bound hand and foot in the meshes of the law of his own making. Little laws and big laws held him fast. When one went to the syn- 1 A small Roman coin. 162 THE WAYS OF THE GODS agogue one did not even hear of God Jehovah, one only heard graybeard scribe wrangling with graybeard scribe as to which was the great commandment of the law. Jehovah was at the mercy of the lawyers who used him to exploit the people. Poor Jehovah ! what he had written he had written, and his own word was used against him. He was the god of the Jew, and no Gentile need apply. He was coming, accord- ing to the book, to put the Gentile in a pit and the Jew on a throne. The Gentile, hearing this, went away in a rage, and would have nothing to do with Jehovah. So it was with all the gods : fast bound to their past they could give no help to the present and no hope to the future. They had to stand by and see the people become the prey of Divus Caesar and his organization. After the death and deification of Augustus Caesar, Divus Caesar was incarnate in the person of Tiberius Claudius, the son of Nero and Livia, a world-weary, embittered man, whose life had been outraged from the moment of his conception to the day of his accession to imperial power. His mother was divorced from his father at the command of Augustus to become the wife of Augustus. Tiberius in his youth was hated by all the Julian family, into which by his mother's marriage he was incorporated; in his manhood was compelled to divorce his own beloved wife, Agrippina, and marry the Emperor's wanton daughter, Julia ; was exiled from Rome, finding in his exile release from sorrow; and, coming to the throne in middle age, found him- self the center of continual conspiracy. Forced to put men to death whom he would gladly have let live, in desperation he renounced the world, and committing the government to his freedman Sejanus, Tiberius retired to his villa at Capri, to practice (according to the libidinous gossip of Rome) the most shameful debaucheries; to brood (according to better authority) over the misery of life. Poor, great, beautiful, sorrowful, Tiberius Claudius Nero-Caesar, and Augustus, Imperator and God ! Never was there a god more miserable than this same Tiberius Claudius Nero. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 163 After him came the mad wretch Caligula; to be succeeded by the stupid Claudius, and after him the buffoon Nero. Thus that old world went dancing down the ways of death to the hell that was waiting for it. Insanity at the top and leprosy at the bottom ! It was a sick, mad world, with not a god in sight to help it. BOOK VI THE GOD CHRISTUS CHAPTER XXXII A New God Conies to Rome On the night of the 18th of July, in the year 64 A.D., a fire started in the wooden booth of the Circus Maximus in the City of Rome, which, after raging for over a week, left the greater part of the city in ashes and the mass of the people homeless and starving. The origin of this fire was by pop- ular rumor ascribed to the Emperor Nero. It was said that he had caused the city to be set on fire that he might ex- perience the sensations of Priam at the burning of Troy. Whether true or false, this rumor occasioned the Emperor distress and alarm. Egoist that he was, he could not help knowing that he was hated and despised as no man was ever before hated and despised. A matricide and an adulterer, he had offended the moral sense even of the corrupt society of the imperial city; a buffoon, taking to the stage and playing a part in the company of slaves, he had out- raged the dignity of the Empire ; scorned by the great, held in horror by the low, this last of the Julian Claudian family felt the chill of approaching doom. The fire in Rome, whether of his making or not, inflamed the people against him to a hotter indignation, and the saying went abroad that "Nero fiddled while Rome burned." To divert suspicion from himself, Nero accused a certain obscure sect of people, called "Christians," of having started the fire. Properly to punish these wretches, and at the same time to amuse the people, the Emperor Nero made a revei in his gardens, to which all Rome was made welcome, and he caused these the accused Christians to be covered with tar, tied to pillars, and burned as torches to light the revels. As he turned in and out among the torches, driving his chariots, 167 168 THE WAYS OF THE GODS he and all the people heard, rising above the roaring of the flames, a mad, glad cry from the lips of tortured dying men and women : "Christianus sum!" "I am a Christian !" Thus, did Emperor and people learn that night that a new god had come to Rome. This god was from the first most obnoxious to the rulers of the city. They despised him as a low-born god, and hated and feared him because he stirred up the dregs of the people to discontent and sedition. The Caesar could find no place in his Pantheon for this god, for none of the other gods would keep company with him, nor would he associate with them. They were the gods of the ruling leisure class, he was the god of the oppressed working class ; they were the gods of the past, he was the god of the future. Between this new god and the old gods there was an irrepressible conflict. They were the gods of the physical, he the god of the moral order, The followers of this god were the offscouring of the earth, broken slaves, thieves, and harlots, persons for whom the better classes had a loathing and a horror such as men have for vermin. This attitude of the educated rul- ing class toward this new god and his people, is expressed by Cornelius Tacitus, one of the keenest minds of his or any age. Writing in the reign of Trajan of the doings of Nero, for whom his hatred and horror were unbounded, in speaking of the great fire he says : "Nero fastened the guilt [of the fire] and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abomina- tions, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our pro- curators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous supersti- tion, thus checked for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their center and become popular. Accordingly an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then upon their THE WAYS OF THE GODS 169 information an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city as of hatred against man- kind. Covered with skins of beasts they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to flames and burnt to serve as nightly illumination, when day- light had expired. Nero offered his garden for the spectacle, and was ex- hibiting a show in the circus, while he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or stood aloft in a car. Hence, even for criminals who deserved extreme and exem- plary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty that they were being destroyed." So wrote the most acute mind of his generation of the god and the people of the coming age, who were to give their name to an era and transform the Roman world into their likeness. A warning to all writers of all ages not to be hasty in judgment nor to despise the lowest of the people. It is not strange that Tacitus and the men of his class should have so misjudged this god Christus and his religion. The origin of this god was obscure, and, from their point of view, despicable. He was a working-man and a Jew, a member of a degraded class and the offspring of a des- pised race. In fact, we ourselves, had we known of Christus no more than Tacitus knew, should never have thought of him as a god, but only, at the best, as a foolish man, one of that kind of men whom Napoleon despised and called ideologists, men who think to rule the world through the medium of ideas. If we had been of the ruling class we would have said of this man that he was not only foolish but wicked, a demagogue, an insane egoist, stirring up the people to hope for that which could never be ; deluding and deluded, thinking himself a god while he was in reality a criminal. 1 "Annals of Tacitus," A. F. Church, W. J. Brodribb: Macmillan & Co. ; London, 170 THE WAYS OF THE GODS There was nothing in the origin of this man or in his early history that gave the least indication that he would attain to the rank of the greater gods. He was the son of a carpenter, a native of the obscure town of Nazareth, in upper Galilee, a town out of which it was said nothing good could come. He never went, to our knowledge, out of that countryside in the which he was born, except to go down when he was twelve years old to the city of Jerusalem, as was the custom of his people, and again at the end of his life. He seems to have been without ambition to be other than he was and spent the early years of his manhood contentedly working at his trade as a carpenter. He secured his education at the school of the synagogue, as did the other Jewish boys in his village. During his youth and early manhood he did not give any promise of his future greatness. We can hardly conjecture what was going on in that soul that was later to flame out with the consuming fires of righteous anger, and give forth burning words that were, like brands blown by the winds, to carry the fire of this soul to the ends of the earth. This young man was known to his neighbors as Joshua ben Joseph. When he comes to the notice of history his father was, probably, dead, since no mention is made of Joseph in connection with the active life of his illustrious son, Joshua (or, as he came to be known to the English- speaking world, Jesus) was living unmarried with his mother, whose name was Miriam, or Mary, and his brothers and sisters in their home in 'Nazareth of Galilee, when an event occurred in his life that carried him out of his obscurity into his eternal fame, an event that has given to this Nazarene carpenter the rank of an immortal god. When he was about thirty years old there came a report to Nazareth of a certain Yohanan, or John, who was preach- ing in the Wilderness of Judea, proclaiming the approach of that kingdom of God, which was the hope and expectation of all the people of the Jews. This John seemed to those who heard him as one of the old prophets. Like Elijah the Tishbite, he came out of obscurity, to upbraid the wickedness THE WAYS OF THE GODS 171 of the rulers of his people. Herod the King, the princes, and the priests came under the lash of his scathing denunci- ation ; to the people he preached repentance and deliverance to come. Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and the region round about heard of the fame of this preacher in the Wilder- ness, and the people went out in crowds to hear him. He was the man of the hour. In an early and now forgotten history of Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth, we are told that Mary, the mother of Jesus, said to him and to his brothers: "Come, let us go and hear this preacher of whom every one is talking." Jesus said: "What does he preach?" Mary answered: "He preaches repentance from sin and righteousness toward God." Jesus turned back to his bench, saying: "Why should I go to hear him? I am not a sinner, that I should repent." And Mary and his brothers went their way. Then Jesus reflected and said to himself: It may be a sin for me not to go and hear this man. If this word is from God it will surely do me good, if not, it can do me no harm. Then Jesus made haste and followed his mother and his brothers and came to where John was preaching in the wilderness of Judea. 1 Upon what little hinges do the great doors of des- tiny turn ! How insignificant are beginnings ! A band of shepherds seek security on a hilltop by the Tiber, and there follows the Empire of Rome. Another band of shepherds faint in the Desert of Zin, and their cry for deliverance is the birthcry of an universal religion. A young man moved by compunction follows his mother and his brothers to listen to a preacher in the wilderness, and we have a new era. Who can tell to-day from what corner of the sky the little 1 The Gospel to the Hebrews. 172 cloud is rising that to-morrow will darken the whole heavens? Jesus, as he walked from Nazareth to the Wilderness of Judea, did not know that the road he was following would lead him to the death of a criminal and to the throne of a god. When he came into the presence of that preacher he heard words that stirred the depths of his soul as the tempest stirs the deeps of the sea. Great waves of thought and feeling swept over him and carried him away from his quiet moor- ings out into the stress and storm of a life that ended in his death on a cross. Between his baptism by John and his death on Calvary this young man had been revealed to him- self and the world as the greatest spiritual genius the race of men had ever known. So great was he that he seemed to himself and to those nearest him to be none other than the Christ, the Son of the Living God. CHAPTER XXXIII Jesus and the Resurrection When Paul was preaching in the Market Place of Athens, he seemed to those who heard him to be a "setter forth of strange gods," because he preached "Jesus and the Resur- rection." Paul was primarily the Apostle of the Resurrection. He did not know Jesus in the flesh. In all his writings he makes no reference to any incident in the earthly life of the Master ; what the Lord did and said as he walked and talked with his disciples in Galilee did not interest Paul; the career of Jesus began for him after his death. /\\. was the risen Lord that Paul preached ; it is the risen Lord who for twenty centuries has been worshipped as a God by the Christian church. If Christ be not risen, then we are told that all Christian faith is vain. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 173 It is the waning belief in the resurrection of Jesus as a fact in the physical universe that is bringing about the dis- solution of the Christian religion. It is impossible for a mind trained in the modern scientific method to accept the popular conception of the resurrection of Jesus. His appear- ances after his death and his bodily ascension into the sky are in such contradiction to physical law, so foreign to all human experience, that the modern mind refuses all consideration to these phenomena, phenomena that for the trained intelli- gence have no validity in the outward physical world of force and matter, belonging rather to the region of the psychic. v~~The resurrection of Jesus is not a problem in physics, it if 'is a problem in psychology. In undertaking the investigation of the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a problem in psychology, I am conscious of the difficulty, the danger, and the delicacy of my adventure. I am reopening that which, for the majority of men and women, is a closed question. Whether one be a believer or a disbeliever in the resurrection as an event in outward hu- man history, one is apt to think that one knows all that can be known in regard to it. Further comment is to the be- liever irreverent, to the disbeliever useless. The subject is so involved with religious emotions that all discussion is dangerous. The writer must proceed with great delicacy lest he offend the convictions and wound the sensibilities of his readers and so defeat the purpose of his writing. But in spite of the difficulty, the danger and the delicacy, the writer goes forward in the full assurance that by means of scientific psychology many, if not all, the phenomena of the resur- rection may be explained, its perplexities unraveled, and this vastly important event removed from its present isolation and given its place in the natural order of the universe. Before proceeding further with our enterprise, it is neces- sary for us to know that we are dealing with a resurrection and not with a resuscitation. The theory advanced by some that the phenomena of the resurrection can be accounted for on the supposition that Jesus was not dead when his body was taken down from the cross and placed in the tomb; that 174 THE WAYS OF THE GODS he was only in a swoon from which he revived and came forth from the sepulchre alive; that he retired to some secret place where he was visited from time to time by his disciples, who went forth from this living presence to preach the death, the resurrection, and the second coming of Jesus as the sav- ing power of a religion that converted a Western world. This theory substitutes a base for a divine miracle, and makes fraud the handmaid of truth. But the universe is not so ordered. So futile a cause could never produce such consequence. If Jesus had not died on the cross, his after life would have been an anti-climax, fruit- ful of no results. These a priori arguments are sustained by the fact that there is no evidence of any kind to uphold the theory of resuscitation. The creed of Christendom is divinely true in affirming that Jesus died and rose again from the dead. He was to the church a resurrected and not a resusci- tated personality. Having dismissed as without warrant, the supposition of a resuscitation, we must now ask ourselves what a resur- rection is and how it differs from a resuscitation. But when we ask the question: What is a resurrection? we are met by the almost overwhelming difficulty that, according to current belief, there never in all the experience of mankind has been but one resurrection from the dead. Of the bil- lions and billions of human beings who have lived and died, only one has come back again from the dead and showed himself alive to his friends. The resurrection of Jesus is unique. It is not to be compared to the supposed manifes- tations of departed souls by means of spiritual mediums. These manifestations, while they may indicate the soul's sur- vival of death, have no relation that we can see to human life. The resurrection of Jesus, as we shall learn, is one of the mightiest events of human history. It is the efficient cause of Christendom and all that Christendom means to mankind. The Greek word anastdsis, and the Latin word resurrectus mean "standing up," rising from the supine to the erect position ; as when a man gets out of his bed onto his feet THE WAYS OF THE GODS 175 and, in the fullness of resumed strength, stands up to face the issues of life. Resuscitation implies feebleness ; resur- rection, power. Bearing this meaning in mind, we proceed to inquire as to the mode of Jesus' resurrection, in what way he, after his death, rose again from the dead, and standing up, became more powerful in death than he had ever been in life. And this inquiry is purely historical, we cannot deal with it apart from the facts in the case. We must analyze the evidence, must follow the vast stream of Christian thought and feeling, in which the belief in the resurrection is carried, to its sources in the hills of antiquity. . CHAPTER XXXIV The Magdalene Tradition The earliest account of the resurrection (save one) that has come down to us is contained in a short narrative of the life of Jesus known to us as the Gospel according to Mark. In this account, we are told that three women, Mary Mag- dalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, went to the sepulchre of Jesus very early on the Sunday morning following his crucifixion and death, which occurred on Fri- day, to complete the ritual of anointing his body, which the haste of his burial had prevented on the day of his entomb- ment. When they come to the sepulchre they find, to their relief and their astonishment, that the great stone that blocks the door of the tomb is rolled away. Entering the tomb they find it empty of the body of Jesus, but they see a young man sitting on the right side clothed in a long white gar- ment, and they were affrighted. And the young man said unto them: 176 THE WAYS OF THE GODS "Be not affrighted. 'Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified ; he is risen ; he is not here : behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him as he said unto you.' And they went out quickly and fled from the sepulchre ; for they trembled and were amazed : neither said they anything to any man for they were afraid." And that is all. In the more ancient manuscripts the Gos- pel of Mark end with these words: xat ouSevt ouSev etxov e^o^oOvTO yap The last twelve verses of the Gospel as found in our Eng- lish version are not genuine. So this little pool of woman's fears and woman's tears is the apparent source of that mighty stream of religious thought, feeling, and action which we are exploring. This Gospel is by many years the earliest of the Gospel histories, and in it is the deposit of the popular thought and feeling of the newborn Christian community. Only one ac- count of the resurrection is earlier than this of Mark. As we follow the stream of tradition downward, we see, as Matthew Arnold says, "A legend growing under our eyes." The account of the resurrection in the Gospel of Matthew is based upon the story of Mark. The women go to the sepul- chre early Sunday morning; they see the angel, who repeats the words and the commands of the angel of Mark: "Go quickly and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead ; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee ; there shall ye see him : lo, I have told you." The legendary accretions of this Gospel tell of the earth- quake that rolls away the stone from the door of the sepul- chre ; of the Roman soldiers, keepers of the tomb, who flee in fright to the Pharisees with news of the resurrection and are bribed into silence ; this legend also has the women see Jesus himself in the garden, who repeats to them the command of the angel: "Go tell my brethren that they go into Galilee; THE WAYS OF THE GODS 177 there shall they see me." In obedience to this direction of the angel, Matthew tells us that the eleven apostles went into Galilee to a certain mountain which Jesus had appointed. There Jesus appeared to them, gave them general directions as to the conversion of the world and then disappeared. There was no formal ascension, only an appearance and a disap- pearance. Matthew's Gospel is of Hebraistic origin, and its purpose is to preserve the teachings rather than to tell the life of Jesus. When we pass from the Gospels of Mark and Matthew into the Gospel of Luke, we find ourselves in an entirely different region of thought and feeling. The Christian move- ment is slowly losing its purely Hebraistic character, it is in process of Hellenization. The writer of this Gospel is Grecian and a scholar. The introduction to the Gospel is in the purest Attic style, worthy of the age of Pericles. This writer is a poet of the first rank, and uses a poet's license freely in his composition ; he belongs to the second genera- tion of Christians and frankly bases his narrative not upon observation but upon hearsay. When this Gospel was written Christianity was already forgetting its Galilean origin ; its home was Jerusalem, from whence it was going forth to the conquest of the world. Luke's account of the resurrection is controlled by the Jeru- salem tradition. He follows the garden story of Mark and Matthew. But the angel, in his account, does not give the command to the women to go and tell the disciples to go into Galilee, where they shall see the Lord ; but he bases the resurrection on a saying of Jesus made in Galilee. Speak- ing of Jesus the angel says : "He is not here, he is risen ; re- member how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, saying the Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and slain, and the third day rise again, and they remembered the words." \ It is evident that we have here not the words of the angel but the afterthought of the church. In Luke's account the women do not see Jesus in the garden, they see only the angels, of which there are two. 178 THE WAYS OF THE GODS They hurry from the tomb to the city and tell the assembled disciples what they have seen and heard. The disciples give no credence to the words of the women; only Peter goes to the sepulchre and sees the empty tomb. In the afternoon of that day Jesus falls in with certain disciples, who are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and talks with them about his own death, explaining its signifi- cance. These disciples do not recognize him until he makes himself known to them in the breaking of bread. Having made himself known he vanishes. At this the disciples rise up and make haste and return to Jerusalem, where they find their fellow-disciples assembled in a certain room, in a wild state of excitement. As they enter the room, the disciples from Emmaus are greeted with a cry to which particular at- tention should be given, because in this cry is an important clue to the mysteries we are probing. As the disciples from Emmaus enter the room in Jerusalem, they are greeted with the words: "The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon." Almost immediately upon the arrival of the disciples from Emmaus, while the doors are shut in the room where they are gathered together, Jesus himself appears in the midst, eats fish, and submits to handling to prove that he is alive, preaches to them of his death and resurrection, commands them to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and then he takes them all out as far as Bethany, where, in their sight, he formally ascends into the heavens. The whole transaction transpires in Jerusalem and its vicinity, and the formal ascension apparently takes place on the evening of the day of the resurrection. In the Gospel of John, the Hellenizing tendencies which we discovered in Luke have transformed to a great degree the character and mission of Jesus. He is no longer so much the Messiah of Jewish expectation as he is the Logos of Grecian speculation. This Gospel is of low historical value. It is not so much a history of the life of Jesus as it is an interpretation of his character and mission. The book was written not earlier than the second decade of the second THE WAYS OF THE GODS 179 century and some scholars assert that it belongs to the fourth decade of that century. The writer's conception of Jesus is in startling contrast with that of Mark, Matthew, and Luke. His Jesus is more a Greek, or rather an Ori- ental, philosopher than he is a Hebrew prophet. In its account of the resurrection, John's Gospel follows closely that of Luke. Mary Magdalene goes alone to the garden, sees the angel who tells her of the resurrection. She hurries away and tells Peter and John, who, at her word, run together to the sepulchre. John outruns Peter, but does not go in. Peter comes up and goes in and sees the linen clothes of the dead lying in the sepulchre. Meantime Mary Magdalene has seen Jesus himself in the garden. That same evening, when the disciples are gathered to- gether in a certain room, when the doors are shut, Jesus sud- denly appears, breathes on them, saying: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them ; whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained." And then he disappeared. A week later he reappears under the same conditions, sub- mits to the handling of Thomas, and disappears once more. There is no formal ascension. The Twenty-first Chapter of John, which is of doubtful authenticity, insomuch that it is rejected by some textual critics and bracketed by all, gives an account of a belated appearance of Jesus to his disciples at Lake Gennesaret in Galilee, where the Lord makes himself known by a miracu- lous draught of fishes. But this is so clearly a reminiscence of the account of this miracle in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, who place it early in the Galilean ministry, that this story of John is without historical value. When we sum up the testimony to the resurrection as given us in the Gospels, we find that all the appearances of Jesus recorded by Mark occur in Galilee. In Matthew the women see Jesus in the garden. In Luke all these appear- ances are in Jerusalem, in John the main appearances are in 180 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Jerusalem, with a belated, unhistorical appearance in Galilee. Only in Luke is there a formal ascension. In all of the accounts, except Matthew, special mention is made of Peter. And in all the accounts, without exception, Mary Magdalene is the first to see the risen Lord. It is this fact which gave rise to the celebrated passage in Kenan's "Origins of Christianity." This writer says: "For the historian the life of Jesus ends with his death. But so deep was the impression which he made upon the hearts of his disciples and upon some devout women that for them he was for several days alive and consoling Whether the body of Jesus was taken from the tomb, whether excited religious emotion always credulous, created the evi- dence to sustain the resurrection? this for want of peremp- tory evidence we shall never know, but we can confidently affirm that in this transaction Mary Magdalene had the prin- cipal part. Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of an hallucinated woman gave to the world a resurrected God." As we read these words of the French savant we are un- easy in our minds ; nor can we rest content with the saying of Matthew Arnold, which is partly true, that we see a legend growing under our eyes, or as we might more poetically ex- press it, we are present at the blooming of a religious Mythos with its promise of a new seedtime and harvest. We can- not stop our investigation with this easy solution. We can- not think that the greatest of realities had its origin in the vaguest of unrealities. We have not yet solved our prob- lem. We have not yet accounted for the appearance in Gali- lee, nor for the Petrine tradition. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 181 CHAPTER XXXV The Petrine Tradition When we pass from the Gospels to the Epistles we are not going forward but backward in time. We are reascending the hills of antiquity, where we shall discover another well- spring of thought and feeling, the source of a tradition distinct and different from that which we have already examined, which at first obscure and uncertain, gradually reveals itself as the great river of Christian doctrine and discipline, to which the stream issuing from the sepulchre at Jerusalem is only a tributary. The Gospels are not the earliest written records of Chris- tian history. This place of honor is occupied by the letters of Paul to the various churches he founded. Of these letters the first Epistle to the Corinthians is most important to our present investigation. In that letter Paul gives an account of the resurrection which antedates that of Mark by at least twenty years. Paul makes the resurrection the sine qua non of Christianity. No resurrection, no Christianity. If Christ is not risen, then our faith is vain. It is to be supposed, there- fore, that Paul would buttress this necessary doctrine with every testimony, every argument that could be brought to its support. But, strange to say, Paul did not know, or did not value, the story of the women who went to the tomb on the morning of the resurrection. Paul was an educated man, trained to discriminate between the important and the unimportant, and his account of the resurrection has all the conciseness and clearness of a scien- tific formula. This formula is as follows-. Moreover, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand; by which also ye are saved; if ye hold fast the word which I preached unto you, except ye believe in vain, for I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scripture ; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the Scriptures: And that 182 THE WAYS OF THE GODS he was seen of Cephus, then of the twelve; After that he was seen of about five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain until this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that he was seen of James; then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as to one born out of due time. I This account of the resurrection Paul received from the apostles in Jerusalem. It expresses the mind of the primi- tive church; and as we see, the primal source of the belief in the resurrection was not Mary Magdalene but Cephus, which is Aramaic for Peter. We have further and conclusive evidence of the mind of the church in this matter in a saying in the Gospel of Luke, to which our attention was called when we examined that document, when the disciples from Emmaus came to the dis- ciples in Jerusalem on the afternoon of resurrection day, we remember, that according to Luke, they from Emmaus were greeted by those in Jerusalem with the cry "The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon." There could not be stronger evidence that in the mind of the church Peter, not Mary Magdalene, was the first to see the risen Lord. And it is this fact which has given Peter the place which he holds in Christian history. CHAPTER XXXVI The Character of Peter We must now, in the course of our investigation, with- draw our attention from Mary Magdalene, and even from Jesus himself, and focus our thought upon Peter; for in the character of Peter and in his relation to Jesus lie the solu- tion of our problem. Peter was a Galilean peasant, a fisherman by occupation ; he was a man of simple mind and ardent feeling; he was a THE WAYS OF THE GODS 183 passionate patriot ; he hated the Roman dominion, and longed for its overthrow. Galilee in those days was seething with discontent and sedition, and the heart of Peter was in unison with the heart of his people. He fed his heart on the hope and expectation of the coming of the Messiah, who would put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and meek, who would raise up the tabernacle of David that was fallen down and restore the Kingdom of Israel. The preaching of John the Baptist had stirred all Jewry, and without doubt Peter came under the power of this prophet. He was longing for the moment of action to come. He needed only a leader to give himself unqualifiedly to the cause of the redemption of Israel. And the leader came, and in Peter found a man instinct with the genius of the follower. Such following is necessary to all leadership. The genius of the leader is not more rare than the genius of the follower. The follower must be a man without initiative, without personal ambition. He must be the alter ego of his leader. He must divine his leader's mind, think his leader's thoughts, execute his leader's de- signs. Such followers are second only to their leaders in im- portance, without them the leader is powerless to accom- plish. Napoleon found such a follower in Berthier, Grant in Rawlins, Jesus in Peter. When Peter attached himself to Jesus, he was in the full prime of his manhood. The follower was years older than the Master, and he came to have for him that unselfish af- fection which the elder has for the younger. Peter's love for Jesus was like the love of Jonathan for David ; "passing the love of women," it had all the ardor of the devotion of Mar- shall Ney for Bonaparte. It is clear, from all accounts, that from the very first Peter ranked next to Jesus in the company that followed the Master in the Galilean period. His name always comes first in any list of Jesus' following, and it has maintained its primacy to the present hour. When Jesus entered upon his public ministry after his baptism by John, he did nothing else but continue the work of his forerunner. He took up the cry of the Baptist: "Re- 184 THE WAYS OF THE GODS pent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand !" This cry was full of meaning to Jewish ears; it meant nothing less than the coming of the Messiah, who in the name and power of Jehovah, the Jewish God, should break the power of the Gentiles and give to Israel freedom and dominion in the earth. But while the message of John and Jesus was the same, their method of delivering it was widely different. John was primarily a preacher, Jesus was essentially a teacher. John was a man of emotion, Jesus a man of thought; John was a man of the desert, Jesus a man of the town and the countryside; John proclaimed the kingdom of God, Jesus ex- plained it; John had hearers, Jesus had scholars; John preached to a congregation, Jesus taught a school. And of these scholars of Jesus, Peter was the most eager. He aban- doned his ordinary way of living, he left his boats and nets on the lakeside and became a peripatetic pupil of a peripat- etic teacher. His untutored mind was as wax to receive the teachings of the Master. The world of the mind of Jesus was reproduced in the mind of Peter. Peter's want of or- iginality made his nature capacious to store the original thinking of Jesus. CHAPTER XXXVII Peter Proclaimed Jesus Messiah As far as we can gather from the evidence at hand, we conclude that toward the end of its second year the mission of Jesus came to a crisis. His teaching had alienated the rulers and wearied the people. So far as he was concerned the promised kingdom of God was degenerating into another rabbinical school. He was to outward seeming only an- other scribe squabbling with the scribes of the older schools. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 185 His popularity was waning, his spirit failing. Jesus con- ceived of the kingdom of God in terms of righteousness and holiness. He was that saddest of all men, the preacher of ab- solute truth in a relative world. Before the kingdom of God that he preached could come, men must be just and women pure. The preaching of Jesus was revolutionary. He denied the right of property and the lawfulness of government. He seemed to expect that at his preaching the rich would abandon their wealth and the rulers their seats of authority. But all his preaching accomplished was the irritation of the possess- ing classes, the discontent of the multitude. All this teach- ing and preaching seemed to come to nothing. The funda- mentals of the kingdom had been explained and reexplained, but no superstructure had risen on this foundation. The people would not respond to the teaching. In his impa- tience Jesus cried : "O, evil and adulterous generation, how long shall I be with you, how long shall I suffer you?" This impatience of the Master communicated itself to his following; they had had enough of talk, they wanted action. They knew what the coming kingdom ought to be ; now let the coming kingdom come. In this time of hesitation and distress Jesus led his dis- ciples to the borders of the land of Israel. He came to Caesarea-Phillipi, and his face was toward the west. He had but to go forward and leave behind him the hostility of the rulers and the indifference of the people. But he would also leave behind the hope and expectation of the Jews ; he would abandon the kingdom of God ; his lever would be without fulcrum, and he not a prophet of God but only a teacher of wisdom. And of teachers of wisdom there were a plenty in the world. At this critical moment in the history of Jesus and of religion Peter interposed, saved the leadership of Jesus from ruin, and made possible for Jesus that career that has placed him at the right hand of God and given him the worship of the most advanced races of mankind. Peter proclaimed the Messiahship of Jesus. 186 THE WAYS OP THE GODS It is not clear from the evidence whether Jesus from the first thought of himself as the king of the kingdom that he preached. There is an uncertainty, a fluctuation in his thought, which makes it difficult to determine just what his attitude toward the Messiahship was. In his early teaching he seems to think of the kingdom of God as an inward prin- ciple rather than as an outward institution. The children of the kingdom were the poor in spirit, the meek, those thirst- ing for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peace makers, the persecuted. It was not "lo, here, nor lo, there, for the kingdom of God was within." It was not an outward polity, it was an inward state. But this quiet piet- ism could only be personal ; it could not be social ; it could not be organic. It might be the kingdom of God; it could never be the kingdom of David. It might save the human soul; it could not deliver the people of Israel. It is the tragedy of the life of Jesus that he had to reconcile these antagonistic conceptions. He knew in his soul that he was the child of God; but was he the king of the Jews? It was at Caesarea-Phillipi that Jesus paused to take account of himself. Who was he? what was he? He turned in his sore perplexity to his followers and asked them : "Whom do men say that I am?" They answered : "Some say you are John the Baptist, and some that you are one of the old prophets." Still more anxiously Jesus asks : "But whom do ye say that I am?" Peter answered at once: "Thou art the Christ of God." Magnificent words! giving Jesus the spiritual leadership of the world, and Peter a power second only to that of his Master. Jesus accepted the proclamation of Peter as the inspira- tion of God. "Blessed art thou, Simon bar Jonah !" he cried, "Flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto thee, but my Father in heaven." THE WAYS OF THE GODS 187 From this moment all hesitation ceases, Jesus adopts the current conception of the Messiahship. His mission is not to the Gentiles but the Jews. He is to restore the kingdom to Israel. His work lies not out yonder in the world,* he must set his face toward Jerusalem. David's throne must be set up in David's city. Under this new impulse Jesus loses his simplicity. He is moody; he walks apart from his following; they dare not speak to him. They have proclaimed him their king; they fall naturally into the rank of subjects. The word spreads throughout Galilee that the Messiah has come, and is on his way to Jerusalem. The whole country- side is aflame with excitement; multitudes go before and follow after, crying: "Hosannah in the highest! Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord !" And Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph as the Messiah of God. CHAPTER XXXVIII Peter Denies Jesus And then nothing happens. Jesus falls back into his old method of teaching. Instead of proclaiming the kingdom and calling the people to arms, he is telling stories in the temple ; he is rousing the extreme anger of the priests and the scribes by his fierce denunciation of their vices ; he is disappointing the people by his inaction, and the inevitable end comes. The priests make ready to seize him ; the people forsake him. Jesus makes no effort to oppose his enemies, no effort to escape them. He comprehends now to the full his mis- sion : he is not to fight for the kingdom but to die for it. His earlier conception of the kingdom was the true one. The kingdom of God is within him. He cannot establish it by outward violence, only by inward obedience. 188 THE WAYS OF THE GODS This action of the Master is bewildering to his following, especially to Peter. Peter had come down to fight for the kingdom; he had bought a sword. Had Jesus given the word, Peter had been the first to raise the war-cry, "The sword of the Lord and Gideon !" and to have bathed his sword in the blood of the Gentiles. The Jewish authorities were not wrong in fearing at that time an uprising of the people. Had Jesus made the sign, Peter would have led the Galileans in an effort to overthrow the Roman power and reestablish the kingdom of Israel. But Jesus did not speak the word. Without an effort at defense or escape, he submitted to seizure. He was arrested, condemned, and executed. This unexpected turn of events changed the courage of Peter into panic fear. Instead of the excitement of the con- flict, he was paralyzed by the cold, benumbing, process of the law. He followed Jesus to the Hall of Annas, and there, when he was accused of being one of his company, he denied his leader, then denied him again and again. In an agony of shame and terror Peter turned and fled into the darkness, in the which we lose sight of him until the Sunday afternoon of the day of resurrection. From indications that we find in the narrative, from our knowledge of the character of Peter and of human nature in general, we may safely conclude that Peter hid himself in the crowd and followed Jesus to the Pretorium and to Cal- vary. He saw the scourging and the crowning with thorns, he heard the death sentence; he saw the nailing of the hands and the feet, he watched from the third to the ninth hour ; he heard the death-cry from the cross, and then in the des- peration of despair he turned and fled away into his own country, Galilee. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 189 CHAPTER XXXIX Peter's Flight in Despair The life of Peter, from the time that he fled from the cross until his reappearance among the brethren in Jerusalem on the afternoon of the day of resurrection, has an importance in the religious life of mankind that can hardly be measured. During those wonderful hours that event transpired which made Peter the leader of the greatest religious movement in history. In reconstructing the life of Peter during this period, we shall have to make use of such hints as we can find in the records, which are few, assisted by our knowledge of the human soul and its workings under given conditions. The first impulse of Peter when assured of the death of Jesus was to escape from the horrors of his position and find refuge in his own country, Galilee. In obedience to this impulse he took the direct route homeward through Samaria. His actions were not those of a man who was conscious of what he was doing, but rather of one who was carried away by the subconscious forces within him. The soul of Peter throughout that journey homeward was the scene of a terrific psychic storm. Everything upon which his life rested was swept away. He had loved Jesus as one man seldom loves another, and Jesus was dead. No mother could mourn her first-born more despairingly than Peter mourned the loss of the youth whom his heart cherished. Not only had he been bereaved of his friend, he had also lost his leader. Peter had cast in his personal and political for- tunes with Jesus. He had forsaken father and mother, wife and children, his ways of livelihood, that he might further the plans of his Master, and now all those plans had come to naught ! It was not some little thing that he expected of Jesus ; it was nothing less than the restoration of the king- dom of Israel, the deliverance of his country from the hated rule of the Gentile. And now this hope for the liberty of his people was blasted as by a stroke from heaven. Peter had proclaimed Jesus Messiah, he had made him, as it were, God 190 THE WAYS OF THE GODS in the earth, and this God had died the vile death of the criminal slave. Could wreck of faith and hope be more com- plete? From the devastated heart of Peter went up the desolating cry "There is no God, there is no Saviour!" But beside this death of his friend, this blasting of his hopes, this dishonor of his God, a calamity had come upon Peter which mortal man seldom survives. In the wreck and ruin of the storm he had lost his own soul ; in the critical moment of his life his own spirit had failed him. In that moment Peter had basely denied his friend, had left his leader in the lurch, had lost his hold on God. He who thought himself brave had turned craven ; he had trembled at the word of a maid ; he had hid himself in a crowd that had blasphemed his Lord ! All the horrors of that horrible time were swallowed up in the overwhelming horror that Peter had denied Jesus, denied him again and again, denied him with an oath. And this action was beyond repair. Jesus was dead and could never know the shame, the sorrow, the bitter repentance of his recreant friend. So this bereaved, disappointed, abased man went on and on through the darkness, losing in his sorrow and remorse all sense of fatigue, and the early morning light found him in the defiles of Gilboa, thirty miles and more from the scene of his disaster. As he came over the shoulder of the moun- tain he saw his own country, Galilee, lying quiet under the dawning. He saw Mount Carmel and Lake Gennasaret ; he saw Capernaum and Bethsaida. That land which was sacred to the eyes of all Israel, the land of Elijah and Elisha, the land in which he had walked and talked with Jesus, was so peaceful in the morning light that the horrors from which Peter had fled seemed to him but a nightmare from which he had awakened to find himself safe in his own country. This peace of nature hushed the storm in the soul of Peter. He listened, and he heard the tinkling of the sheep bells; he looked, and he saw the shepherds driving their flocks to pasture. He went to some shepherd's hut, begged a morsel of bread and some goat's milk, to break his fast, and lay down on the ground and slept the deep sleep of exhaustion. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 191 CHAPTER XL Peter's Return in Joy When Peter came to himself, the sun was past meridian. He came out of his sleep with a bound and looked about, amazed to find himself in Galilee. And then he remembered yesterday. What was he doing here in his own country, while Jesus lay dead in Jerusalem? Why was he in hiding while his brethren were in danger of their lives? His polt- roonery roused in Peter a great anger against himself. He shook himself fiercely, turned about, and set his feet in the way by the which he had come, to return to Jerusalem. On his return journey the soul of Peter was calm with the calmness of settled grief; his heart revived; he lived over again his life with Jesus. Every word that had fallen from the lips of the Master came into his remembrance with new and fuller meaning; every act of the Master gained new significance. He began to see a divine purpose in the death of Jesus. Jesus could not be a man of violence, he could not sow the tares of hatred in the world. His death was sacrificial ; it was a testimony to the truth ; an offering to God for the sins of the world. As Peter thought on these things his heart went out in one longing desire to see Jesus again. And he saw him. Before him, his eyes accustomed to the darkness, the Mas- ter walked, going toward Jerusalem. The heart of Peter stood still, he dared not cry out, he dared not rush forward and lay hold of the hand of the Lord ; but he followed after as the Master walked on before. Then Peter spake, and the Master listened. He poured out all his sorrow and remorse, all his hopes and fears in the Master's hearing, and the Master did not repulse him. Hour after hour these two went on in the way toward Jerusalem, the Master going before, and Peter following after. When the morning began to break, they had come to the borders 192 THE WAYS OF THE GODS of the land of Judah, and Peter paused to rest and the Master also stool still, his form dimly fading in the growing light. Then Peter turned about and he saw the figure receding in the distance, as if Jesus were going back into Galilee. And Peter made haste, flying on the wings of joy, and came, breathless, into the company of the disciples in Jerusalem, bringing the glad tidings that Jesus had risen from the dead, that he had walked and talked with him through the night, and that now Jesus had gone back into Galilee. CHAPTER XLI Psychic Projection The process by which Peter had seen Jesus is known to psychology as psychic projection. In times of cerebral ex- citement, when the objective mind is in abeyance, the psychic force projects the images of the subjective mind on the lenses of the eye, and the man sees what he thinks. He expresses his thought to himself, not in words but in visions. This ex- pressing of thought in vision is a reversion to primitive habit. Ages and ages before man had evolved language and could think in words he thought in vision. He saw with his mind's eye what his mind conceived. That hard and fast boundary between the outward and the inward, between the physical and the psychic, which limits the thinking of the modern educated man, did not hold in the primitive age ; it does not hold now with children nor with any one in sleep or in de- lirium. In our sleep, when our evolved objective mind is quiescent, we revert to primitive custom and think in visions. Our vision is purely psychic, having no relation at the time with our physical senses. The grown-up educated man has become so habituated to think in words that he has largely lost the power to think in visions. The artist retains that THE WAYS OF THE GODS 193 power : the painter sees with the inward eye ; the musician hears with the inward ear, the deaf Beethoven heard in his soul his own divine harmonies. The mass of early Christians were primitive people. Peter's power of verbal expression was most meager. It was per- fectly natural for him to think in visions, and when he came to the little band of brethren he found them of the same mind with himself. He had but to suggest and they would follow his suggestion. They were apt subjects for psychical con- tagion. We can readily understand that Peter took the eleven apostles and hastened with them back into Galilee. And there at a certain mountain they all saw Jesus. Then Jesus began to appear first to one and then to another, until the fact of his resurrection crystallized into a belief, to be later formulated into a doctrine. It is psychologically significant that in the manifestation of Jesus to Paul, Paul did not see Jesus, he only heard him. Paul was an educated man, his power to think in vision was limited. Paul had never seen Jesus in the flesh, hence he could not see him in vision, for the subjective mind can only project images which have been impressed upon it by the senses. Psychic projection is recurrent. The last appearance of Jesus to Peter, Christian tradition tells us, occurred just be- fore Peter's death. The Apostle was in Rome ; a persecution was raging; his fellow-Christians besought him to leave the city; he consented, and as he went out of the gate he saw Jesus coming in. Peter said to Jesus: "Dot-nine, quo vadis?" (Lord, whither goest thou?) "To be crucified in thy room," was the answer, and Peter turned about and went back into the city and was crucified, at his own request, with his head downward. The appearance of Jesus to Mary in the garden was due to the well-established fact that at the hour of death and for some limited time afterward the soul departing has the power to make its presence known to receptive spirits ; the apparitions of the dying or dead to the living are tha commonplaces of 194 THE WAYS OF THE GODS psychical research. Myers, in "Human Personality," gives in- stance after instance of such apparitions. They are too many and too well authenticated to be put down as mere mistakes or frauds. That the apostles and the primitive church did not attach much importance to these appearances to Mary we have al- ready learned ; but they were seized upon by the Christian imagination, and became the fruitful source of myth and leg- end. The doctrine and the discipline of the church have their origin in the vision of Peter. The worship and the art of the church are derived from the vision of Mary. These two streams of tradition have come down side by side, each main- taining its distinct character, each watering a different region of Christian thought and feeling. CHAPTER XLII The Resurrection of the Dead The easy acceptance of the witness of Peter and Mary to the resurrection of Jesus arises from the fact that this event was in accord with the mode of thought prevailing at the time. Our conception of the universe was not the concep- tion of Peter's generation. Our universe, with its infinite space, its myriad suns, its bewildering worlds, its eternal en- durance, had no place in their thoughts. Their universe was limited by their knowledge. The earth, the home of living men, was the center of this universe; in the sky the gods had their thrones ; in the earth the dead rested. The dead of the ancient world were not nearly so dead as are the dead of the modern world. Our dead are huddled away in cemeteries and are soon forgotten. The ancient dead, after the evolution of the family, never lost their place in the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 195 family circle. Their existence continued in the tomb, they were the guardians of the family life and the family estate. At times the dead came out of the tomb to warn the living. Psychic projection, by means of which the dead were seen by the living, was of constant occurrence in the primitive world. And this gave rise to a belief in a resurrection of the dead, when all that were in their graves should come forth and stand up once more on the earth. When Peter saw Jesus he said : "This is the resurrection. He who was dead has risen, he has overcome death." By those who have little experience in psychic phenomena, who do not live in the psychic world, who are unacquainted with its laws, to whom the physical only is real, it will be objected that the writer has based the mighty event of the resurrection on a delusion. Peter was deluded when he thought he saw Jesus walking before him on the way to Jerusalem, and the delusion of Peter has been the abiding delusion of the Christian Church. The answer to this objection is that Peter, when he saw Jesus, was under the power not of a delusion but of an illu- sion. A delusion is the negation of truth ; an illusion is truth seen in relation. Throughout our lives we are under the power of an illusion. When in the morning we say : "The sun is rising," when in the evening we say : "The sun has set," we are under illusion. From science we learn that the sun, as a matter of fact, never rises and never sets, that it is we who rise and set as our revolving earth carries us above and below the line of the sun's light. Yet we do not err when we say the sun rises and sets ; we only express a re- lative truth. For us the sun does rise and set, and it al- ways will so long as man is on the earth and the sun is in the heavens. Likewise, Peter, when he saw Jesus walking before him on the way to Jerusalem, was under the power not of a delusion but of an illusion. Jesus was, indeed, not walking in a physi- cal body in the physical world ; but he was walking in a psychical body through the psychical world. He had risen 196 THE WAYS OF THE GODS from the dead to stand erect in the heart of Peter to wield a power mightier than physical man can exercise. Jesus' walk with Peter did not end at Jerusalem. Those two went together until they came to Rome, and there Peter, in the name and power of Jesus, laid the foundations of a new dominion which, built on the ruins of the empire of the Caesars, saved Europe from utter anarchy, preserved ancient learning, and for ten centuries, in the name of Christ, ruled the Western world in the interests of morality, religion, and personal salvation. It was as Jesus said : Men could kill the body, they could not kill the soul of Jesus. We have a like instance of resurrection in the case of Caesar. Brutus, Cassius, and their crew thought they had killed Caesar at the foot of Pompey's pillar, and so they had killed the body of Caesar, but they could not kill the soul of Caesar. The sun had not set that day before the soul of Caesar rose up and went marching through the streets of Rome, followed by an army of men with torches in their hands to burn the houses of those murderers over their heads, and to drive them from the city never to return. The soul of Caesar had risen from the dead to stand up in the psychic life of Rome, to carry to its issue the revolution that the genius of Caesar had inaugurated. He followed up the victories of Pharsalus and Thapsus with the victories of Phillipi and Actium, and made the name of Caesar synony- mous with efficient government for all time. Whenever a new emperor came to the throne, the people worshipped and said : "It is Caesar come again." We have had in our own history a remarkable example of psychic resurrection. At the outbreak of the Civil War it was declared by Lincoln and others that the Federal authorities had no intention to wage war against slavery ; the purpose of the war was not to destroy slavery but to preserve the Union. But both North and South had to reckon with a grim old warrior, whom the slave power a few months be- fore had hanged on Charlestown Green, who rose up from the dead to take moral leadership of the hosts of freedom. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 197 A Massachusetts regiment on the way to the front marched through Washington singing the song of John Brown, a song of few words and simple music. Nobody had written the words, nobody had composed the music. They were nothing less than the words and music of rugged old John Brown himself, who had died to bring this war to pass, who now rose from the dead and inspired with his purpose the hearts of the soldiers who sang this song as they went on to battle ; and in the sound of it was the doom of slavery. John Brown's soul could have no peace until slavery was des- troyed. The great Lincoln himself was obedient to the spirit of Brown and shares with Brown the greatness and glory of that period. We have now arrived at the point where we can define a resurrected person as one who, having lived and died physi- cally for truth and righteousness, rises psychically from the dead and stands up in the power of his resurrection in the hearts of men, to inspire them with nobler thoughts, to in- cite them to braver actions. Such was the resurrection of Jesus. Its perplexities arise from the necessary confusion of psychic with physical phe- nomena on the part of the primitive church, and its present power is restrained by the crystallization of psychic phe- nomena as physical by the creed of the later church. Consid- ered as a physical phenomenon, the resurrection of Jesus is not only improbable, it is impossible, it is absurd, it is grotesque. Considered as a psychic phenomenon, the resur- rection of Jesus falls into the natural order of the universe. What we call death is not the destruction, it is the release of psychic force. Personality is persistent and diffusive. What Emerson calls the "Oversoul" is simply the accumulated liv- ing force of all-souls. The psychic force of Jesus, which is his personality and which was not subject to death, rose up in the heart of Peter, and Peter brought him to Rome. 198 THE WAYS OF THE GODS CHAPTER XLIII Christus, The War God of the Spiritual Israel After his conversion and baptism by John, followed by a brief retirement in the wilderness, Jesus entered upon a career of conquest than which there has been none like it in all the history of the world. In comparison with the con- quests of Jesus the conquests of Caesar, both in time and space, are of the second order. Caesar laid the foundations of an empire that lasted for five hundred years. Around Jesus crystallized a government that endured for ten cen- turies as the ruling power of the Western world, and though long since betrayed from within it has resisted the assaults of time for ten centuries more. Caesar arrested the decay of an old and dying civilization. Jesus gave birth to a new and expanding civilization which is called after his name. This war of conquest which was inaugurated by Jesus ben Joseph in the days of his flesh was carried to a successful issue by Christus, the son of Jehovah, the War God of the spiritual Israel. In the conduct of this warfare, the son was like the father, fierce as the desert, implacable as the mountain. He declared war against the enemies of his people from genera- tion to generation. The purpose of this warfare was nothing less than the de- struction of one world and the creation of another. After his sojourn in the desert, Jesus returned to his own city of Nazareth in Galilee. On the Sabbath he went to the syna- gogue, and the ruler of the synagogue asked him to read a scripture for the day. The young man was given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. And he opened the book and found the place where it was written : The Spirit of the Lord is upon me Because he anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. He hath sent me to proclaim release to the captives ; And the recovering of sight to the blind; To set at liberty them that are bruised, To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 199 And He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down ; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began to say unto them: "To-day hath this scripture been ful- filled in your ears." And all bear him witness and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said: "Is not this Joseph's son?" And Jesus went on to say: "But I tell you of a truth many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah when the heavens were shut up for three years and six months when great famine was throughout all the land, but unto none of them was Elijah sent save unto Serepta, a City of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha, the prophet, and none of them were cleansed save Naaman, the Syrian." And all they in the synagogue when they heard these things were filled with wrath. And rose up and thrust him out of the City and led him unto the brow of the hill, whereon their City was built, that they might cast him down headlong. But, he, passing through them, went his way. In this bit of history we have the account of the opening engagement of a warfare that filled the world with its tumult for three hundred years. As we read these words we can see in them nothing that should have roused the wrath of the people and put the speaker in danger of his life. They seem to us innocuous words. We have heard them a thousand times and they have never stirred the pulses of our hearts. That is, however, because we hear the words and do not un- derstand the thought behind the words. When Bonaparte took command of the Army of Italy, which was the beginning of his astounding career, he issued a proclamation to his army. He said : "Soldiers, you are hungry and ragged and without pay. The government owes you much, but can do nothing for you. Your patience, your courage, do you honor but give you no glory, no advantage. I will lead you into the most fertile plains of the world. There you will find great towns, rich provinces. There you will find honor, glory, and riches. Soldiers of Italy, will you be wanting in courage?" Professor Seeley tells us that in this proclamation of the young Corsican was the spirit and the explanation of the history of Europe for the next twenty years. 200 THE WAYS OF THE GODS So I find in the sermon of Jesus, in the synagogue of Nazareth, the spirit and the history of the world for the next ten centuries. By that proclamation he called the poor of the earth to engage in an implacable warfare to abolish their poverty, he called the slaves of the earth to an irrepressible conflict for freedom, he stirred the heart of the prisoner to break the bars of his prison house, he proclaimed to the landless their right to take possession of the land, to the debtor he promised deliverance from and to the creditor the loss of the debt. And as if this were not enough, this young man had the audacity to strike a blow at the precious spe- cial privilege of the Jew to call himself, and to be, the chosen and only people of the God, Jehovah. Surely here was cause enough for terror and wrath. This young man said captives taken in war must not be enslaved by their captors. The slave was the equal of his master and entitled to the freedom of his master. What a horrible doc- trine! How subversive of society! Who would go to war if he could not make slaves of the vanquished? W T as this young man wiser than Moses who had given the captive women and children as slaves to the victors? Over the hill with such a fellow ; he is not fit to live ! He is going to unchain our prisoners in our dungeons and turn those criminals loose to prey upon our goods and endanger our lives. Away with him to the dungeon, to consort with the wretches whom he loves ! He proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord. He would revive that obsolete, impractical law of Moses, which cancels all debts and redistributes all land once every fifty years. Moses' law was bad enough, but this insane fellow tells us that he is not going to do this fool thing once every fifty years, but once every day. Did you ever hear anything so crazy as that? Away with him ! he would abolish the sacred rights of property in the interests of a lot of miserable paupers who haven't sense enough to know the main chance when they see it. Away with him ! Kill him, and throw his carcass to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air! THE WAYS OF THE GODS 201 And as if this were not enough, he tells us out of our own books that our God, Jehovah, loves a Sidonian and a Syrian as well as, if not better, than he loves the child of His own son Israel. Who can listen to such blasphemy? Seize the traitor, drag him through the streets and throw him down on the rocks, crush every bone in his body and leave him there that the dogs may come and lick up his blood. These were the thoughts and the feelings roused in the hearts of his hearers as this young man, Jesus ben Joseph, in his native city, declared war for the abolition of slavery and of poverty; for the cancellation of debts and the redis- tribution of the land ; for the suppression of special privilege and the exaltation of the poor to an equality with the rich. Such doctrines necessarily excite contention and made war to the death inevitable. The method of warfare adopted by this young general was not less remarkable than was the purpose of his warfare. He did not deluge the earth with the blood of his enemies, but he made it re'd with the blood of his friends. His first great vic- tory was won when he himself was seized in the night, bound in the morning, stript naked at noon, and nailed to the cross and left in his agony to die in his pain and his shame at eventide. His enemies stood and watched him, wagging their heads and saying : "Let him come down from the cross." And he did come down from the cross in the night, tri- umphant over death, a warrior that need not be ashamed. With the breastplate of righteousness as his defense, with the girdle of truth as his strength, with the sword of the spirit as his weapon, and his feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace, this War God went out before his people in the most singular warfare ever waged by man against man. In this warfare men conquered by defeat and lived by dy- ing. Christus, the War God of spiritual Israel, was taller than Saul and fairer than David. His crown was of thorns that blossomed with roses of blood. He was the bridegroom of a spouse of whom when they saw her, men said : "Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the noon, clear 202 THE WAYS OF THE GODS as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" Rank after rank his soldiers came and died, in the sands of the arena, on crosses on the hill-tops, by rack and by fire, and for every man that died ten men stepped up to take his place. For three centuries there was in the heart of the Empire of Rome a people whom the terrors of the Empire could not frighten. The tactics of Jesus ben Joseph, Christus, son of Jehovah, Generalissimo of the armies of the Lord, outwitted the strategy of Imperial Caesars, and the Labarum was low- ered to the Cross. The Working-Class God had driven the gods of the leisure class out of their temples and appropriated these temples to his own uses as the spoils of war. The triumph of primitive Christianity in the Graeco-Roman world was the triumph of moral over physical force. CHAPTER XLIV Christus, The Tent God of the Spiritual Israel The Christian religion in its beginning was, and indeed, is now, so far as it is essentially Christian, only a variation of Judaism. At the first it differed from orthodox Judaism only in the belief that Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, whom the rulers of Israel had crucified and slain, was both Lord and Christ. When Peter and John and the other disciples of Jesus met in an upper room after his death they did nothing more than organize another synagogue, of which there were hundreds in Jerusalem and the various cities of Judea, Galilee, and the world of Judaism outside the Holy Land. If these men had been told that they were founding a new institution which would become the rival and the enemy of the synagogue in every land, they would have cast away THE WAYS OF THE GODS 203 such a purpose as far from their intention and hateful to their loyalty as sons of Israel. They would have said, and did say: "Not so, we are the true Israel holding fast to the tradi- tions of the fathers, fervent in the hope and expectation of all the people of the Jews that our God Jehovah will come and deliver his people Israel. This hope for us has become a certainty; we have seen the Lord's Christ. He has taught us on the hillside, walked with us by the way, healed our sick- ness, and turned our sorrow into joy. You, not knowing who he was, killed him, but Jehovah gave him back to us from the dead ; he is alive in our midst, and from his hiding-place in the heavens is coming with glory to restore the kingdom to Israel and to bring the nations into subjection to the Lord and his Christ." When in the City of Antioch, and other Gentile cities, the Christian congregation dropped the Jewish word synagogue and adopted the Greek word Ecclesia as the name of its or- ganization, it did not change essentially the principles or the purposes of that organization- When the Church separated from the synagogue it robbed the synagogue of its god and its sacred books ; the traditions of the synagogue became the traditions of the Church. The organization of the Christian community in the primi- tive church was nothing else than a reversion to the tribal organization of the Children of Israel in the days when they wandered in the desert of Zin. Christians called each other brothers, not in the narrow sense of the agnatic family, but in the broader meaning of the tribal organization. In tribal Israel the minor fatherhood of the head of a given family was subordinate to the tribal fatherhood of Abraham. Wher- ever a Jew meets a Jew he is conscious of this tie of kindred. Though the one may be poor and the other rich, though one is a cultured German and the other an ignorant Pole, the sense of a common origin is strong enough to compel the rich and the cultured to recognize his brother Jew in the poor and the ignorant. But what is now a feeble emotion was in the days of tribal organization an overmastering pas- 2U4 THE WAYS OF THE GODS sion. When Israel was in the desert her elders were fathers in Israel and her young men brothers in Israel. This form of organization was adopted by the early Chris- tian Church. Brotherhood was based, not as with us, on family relationship, but upon community relationship. The Christian neophyte entering the church was, in the thought and language of the church, born into a new life with its new relationships. The new-born Christian, by the fact of his birth, was a member of the household of God, with all the privileges to which his birth entitled him. When he came to the full consciousness of his new life, he found himself surrounded by elder brothers and sisters, able and willing to help him in his struggle for life. There was a roof over his head to protect him from the elements and a table spread at which he had the right to sit and eat and drink. All this is the commonplace of Christianity; it is on the lips of the preacher every Sunday and holy day, but what is now a formula was once a fact. The progress of Chris- tianity was accelerated by the practice of Christianity ; when the Christian movement was in the freshness and the rush of its youth, this principle of tribal brotherhood came with healing to a world in which, for the mass of the people, the prevailing relation was that of master and slave. In such a relation there can be no feeling of mutuality. The master and the slave are creatures of worlds as different as the world of the man and the ox. The man drives the ox to labor in the morning and kills him for meat in the evening, and so it was with the slaves and the lower working class in the Graeco-Roman world, they were simply meat for their masters. When a master became a Christian he found himself re- duced to the equality of the slave. He and his slaves were brothers in this household of God. The bishop, who re- ceived him into the church, might be, and frequently was, a slave. The slave, degraded and outraged in his manhood, found himself a free man in the tribal life of this Israel of God. He sat at the same table with the master, ate of the same bread and drank of the same cup. The rapid increase THE WAYS OF THE GODS 205 of the Christian community in its earlier period was owing to the assimilation of the slave population. The church did not attempt to abolish slavery as a political institution of the empire, but it made slavery impossible within the confines of the church. It did not have one church for slaves and another church for free men, as was the custom in our South- ern States in the days of Negro slavery, but it incorporated into its membership with equal alacrity and equal indiffer- ence the master and the slave. Within the organization it compelled the master to recognize the humanity of the slaves and the slave the humanity of the masters. It is said : "Sirs, ye are brothers, ye cannot wrong one another." In the tribal form of organization the women were far more the equals of the men than they were in the later agnatic family and political organizations. When the tribe is on the march the women must walk side by side with the men, they must share in the labors, and have a place in the councils of the camp. They cannot be secluded from the common life ; their only restriction is that they stay in the camp while the men go out to battle but this restriction is swept away when the battle is in the camp ; then the women fight hand to hand with more than the fierceness of men in defence of their young- The tribal form of organization gave great liberty to women in the early Christian movement. This religion recognized the personality of woman and made her in her own right a partaker in the common salvation. From the first this re- ligion had a great attraction for women. When Paul preached, we are told, such and such men were converted and "devout women not a few." The woman never became a bishop in the church nor did she occupy the seat of the elder, but she had official recogni- tion as co-worker in the administration of the affairs of the church with the bishop and elder. In the warfare of the church the woman held the first rank in the army of martyrs. It was the women, even more than the men, who, by their fearless confession and their dauntless death, made possible the victory of the church. The recognition of the personality of the woman came as a gift of God to the slave women of 206 THE WAYS OF THE GODS the Roman world; when such a woman came into the Chris- tian church it did not matter that her body had been out- raged by her master; if she had not consented to the outrage and in the inner shrine of her soul desired purity, then she was pure, pure as the proudest matron who took her in her arms and called her sister. In the tribal organization private property is of little con- sequence. An army on the march has a common commis- sarat, the officers and the men sleep on the ground and eat the army rations. When the tribe is moving, its baggage is light, the chief and the tribesman are upon a near equality. The one cannot live in luxury while the other is starving, for that is fatal to the tribal life. The only privilege that the chief has over the tribal man is that he may and must go before the tribal man in the battle ; he has the right to leader- ship ; it is his prerogative to be the first to die. The early Christian movement was subject to these rules of the tribal life. The possessions of each were the possessions of all. Private property was subordinated to community need. In the days of its early enthusiasm, no Christian said "that aught of the things that he possessed were his own, but they held all things common." The church was not socialistic in the sense of modern socialism, because produc- tion was necessarily individualistic; hand tools made of each man a hand worker, and anything like a socialization of the process or the product of labor was out of the question. Nor was the Christian society communistic in its early period. Communism is possible only when the community has common property in land. Early Christianity was the re- ligion of the city slave and artisan, these had no land to hold in common (that came later) ; their possessions were the pittance of the slave and the paltry wage of the free worker. It was the pooling of these that was the main source of the wealth of the church. There were "not many nobles, not many rich," we are told, in that body of men and women who professed and called themselves Christians. It was the pen- nies of the poor not the pounds of the rich that financed this army of the Lord. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 207 There were no idlers in the camp to consume the product of the workers ; when a man became a Christian he did so at the risk of his life and only the energetic would make the great adventure. It was the business of the bishop to train the youth in industry and to watch over the morals of the young. In the course of its evolution the church elaborated a system of discipline that made idleness and wastefulness punishable by censure and exclusion from the common weal of the church. The communion of the saints was an article of the creed of primitive Christianity, and this did not mean, as in our day, communion only in the spiritual gifts of love and joy and peace in the Holy Ghost but also communion in the gifts of bread and wine and clothing and shelter. The Christian community was a community with community rights and not a mere aggregation of individuals. The people were unified by a common danger and a com- mon hope. They were living in a world which was to them a desert place in which there was neither bread nor water. The mass of the people in that ancient world were in a state of chronic starvation ; they never had enough to eat. One cannot read the early literature of Christianity without feel- ing the pangs of hunger. Like a famishing man in his dream, it dwells on great clusters of grapes and fabulous fields of wheat. Its tree of life bears twelve kinds of fruit every month. Its thought is to eat and to drink in the kingdom of God. When the day of God comes it will be to "fill the hungry with good things." Starvation and slavery were the haunting dread of human life to the millions who lived in the cities of the Roman Em- pire, in the days of the decline. It was this dread that drove men together in mutual benefit societies, that made the de- fenseless form leagues of defense. They were driven to- gether as the sheep on the wild are driven together by the storm, that huddling close they may protect one another from its icy death. Christianity was the sheepfold giving shelter to these victims of the wind and the rain. It was the armed camp with its sentries guarding those within from 208 THE WAYS OF THE GODS foes without. It was the congregation of Christus, the Son of the Tent God of Israel, who had come at his Father's command to rescue his people and bring them out of the house of their bondage into the land of promise. All that ancient Israel had dreamed the Christian hoped to attain at the coming of Christus his god, and for that coming, with a faith that survived a thousand disappointments, he watched and waited even as they that watch for the morning. Blessed illusion ! While the Christian watched and waited, he made for himself the Kingdom of God that he longed for, a kingdom in which the slave was as free as the master, the woman the equal of the man ; wherein the strong were the protectors of the weak, and the rich became as the poor. That spiritual Jerusalem was as a city at unity with itself, and to it came the tribes of the earth to worship Christus, the Son of Jehovah, the King and the Keeper of the City of God. CHAPTER XLV Christus, the Son of Jehovah the Righteous The persecution of the worshippers of Christus by the Roman Government, the hatred of his followers by the Roman populace, calls for explanation. As we know, the Roman Government was tolerant of all religions and hospitable to all gods, and with the people religious variety was the spice of life. The cult of every known god, except Christus, was cultivated in the City of Rome with impunity and ardor. The priests of Isis made the proudest matrons of Rome the victims of their lust; Heliogabalus, the sun god of Syria, made sodomites of the young men of the city. Every de- pravity which the corrupt imagination could conceive was freely practiced under the guise of religion with the connivance if not with the consent of the authorities. Only the God Christus was singled out for censure and his followers sub- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 209 ject to punishment. What makes this the more strange is that these victims of Roman rage were an obscure, harmless folk: they were not fierce like the Jews, stirring up rebellion against the city, they were quiet and submissive and did not resent the greatest injuries; they were for the most part the off- scouring of the people, slaves and converted criminals- Pliny the Younger, writing of them to the Emperor Trajan, said: that the only facts which he could discover were that they had a custom of meeting together before daylight and singing a hymn to one Christus as God. They were bound together by no unlawful sacraments, but only under mutual obligation not to commit theft, adultery, robbery or fraud. 1 It was such a people as this that the Roman Government pursued with relentless rigor for more than two centuries ; they were beaten with rods, imprisoned, beheaded, thrown to the lions, and burned at the stake. And this violence was not the consequence of sporadic outbreaks, but was the set- tled policy of the government. The vilest and the most virtuous of the emperors agreed in their detestation of the religion of Christus and put his followers to torture and death. Nero was no more bitter nor cruel in this respect than was Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius was as severe as Domitian. The priests of the various temples were not slow to in- flame the wrath of the rulers and to excite the fears of the populace. By imperial decree and popular tumult the fol- lowers of Christus, called Christians, were in constant dan- ger of death. And this was no mere madness on the part of the estab- lished authorities in religion and politics; the emperors and the pontiffs had reason to fear this new, strange god who had made his entrance so silently, so mysteriously into their city. This simple, harmless people who were called after his name were not so simple nor so harmless as they seemed. In the purlieus of the slave markets and in the outlying graveyards, wherever Christians met together, forces were 1 Millman, "Christianity," vol. ii, p. 93: John Murray, London, 1867. 210 THE WAYS OF THE GODS generated that were destructive of the system under which emperors and priests lived and ruled. All other gods that found refuge in Rome were submissive to Divus Caesar, the God of the Organization ; only the God Christus denied him. And it was this denial which was the all-sufficient crime calling for the extermination of this god and the destruction of his following. Christus denied the right of the Emperor to rule the peo- ple. His rule, founded as it was upon physical force, was an outrage to the soul of man. Christus made the soul of man a sovereignty ; each man was answerable only to his own soul, which was the seat of the living God. In the em- perors and the priests Christus saw not the benefactors but the oppressors of the people, who laid upon their shoulders heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, which these favor- ites of the existing system would not lift with one of their fingers. In the thought of Christus all rule of man over man was an outrage upon humanity. In his conception of gov- ernment rulership gave place to leadership and mastery to service. They who were great in the community were to be the servants of the community; they were to occupy not the place of safety but the post of danger. Christus was horrified to see emperors housed in palaces while the people perished from the cold; it was sacrilege that the rulers should riot in luxury while the people starved for want of bread. In the thought of Christus social forces or- ganized into government were divine, to be used only for the good of the people. The prostitution of these forces by the ruling class to gratify their lusts and their cruelties was to this god an unspeakable profanation ; the abomination of desolation in the Holy Place. Such rule founded upon force and not upon consent was as the rape of a woman, a deed of shame, destructive of love and life. To make such rule impossible in the earth was the fixed purpose of the God Christus. The emperors and the priests made no mistake in the war which they carried on from generation to generation against this god and his people. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 211 Not only did Christus dispute their rule but he denied as well the validity of their laws. He, as the incarnate son of Jehovah The Righteous, opposed his righteousness to their legalities. According to Roman legalities one man could own another man as his private property and the master could and did live on the unrequited labor of the slave. If the slave ran away, the master pursued him with dogs, and if he resisted arrest, he was crucified ; the slave girl, if she resented the lust of her master, was strangled and thrown to the fishes. A world in which such horrors could happen was to Christus a lost world, doomed to destruction. This legalized system of slavery could not and cannot sur- vive the heat of the wrath of a righteous god. The conten- tion of righteousness against legality will go on and must go on until legality becomes righteousness and righteousness legality. The laws of the land which give the land to the few to the exclusion of the many, which acknowledged legal owner- ship based upon title deeds, to the hurt of natural owner- ship based upon occupation and use, was iniquity in the sight of Christus, Son of Jehovah The Righteous. In his conception the ownership of land is in Jehovah, who holds it in trust for the people; the land is for the people and the people for the land. It was so in the days of Joshua, the son of Nun ; it is so in the days of Jesus, the son of Joseph. To Christus it was a foul injustice that woman should be subject to a different moral standard from that observed by man, that she should be stoned for her adultery while he gloried in his sin. In the eyes of Christus woman was a soul as well as a sex. She, in the right of her soul, was entitled to her place side by side with man in all the affairs of life. If he were king, she was queen ; they were to sit side by side upon their thrones ruling their common domain. The God Christus was a revolutionary god, having in mind the overthrow of the pillars of ancient society, which were imperial rule, human slavery, private unlimited owner- ship of land, and the subjection of women. Christus decreed democracy, the freedom of the slave, the redemption of the 212 THE WAYS OF THE GODS land, and the emancipation of the woman ; and for these things he was hated and pursued to his death by the emperors and the masters of the slaves, the lands, and the women of the ancient world. And besides all this, Christus was the sworn enemy of all priesthoods. The temples with their sacrifices of bulls and goats were an abomination to him, the priests with their dron- ing prayers were to him as fools making merchandise of their own folly. What they called the service of God was in the eyes of Christus the service of evil. The substance of the people was taken to build houses for the gods which the gods could not live in and the meat of the people was brought to the table of the priest where the gods could not eat. The whole system of religion, Jew and Gentile, as it existed in his day was to him nothing but a contrivance by which the priests exploited the people ; and this was the all-sufficient reason why the priests hated Christus and Christus hated the priests. He was the son of that God who did not live in temples made with hands, who did not eat bull's flesh nor drink the blood of goats, who did not require that his people should tread his courts. What he asked of them was that they should judge the fatherless and plead the cause of the widow ; that they should feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, comfort the prisoner, do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God, who was a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in truth. Such doctrine could not but make the ancient world afraid, for it meant the destruction of that legalized kingdom of man's making, that it might give place to the righteous king- dom of God's creating. The antagonism between Christus and the Roman Caesar was the natural consequence of antag- onistic ideals. THE WAYS OP THE GODS 213 CHAPTER XLVI Christus, the Son of the Holy One of Israel That wonderful institution, the Christian church, came into being to preserve men and women from the depravity of the world. In the thought of the followers of the god Christus the Graeco-Roman civilization in the midst of which they lived was not only terribly unjust, it was also horribly un- clean. This uncleanness was not such that it could be washed away in the bath, it must be purified by fire. This sense of physical and moral impurity was not a creation of the Chris- tian movement, it was an efficient cause of the success of that movement. The feeling of uncleanness made the whole world miserable. In spite of the public baths and the abundant pri- vate baths in the homes of the wealthy, the ancient city, even more than the modern, was the haunt of physical impurity. The very conditions under which the mass of the people lived prevented cleanliness. The walled city of the ancient and medieval world was almost of necessity the breeding-place of physical vileness: the narrow streets, the ill-ventilated houses barred the sun- light and vitiated the air. The people, crowded into close quarters without adequate sanitary provision, were the vic- tims of vermin and contagious diseases. Plagues and fevers were the natural consequence of this unnatural mode of life, and men and women died of them by the hundreds and the thousands year by year. Our modern cities, bad as they are, are a paradise of cleanliness when compared with the ancient and medieval city. Diseases common in those cities are al- most unknown to us. As we go out of our city into the sur- rounding country we never hear the leper's bell nor the leper's warning cry; "Unclean, unclean!" The low estate of medical knowledge gave to this un- cleanness a power and a horror of which, happily, we know nothing. Remedies viler than the sickness were prescribed by physicians whose ignorance was only equaled by their 214 THE WAYS OF THE GODS cupidity. Philters were concocted, charms were devised, to the delusion of the sick man. The priests were not back- ward with their prayers and incantations to drive the devils out of the tortured body. Sickness was ascribed to the pres- ence of a foul fiend, the expulsion of which was necessary to a cure. Venereal and nervous afflictions made their victims blind and crazy, and as these poor creatures were not cared for by the state, being for the most part slaves, they made the streets and the highways pestilent with their beggary and their shamelessness. Civilization has always been unclean; humanity crowded in cities creates the foulness that destroys it. A pig running at large in the forest is as clean an animal as one would wish to see, a pig in a pen is filthy; but the pig is not to blame for that filthiness, it is the pen. Not only was the ancient city physically unclean, it was morally vile as well. Abuse of the appetites was prevalent and destructive of all that made human life decent and toler- able. The existence in every city of a large slave population, living in promiscuity and yielding themselves without resist- ance to the vicious desires of their masters, made possible a condition of moral depravity such as we at present cannot so much as comprehend. Our cities are bad enough, but in gluttony, in drunkenness, and in lechery, such cities as Rome and Antioch in the days of their decay were to our cities as hell to heaven. In one respect they may have been better than we; they were not hypocrites, hiding their shame be- hind a curtain of sanctimoniousness: what they did they did in the open, and their shame was their glory. We have in the "Satires" of Juvenal, in the "Poems" of Ovid, in the "His- tory" of Suetonius and the "Annals" of Tacitus, ample evi- dence of a moral condition sufficient to turn the heart of a decent man cold with loathing, and to make the world an unfit place for a decent woman to live in. It was this physical and moral uncleanness that gave to the Christian movement that principle of separation which made of its people a peculiar people, living apart, hating and hated by the world from which they had withdrawn. The antag- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 215 onism of the church and the world which is written on every page of history, sacred and profane, since the advent of Chris- tianity, was the necessary outcome of that conception of sin and holiness which possessed the mind of the primitive world. Ignorant of the natural causes of sickness and moral de- pravity, the primitive mind ascribed these evils to the direct action of the gods. It was from the gods that the sickness came, it was to the gods that the sick must look for deliver- ance. The anger of the gods was aroused by the neglect of men. If man did not worship the gods aright, the gods visited them with the plague and the pestilence. Each god had his own particular province in which he gave expression to his good will and his anger. The domestic gods were the keepers of domestic virtue ; they punished the adultery of the wife and the disobedience of the children by causing the heir of the house to die of the plague. When the Pater-familias was at odds with the gods they cursed his cattle with barrenness and beat down his harvest with the hail. The neglect of the city gods was avenged by the pestilence and the abandonment of the city to its foes. It was the sin of Israel against the god of Israel that was the cause of the calamities of Israel. So there arose in the heart of man that sense of sin as separating between him and his god which, for good and for evil, has played so great a part in his spiritual life. In this way the primitive mind ascribed physical illness to spiritual agencies and looked upon the physical creation itself as es- sentially unclean and the cause of uncleanness in the soul of man. The sin of the world was the destruction of the world ; only by escaping from the world could the soul be delivered from the damnation under which the world rested. Because of this, the followers of the God Christus were called upon to forsake the world that they might become a holy people acceptable to the Lord. This quality of holiness, which was one of the essentials of the early Christian movement, gave to it a power which no other propaganda at the time possessed. Its cry to the people was : "Come, wash and be clean !" Its initiatory cere- 216 THE WAYS OF THE GODS mony was a bath; it offered cleanliness as a free gift; the only pre-requisite was the desire to be clean. "Come, wash you and make you clean!" was a welcome invitation to souls and bodies soiled and sick of the soil. Christus was a clean god; he was not city-born, he came from the country-side, washed in the dew of the morning and fragrant with the scent of the new-mown hay. Men saw in him the purity of the rain and the cleanness of the sunlight. His followers ascribed to this god an extravagant moral perfection ; they said he was a god without sin ; in him there was no guile, neither was sin found in his mouth. His sin- lessness was a miracle; it was an attribute of his divinity. He did not sin, because he could not sin. In these claims the followers of Christus overshot the mark. They made of him a prodigy, they removed him out of the sphere of moral experience, they imperiled his humanity, and a god without humanity is no god for man. For the time being this exaggeration served its purpose. Men worshipped sinlessness, they made moral cleanness a passion of the soul. In their eager reaction against the evil of their times, these worshippers of Christus went to a far extreme, they made appetite itself a sin. To eat and to drink and to love was an evil, displeasing to Christus and the occasion of death to the soul. To fast and to weep and to pray, to scourge the body in the interests of the spirit, be- came the ideal of the Christian life. The people were set to practice an impossible holiness which was sure to result in a vicious reaction. But so it is with this poor human nature of ours ; it swings from extreme to extreme and by so swinging it moves the hands of the clock of progress and brings the world little by little to the golden mean which Aristotle tells us, is the seat of virtue. The worship of Christus, the Son of the Holy One, the One who is high and lifted up, who shares man's sorrows but not his sin, in whose eyes the stars are unclean, was the inevitable reaction from the worship of the old nature gods by a depraved city people. The nature gods can be wor- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 217 shipped with safety only in the midst of nature: the god of the sky under the sky, the god of the harvest in the fields of the harvests, the god of the vine where the grapes are in cluster, the god of fecundity where children are welcomed. These gods when carried into the city, lose their fresh- ness and their innocence; they become corrupt and corrupt- ing. They change the desire for children into a lust for women, they make of eating gluttony, and of drinking drunk- enness. The farmer, after a hard day's work, can drink the pure wine of his own making and be glad of heart ; he can eat freely of the bread of his own baking and be satisfied, and beget sons and daughters and be the more vigorous for his lawful indulgence. But in the city, if he is rich and able, he will be tempted to eat for the sake of eating, to drink for the pleasure of drinking, and to love for the sensation of loving. His appetite will grow by that which it feeds upon until he becomes a glutton and a lecher. Country gods aje for the country-side; they are dangerous to the morals of the city- It is one of the marvels of religious history that Jesus ben Joseph, the man of the country-side, should have become the reforming god of the city. He, who, in the days of his flesh, was a free liver, called by his enemies a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of harlots and a companion of sin- ners, became by a process of deification the god of the city ascetic, the god of the man who sought to save his soul by starving his body, and to maintain his purity by renouncing his manhood. Holiness at the best is a negative quality; it saves men and gods by secluding them. The moon is chaste because the moon is alone ; a saint on a pillar is a saint on a pillar. Jesus ben Joseph lost much of his power over humanity when as a god he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty of The Holy One of Israel. 218 THE WAYS OP THE GODS CHAPTER XLVII The Worship of Christus in the Primitive Church It came to pass one day in the month of August many years ago that I was walking at noontide down the Via Appia, in the City of Rome. This once famous thoroughfare had long since ceased to be the resort of the people or the highway of traffic. In the days of Roman greatness the Via Appia was thronged with chariots carrying the Roman patrician to and from his villa in the country; to and from his house in the city; fashionable women lolled in their litters, with their sandaled feet exposed to attract the eye of the Roman gal- lant; merchants with their wares, physicians with their philters, stood by the roadside calling to the people to buy; slaves bending under their burdens were carrying goods from Rome to Capua, and from Capua to Rome ; gladiators were marching from the pens in the Campania to the Circus in the city. In the good old days one had but to stand on the road- side of the Via Appia to see all Rome pass by. But on that midday in August I saw nothing but a donkey- cart with a sleeping driver going slowly towards the Cam- pania and lizards running along the wall. It was as lonely, as desolate, and as dull under that noonday sun as it was wont to be thronged and alive and amusing twenty centuries before. Making my way past the tombs of the patricians which line the roads for miles out of Rome, I came to the church St. Sylvester, and with a guide entered the Catacombs. We followed the winding way of this subterranean burial place until we came to the Chapel of St. Sixtus. a large chamber cut out of the volcanic rock as a place of worship for the Christian people in the days of their greatness. It was in these catacombs that the worshippers of Christus laid their dead, to await the coming of their God, when the dead should hear his voice and live. These catacombs were the sleeping chambers of the saints until they should awake in THE WAYS OF THE GODS 219 the morning of their resurrection. Into these catacombs the living came to meet their god. There was no difference be- tween the dead and the living in the thought of this people of Christus, only this: that the living were awake and the dead were sleeping in Jesus, the Christus of God. The living cut out from the rock the Chapel of St. Sixtus and the Chapel of St. Callixtus and set their altars there to offer upon them an unbloody sacrifice, holy, acceptable to the Lord. It was with these passageways through the earth as it was with the Via Appia above, once they had been crowded with Christians bringing their dead to burial, or coming with flowers to the tombs of their friends, and to worship in the chapels by the way. On that afternoon in August I was alone with the guide, not even a tourist dis- turbed the solitude of those chambers of the dead. As I stood in the Chapel of St. Sixtus in the Catacombs I thought of another chapel of another Sixtus in the Palace of the Vatican. The contrast was great, and we will bear that contrast in mind as we follow the progress of the God Christus from the days of his greatness in the Catacombs to the days of his decline in the Palace. Here at this little stone table in his chapel on, as it were, the 4th of August in the year 258 A. D., Sixtus II, bishop of Rome, was breaking bread for his people. Between him and the people there was no difference, except that he was the father and they his children. His dress was as the dress of a common man; it would have been abomination on the lips to call him by the heathen title Pontifex Maximus, or His Holiness, or any other name except Father and Overseer or Bishop. He was a follower of Jesus the Christus, a mem- ber of the congregation of the saints, with no privilege above his brethren save the privilege to die for them. And that privilege he enjoyed that day. For as he stood at the table of the Lord breaking bread for the people of the Lord, the soldiers of the emperor Valerian came and took him away; and on the sixth day of August in that selfsame year, Sixtus II, Bishop of Rome, died under the hand of the executioner a saint and a martyr of the church. 220 THE WAYS OF THE GODS As I stood in the chapel and recalled this event and studied the Christian memorials around me, I could not help seeing and feeling how entirely the Christus was the God of the Catacombs. His sacred symbols, the fish and the lamb, on every side ; his sacred sign of the cross sealed every door of every tomb ; the Greek letters of his monograph, I.H.S., which were interpreted by the Roman to mean Jesus Hominis Salvator, Jesus, the Saviour of Man. There was no sign of any other god to be seen other than the sign of the God Christus. The glory of the Father was lost in the nearer glory of the Son. Men might fear the Father, but they loved the Son. They loved him, for he was even such an one as themselves. He had been a working man as most of them were working men ; he had been of a despised and rejected race, even as they were a despised and rejected class, he had been oppressed and afflicted, even as they were op- pressed and afflicted ; he had rebelled against the injustice of the world, even as they were rebelling. Down in the Catacombs they were singing their revolutionary songs: "He shall put down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and weak." "He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away.'* They were exhorting one another to watch and wait for His coming, when the powers of heaven should be shaken, when the sun should be darkened and the moon turned into blood, when the elements should melt with fervent heat and out of this burning, fiery furnace should walk Christus, the Son of Man, not a hair of his head singed, not the smell of smoke in his garments ; who by the power of his word should out of the melting elements of that old world, drunk with the blood of the saints, mould a new world, informed with his righteous- ness and possessed by his people. ^ It did not take long, standing there in the darkness, ligtitecl by the torch of the monkish guide, to see that Christus was a great God in the days of the Catacombs, a God for whom men would forsake father and mother and wife and children and house and land ; a God for whom men would gladly and eagerly die ; a God of whom men asked nothing but that he 221 would wash them and make them clean ; a God for whom a prince would forget his nobility and sit beside the beggar on the wayside ; a God for whom a beggar would cast off his degradation and become rich with the unsearchable riches of Christus. This was a God to be reckoned with above all gods of the bed and the gate and the fire; he had a strength beyond the god of the sky and the earth and the water; he was more powerful than all the gods of the cities; mightier than Divus Caesar, the God of the Organization, for he was the god of the human heart, from which are the issues of life and death. Down there in the Catacombs, in burying places and caves of the earth throughout the Roman Empire was generated that love for and devotion to Christus as God, a devotion that compelled the recognition of his divinity, made his church supreme for ten centuries in Europe, and gave his name to Western civilization. This worship of Jesus was not based in reason, it had its seat in the emotions; it was, in this earlier period, but little troubled by theological subtleties. God the Father was to the devout Christian of the Catacombs but little more than the background of Christus the Son, and God the Spirit was nothing else than the Spirit of Christus abroad in the world. The religion of Christus was powerful because it was sim- ple. Believe on the Lord Jesus-Christus and be saved was its creed ; wash in the waters of baptism and be clean was its initiation ; eat of the bread, which is the body of Jesus and live with Jesus was its doctrine. A few simple facts were all that the Christian neophyte had to master before his discipleship. The birth, the death, the resurrection of Chris- tus was the heart of his religion. With this simple dogmatic the Church went to the lower orders of the Roman Empire and gave them a supreme object of enthusiasm, a philosophy of history that the most child- like could grasp, and an undying hope to keep them alive. To love Christus was the beginning of life; to go to Christus the end of life. 222 THE WAYS OF THE GODS And the worship of Christus was as simple as its doctrine. It consisted, as Justin Martyr tells us, of a few prayers, the reading and the explanation of the Memoirs of Christus, and the breaking of bread to the people in remembrance of the breaking of bread by the Master in the hour of his betrayal, simply that and nothing more- No priests standing before the altars in chasuble, bedecked with embroidery and be- gemmed with jewels; no great cathedral with vaulted roof, no music of Palestrina, sung by women and men and boys trained for the purpose. Only a plain man in the plain clothes of the people, standing before a table hewn out of the rock by the people themselves; only the low room of the Catacombs, lighted by torches that the people carried ; only the songs of the revolution, sung by the people of the revolu- tion as they walked in and out and round about through all the turnings of the ways between their dead. And yet this great people were not without a wealth of their own, as was proved by St. Lawrence, the archdeacon of Sixtus II, Bishop of Rome, in whose chapel I was medi- tating. There I remembered that when the soldiers of Valerian came and took the bishop to his death they carried away the archdeacon also, as a prisoner, and brought him before the Pretorian Prefect of the City of Rome. Now the Prefect of the City knew that the archdeacon of the church was the keeper of the treasures of the church, and the Prefect said to the archdeacon : "Bring me the treasures of the Church and you shall live; refuse and you shall surely die." The arch- deacon answered: "Give me three days, my lord, and I will bring the riches of the church to your palace." The Prefect consented and the archdeacon went his way. The Prefect was glad, for he had heard that the church was very rich. When Lawrence, the archdeacon, left the Palace of the Prefect, he made haste and went to the house of the banker of the church, and asked the banker, saying: "How much money has the church in your keeping?" and the banker an- swered saying: "So much," and the archdeacon answered the banker saying: "Send so much to the Bishop of Vienne in THE WAYS OF THE GODS 223 Gaul, and so much to the Bishop of Toledo in Hispania, and so much to the Bishop of Carleon in Britain, and so much to the Bishop of Carthage in Africa, and give me the rest in three bags for myself." And the banker did as the arch- deacon had said, and when he had finished the archdeacon spake to the banker, saying: "Have you anything left of the treasures of the church?" And he answered and said: "Noth- ing." And the archdeacon made haste and went out into the city and found two deacons of the church and brought them to the bank and gave one bag of money to the one deacon and one bag of money to the other deacon and car- ried one bag of money himself. Then with a deacon on either hand the archdeacon Lawrence went down into the slums of the City of Rome, in and out its sordid streets, up and down the rickety steps of the rickety tenements, knock- ing at the door of the blind Mopsuestia, giving her of the money of the church and saying: "Be in the square of the palace of the Pretorian Prefect at such an hour and on such a day." So from door to door, with his deacons beside him, the archdeacon went, giving of the treasure of the church to the halt and the lame and the aged, until all the money was gone, saying to each as he gave : "Be in the square of the palace of the Pretorian Prefect at such an hour and on such a day." When the day and hour arrived the archdeacon stood be- fore the Prefect and the Prefect said: "Where are the treas- ures of the church?" And the archdeacon answered and said : "They are without, my lord, in the square of the palace of the Prefect of Rome." Then was the Prefect glad of heart and he went to the door of the palace, expecting to see the square crowded with wagons bringing the treasures of the church, and he saw, as it were, all the beggars of the City of Rome in the square of the palace of the Prefect of the City of Rome. Then the Prefect turned with fury and said to the archdeacon : "What meanest thou by this?" "I mean," answered the archdeacon, "to obey my lord, and bring to him the treasures of the church." 224 THE WAYS OF THE GODS And the Prefect cried : "What! callest thou these the riches of the church?" And the archdeacon answered and said : "Yea, my lord, the lives of the people are the wealth of the church." Therefore, the Prefect was angry and he commanded his soldiers to take the archdeacon and put him to death. And the soldiers, seeing that the Prefect was very wroth, went and made a great gridiron and stripped the archdeacon and bound him naked to the gridiron and broiled him over a slow fire, and so he died. Thus did the story come back to me as I stood in the Chapel of St. Sixtus in the Catacombs of Rome, and I came up out of the Catacombs into the light of day, and it was toward evening; for the day was far spent; and I went my way down the Via Appia to the church of St. Paul Without the Gates ; and as I walked I saw the dome of Michaelangelo hanging in the evening sky, and I looked and I said: "There is the dome of St. Peter's but what has become of the God Christus, and where are his people?" BOOK VII THE GODS OF THE GREEK DIALECTIC CHAPTER XLVIII The Gods of the Greek Dialectic When we look for the God Christus after his religion, by reason of the devotion and self sacrifice of his people, grown rich and powerful and popular, has emerged from the darkness of the Catacombs into the light of the upper world, we find that the God has shared in the elevation of his religion. Christus is no longer, exclusively, if at all, the/ God of the Working Class, bearing their griefs and sharing their sorrows ; He is in process of becoming the God of the Leisure Class and is taking his seat with the princes of the people. He is no longer hid from the wise and the prudent and revealed only unto babes; his destiny is in the keeping of the wisdom of the philosopher and the prudence of the lawyer. He has ceased, or almost ceased, to be an object of devotion, and has become a principle of contention. He has left the lowly places of religion to stand in the storm-center of theology. He is no longer Christus, the Son of Jehovah, the War God of the Bene-Israel, nor is he the Sdh of Jehovah The Righteous, nor yet the Son of The Holy One. He has become the Son of the Absolute. He is one of the gods of the Greek Dialectic. This transformation of Christus from the God of a simple religion into the God of an abstruse theology was as inevit- able as it was for him unfortunate. When he left his native heath in Galilee and entered into the Graeco-Roman world, Christus had to accommodate himself to the thought of that world and adjust himself to its policies. The vitality of the Christian religion, the burning zeal of its people, its moral elevation, its definite philosophy of his- tory, its doctrine of resurrection and judgment, made a pow- erful appeal not only to the emotions but to the intelligence 227 228 THE WAYS OF THE GODS of the men and the women to whom it was preached. As compared with the absurdity of the Greek Mythos, wherein the gods were mutilating the gods, in which there was no hint of the origin of the world, only chaos and black night at a beginning, I say, in comparison with this indefiniteness and absurdity the Christian account of Creation seemed clear and sane. When the morality of Zeus, as described by the poets, was set side by side with the morality of Jehovah and Christus, as pictured by the prophets and evangelists, the old gods could not but suffer in the presence of the new. Men and women wearied with unbridled indulgence fled from the pleas- ure-loving gods of the Greeks to find relief in the ascetic gods of the Hebrews, f ( / Early in its history the religion of the despised Nazarene | began to draw into the circle of its influence the best minds as well as the noblest souls of the Mediterranean world. Jesus had been dead hardly ten years before the great Rabbi, scholar, and thinker, Saul of Tarsus, ceased to persecute and became an apostle of the Lord. The influence, direct and in- direct, of this mind upon the character and the fortunes of the religion which it adopted is beyond calculation. Without Paul, Christianity, in all probability, might have been no more than the passing religion of an obscure Jewish sect. When Paul was once converted to a belief in Jesus, that he was the Christ, he melted that belief in the fires of his in- tense emotion and recast it in the mould of his intelligence. Paul lifted Christus and his religion from its local environment and made it universal. Jesus ceased to be a Jew crucified to glut the hatred of the Pharisee and to quiet the fear of the Roman ; he became, in the thought of Paul, the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world, as propitiation for the sin of the world. Paul took the folklore of the Hebrew scriptures and or- ganized it into a theology. Paul himself was intellectually \ the child of the Hebrew Scripture crossed by Greek culture. The Jehovah of the Scriptures was in his mind identified with the Absolute of Plato. He was the god who dwelt in the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 229 light which no man could approach unto. Paul took the naive Hebrew philosophy of history and made it cosmic ; he carried it far back of the mere creation of the heavens and earth into the inner shrine of the secret counsels of God. If Peter was the founder of the church, Paul was the father of theology. He opened the door that made the Christian religion of easy access to the Grecian mind. He removed from Jehovah the odium of provincialism, making him cos- mopolitan. He gave to the Graeco-Roman world what it must have (if it would be saved), a catholic religion. This Jewish scholar and preacher did not know, and could not know, that the casual letters which he was writing to his converts would be to future ages the quarry of theology; that out of the flashes of his genius was flowing the lava, from which, when cold and hard, men should hew great systems of dogma, in which the God Christus should be enclosed and entombed. Yet so it has come to pass. In the Second Century of the Christian era the Greek philosopher found in the Christian church a congenial home. He entered it as its neophyte ; he soon became its master. Bringing with him his native philosophic conception, he leav- ened the dough of Christian thought and feeling, baked that dough in the fiery oven of his controversy, and gave it back to Christianity as the hard, dry, indigestible loaf of orthodoxy. The entrance of this new element into the religion of Christus was as outwardly innocent as it was inwardly subtle. The philosopher did not come into the church to exploit by means of the church his philosophic preconceptions, he was won by the spiritual grace and the moral beauty of the God Christus. Once in, however, he could not help bringing his thought to bear upon the life of the religion of his adoption and slowly transforming it until it became not the religion of his adoption but the religion of his creation. We have in the story of Justin Martyr an instance of this guileless entrance of the philosopher into the church. Justin was a scholar and a thinker. He had traveled from country to country, sitting at the feet of the great masters of philoso- phy, to grasp, if he might, the secret of life, to know why 230 THE WAYS OF THE GODS and for what he was living. This man was a seeker after truth, and no matter how far he traveled, truth, like the hori- zon, was ever beyond and before him. When weary of his pursuit, he tells us, he was walking one day on the shore of the sea, meditating upon the vanity of learning, when he was approached by a venerable stranger, who asked him the oc- casion of his thoughtfulness. Made confident by the open, benign countenance of this wayfaring man, Justin laid bare to him his heart; told him of his longing for truth, of his vain search, and of his weariness even to despair. Then the stranger told him that truth was not to be found in philoso- phy but in religion, not in thinking but in living, and pro- ceeded to unfold to him the life story of Jesus ben Joseph, the Christus of God. As Justin listened his heart was taken captive and he followed the stranger to a gathering of the Christians, was baptized, and so became a father in and a martyr of the church. After this manner, hundreds upon hundreds of Grecian phil- osophers and Egyptian sages embraced the religion of Jesus. Not content to leave it in its simplicity, they founded famous schools for its explanation in Antioch, Alexandria, and the cities of the Empire, and wrote the next chapter in the history of the "Ways of the Gods." CHAPTER XLIX The Coming of the Absolute There is a story classic to Harvard University, which is told of that genial philosopher the late William James (blessed be his shade!) and of his equally genial colleague and friend the late Josiah Royce. James and Royce, though bosom friends, were bitter philosophical enemies; Royce was an Idealist, James was a Pragmatist. James was a disciple of the school of Heraclitus, Royce was a follower of Plato. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 231 Whenever these men met the scrimmage was on. One after- noon as Royce and James were contending in philosophic warfare, the wife of James snapped her kodak and caught her husband in the act of shaking his fist under the nose of Royce. When Mrs. James had developed her picture she showed it to her husband; he took it and wrote under the contending figures the words : "Damn the Absolute." In damning the Absolute James was blaspheming the great God of the Greek Dialectic. Before this Absolute the intel- lect of man has bowed in abject submission and his heart stood still in holy terror. In fear of the Absolute men have sacrificed their reason, arrested the progress of thought, made heresy a crime, and filled the earth with blood and tears. Who is the Absolute and whence came he? To answer this question we must go far back in the history of man, when nature was putting man to school and he was learning to talk. Whether speech is a divine gift or a human achievement may be open to question. If a divine gift, it is the most useful of all the gifts the gods have given to man ; if a human achieve- ment, it reflects the highest credit upon and gives great ad- vantage to the race of animals which by means of this faculty of speech have been able to arrange and express their thoughts and emotions, to communicate easily with one another, and to organize themselves into societies for mutual advantage. Men who are of a common speech always have a common interest. That speech is an acquirement rather than an original gift is, I think, established by the fact that we all have to learn to talk after we are born ; and the form of our speech depends upon our environment. If our infancy is spent in France, we will speak French ; if in England, English. A child can as easily acquire one language as another. It is only after our habits of speech are formed that acquisition of a new lan- guage is difficult ; but at no time in our lives is it impossible. Speech comes by hearing ; if one leaves one's native land and resides for a long time in a foreign land, one will almost of necessity acquire the speech of one's residence and lose that of one's birth. 2.32 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The origin of speech is naively set forth in the account of creation which we find in the second chapter of Genesis, where it is written : "And out of the ground the Lord Jehovah formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them ; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof." Undoubtedly this account of the origin of language is correct in its main elements: speech did begin in names. And living creatures, being the enemies and friends of man, were the first to receive from him the honor and convenience of a name. Some peculiarity, such as a growl or a shriek, was imitated and so became the name of the animal or bird uttering the growl or the shriek. When once man had acquired the habit of naming things the immense usefulness of this acquirement caused its rapid expansion. To give a thing a name is to give it definiteness; by its name we separate it from all other things. If a man says: "I met a man," we know at once that he did not meet a horse or a cow; if he says I met John Smith we are aware that it was not William Robinson that he met or any other man save John Smith. If one had to describe the man whom one met by the color of his hair and his eyes, the length of his nose, and the squareness of his chin, we should not, nine times out of ten, be able to recognize the man by the description, but when he says John Smith, then we know at once the man by the name of the man. The descriptions of the hero and the heroine by an author are always amusing to the physiological reader, for he sees at once that were he to paint a picture from such description, he would out-whistle Whistler in im- pressionism. "But," at this point cries my impatient reader, "but what has all this to do with the Absolute?" Have patience, dear reader, and you will soon see that this has everything to do with the Absolute. From naming things, man went on to the naming of quali- ties; some things were sweet and some were sour, that is, some things were pleasant to the taste, expanding the glands, and some were unpleasant, contracting the glands; hence the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 233 sweets and the sours. Some things were bright to the eyes and some were dark, and so the observer became conscious of and began to name the reds and the greens, the white and the black. Man saw some things at rest and some in motion and he gave names to these states of existence. He saw that some things were like other things and he put these together under a common name. So we have "man," "horse," and "dog" as the general names of a vast number of individual men, horses, and dogs. We have "sweet" and "sour," "soft" and "hard," as general names for certain classes of sensations. We have "good" and "bad" as distinguishing certain lines of conduct in their relation to our happiness or unhappiness. In the course of the evolution of language man acquired three faculties which, while they have been of untold advan- tage, have also been the occasion of much confusion in his thought and misfortune to his life. These faculties are gen- eralization, classification, and abstraction. By generalization man brings together a vast number of things that have some- what in common, by classification he gives to those things a common name, by abstraction he takes away from the classi- fied object all particulars and leaves only the general char- acteristics ; as, for instance, when one says "horse," one ab- stracts height, weight, color, breed, and leaves in the mind only the general-notion horse. In the world of reality there is no such thing as horse, only a horse or horses ; horse is simply a convenience in thinking. The same is true of qualities ; when one says "good," one has a general notion of actions conducive to well being; in reality there is no such thing as good, only good deeds. Good is a counter in thinking. And here came the danger ; when generalization, classifi- cation, and abstraction were in the full swing of habit, this habit induced the further habit on the part of the mind to think abstractly, to think vaguely of horse instead of horses, of good instead of good deeds. And the more highly devel- oped the language, the more readily it gave itself to this mode of abstract thinking. Children always think concretely as do primitive and uneducated people; the grown-up, educated man does nine-tenths of his thinking abstractly. He takes a 234 THE WAYS OF THE GODS glance at a given object, refers it to its class, and has done with it. The primitive man sees the object before him with its particular features; the thought of the primitive man is vivid and limited, the thought of the cultured man is vague and wide. The primitive man deals for the most part with nouns and verbs, the cultured man with adjectives and ad- verbs; the primitive man is a poet, the cultured man is a philosopher. The most highly cultured people the world has ever known were the Greeks, and especially the Attic Greek in the time of Athenian supremacy. These people developed the rich- est language ever evolved by man. The Greek expresses the nicest shades of meaning; gives itself to the most delicate abstractions. It was this perfection of language that was both the glory and the snare of the Greek. The Greek mind lost itself in its language, was entangled in its own subtlety. Greek philosophy was the outcome of this effort of the Greek mind to carry generalization, classification, and abstraction to the limit. The Greek dealt with words rather than with things. His itch was not for observation but for definition. Words became to him realities, existing apart from the mind. The prince of these jugglers was Plato. Plato was essen- tially a man of words. His doctrine of ideas gives reality to words, good is a reality apart from good deeds; before there can be good deeds there must be good. This abstract good is the origin of all concrete good. So also there were sweet and sour from which all sweets and sours were derived. Plato's world of ideas was a world of adjectives waiting to be united to their nouns. When one penetrates into the ideal world of Plato one is in a fantastic world where everything is wrong-end first; good is waiting for good deeds, sweet to be sweets, and sour to be sours. One cannot help thinking that the philosopher is playing with words, and so he is. One can see a twinkle in his philosophic eyes when he uses words as a child uses blocks in a nursery to build fantastic struc- tures that can serve no purpose except to amuse the child or the philosopher. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 235 The last and greatest of abstractions is Being. Being is existence as existence, apart from any existing thing. When one thinks of Being as Being one must be careful not to think of tall or short, narrrow or broad, dark or light, hard or soft, motion or change, wash your mind clean of every possible particular and think only of the general, and you have Being. And Being is the Absolute. Plato was illogical and identified good with Being; and the Christian fathers, still more illogical, identified Being with the Hebrew God Jehovah, whence came all the confusion of Christian theology. The Absolute is absolute and he is nothing else. He is imprisoned in his own absolutism. If the Absolute do but wink his eye, his absolutism is in danger; if he sneeze, it is shattered. When Christian theology made Absolute Being its primal god it was on the horns of a dilemma. If its god acted he couldn't be Absolute, and if he couldn't act he was of no use as a god. Theology first shut God up in his ab- solutism then had to resort to all sorts of contrivances to get him out of his prison. Like Haroun al Raschid, this Absolute had to put on the disguise of the relative and so get out into his world. Why should the Absolute go to the trouble of creating a universe. Absolute Good cannot better Absolute Good. We are told that the Absolute was lonely; "What," says Ralph Cudworth, that delightful Platonist of the Seventeenth Century, in his 'Intellectual System of the Universe,' "what was He [the Absolute] doing in his melan- cholic dungeon before he entered upon the work of creation?" The theologians have been sadly bested to give any good, plausible reason why the Absolute God should disturb his absolutism by creating a world. How can changelessness initiate change? Poor dear old Plato, how by your juggling you have con- fused the world ! How you persuaded men to put the cart before the horse, the concept before the percept, the idea before the thing itself. When you spelled idea with a capital I and persuaded men that the idea was antecedent to and the cause of the reality, you played a scurvey trick on human 236 THE WAYS OF THE GODS thinking. You led men to believe that something was noth- ing and nothing is something. As Walter Pater says: "The Absolute, when you come to it, is nothing, pure idealism is pure nothingness." Well might Claus in Balzac's story "The Search of The Absolute," spend fortune and life in the search and never find it, for the Absolute is nothing, and nothing can never be found. Where Christian theology went on to identify the Jehovah god of the old Testament with the Absolute Being of the Greek philosophy, it entered upon a course of bewildering contradictions that have made it the despair of the human mind. The best that the mind can say is: "I believe be- cause I cannot understand." To sing: Change and decay in all around I see, O, Thou who changest not, abide with me. may soothe the restless soul, but to make of changelessness a god is to make your god impotent for good or evil. The Absolute of the Greek Dialectic, without extension, color, feeling, or motion, may be a great god in the intelligence, but he can never reach the heart. The Absolute is a god made out of a word, it is an adjective torn from its noun ; and yet no Moloch of brass in the groves of Syria has been more cruel than this god of the Greek Dialectic. In his name thinking has been held a crime. Men and women and children have been burned in the fire of persecution because they have failed to say of the god Absolute just what his priests commanded them to say. Far removed from all that is relative to the life of man, the Absolute, like some bed- ridden tyrant, has spread terror over the earth. Well might James say: "Damn the Absolute!" Only by coming out of his absolutism can God come into his world. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 237 CHAPTER L Christus, The Son of The Absolute As long as the person and the religion of Jesus ben Joseph were in the keeping of his own people there was no dispute as to his origin or nature. It never occurred to Peter, James, or John to think of him as other than as a man. He was the son of Mary, and his father's name was Joseph. He differed from those about him in degree but not in kind. Jesus was a greater man than Peter : Peter was the disciple and Jesus the master. His intense personality, with his pow- ers of loving, drew John to his bosom. His mother and his brothers, unable to comprehend his genius, said that he was beside himself. No one, I say, when he was alive, thought of Jesus other than a man, a great man, a good man, a crazy man, all sorts of opinions were entertained in regard to him ; but not for one moment did men think of him as a god, not for a single instant did Jesus have any such thought of himself. When the rich man bows to him and calls him "Good Master," he answers roughly: "Why callest thou me good, there is but one good, that is God." If we except the prologue to the Fourth Gospel there is not a word in the New Testament affirming anything like the Deity of Jesus. The very fact that his followers came to look upon him as the Messiah, or the Christus of God, was on their part an affirmation of his human origin and his human nature. To be Messiah he must be of the seed of David according to the flesh. He was the anointed of the Lord just as David was the anointed of the Lord. He was a man upon whom had come a double portion of God's spirit. He was the chosen servant of God to do his will. Even the birth stories of Matthew and Luke, which are of much later origin than the body of those Gospels, do not give to Jesus the attributes of Deity. His origin is the out- come of a creative act of Jehovah. Just as Jehovah created the first man out of clay, so he created the second 238 THE WAYS OP THE GODS man out of the substance of human nature in the womb of the Virgin. Even in Second Century thought Adam and Jesus were equally the creatures of God. The early church did not >ray to Jesus, it prayed to God in the name of Jesus. When the religion of Jesus passed out of the control of the Jewish mind and conscience and came into the power of the acute intelligence of the Greek and the practical judgment of the Roman, an elective process set in by which elements of Greek philosophy and Roman politics were amalgamated with the principles of the Hebrew religion to bring into being that new body of thought known as Christianity. The first change wrought in the system of Hebraic think- ing was the deification of Christus. This deification was the instinctive tribute of the common people, the slaves and the artisans, to the character and work of Jesus. When salva- tion was preached to these outcasts of the Roman world, when they were told that Jesus had died for them, that he had come again from the dead, that he had gone away from them into heaven, and that he was to come again with glory to judge the world, to cast down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and meek, it was perfectly natural for these simple souls to think of Jesus as a God. They were not philosophers troubled about the unity of God, they were plain folk to whom gods were as simple as themselves. The gods were to them almost as numerous as men ; they changed their gods when they changed their city. They had wor- shipped Apollo, now they worshipped Jesus. The change was no greater than if a man to-day were to cease to be an Epis- copalian and become a member of the Salvation Army, if so great. That men should become gods was not strange to that generation ; had not Julius Caesar, almost in their day, be- come a god, with his place among the stars and his month one of the months of the year? Was not the image of Divus Csesar set up in every city for men to worship, and was not Christus greater than Caesar? This reasoning on the part of the mass of the Christian people deified Jesus. Before the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 239 Second Century had passed away the Christus was the cen- tral object of Christian worship. The church no longer prayed through him but to him. The cry of "Christe Eleison!" went up from a million hearts that looked to this god for mercy and salvation. By the end of the Second Century the Deity of Jesus was the heart and the soul of the Christian faith. At the same time the Christian church was compelled to recognize another God beside Jesus. Jesus was not the origi- nal God; he was the Son of God. The Son was nearer and dearer to the Christian heart than the Father, but still there was the Father in the background, demanding the acknowl- edgment of his original divinity. So that the Christian church to the ordinary observer had two gods, the Jehovah Father and the Christus Son. And yet this sect was crying with all its lungs that there was and could be only one God. It was this contradiction that brought on the Christian body the derision of its enemies and sadly disturbed the thoughts of its friends. When the Greek philosopher who was a Christian was called upon to give a reason for the faith that was in him, he had as a Christian to hold fast to the Deity of Jesus, as a philosopher he had to preserve the Unity of God. When the heathen scoffer asked him if Christus were a god, he must answer: "Yes," when the same scoffer asked if the Father were a God, the philosopher must still answer: "Yes." Then says the scoffer : "I cannot see how for all your boasting you differ from the vulgar round about you. It is true that you have only two gods, while they may have half a dozen, but that is a matter of degree. You admit the principle of more than one god; having two now, you may have a dozen next year." "No, no," protests the Christian philosopher, growing red in the face, "you misjudge us altogether, we have and can have only one God, Christus is not a god in his own right; he is the Son of God." "Oh, I see," says the scoffer, "but it seems to me that you have not bettered your case ; if a father and a son are two men, why should not a father and 240 THE WAYS OF THE GODS son be two gods? And, besides, how does it come to pass that your father God has a son? Has your God a wife to whose couch he goes up and begets sons and daughters, even as Marduk in the Temple of Babylon?" "Never, never!" shouts the Christian philosopher in a rage; "such a thought were blasphemy ; our God is holy and knows not the shame of a woman's love." "How, then, has he a son?" says the scoffer. This problem of the relation of the unity of God to the Deity of Jesus disturbed the peace of the Church for four centuries. In the process of its solution the basis of Chris- tianity was changed from conduct to creed ; it ceased to be a religion of the heart and became a dogma of the intellect. The church had to define the Sonship of Jesus Christ in such a way as not to disturb the absolute oneness of the Father; God was alone, unapproachable, without spouse or marriage-bed, and yet he must have a son. Unconsciously the theologians of the Third Century devised a method of genera- tion which nature had used in the beginning of life. In the slime of the river bottoms are little creatures the life history of which antedates man's by a million generations; in these minute creatures we see how life was continued before sex with all its complexities was evolved to be the glory and the shame of the world. The amoeba, like God, is one and al- ways one; it is complete in itself, no female of the species disturbs its peace. It neither marries nor is given in mar- riage. It is in itself both male and female. When the amoeba grows too large for comfort it contracts in the center and breaks in two, and there are two amoebae instead of one, yet each one is one. This is generation by budding. So it was taught by the philosophers that God generated in himself another God and begat out of his own self a son. But even this did not save the Unity of God, for the Son could not be equal to the Father, because the Father was before the Son in time. The Father was eternal, without cause, beginning, or end. The Father was the cause of the Son, and the generation of the Son was the beginning of time. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 241 It was at this point that the great battle was fought in the Fourth Century that resulted in the establishment of the orthodox form of Christianity. Two parties, one led by Arius the Libyan, and the other by Athanasius the Arch- bishop of Alexandria, struggled for the mastery in the body of the church. The party of Athanasius asserted that Chris- tus was the Son of God from all eternity and Arius affirming that there was a time when Christus was not TQV TCOTSOUX -r^v; was the war cry of the Arian. Arius kept Christus in the region of creation, Athanasius put him outside time and space. Arius maintained the Unity of God, Athanasius up- held the Deity of Christus. Arius made the Oneness of God, Athanasius the Presence of God, the supreme article of faith. Both Arius and Athanasius were Platonists holding to the Absolute. Arius kept the Absolute intact ; Athanasius gave him a way of escape. Arius represented the primitive con- ception of the nature and mission of Jesus Christ, Athanasius the conception of the Philosophic schools. In the course of this contention Jesus was robbed of his simplicity; instead of a being of flesh and blood, born of a woman, made under the law, a man among men, living the life and dying the death of man, he was transformed into a theo- logical concept. He was exalted to the right hand of the Majesty on high. He became God out of God, very God out of very God : the Second Person in the Adorable Trinity. This exaltation of Jesus lost him his hold on the hearts of the people. He ceased to be the God of a religion and be- came the Divinity of a theology. In order to adapt himself to the demands of the Greek intelligence, he had to sacrifice that which had made him dear to the heart of the shepherd and the slave. Men could worship Jesus, whether god or man, but they could not and cannot worship the Second Person of the Adorable Trinity. Such a god is too abstract and abstruse to hold the devotion of the simple. The elevation of Christus into the regions of the Absolute removed him from the realm of human experience. His fate was the fate of all the gods. When the gods by reason of 242 THE WAYS OP THE GODS changes in thought and circumstance outgrow the common people then that befalls them which happens to the English statesman when he outlives his usefulness in the Commons, he is sent up into the House of Lords. And so it happened to Jesus ben Joseph. CHAPTER LI The Divine Personality of Christus, Son of The Absolute By reason of his exaltation to the rank of an Absolute God, Jesus ben Joseph lost his human and acquired a divine per- sonality. This matter was settled in the Council of Ephesus at Whitsuntide, in the year 431. One Anastasius, a presby- ter of Constantinople, at the instance and with the full con- sent of his bishop, had warned his hearers, in a sermon, of the danger of giving Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the title of Mother of God. It is impossible, said the preacher, that God the Absolute should have a mother; if he were born, he could not be Absolute ; and if he were not Absolute, he could not be God. The preacher went on to say that Mary was the mother of the human person Jesus, with whom the divine person Christus, descending from heaven, was associated. No sooner was this utterance made than there was an uproar among the monks and the clergy, for the title Theo- tokos (or Mother of God) had grown dear to the monkish and clerical heart. Appeal was made from the judgment of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, who had confirmed the doctrine of his presbyter, to Cyril, bishop of Alexandria (the same who caused the brilliant Hypatia to be cruelly put to death), and to John, bishop of Antioch. So great was the contention over this question that the emperors Theodosius and Valentinian ordered the bishops metropolitan with their suf- fragans to assemble in council in the city of Ephesus to de- bate and settle this dispute. Cyril of Alexandria with his THE WAYS OF THE GODS 243 suffragans and partisans arrived first, and without waiting for John of Antioch, who was delayed, proceeded to condemn Nestorius and Anastasius as heretics; to deprive them of their offices in the church, and to decree their perpetual ban- ishment. John of Antioch, when he reached the city, was indignant at the hasty action of Cyril and held up the decis- ion. But after a furious controversy, in which Christian charity was torn to tatters, the party of Cyril prevailed, the teaching of Nestorius was declared to be heretical, and as a heretic Nestorius was deprived of his holy office and ban- ished from the city of Constantinople. The effect of this decision was to affirm that Jesus, the Christus, was one and only one person. The Nestorian doc- trine had implied a double personality in the one individual ; the human personality of Jesus and the divine personality of Christus, so that one could say this Jesus did as a man : as a man he wept at the tomb of Lazarus and died on the cross, for God can neither weep nor die, and this Christus did as a god : as a god he commanded the winds to cease and restored the dead son of the widow of Nain alive to his mother. But the decree of the Council put an end to this distinction. Jesus the Christus was One Person, and that Person was God. God wept at the tomb of Lazarus and died on the cross. The Nestorian heresy, like the Arian, was an effort to save the Absolute. The Nestorian doctrine kept God free from the entanglements arising from the human imperfec- tions of Jesus; the orthodox teaching made God responsible for every word and act of Jesus. It gave infallibility and im- peccability to the character of Jesus, for God could not err, neither could He sin. The orthodox view was more logical, from the standpoint of pure reason, the Nestorian more in accord with the facts. As we read the story of this Council and of the Council of Chalcedon which followed, we are grieved at the utter lack of charity in the hearts of these bishops and doctors of the church. During these controversies that spiritual disease was developed known as odium theologicum, a disease that soon became an incurable malady destroying the very life of the 244 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Christian religion. These controversies, which raged so fiercely, consumed all that was lovely and saving in the re- ligion of Jesus ben Joseph, leaving nothing but clinkers and ashes. The very words of the controversies that rent the church of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries have become meaningless to us. When on Easter day the choir sings to Stainer's music the Nicean creed, the music may thrill our emotions, but the words do not stir our thoughts. For all the good that comes to our understanding, the words might as well be in an unknown tongue. The Roman Church does well to sing the creeds and service of the church in Latin ; this soothes the emotions and does not disturb the mind. As a matter of mental gymnastics I ask the reader to be patient while I try to make as clear as his, or her, and my own mental capacity will permit, the meaning of the words which set the early church on fire, and which, cold and hard as volcanic rock, are now imbedded in our creeds. The con- troversies, the outcome of which was the orthodox Chris- tianity of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, and which re- mains orthodox to the present day, raged around two words : "nature" and "person." Was Christus of the same nature or substance as the Father, and had he a human as well as a divine personality. The first question was the cause of the Arian, the second of the Nestorian controversy. What then is "nature" or "substance" and what is "person?" The best definition of a word is to be found, not in the dictionary, but in the ordinary use of the word as it is cur- rent on the lips of men. When we speak of human nature, cr as the Greeks would call it, of human substance, we have in mind all that is substantial to the existence of man. Hu- man nature implies the upright position, the sensitive hand, the conscious mind, the social instinct. All that goes to the making of a man preexists, as one may say, in the substance out of which man is made. When we are conceived our vitality is the vitality of the human seed, our substance the substance of human flesh and blood ; it is because of this sub- stance, which is preexistent to our birth, that we are born THE WAYS OF TJIE GODS 245 human and not canine or other being. All around us we see this fact of nature or substance: in the tree, in the horse, in the dog. It is this substance that separates one order of life from another. A man is a man and not a dog, because he is of the substance or nature of a man and not of a dog. On the surface these substances are permanent and ex- clusive; a man never should be, never can be, never will be a dog, his nature or substance forbids it. Now the Greek mind, aware of this surface fact, asserted that there was a god nature or substance forever separating God from all that is not God. God could not be man any more than man could be God. As God he must be forever apart and alone. This is not the desire of his soul, it is the necessity of his nature, and according to this theory man is man and God is God and never the twain shall meet. It was the effort of the Nicean theologian to bridge this unbridgable gulf. The gods of the heathen could not be gods, because they were so human ; if Jesus were a mere man, as it is said, he could not be God because he was a man. And there you are ! God is shut out of this world and he can't get in ; he needs man and man needs him ; but it is a far cry from the loneliness of the Abso- lute to the necessities of the human soul. One deep calleth another, because of the noise of the waterpipes, the deep of God's loneliness calls to the deep of man's necessity. To meet this necessity the Heaven, like Uranos of old, descends to the embraces of earth ; the Person of God comes down and impregnates the womb of a woman. And God is born and lives and dies, as does a man, and all this that man and God may meet and know one another. This is a beautiful and, under certain conditions of thought, a workable theory. In spite of its outre character and in- numerable contradictions, the theory prevailed as long as men held to the doctrine of the immutability of substance or nature. This was Plato's doctrine of Idea or the Absolute ap- plied to theology. Each existence in the visible world had its form or substance in the invisible world and it could never change. Man is man and dog is dog, because man and dog have their archetype in the eternal mind which altereth not. 246 THE WAYS OF THE GODS He who holds to the Absolute and believes in the perma- nence of species must devise some such artificial method as that of the Nicean creed to open a way for the Absolute to become relative and enter into the activities of the world. When once, however, this illusion of the permanence of nature or substance is dispelled, when we see as we do to-day that species are not immutable, that nature or substance in- stead of being as hard as iron, is as plastic as clay ; that man and dog have more in common than in difference the di- gesting stomach, the breathing lung, the beating heart are the same in the dog and in the man; that human nature re- cords the experience of all nature from the lowest infusoria to the highest and most gifted man, then we see that all the elaborate apparatus of the Nicean theology was devised to overcome a difficulty that did not exist. We may pity these men as we pity the builders of the Tower of Babel, they were building a bridge to span a supposed chasm between God and man, a chasm so wide that it needed the infinite to reach from side to side, and lo, and behold ! the chasm is not there. Earth and sky are not separated; they are united by space. Man and God are not divided, they are united by nature. Man is the manifestation of God. Get Plato's Ab- solute out of the way and God has no difficulty in getting into His world. He is always there. So much for nature or substance; now what is person? Persona, from which person is derived, is the Latin name for the mask that the actor wore on the stage to designate the character he was playing. His mask was his distinction. Ac- cording to his mask he was playing this character and not that. He came and went according to the cue of his mask. So the Latin writers came to use this word to signify dis- tinction or character. The persona of a man is that which is peculiar to him; by his personality he is separated from all other human beings, as we say, "no two persons are ex- actly alike." Later "person" came to mean the man himself. Persona was the ego, the I am, which lay behind and held together the nature of the man ; its thoughts and feelings and actions were the thoughts and feelings and actions of such a THE WAYS OF THE GODS 247 person. The Greeks to express this meaning used the word hupostasis, that which stands under and upholds, the bind- ing, sustaining principle in each man which makes him one and not many. Personality is distinction. We speak of a man as a great personality, because the distinctive elements in his nature separate him from the vulgar. When theology came to apply the term persona to the Absolute, it was guilty of an incurable contradiction; one might as well speak of a square circle. Personality is limi- tation and a limited Absolute is just no Absolute at all. In spite of its twisting and turning, the Christian theology when it gave divine personality to Christ was polytheistic to the core. Its Trinity, in spite of all its shrieking, is three gods and never one, and the Christian dogma naively recognizes this fact in assigning to each of its three gods separate func- tions. It teaches its children to say: "I believe in God the Father who made me and all the world and in God the Son who redeemed me and all mankind, and in God the Holy Ghost who sanctifieth me and all the people of God." There you have three persons, each person having a different char- acter and playing a different part. Now, if you say that the three persons are one god in the substance of the god-head, you do not make them one any more than you make three men one, by saying they are one in the substance of humani- ty. Of course they are; but what of it? The blame of all this lies with the Absolute, which James in his wrath damned. If it were not for the Absolute we should not be wandering in and out and around about in these theological tortuosities, singing "three in one" and "one in three" as if we were children playing puzzle. We should just take "God" simply, as the primitive man took him and as the plain folk take him to-day, as he comes to us in the light and in the dark, in the voices of our solitude and in the faces of our friends. As St. Thomas a Kempis says : "It is better to love God than to define him." And the pity of it all is that it makes God uninteresting. Jesus ben Joseph, forcing the issue in Jerusalem ; giving voice 248 THE WAYS OF THE GODS in the Courts of the Temple to a denunciatory eloquence un- equalled in the history of oratory; bidding farewell to his friends, when he knows death is at hand, with a pathos that moves the heart; standing before Pilate in a way that wins the admiration of his judge; dying with the cry, "Why hast thou forsaken me?" on his lips, all that has a deep abiding interest that wins and holds the heart. But to think of Christus, the Son of the Absolute, Light of Light, God out of God, Very God of Very God, Begotten and not made, being of one substance with the Father (of whom we must be careful not to divide the person nor confound the natures), all that is as interesting as a chemical formula, useful, it may be, to the chemist, but to the common man, a mere ar- rangement of words. If the chemist can turn his formula into a living, burning light under our eyes, well! if not, we sleep while he lectures. Poor Jesus ben Joseph, in all that thou hast gained in di- vine substance and personality, thou hast lost the more in human interest and devotion. CHAPTER LII The Celestial Caesar In the year 410 of the present era, the Goths, under the command of their chieftain Alaric, took and sacked the city of Rome. This event filled all the civilized world with as- tonishment and terror. It seemed to those then living as if the end of the world had come. The Mediterranean civiliza- tion, bereft of its imperial City, sank into a sullen and a dumb despair. There was no comfort in the present and no hope for the future. Rome, which for twelve centuries had been the dominant city of the then known world, was now the prey of the barbarian. Her patricians, bound with cords, were sold into slavery ; her matrons were given to the rude embrace of the bearded men of the north ; her treasures were pillaged to enrich the stranger. What Rome had so often inflicted upon other cities, she now suffered within her own walls. She who had been the mistress of a world was the captive of a tribe. She had enjoyed her long day of triumph, but now the night of disaster had fallen upon her. No won- der that the world trembled when Rome fell. Those who were of the old faith, worshippers of Jupiter Capitolinus, ascribed these calamities to the wrath of the ancient gods, because men had forsaken them and gone over to the worship of the parvenu gods of the Semitic dynasty. Christus, with his specious promises of life after death, had charmed the people away from the altars of Saturn and Venus, of Jupiter and Mars, who had in their keeping the good things of this world ; who through all the centuries had given Rome victory over her enemies and enriched her with the spoils of conquered lands. "Back to Jupiter!" was the cry of the Pagan. "Back to Jupiter! Away with these sor- 251 252 THE WAYS OF THE GODS did gods of the Jew, who do not and cannot care for the City of Rome." It was this cry of the defeated gods of the old regime that roused St. Augustine, the greatest mind then living, to come to the rescue of the god of the religion to which he himself had been recently converted. The taking and the sacking of Rome gave to Augustine occasion and inspiration to write the greatest of all his books, and they are many, called by him "De Civitate Dei", "Concerning the City of God." In the City of God Augustine not only defended the Christian religion against the assaults of its enemies, but he also or- ganized that religion into a consistent scheme to meet con- ditions consequent upon the fall of Rome. In the place of the city of the Caesars he put the city of God. The Deus or God of Augustine was none other than Caesar himself, clothed with omnipotence, enthroned in the heavens as the absolute ruler of the world. Nowhere is the process of evolution more evident than in the development of the God of the Hebrew religion and the god of the Greek philoso- phy into the God of the Roman Church. This god of August- ine is the Absolute of Plato identified with the Jehovah of Isaiah and endowed with the political power of the Roman Caesar. The City of God of which Augustine treats was no ideal city, out of the sight and sound of man ; it was a city popu- lous and powerful ; a city that conquered Rome a century be- fore Alaric, the Goth, had set foot in Italy. It was a new Rome born out of the old. As a city it was highly organized and effective to take up and carry on the work of ruling the world, which had been of old and was to be far into the future the mission of the City of Rome. That City of God of which Augustine wrote was none other than the Chris- tian church of which Rome even then was considered the capital ; a claim which Rome was destined to press in season and out of season until she became once more the ruling city of the Western world. Christianity owes its religious conceptions to the genius of the Hebrew prophets ; its dogma is the product of the sub- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 253 tie mind of the Greek philosopher; its organization is the work of the Roman lawyer. #A. century and more before Augustine had written his book concerning the City of God, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, had written his epoch-making treatise "De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate", "Concerning the Unity of the Catholic Church." Cyprian was a brilHant and a successful lawyer who was converted to Christianity in mid- dle life, bringing to the service of that religion the training and the mental attitude of his profession. His conversion was the delight of the church and the despair of the outside world. When men of the character and ability of Cyprian embraced the fortunes of Jesus it was no longer possible to speak of Jesus and his following after the manner of Tacitus. In the days of Cyprian Christianity was already becoming respect- able; it was still persecuted but the persecution gave it eclat. Cyprian himself died for the faith, but he died with the dig- nity of a Roman and not with the sordidness of the slave. The time had passed when men could become living torches to light the revels of drunken emperors. At the time of his martyrdom Cyprian was bishop of Carth- age; at the outbreak of the persecution in the reign of the emperor Decius, Cyprian, at the prayer of his people, went into retirement. Under Gallus, the persecution being re- laxed, the bishop returned to Carthage and was active in the work of the church. When Valerian succeeded to the empire the persecution was renewed and Cyprian was first banished, then recalled and beheaded, to the sorrow not only of the Christian community, but also to the regret of the people of Carthage in general ; for he was a great and a good man, of whom the city was proud. When Cyprian came to his episcopate, he found his dio- cese rent by schism and sorely troubled by heresies. The Christian churches scattered throughout the empire were more or less at odds with one another they differed both in mat- ters of faith and in rules of discipline. There was no central recognized authority to which disputes could be referred for settlement; each church was more or less a law unto itself, subject only to the binding force of the Christian tradition. 254 THE WAYS OF THE GODS It was to meet and to correct the evils consequent upon this lack of organization that Cyprian propounded his theory of the church in his treatise "De Unitate." Being a lawyer of the Roman Empire, Cyprian followed the lines of organization with which he was familiar. In the Empire power was centralized in the emperor. In theory the Imperium was conferred by the Senate; in fact, it was the prize of the successful general, but whether chosen by the Senate or acclaimed by the legions, the emperor, when once an emperor, was the master of Rome. His word was law, his power personal and absolute. He could put men to death or banish them to Scythia without trial. He alone was res- ponsible for the safety of Rome, he appointed the officers of the State, he sent the pro-consuls to rule the provinces. From the farthest confines of Britain to the borders of Parthia there was not a man so great that the emperor could not destroy him. When the emperor had put a man over a city that man was not a servant of the people, he was the vicar of the em- peror. In other words, the government of Imperial Rome was government based upon authority centered in a person. It was this system of government that Cyprian applied to the uses of the Christian church. The Christian church was the City of God, even as the city of Rome was the city of Caesar. All authority was centered in God, and God was a person. In ruling the world, God delegated his power to persons chosen by himself. The church was his creation ; God gave power to Jesus Christ to found his church. Jesus Christ, in turn, gave power to Peter to govern the church. Peter went to Rome and established the church in that city and gave to his successor in the bishopric of that church, for all time, the powers of government in and over the church. The various bishops of the various churches derived, each his authority, not from the people, but from God through Christ and then through Peter and the Apostles. The peo- ple might designate whom they would like to have for their bishop, but they could never make him their bishop. Before he could exercise that office he must receive power and au- thority from God, through Christ, from Peter as the Vicar THE WAYS OF THE GODS 255 of Christ, and the Apostles; through the laying on of hands by the bishops, who conveyed the electric current of power and authority down the line. This theory laid down by Cyp- rian established itself by force of circumstances and is to this day the theory of all churches claiming to be apostolic. It is the theory of the Roman, Greek, and Anglican churches, which differ from one another only as to the share which the other apostles have with Peter in the possession and exercise of this delegated authority; Rome says they have none, the Greek and the Anglican deny this, and say that the apostles share and share alike in this gift of authority. This doctrine is destructive of unity. Rome has the logic of the theory; hence Rome prevails. But wherever this theory is held, whether in Rome, Oxford, or Moscow, the status of God is the same. God is the absolute ruler of the church and, through the church, of the world. By a carefully arranged machinery he appoints the officers of the church who are to rule both church and world. When a man is once a bishop he is so by divine right; he is not the servant of the people, he is the Vicar of God. This is not only true of the pope or the bishop, but of every officer of the church down to the last little priestling ordained by the bishop. It was to the establishment of this theory that St. Augustine dedicated his great genius : he saw in the fall of Rome the opportunity of God. God could now reign in Rome in the person of his Vicar. The imperialistic conception of God, which was held by Augustine in common with the Roman lawyers, separated God from the people. God was the sov- ereign, the people were the subjects; it was for God to com- mand, for the people to obey. God was majesty, might, and power, the people must bow before his majesty, tremble at his might, and suffer the exercise of his power. The God of Augustine has nothing of the vacillation of Jehovah ; he does not repent that he made man because man is wicked, God made man to be wicked, that in the punishment of that wickedness God might be glorified. Nor has the God of Augustine anything of the vagueness of the Greek Father- God, who can do nothing except through the Son. 256 THE WAYS OF THE GODS With Augustine God is God, and that is the end of the mat- ter. What God wants to do God can do, and God does do. He is the Absolute sovereign, Nothing happens without his will ; we are what we are, we do what we do, we suffer what we suffer, all in accordance with the will of God. This con- ception of God was congenial to the Roman mind. If one asks why this is so, the answer is : It is the will of God. Why am I sick? It is the will of God. Why am I poor? It is the will of God. Why am I in prison? It is the will of God. God is personal will enthroned in the universe, commanding the universe. It is this imperial God who rules in the Catholic church through his vicar, the pope, who rules in every diocese through his vicar, the bishop, and in every parish church through his vicar the priest. There is nothing indefinite here; God is God, and there is none beside him. This is God's vicar, his word is law. God is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him. I, his Pope, his bishop, his priest, speak in his name. Listen and obey. CHAPTER LIII God Almighty: Creator of Heaven and Hell Augustine, in common with all the doctors of the church, accepted the Hebrew Scriptures as of divine inspiration and authority, they were the very word of God, expressing his will. But Augustine did what every one must do; he in- terpreted those writings in the light of his own genius to ac- commodate them to the conditions of his own time and place. In the Hebrew Scriptures Jehovah is the creator of the heav- ens and the earth. In the scheme of creation the earth oc- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 257 cupied the central position as the scene of the activities of Jehovah. The heavens ministered to the earth. In the days when the Hebrew Scriptures were written, man was of the earth, earthy. On the earth man's life was lived, in the earth man rested after his life was over. Man was not yet capable of aspiring to any other life than the life that he lived as a denizen of the earth. The Hebrew writers had in their minds no such conception as we hold when we speak of heaven. The Hebrew did not think of himself as personally immortal. The only immortality that he craved was the immortality of the tribe. Israel was to live forever and keep Jehovah's name alive in the earth. There were no mansions in the skies that Israel coveted ; his heart was de- voted to his own land, with its vines and its fig trees. His desire was for length of days. He that would live long and see good days must eschew evil and do good ; must seek peace and ensue it. Length of days was the reward of virtue to the Israelite. Even after the Hebrew thinkers had assimilated the thought of a personal life after death, they still made the earth the scene of that life's activities. The resurrection from the dead was a resurrection to and a renewal of the earthly life. Jer- usalem glorified and triumphant ; the Jew the dominant peo- ple, with abundance of bread and wine to strengthen and make glad his heart was all that the Jew asked of Jehovah. That granted, the Jew would sing the Lord's songs in the Lord's house until all the world should hear that song and praise the name of Jehovah of Hosts. As for a home beyond the sky, the Jew never dreamed of such a thing, nor desired it. X" As for hell as described by Christian theology, neither the f Jew nor the Pagan ever conceived of such a place of torment. : Hell is the gift of Christianity to humanity. Death was un- desirable to the Hebrew and the ancient man in general sim- ply because it was the absence of life. This attitude of mind is set forth with clearness in the prayer of Hezekiah in Isaiah, XXXVIII. The sick king laments his coming death in a manner congenial to the belief of his time : 258 THE WAYS OF THE GODS I said in the cutting off of my days I shall go to the gates of the grave. I am deprived of the residue of my years. I said I shall not see the Lord, even the Lord in the land of the living. I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world. Mine age is departed and removed from me as a shepherd's tent. I have cut off like a weaver my life ; he will cut me off with pining sickness ; from day even to night will thou make an end of me. Here is regret for departed life but no fear of coming horror; darkness and silence and a life gone out, and that is all. The Hebrew did not have even so vague a notion of life after death as prevailed quite generally in the Gentile world ; a life of semi-consciousness in the grave, dependent for what little satisfaction there was in it upon the remem- brance and ministration of the living. But as for a life after death of exquisite happiness or of exquisite misery it never entered his mind. Heaven and hell were undiscovered coun- tries to the ancient Hebrew mind. These regions were brought into view by the Christian theologians and their topography was very largely the work of the Roman lawyers.^ To Augustine, more than to any other man, is owing those clear outlines of heaven and hell, especially of hell, which have made these places such realities to the Christian mind- In Augustine's time men were like Caius Cassius, "aweary of the world". The earth had lost its charm. Men living in cities, as did Augustine, had ceased to be familiar with the gods of the countryside; they were not refreshed by the waters of Arethusa, nor did they walk in the light of Artemis. We must never forget that Christianity was a religion of the city; it made little or no headway in the country. So much was this the case that those that were not Christians in the days of Augustine were called Pagans, or countrymen- And city life with its corrupt politics and its licentious society had become an abomination to the Christian. To him the world was very evil, its times were waxing late. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 259 This earth instead of being the principle scene of the acti- vities of God and man, was but an episode, lying between heaven and hell. Man's life on the earth was under a curse ; instead of being the home of man it was his place of banish- ment. God was not in the earth, he was in heaven, and only by leaving earth could a man gain admittance to the presence of God- So that to this day we say of a man who has died, that he has gone to his God; as if when alive he was not with his God. In this scheme of Augustine, God is not Jehovah, Creator of heaven and earth ; he is God Almighty, Creator of heaven and hell. Heaven is his throne-room, hell is his dungeon. His throne-room was thronged with his subjects, his dun- geon was crowded with his enemies. God created for his own purposes both heaven and hell- In the days of Augustine what was left of the Roman Empire, decrepit and senile, was, in the person of its em- peror, rapidly assuming the guise of an Oriental despotism. All of the simplicity of the Republic and of the early Empire was gone. The emperor, instead of living, as did Augustus Caesar, in his own house as a simple citizen, coming and going as any private man, plain in his dress, austere in his habit, lived in a palace of a thousand rooms, thronged with eunuchs, crowded with sycophants, the scene of license and luxury; the emperor himself secluded and worshipped as a god. Clothed in purple, crowned with gold, seated on ivory, he received the obeisance of the people. The meanest and the greatest were on equality when they were in the presence of the emperor- Etiquette banished simplicity, so that life in the palace of the Caesar was bur- densome, dangerous, and tedious; he who came into that pal- ace must come richly clothed. A frown on the face of the emperor meant death. If the emperor smiled the man must smile and stand just so. When Constantine removed the seat of empire from Rome to Byzantium and built there his new Rome, which was called after his name, Constan- tinople, he not only changed the place, he changed the char- acter of the capitol city. Rome could never altogether divest 260 THE WAYS OF THE GODS herself of the vestiges of her Republican simplicity. Con- stantinople had no such past She entered at once upon that career of luxury and despotism which has been her experience ever since. So it was with God. When Jehovah removed his capitol city from earth to heaven, he not only changed the place, he changed the character of his divinity. As long as he dwelt in Jerusalem God could not rid himself altogether of the asso- ciations of the desert; the grit of the sand is in his hair, the tan of the desert is on his cheek, the smell of the sheep-fold clings to his garments. He is a god who has known hard- ships; he has sat cross-legged in the door of Abraham's tent- Such was the god Jehovah, and even Jerusalem could not rob him of his rusticity. But when he becomes God Almighty, and has removed his capitol city from earth to heaven, then all this simplicity is gone and in its place is a meritricious, Oriental, despotic court. God sits on his throne, Cherubim and Seraphim veil their face before him ; the whole atmosphere is laden with the fulsome praises of His Majesty- God exists only to be praised. His own hap- piness and glory is his single thought. If we may believe the theologians, God created man simply to praise Him. Any slightest thought of criticism of His Divine Majesty is pun- ished with banishment from heaven to the torments of hell. Lucifer, son of morning, falls from heaven because he will not bow before the Great White Throne. This conception of God and heaven is Constantinopoli- tanism pure and simple ; it has been the ideal both of Caesar and Sultan from the foundation of that city to this day- And it is upon this conception that Western Christendom has fed its imagination for nearly two thousand years. As in the palace of the Duke of Ferrara, the dungeon foul and dark and filthy was under the banquet room, so it was in the city of God. The fires of hell were raging under- neath the golden streets of the new Jerusalem. Only a decadent^ and dying civilization could have given birth to any such conception as ' tHg~n"ristian fiell^; that conception has in it a 'refinement of cruelty, possible only THE WAYS OF THE GODS 261 to a depraved mind, and the mind of Augustine, great as it was, was depraved. It could not help being depraved; it was born, lived, and died in an atmosphere of depravity. For centuries the Roman had steeped his soul in cruelty. What to us would be shocking beyond endurance was to him a matter of every day occurrence. Augustine's conception of hell was born of the cruelties of the empire. God, in his conception, is more cruel than Nero: for Nero did not create his victims, and he could only burn them for an hour at the most. God did create his victims, and he could burn them through eternity- Augustine devotes two chapters, Chapter XXI and Chap- ter XXII of "The City of God" to prove that God can, by his creative power, keep a human body of flesh and blood and bone and nerve alive through all eternity in order that he may burn it in the fires of his wrath. Beyond this, a conception of cruelty cannot go. As the king punishes treason with the greatest severity, so God visits heresy and schism, which are acts of treason against the City of God, with a penalty beyond the punish- ment of adultery and murder. For the heretic the fires of hell burn hotter than for the common criminal. Soon after the time of Augustine, the church, that she might be pleasing to her Lord, entered upon that career of cruelty which is one of the darkest blots on the pages of human history- The church in all its branches would gladly forget these passages in her history. But the student can never forget; these transactions have singed and charred the very nerves of human race memory; so that at the thought of them the soul winces. From the day when the monks of Alexandria stripped the beautiful and gifted Hypatia naked and scraped her quivering flesh from her bones with shells to the day when Henry VIII and his priests burned Anne Askew in the fire ; from the days when the priests of Rome burned Gior- dano Bruno in the Piazza, del Fiore to the days when the priests of England heaped scorn on the head of the venerable Darwin, more cruel deeds have been done in the name of God Almighty than I, for one, would care, if I were God, to 262 THE WAYS OF THE GODS be responsible for. Well did Jesus say: "He that killeth you will think he doeth God service." It is to be said for primitive and pure Christianity that i this conception was foreign to its mind. As long as the \ religion was in the keeping of the working class it did not 1 easily lend itself to such extremes. The mind of the early 1 / church was tender toward suffering as having itself suffered. V It remembered the prayer of its Founder for his persecutors and in its hour of agony it prayed for surcease of pain. Chis notion of hell we owe to the Roman lawyer; and the is always cruel- __ Human government has, until very recently, been (and, in a measure, is even now) based on fraud and violence ; it is haunted by fear and buttressed by punishment; its safeguards are the dungeon and the gibbet. It knows nothing of the love that casts out all fear and walks defenseless as Daniel into the den of the lions. Man is for the most part like Robespierre: he can think of government only as a killing. Here is a woman who is suspected of in- civism ; what shall we do with her? Send her to the guil- lotine ! Here is a man whose patriotism is shady ; what shall we do with him? Send him to the guillotine! So it was all day long, to the guillotine! to the guillotine! to the guil- lotine ! until Robespierre has guillotined all that was virtuous d noble in France and then comes, himself, under the axe. But alas, and alack a day! that we should have ascribed such npidity to our God ! Here is a woman who differs from your priests in hfir teaching; what shall we do with her? Torture her and send her to hell- Here is a man whose orthodoxy is in doubt; what shall we do with him? Oh, burn him and send him to hell ! Here is a nation that has never heard of your plan of salvation; what shall we do with it? Oh, just send it to hell; until hell is all peopled by the noblest souls that ever breathed the breath of human life. All this is so stupid that it is ridiculous, and the wonder is that men could ever have been so crassly idiotic in their minds. The Christian world owes a profound apology to the so-called heathen world for sending all its saints and sages. unseen, unheard, to the Christian hell. It was not fair to God THE WAYS OF THE GODS 263 nor to the heathen and sage. It was, however, a great com- pliment to hell. It makes hell desirable. /'The excuse for all this is that hell is born of a horror for\ sin. But of all the sins of which man can be guilty, cruelty/f js the greatest; and hell is cruelty deified. f O my brothers and my sisters, is it not time that you and I came out from under our bondage to the Roman lawyer, and delivered ourselves and our God from the cruel libel which these have laid against him and us? We have no sin and can have no sin that deserves eternal torture. God Almighty Creator of Heaven and hell never did exist, never can exist! Let us forget him. CHAPTER LIV The Wrath of God In the Augustine scheme, Jesus ben Joseph is not the God Christus, worshipped by the common people; his business is not, primarily, to inform them with his wisdom, to win them by his tenderness, to lead them in the way of righteousness. His relation to the people is subordinated to his relation to his God. Jesus did not come into the world to save the world by wisdom and by love, he came to save it by his blood. His death was not the natural consequence of his course of action in antagonizing the priest and scribe ; he did not die, as Savonarola died, because his life was dangerous to the exist- ing order, he was not the victim of man's rage or fear; he was the victim of God's wrath. He was the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world to take away the sin of the world. God was angry with the world because of the sin of Adam; Christus, by his death, appeased this anger of God. This theory of the nature and office of the Christus has its origin far back in the primitive mind of man. It is an in- 264 THE WAYS OF THE GODS heritance from the ages of ignorance and fear. Everywhere we find primitive man seeking to propitiate his god with blood ; human and animal sacrifice prevailed as soon as man emerged into the full consciousness of himself and the world about him. When he awakened in the garden of Eden, he found himself naked and he was ashamed and afraid. He heard the voice of his God calling in anger, and he hid him- self- That is the parable of man's life from its earliest con- sciousness down to the present day. God has always been an object of fear. Fear is the motive of worship. Listen to the litanies that go up to God from the lips of the priests, and are they not appeals for mercy? All through the ages man has been as a child afraid of his father. And there was reason for it, since in all the early ages the fathers were bitter toward their children, the little ones were visited by the rod for every offense. It was a hard thing in those days to be a child in a grown-up world. Then, as always, man has made God in his own image. Man looked on every calamity of his life as the infliction of an angry god ; the flood and the drought, the fever and the chill, came not in any order of nature, but were the outbreaks of the bad temper of the Gods. It is pitiful that, from the first, man has thought of the universe and of the gods of the uni- verse as unfriendly to him- Have you never passed a house at night and heard the falling switch and the cry of the tortured child? "Oh, father, don't, don't! I'll be good, I'll be good, I'll be good !" And so it is with us, who are but grown- up children, when we suffer the slings and arrows of out- rageous fortune, we lift up our agonized voices and cry to our God: "Father, don't, don't! I'll be good, I'll be good!" In order to keep the gods in fair temper, men brought to them of the firstlings of the flock and the heifer of a year old, that the gods might eat of the savory mess and be satisfied and pleased. For man said : "A hungry god is an angry god; I'll feed him and keep him in good humor." In the time of stress man said : "The god is dainty, he wants better meat than this: I will slay for him my first born, I will give the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul." Out of this fear of THE WAYS OF THE GODS 265 primitive man, out of his conception of the gods as being like himself, easily moved to anger when cold and hungry, was developed all that vast system of animal sacrifice which was the way of man's approach to God in the early stages of his religious life. As times softened manners and man became less a creature of his crude emotions, these butcheries in the temple offended his sensibilities and shocked his reason- He saw that the god did not eat of the fiesh that was laid on his altar; all of this except the offal, was the perquisite of the priest. But few men had the temerity to scout the whole system as absurd and useless. A Micah here, an Isaiah there, might utter his protest, but the custom was hoary, the tradition was sacred, and so the temples continued to be slaughter-houses, and priests persuaded the people that the gods must be fed with the sacrifice, else the gods would be angry. It was this primitive conception that Augustine, following the lead of Paul, organized into a system of religious doctrine and worship and bequeathed as a perpetual heirloom to the Christian church. The misery of the world Paul and Augustine ascribed to the anger of God at the sin of Adam- Adam disobeyed God and turned God against him, and not only did Adam suffer from the wrath of God, but his act involved the whole race of man down to the last generation. Man, by that act of disobedience, became evil in the sight of God ; sin curdled his blood and depraved his nature. With the growth of the conception of life after death man's dis- obedience involved not only suffering in this present life but eternal misery beyond the grave. When one's reason is awake, one stands amazed in the presence of such a conception as this; it is only because it has the sanction of religion that it can endure for a moment under the condemnation of the intelligence and the con- science. God's abiding wrath on the suffering children of men is too horrible to think of- Just think! God angry for four thousand years. How I pity him ! It was necessary that this wrath should be appeased if man was ever to escape from his misery. A scheme had 266 THE WAYS OF THE GODS already been devised by which this anger of God might be turned away from the sinner and fall upon the head of an- other. The Priests of the Hebrew religion had worked out an elaborate plan whereby the sinner might lay his sin upon the head of a victim and so be free. He brought the firstling of his flock and laid his hand upon its head and con- fessed his sin, and then he killed the lamb and burned it on the altar as a propitiatory sacrifice; and the blood of the lamb was the cleansing of his sin- /Paul took this thought of the Hebrew Rabbi and made basic to Christian theology. The death of Jesus on the cross was not the death of a martyr to truth and righteous- ness ; it was the death of the Lamb of God, slain to take away the sin of the world. In this theory it is not the life, it is the death of Jesus that is of supreme importance. He does not die to satisfy the demand of his own soul, he dies to appease the wrath of God. It is out of this conception that the whole scheme of Christian salvation has been evolved. Man is saved from the wrath of God by the blood of Jesus, cme ask if one dare ask why this elaborate scheme was necessary to bring about so simple a matter as the for- giveness of erring man by his God ; why if God wanted to forgive he couldn't just forgive and have done with it, the solemn answer is that God's justice must be satisfied before his forgiveness can be given. And here we have the root of the whole matter. Here we have Plato's Absolute, which William James damned, coming to confound us- /justice is something which exists in and of itself, apart from God, and controls hjs actions ; God cannot be merciful lest justice be offended. /Justice must have its victim before mercy can have its way. It is this grim justice that has been the occasion of the greatest crimes in the human calendar. Justice is the great god of the lawyer in whose name the lawyer "sends men and women to shameful death, shuts human souls away from human sympathy in foul dungeons, and makes a felon's cell a hell on earth. Justice does not look at the sinner, it only looks at the sin- Justice does not protect the people, it only guards the portals of the king. Justice has been pictured THE WAYS OF THE GODS 267 as a blind woman, holding an even balance; it should be pictured as a grim and gory man holding an axe. Justice in this world has never known how to forgive, only how to punish. God's justice could be satisfied only with the blood of God's Son. Under the impulse of this thought the religion of Jesus ben Joseph drifted far away from its simplicity; Jesus was a disciple of Isaiah and Micah ; God to him was not anger, he was love- The great saying of Micah is the soul of his and of all religion : Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my first-born for my transgres- sion, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk nimbly with thy God? rtal words ! Almost the last words that man can >eak concerning himself in relation to his God. But far too simple to satisfy the sophisticated mind of the rabbi and the lawyer. Instead of this direct method we have the vast elaborated mediums of the doctor of the law. In the scheme of Augustine the City of God is the place for safety- Outside the church there is no salvation. Entrance to the church is in the keeping of the priests. The church lives by offering the sacrifice of Christ as a perpetual offering to God. To be saved one must be in the communion of the church, and the communion of the church is guarded by its doctrines. It was this conception that changed the Christ- ian ministry of the earlier, period into the priesthood of the later age. The City of God took over the ancient temples and appropriated the assets of the older gods- The Chief priest of the Christian church assumed the privileges and the title of the chief priest of Jupiter. He was pontifex maximus in the city of Rome. It was by means of this dogma that 268 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Rome disciplined Europe for a thousand years. It is the greatest triumph of pure idealism known to history. This idea had no relation whatever to the fact and yet the idea was greater than any fact- There was no angry God, yet in the name of an angry god Rome ruled the world. Rome was successful because, in her early and formative period, Rome used this angry God to check the unruly wills of men; he was a bogy with which she frightened the ignor- ant. The world was in a welter of confusion ; men could not listen to reason or give heed to conscience; it needed the voice of stern authority to curb their cruelty and to restrain their lust. The belief in an angry God is a useful belief if sanely held- Fear is the guardian of virtue when virtue is weak. The popes and the priests did do something in the way of protecting the weak from the ravages of the strong, and men from the violence of their own passions. But power such as they possessed cannot be safely en- trusted to men. It is no exaggeration to say that this power was used for the aggrandizement of the priesthood, for the arrest of thought, and for the clouding- of the conscience Under this ~systefrf,"~human life could not be lived simply, sweetly, nobly; it was as if one lived in a house where some one was always angry: one dare not speak his mind for fear of giving offence- Under this teaching, man became self- conscious, he was always saying to himself : "I have a soul to save, a God to glorify." Is it not time that we dismissed from our minds the thought of an angry God appeased by blood? Can we never outgrow the terror of our childhood? Must we always think of our Father as bearing a rod? BOOK IX THE MEDIEVAL GODS CHAPTER LV The Eclipse of Christus The two centuries following the publication by Augustine of the "De Civitate Dei" are the most degraded and dis- astrous in the life of the Western world. During those cen- turies the old civilization died a death of pain and shame. Be- fore Augustine passed away, Africa was overrun by the Vandals, his own city of Hippo was besieged, and the great saint and doctor died praying for a deliverance that never came. Of all the barbarians from the north who swept down on the provinces of the Roman Empire, the Vandals were the most ruthless ; so ruthless were they that their name has become a synonym for wanton destruction. They came like locusts on the gardens and orchards of Gaul, Hispania, and Africa, and left not a green thing behind. Villages were laid waste, cities were obliterated from the map, populations were reduced to slavery, and Western Europe, after the Vandal invasion, reverted to a barbarism, from which it has not yet emerged. The Vandals were of kin to the Franks and the Germans, who are even to-day making Europe a place of slaughter. In the year 475 Odoacer the Goth deprived Romulus Augustulus of the imperium, and the Roman Empire ceased to exist. Rome, instead of being the mistress of the world, was now in the possession of a Gothic chieftain, and Italy fell into that condition of discord and disunion from which it did not recover until the days of Victor Emmanuel and Cavour- The City of God survived the disaster of the City of the Caesars and, out of the ruins of that city, built for itself a 271 272 THE WAYS OF THE GODS new, a wider, and a greater dominionX/The bishop of the city of Rome centered in himself all the hopes and fears, all the religious devotion and enthusiasm, that had been generated In the hearts of the people by the worship of and the love for the God Christus, organizing these hopes and fears, this devotion and enthusiasm, into a political machine for the control and discipline of Europe./ From the day that Rome ceased to be imperial, it began to be papal,/ But before the Pope could come to his own, Western Europe had to pass through centuries of darkness and dis- order in which humanity was forgotten and man became once more a beast of prey, finding his chief satisfaction in fighting and drunkenness. But if the condition of the Western Empire was deplorable, the condition of Eastern Europe was despicable. The West reverted to a barbarism in which there was a promise of life, the East sank down into an effete, corrupt, and loathsome civilization which could only end in further degradation, de- cay, and death. The emperors of the East anticipated the career of the Sultans: they were emperors of the palace, they were the slaves of women, they were exalted and cast down by the intrigues of the eunuchs. The Christian religion in the East had none of the effectiveness of the church in the West. The Patriarch of Constantinople could not compete with the Patriarch of Rome. In the West, by the disasters of the empire, the church was left free to work out its own career; in the East the church was under the shadow of the palace; religion was a function of the State. The bishop of Con- stantinople was and must be the obsequious servant of his master, the emperor. If he dared to lift up his voice against the iniquities of the palace, as did St. John Chrysostom, the empress banished him to the savage regions of Mt. Taurus- Christianity in the East was not in the keeping of states- men, it was the prey of the monks; and the monks of the East were as nasty as hornets and as quarrelsome as spiders. Keeping up a perpetual wrangle and jangle over abstruse points of doctrine, the warring factions carried their quar- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 273 rels into the Circus, where the opposing parties had their chariots and their colors, and shouted hatred at one another from the benches. If any institution was ripe for judgment that institution was organized Christianity in the East at the beginning of the Seventh Century, and that judgment came. /'"in the year 622 occurred that event pregnant with con- / sequences for the future of Christianity and Europe, known / as the Hegira of Mahomet. It was in that flight that fate / flung out into the world a God who, within a century, swept / into his control Western Asia and Northern Africa, who made Spain his province, who confined the Roman Empire of \ the East to the environs of Constantinople, and finally, after N^centuries of conflict, made that city the seat of his sovereignty.^ Mahomet, the prophet of this mighty God, was an Arabian camel-driver, who in the course of his travels between Arabia and Syria became familiar with Christianity and Judaism; and having a genius for religion, he soon found, by contact with higher forms of faith, the crude idolatries of his desert tribes ridiculous in the light of his intelligence and repugnant to the dictates of his conscience. He could not kiss the Black-Stone of Mecca without laughing, nor worship it with- out shame- But while the soul of the camel-driver rose above the gods of his people, it could not embrace the God of the Christians. This keen-eyed Arabian saw at once that God could not be any such piece of complicated machinery as Christian theology had made him out to be, his simple mind rejected the subtleties of the Greek philosopher its sub- stance and its persons had no meaning for him. This man of the desert found his god in the Desert the God ' of the Bene-Israel. With one sweep of his genius he swept away all accretions that had gathered in the temple of that God and left him nothing but the unity, the austerity, and the implacability of the desert. Mahomet reduced religion, as far as God is concerned, to the lowest common denominator; his creed can be expressed in nine English words : "There is one God, and Mahomet is his prophet." Beyond this, sim- plicity cannot go. 274 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Having formulated his faith, Mahomet proceeded to live it. He sought his Desert God in desert places ; he received from his God visions and revelations. He was the camel-driver of Khadijah, a wealthy woman of Mecca. His mistress made him her husband, and she was his first convert- His love for his wife was the stay of the prophet in all the dark hours of his early career; when scorn was heaped upon him from without, and when doubt weakened his faith within, he re- assured himself by saying : "Khadijah believes in me !" And to this day Khadijah shares with Mahomet the veneration of the faithful. Having made a few converts in Mecca, Mahomet became not only an object of derision but also of hatred. The chief men of the city sought to kill him. To escape their wrath, Mahomet, with his following, fled by night to the neighboring city, Yathrib ; known thereafter as Al Medina, the City of the Prophet- When his enemies came out in force against him, he met them on the field of battle and beat them ; and from that hour the sword of Mahomet preached effectively the religion of Mahomet. The wild tribes of the Arabian deserts were swept into the new movement as by the magic of their god. Fired by the zeal of their new-born faith, they rushed out of the desert with the cry of, "Allah il Allah !" (God is God) on their lips, with veneration for the prophet Mahomet in their hearts, with the sword of the Lord in their hands, and made their own the fairest portions of the earth. The birthplace of Christianity was lost forever to Christianity, and is to this day in the keeping of the God of Mahomet. The God of Mahomet is a god congenial to the souls of fighting men, he is the War-God of the Desert, who gives to his soldiers the reward of bravery, who soothes their fiery souls with the unlimited embraces of women, who gives them the spoils of the cities, and if they die fighting, they pass at once into the presence of the black-eyed Houri, who embrace them under the shade ot the palm trees of Paradise- This religion threatened for centuries the religion of the Christ. It seems but an accident that Europe is to-day Christian and not Mahommedan. Western Europe owes its THE WAYS OF THE GODS 275 deliverance to the valor of the Franks who, under Charles Martel, defeated the Mohammedan invaders on the field of Tours, and drove them beyond the Pyrenees, thus saving Western Europe to Christianity. The simplicity of the religion of Mahomet left the mind free to employ its powers in dealing with the facts of life. The followers of the Prophet, during the centuries that fol- lowed, outstripped the Christians in the sciences, the arts, and the amenities of life. They built their cities from Ispahan to Granada and made them the centers of learning. To them we owe the figures from 1 to 10 which have displaced the clumsy numerals of the Latin and made possible the rapid calculations necessary to the complications of modern life. It is hardly too much to say that, but for the Arabic method, of numbering, our present industrial civilization could scarce-~i ly have come into existence. It was in his conflict with the Saracens that the rude Saxon and the Frank were taught the first rudiments of good man- ners, Saladin was the teacher of Coeur de Lion. The wars of the Crusaders did not recover the Holy Land, but they did bring the enlightenment of the East to the West and made possible the passage of the Teutonic people from barbarism to civilization. We cannot afford to despise the God of Mahomet, as it is to him and his people that we owe so much that is useful in our present civilization, such as it is. The religion of Christus in the East, as a consequence of the conquest of Islam, became a subject religion, a religion that existed at the mercy of the Caliph and the Sultan. After the conversion of Vladimir the Russ, who for the sake of marrying a princess of Constantinople embraced the Christ- ian faith and drove his people into the rivers at the edge of the sword to be baptized, the Eastern church lost all power of expansion. It has for centuries lived a sordid, dependent life under the rule of the Turk, and has lent itself as the plausible instrument of the despotism of the Tsar of Russia- It calls itself orthodox ; it worships its creed ; it has not since the Seventh Century added to or taken away from its articles of faith, it has had saints and doctors, but these have been the 276 THE WAYS OF THE GODS saints and doctors of a stagnant religion that has been the breeding-place of ignorance and tyranny. Christianity in the East has sadly failed to fulfill the promise of its youth. In the West it had a more active and honorable career. The Roman lawyers organized Christianity into a vast politi- cal machine for the government of Western Europe. There is not in all history anything more marvelous than the rise of the Bishop of Rome to the political mastership of Western Europe- Beginning as the overseer of a little band of slaves, thieves, and harlots in the Trastevere, hiding from the wrath of the emperor in the darkness of the cata- combs, he rose step by step from this lowliness and obscurity to be for centuries the most considerable personage in Europe, until he could compel an emperor to wait for three days barefooted in the snows (as did Henry of Germany, at Canossa, to get the pardon of Gregory VII), and until Charles of Hungary and Charles, King of Naples, led the horse of Boniface VIII on the day that he assumed the triple crown yt the Pope. { The exaltation of the Pope was due to the fact that he ^succeeded to the spiritual eminence of Jesus and to the political supremacy of Caesar. Before the Pope could be pope Jesus had to die on the cross and Caesar had to triumph on the field of Pharsalus. It was the Pope's advantage that he was at the place where these two streams of personal in- fluence met and mingled- /'' Jesus had thrown the spell of his spiritual genius over the Western world ; he had entered the womb of the West and impregnated it with a new life; he had revealed to man the-soul of man. He had made human life to consist not in the abundance of things a man possessedj but in intregrity and purity of soul. He had made life the common and equal possession of all men, rich and poor, high and low alike, only the poor had the advantage of the rich, in that they were not, burdened with the baggage of life. Jesus inspired the mass of the people with hope and gave enthusiasm to humanity. These riches of Christ came into the keeping of the Pope as the overseer of the Christian Church in Rome- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 277 Just as Jesus was the greatest spiritual genius of the race, was Caesar the greatest political geniu^ Caesar was not a brilliant conqueror as was Alexander, nor was he a vulgar conqueror as was Gengis Khan; he was primarily a politi- cian. j a_statesman. an organizer/' All the wars of Caesar were wars of policy! yrae saw the civilized world falling into ruin through the powerlessness of the Roman oligarchy to govern the world it had conquered. He swept that oligarchy out of his way and reorganized the Roman world, centering all authority in himself and making of the republic of Rome an empire, and thereby so casting the spell of the name and power of Imperial Rome over the imaginations of men that to this day his name is the synonym of political supremacy. When the empire of Rome fell, the ghost of that empire haunted Europe for ten centuries, indeed, it still stalks abroad in the guise of the Roman Church. When Constantine removed the seat of the empire from Rome to Byzantium he did not remove the empire. The empire was not so much an outward fact as it was a spiritual conception; the people could no more conceive of a world without an emperor than they could conceive of a heaven without a god. It was this that gave the Pope his opportunity; in the ab- sence of the emperor he was the most considerable personage in Rome, and not only in Rome but in Italy- In the Christian dogmatic he had a means of disciplining the people that no other possessed. Almost in spite of himself, he was com- pelled to reorganize Europe. A double portion of the spirit of Caesar seems to have fallen upon him. He became to all intents and purposes God on earth. At his excommunication men's lives were blasted and at his interdict whole nations thrown into terror and despair. He separated the clergy from the laity by the rule of celibacy and made of the clergy a force to elevate the church and depress the people. More and more the Pope centered the power of the church in himself, he was ' both Christ and Caesar, though more Caesar than Christ. As the Pope became more and more powerful Caesar eclipsed Christ and the Pope was worshipped as Divus Caesar, 278 THE WAYS OP THE GODS the God of the Organization. And it is so even to this day, in the Catholic Church the Pope is carried aloft to receive the adoration of the people. The jubilee of the bishop is celebrated with pomp and ceremony-.j^The Catholic Church has succeeded in substituting itself for God as the object of worship ; the Catholic Church is the clergy, and the clergy is the Pope7^> And So it has come to pass that Joshua ben Joseph, Jesus the Christus of God, is to-day in the East hardly more than an article of the creed, and in the West the motive power of a vast political machine. For centuries he has been iu eclipse, creed and church hiding him from the eyes of the people. But the day of his emergence is at hand. CHAPTER LVI Mary: The Goddess of Consolation When the Sun is in eclipse the Moon is seen in the sky. The philosophers and the lawyers had so obscured the light and the love of Jesus ben Joseph that the eyes of men could not see by that light nor could men warm themselves in the heat of that love. Man can no sooner worship the Second Person of an Adorable Trinity than he can worship the hypotenuse of a triangle. Mathematicians may adore the hypotenuse, philosophers may bow down before the Second Person, but the common man stands, bewildered and lost, in the presence of these divinities, he can make nothing of them. These do not satisfy his craving for worship, and he turns from them to gods more congenial to his mind and nature. The consequence of the super-exaltation of the Christus was the influx of a multitude of minor divinities. Man had been too long used to the gods of the fireside, of the field, and of the city street to content himself with an abstract god far THE WAYS OF THE GODS 279 away from his home, his land and his city. As the average man is incurably polygamous, so he is incurably polytheistic: he can no more center his thoughts on one god than he can center his desires on one woman. This fact may be ignored in the interest of theology and morality, but it is a fact with which theology and morality has had to deal from the time man emerged from the horde until the present day. When Christianity became the religion of the multitude it could no longer protect the Absolute unity nor the stainless purity of its god; it had to give the people gods after their own kind, else the people would forsake the church and turn again to the gods of the countryside. In the Seventh and Eighth Centuries the church compromised with paganism ; while maintaining the Absolute Tri-unity of its great gods, it ad- mitted minor gods into the sacred precincts of the church and permitted them to receive divine honors- The church was forced to this compromise by the pressure of the people, who would have gods of their own making, in spite of the objection of the lawyer and the philosopher. So the old gods came back with a rush. They had changed their names, they had been recast in the mold of the new religion, had lost their beauty and their joyance. Simon Stylites on a pillar was a poor substitute for Mercury lighting on a heaven- kissing hill ; but Simon and his co-gods were there, receiving the adoration of the multitude. The martyrs and the con- fessors became the minor gods of the church, and there were enough of them to go around, so that every man could have a god of his own choosing. The iconic age returned, and images of the saints stood in the niches of the Christian churches just as the statues of the gods had been wont to stand in the niches of the heathen temples. All this was in accord with the principle that revolutions always return upon themselves. Progress is a process of chain-making; revolu- tions, returning on themselves, make link within link, and so the chain lengthens. These minor gods of the Christian church were endowed with all the attributes of divinity necessary to make them useful and sufficient gods in the daily life of the people. They 280 THE WAYS OF THE GODS could heal the sick, they could give sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, they could pardon sin and secure to their patrons the blessings of eternal life. Because of the power of these divinities, the medieval Christian lived in an atmos- phere of what we call the supernatural. The supernatural was his world. He knew no nature with its impersonal laws, acting inevitably and without regard to the whim or wish of man. The world to him was in the keeping of the saints who could withhold or send the rain, who could visit with the plague or take the plague away. Miracle to him was not the unusual ; it was the usual- The miracles recorded in the lives of the saints make the miracles of the Old and New Testa- ment look like second best. Saint Maur could walk on the water with more ease than Jesus; the bones of St. Thomas could quicken the dead to a resurrection other than his own, and St. Anthony of Padua could spy out the hiding-place of lost valuables with more than the omniscience of Christus, I The history of the medieval man proves conclusively that man does not live in the actual world but in a world of his own making- We each inhabit a world that has been created for us by our own thought. The medieval period has been called the age of faith; it should be called the age of credulity. True faith can only be based on knowledge. The Middle Age was an age of ignor- ance. The men had no knowledge upon which they could base a sane belief; they had no faith, they could have no faith, in the order of nature, because they were ignorant of nature ; for them there was no nature with its play and inter- play of forces. They had no such sense as we have in the security of the operations of nature. They were the victims of capricious beings, whose actions were as uncertain as a child's: saints helped them, devils hindered them. In the day they might meet a saint and receive his blessing, in the night ghosts haunted the darkness and goblins sat upon the foot of their beds. The saints themselves might at any mo- ment turn sour and slap a man in the face. The medieval age was an age of cold and darkness and fear. Murder and rapine were the order of the day. The THE WAYS OF THE GODS 281 Vandal and the Hun rode shrieking through Europe, pillag- ing, burning, killing, and the Vandal and the Hun were fol- lowed by the Saxon and the Dane. Cities and lonely castles, with their forbidding walls, with their moat and portcullis, were the gathering-places of frightened men and women and children. It is lovely to read about the Middle Age, but, I trow, it would have been uncomfortable to live in it. The Ninth Century was the midnight of the darkness and confu- sion of Europe which followed upon the overthrow of the Roman Empire by the barbaric invasion. It was at that time that men fled for protection and consolation to the Bosom of the Mother of God- The exaltation of Mary to the rank of the greater divinities was the demand of a time when no male god could comfort the soul of the people. The Middle Age was an age of child- hood, it needed a mother's love more than it needed a father's care. The childishness of the age is seen in its nervousness, in its capriciousness, in its emotional instability. Like chil- dren, it was afraid of the dark and easily moved to tears. The men fought and drank like children, without regard to con- sequences, and when their righting and their drinking brought them headaches and bloody noses, they ran to Mother Mary for comfort; just as children run to mother when they have a bruise or an ache. The Middle Age was a childish age, and therefore it was a woman's age, for women are the natural protectors of children. The priests who ruled Europe in the Middle Age were as much women as men, they were asexual, they were beardless, they wore petticoats. In deal- ing with the rude baron they practiced the guile of the woman ; they did not exercise the strength of the man. The childishness of the age is seen in the extravagance, the violence, and the instability of its emotions- The Crusad- ers march through Syria and leave behind them cities in ashes, fields wasted, murdered men, and ravished women ; but when they come to the Mount of Olives, and see Jerusalem, they burst into tears. The flagellants go naked to the waist through the streets of the city and flog themselves until the blood runs, and then laugh like maniacs at their own folly. 282 THE WAYS OP THE GODS The architecture of the Middle Age is childish. We say of the Gothic Cathedral : "It is a dream !" and so it is, the dream of a child. It is the outcome of aspiration without ex- perience. The character of Gothic architecture in comparison with the classic is set forth so truly and so quaintly by Brother Copas in the story of Quiller-Couch that I will let Brother Copas be my spokesman. It is upon the question of restoring the cathedral that Brother Copas speaks his mind; addressing the bishop he says: "My Lord, when a Hellene built a temple to his god he took two pillars, set them upright in the ground and laid a third block of stone a-top of them. He might repeat this operation a few times or a-many, according to the size at which he wished to build. He might carve his pillars and flourish them off with acanthus capitals and run friezes along his archi- traves, but always in these three stones, the two upright and the beam, the trick of it resided, and his building lasted. The pillars stood firm in solid ground into which the weight of the crossbeam pressed them yet more firmly. The whole struc- ture was there to endure, if not forever, at least until some ass of a fellow came along and kicked it down to spite the old religion; because he had found a new one. But this Gothic this cathedral which it seems we must help to pre- serve, is fashioned only to kick itself down." "It aspires" [said the bishop]. "Precisely, My Lord, that is the mischief ; when the Greek temple was content to repose upon natural law, when the Greek builder said : 'I will build for my gods greatly yet lowly, measuring my efforts to the powers of man, which at their fullest I know to be moderate, making my work harmon- ious with what little it is permitted me to know' in jumps the rash Christian saying, with the men of Babel : 'Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven,' or in other words, let us soar above the laws of earth and take the kingdom of heaven by storm. With what re- sult? THE WAYS OF THE GODS 283 Sed quid Typhceus et Vilidus Mimas Contra sonantem Palladis agida? The Gothic builders, like the Titans, might strain to pile Pelion on Olympus vis consilii expers, my Lord, from the moment they take down their scaffolding; nay, while it is yet standing, the dissolution begins. All their complicated structure of weights, counter-weights, thrusts and balances, has started an internecine conflict, stone wearing against stone, the whole disintegrating." ' So much for Brother Copas. When I stood in that wilder- ness of stone, the nave of Yorkminster, I did not wonder that Cromwell used it to stable his horses; when I stood on the roof of the Milan cathedral, with its forest of pinnacles, I said : "Here is childish conceit gone mad-" The intellectual life of the Middle Age was as childish as was its artistic. The writings of the schoolmen are a marvel of futility. Children always talk confidentially of that of which they know nothing. Fact is to them non-existent, they live in a world of fancy ; their world is a world of lions and bears and giants and Indians and cowboys. The medieval man knew nothing of the earth upon which he lived, his knowledge of its geography was grotesque to laughter; but this did not faze him. Knowing nothing of the earth, he proceeded to map out the topography of heaven and hell with the minuteness of a specialist; having not the slightest ac- quaintance with the workings of his own mind, he read the mind of God like a book. He played at thinking as children play at telling endless stories, without point or purpose. The intellectual product of the Middle Age lies in our libra- ries as dead as is the mummy of Rameses in the British Museum. The mind of the Middle Age thinker was as active as a squirrel in a cage; like the squirrel, it simply ran and ran without getting anywhere- Scholasticism is a byword for in- tellectual futility. i '"Brother Copas," A. T. Quiller-Couch, Scribner & Son, 1911. 284 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Childish in its knowledge, the Middle Age was in great fear where no fear was. Its awful bogy was the second coming of Christ. It expressed this fear in the exquisite poetry of the "Dies Irae." The souls of the people were kept in con- stant alarm, the thought of Christ was fearful ; he was the judge, stern and awful. The frightened children fled from him to find protection in the merciful arms of his Mother. This view of Christ and Mary in relation to the last judg- ment is set forth in Michaelangelo's cartoon of that event on the east wall of the Sistine Chapel ; God the Father sits in the upper cirro, serene, self-satisfied ; in the lower sky Jesus is to his right and Mary to his left, the dead are rising from their graves, Christ, with angry brow and uplifted hand, is beating them down to hell ; Mary, with arms stretching down- ward, is lifting them up to heaven. This is the sum of the Middle Age religion ; a religion of fear soothed by a woman. Puvis de Chavannes has caught the spirit of the age in his wonderful cartoon on the walls of the Pantheon in Paris, showing St. Genevieve watching over the city. Paris is the prey of fear, men and women crouch in her wattle huts under the shadow of her cathedral, in terror of the death that lurks in the darkness ; the Northmen are abroad at night and the wolves are howling over the dead that they leave behind. There is no hope save in the saints, so St. Genevieve stands in the battlements of Notre Dame, watching over sleep- ing Paris that owes its safety, not to the valor of its men, but to the piety and the prayers of its women. It was in this age that Mary, Mother of God, Mother of Sorrows, Goddess of Consolation, attained to the rank of the Greater Divinities- She became in reality the incarnation of the Holy Spirit of Comfort, the Third Person in the Adorable Trinity. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 285 CHAPTER LVII The Exploitation of the Gods Some three-and-thirty years ago it was my privilege to cross the Atlantic Ocean and make my first visit to England. I was then in the freshness of my young manhood and in the full flush of romanticism. I was the worshipper of Scott and the disciple of Newman. While I was yet a lad Scott charmed me away from the prosaic surroundings of my West- ern home and made me walk with him in countries strange and far away. I sat up all night reading his romances, and steeped my soul in the spirit of that pseudo-Middle Age which he created by the witchery of his genius for the delight and the deceiving of generations of confiding youth. For nearly twenty years he compelled me to live in his Middle Age, to take his Bois Guilbert and his Rowena, his knights and priests, his castles and his monasteries, for real knights and priests, for real castles and monasteries. Great is the power of genius, that can take the dust of ages and reform it and make it seem as if it were alive ! Under the influence of Scott and Mrs- Porter, I spent all my thinking, dreaming hours in the company of men in armor and of women in white samite. As I walked alone, I de- claimed at the top of my voice: "Scots wha'ha'wi' Wallace bled!" I was a youth in the Middle Age. It was, then, as a medievalist, the child of Scott, the dis- ciple of Newman, that I crossed the waters. I had a mind to make a tour of the cathedral cities of England. I went by the way of Greenough. Landing early in the afternoon, I took a train for Glasgow, and from thence went immediately to Edinburgh. When I reached the city of Scott it was evening, and the sun was going down. I came out from the railway station into Princess street and I feel still, in my old age, the thrill of joy that swept over me as I looked across the Ravine and saw the Castle, its flags flying, and heard the pibroch. I was at home at last, in the land of 286 THE WAYS OF THE GODS my dreams ! This was my beloved Middle Age right before my eyes. While I looked the sun went down, and after din- ner, taken, not in the Middle-Age Inn but, to my disgust, in a modern hotel, I went out and walked up and down Princess Street during the long twilight of an August night until the darkness came, pacing to and fro, my eyes on the Castle, as if I were a sentinel on guard. A visit to the Castle rather chilled my ardor: the soldiers were not heroic figures. As I went about the Old Town I saw such poverty, such drunkenness, such misery that my worship for the past was lost in pity and horror for the present. One who has not seen the old town of Edinburgh on a Saturday night as it was thirty years ago has not seen an exhibition of drunkenness, squalidness, and misery that made the city of Scott an unromantic chamber of horrors. Leaving Edinburgh, I reached Durham in the night and went early in the morning to visit the cathedral. From the very first I suffered a shock of disappointment I said : "Is this a cathedral?" Somehow, it did not answer to the vision of my soul. The first impression was that of bigness, the second of uselessness. I went into it, and the Verger showed me around, for which service I paid him a shilling. Durham is not one of the larger cathedrals, but its inter- ior would hold all the people of Durham and to spare. It stood there on the hill, looking over the city, a monument to the Middle Age- Its keynote, as I studied it, was exag- geration ; I began to think of it not so much as a work of art as an economic waste. Were the people of the Middle Age so well housed that they could afford to build so expensively for their God? And then I remembered that in the Middle Age the people lived in wattle huts, without windows, with- out comforts, cold, hungry, and afraid. I learned that the building of this cathedral exhausted the labor of the neigh- borhood for nearly two centuries. Each bishop vied to outdo his predecessor in the extravagance of his building. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 287 Near the cathedral was the castle of the Baron and the palace of the Bishop, and I began to bethink me of what the Middle Age was in reality; it was not a page in "Ivanhoe," it was not a glamour of silver armor and silken sheen, it was not royal knight and lady, it was an age of darkness, dirt, and disorder, an age in which the gods and the people were exploited to enrich the barons and the bishops. When I visited Yorkminster this impression was intensi- fied. If ever there was madness in stone, it is Yorkminster. Here is vastness to no purpose, human effort wasted, build- ing a house for God so big that any reasonable god would be lost in it! Accidentally I was locked up in the chapter room of the Minster for two hours while the verger was taking tea; I spent the time studying the faces on the heads in which the ribs of the roof terminated. Such grotesqueries, ringers in the mouth, face drawn awry, mouth wide open, chin and nose meeting, it was as if the monks who carved these heads were laughing at their own folly, taking revenge upon themselves for their lack of reason. As I visited cathedral town after cathedral town I saw these three buildings: the cathedral, the castle (old or new), and the palace, always the palace. I saw the cathedral close, with deaneries and canonries snug and comfortable, and I said to myself: "The gods were profitable to the clergy in the good old days ; if I could choose my lot I'd be, me lud, bishop in the days when the bishops exploited the gods for all the gods were worth." In that visit to England my romanticism received a shock from which it never recovered. Four years later I visited the Continent and in every city I found the Middle Age represented by the cathedral, the castle, and the palace, until at last I came to Rome and stood in the Piazza. San Pietro, where I saw that great age come to its culmination in St. Peter's and the Vatican. St Peter's is so vast that it looks small ; the eye fails to take it in, it is just like all-out-of-doors. The palace of the Vatican, the home of the Pope, with its eleven thousand rooms, is a city 288 THE WAYS OF THE GODS all by itself- It was in the building of these two monstrous houses that the exploitation of the gods by the priesthood was carried to an extreme that brought ruin to the power of the clergy to oppress the people. It was the sale of in- dulgences to get money to finish St. Peter's that set Luther trumpeting against the whole system until, at his trumpeting, the medieval papacy, like the walls of Jericho at the trumpet- ing of the priests of Joshua, came down with a crash. The exploitation of the gods in the interest of the priest- hood has always been the crime of the clergy. Everywhere and in every time since man began to grope his way upward from primeval slime, the medicine man, the fakir, the priest, the clergy-man has made his gain out of the fears and the hopes, the joys and the sorrows of the people. Everywhere the gods have been exploited in the building of temples, the setting up of altars, the celebrating of ceremonies, the estab- lishing of priesthoods. At first all this is done unconsciously, that the gods may be kept in humor and the people suffer no harm. It is during this unconscious period that religion is vital, powerful, and ennobling, expressive of the life of the people- But in due time this exploitation becomes conscious; the priests get wise to the fact that it is they and not the gods who are the "real beneficiaries of this system of worship. The gods do not eat of the meat of the sacrifice, but it comes handy to the pot of the priest. The gods are not moved by the flatteries of worship but the saying of prayers is an elegant and a profitable occupation for the clergy. The clergy entrenched in power by law and custom, saw their advantage and improved it. For centuries Europe suffered the exactions of the clergy, at first patiently and then re- belliously- The literature of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries reeks with denunciation of the corruption of the church. Every device was made use of to draw money to the coffers of the clergy. The Fourteenth Century opened with a saturnalia of ex- ploitation. Pope Boniface VIII, in the last year of the old century, proclaimed a jubilee for the first year of the new. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 289 Any one visiting Rome and the altars of the Apostles in that year would receive, at the Pope's hands, full indulgence and pardon for all his sins. To secure so great a blessing mul- titudes came from all parts of Europe to the Holy City; as many as two hundred thousand pilgrims were in Rome at a given time, crowding the churches, and attendants, armed with rakes, gathered in the copper, silver, and gold coin that fell like hail at the base of the altars. The jubilee became an institution; first occurring every hundred years, then every fifty, then whenever a Pope was in need of money. It was an easy and delightful way of getting rid of one's sins, and the people came to avail themselves of the privilege. They could have a good time coming and a good time going and save their souls by the way. The last and most elegant of the beneficiaries of this system of conscious exploitation was none other than Giovan- ni de Medici, known to history as Leo X- Giovanni de Medici was the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The interest of his father made him a cardinal at nineteen. The letters of Lorenzo in relation to the elevation of his son are curious revelations of the state of politics and morality in Italy in the Fifteenth Century. Talk about graft ! Why, our grafters are sucking children beside these men of the Italian Renais- sance. Our grafters exploit the people; these men exploited the gods, making a conscious gain of godliness- Lorenzo, having secured the promotion of his son, pro- ceeded, out of the treasury of Florence, of which city he was the boss, to furnish him with horses richly caparisoned, with sumpter mules, laden with presents for the Pope and his cardinals, and surrounded him with cavalcades of the noblest youth of the City on the Arno. And so Giovanni, a boy of nineteen ! went to Rome and took up his residence in a palace as a prince of the church. Giovanni played his cards with all the astuteness of a Medici. Holy orders sat lightly upon him ; he never went beyond the order of deacons, nor did he entangle himself with the sanctities of the priesthood. He was an elegant man, prudent withal and a favorite with the ladies- The 290 THE WAYS OF THE GODS reigning Pope grew jealous of him, and he withdrew from the city. But Giovanni bided his time, and while yet in the thirties, on the death of Julius II, he himself, as cardinal deacon, acting as scrutinor of the ballot, proclaimed his own election. When asked what name he would assume he an- swered, turning his turquoise ring the while: "In my idle hours, when I have indulged the absurd dream that I might be chosen successor of Blessed Peter, I have said that if so strange and unmerited an honor should befall me I would take the name of Leo X 1 in honor of Leo IX of sacred memory." And so, Giovanni de Medici was proclaimed Pope Leo X from the window of the Vatican, to the waiting people of Rome. Leo X has given his name to an age of the world. Men speak of the Age of Pericles as the age in which Greek genius fruited ; they speak of the Age of Augustus as the age in which Horace and Vergil sang their songs ; and the Latin genius had its brief day of glory; and so they speak of the Age of Leo X as the age in which the splendor of the Italian Renaissance culminated. Leo X was the liberal patron of arts and letters, he was the center of a magnificent court. Cour- tesans, elegant and refined, soothed his idle hours ; he was a pagan of the pagans, when he came from Mass he would smile and say: "This Christianity is a convenient superstition!" In his hands the exploitation of the gods was a conscious, necessary method of supplying the ever-hungry maw of the papal treasury with silver and gold. Ecclesiastical offices were sold to the highest bidder; indulgences, giving pardon for sins, were common commodities in the market. Hawkers of these papal parchments were in every city and village and at every cross-road, crying their wares. No one with money in his pocket need go unshrived of his sin. The papal curia sold the archbishopric of Mayence to Prince Albert of Brandenburg for fifty thousand gulden, and then gave the archbishop the right to sell indulgences through Northern Germany to recoup himself. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 291 But this was going too far! The outraged gods awoke to their shame. When Tetzel, the agent of the archbishop, came into the Electorate of Saxony peddling his wares, and was drawing toward Wittenberg, the storm that had been brewing, broke, with violence. One Brother Martin, son of a miner of Eisleben, monk and professor, nailed to the door of his church his thesis asserting that he would main- tain before all-comers the proposition that all this indulgence business was unscriptural, unholy, a profanation of God, and a robbery of man- And all the people were aflame at the words of Brother Martin, and the flame spread, until all Germany was in conflagration. At first the elegant Leo, toying with his courtesans, laugh- ed at the uncouth monk, who called his infallibility into ques- tion. But his laugh did not put out the fire. Then he threatened. But his threats only fanned the flames; and before Leo died, the right of the Pope and his priests to ex- ploit the gods to the shame of the gods and the loss of the people was burned to ashes in Northern Germany and with it was consumed the right of the Pope to rule over the intel- ligence and the conscience of man. The unity of the church was rent asunder, and Catholicism became a sect. CHAPTER LVIII Joseph Comes to His Own The religious upheaval of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries not only created the national churches and religious denominations of Protestantism, but it also profoundly trans- formed the Catholic Church itself. The Catholic Church of the post-Reformation period is so unlike the Church of the Middle Age, or the Church of the Italian Renaissance, that it 292 THE WAYS OF THE GODS seems not the same but a different institution. It is true that the church did not abate its claims, but it did abate, in some degree, its insolence in the assertion of its claims. In the Council of Trent it did reaffirm all its traditions; it still clothed the Pope with the powers of a Vice-God, but the Pope did not (because he could not) exercise those powers with his old-time rigor. A great section of Europe had escaped from under his hand; he could not punish, he could only scold it. The men of the North smiled at his ex- communication and laughed at his interdict, and even the men of the South, who remained steadfast in the old order, would not endure such exercise of papal tyranny. So the excommunication was reserved for the recalcitrant priests, and the interdict fell into innocuous desuetude. After the religious wars were over, and the persecutions had spent their force, mankind at large was delivered from the fear of the papal censure. Only the priests of the church need fear the wrath of the church. Not only did the religious revolution limit the power of the Pope, it also purified his court. After the Reformation the seat of Peter was never again defiled by the occupancy of such monsters as Bartholomew Cossa (John XXIII), or by such rascals as Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI), or even by such worldlings as Giovanni de Medici (Leo X). The necessities of the times brought to the front men of different character and caliber, men less able, perhaps, but of purer morals. The Italian voluptuary, Leo X., was succeeded by the harsh, stern, ascetic Adrian of Utrecht, tutor of the Emperor Charles V, who saw in his great office not a means of indulg- ing his artistic tastes or enriching his relatives but an op- portunity to serve God and the people. He struggled to make of the church not a mere political machine but a religious institution. Adrian's lot was not a happy one. He was a Netherlander and the church was Italian; he was pure and the church was corrupt; he was religious and the church political. After his brief pontificate of a year, which did nothing but lay bare the hideous ulcer that was eating at THE WAYS OF THE GODS 293 the vitals of the church, the papacy slipped back into the keeping of the family of the Medici, Giulio, nephew of Leo-X, succeeding Adrian. Under his pusillanimous, feeble guid- ance, the Roman Church drifted on to ruin. Giulio de Medici, who took the name of Clement VII, shilly-shallied with Henry VIII of England in the matter of the divorce until England was lost to the church. He played fast and loose with the Emperor, until in desperation, the armies of the Emperor, under the Constable Bourbon, stormed and sacked the City of Rome. The Papal See had to wait twenty years for the three great popes of the counter reformation : Michele Chislere, (Pius V), Ugo Boncompagni (Gregory VIII), and Felice Peretti (Sixtus V)- Under these pontiffs the course of the Reformation was arrested ; France became once more the eldest son of the church, Bavaria and South Germany re- turned to the fold and reaction set in all over Europe. Cathol- icism invaded the strongholds of Protestantism and kept up a guerilla warfare all along the line. Under the impulse of the scientific movement, the church acquired a sanity unknown to her earlier history. She de- pended less on miracles and more on moral forces. A new order of saints adorned her calendar. St. Francis de Sales, St. Philip of Neri, and St. Charles Borromeo were men of saner mind than Benedict of Nursia, St. Chad and Cuthbert, or even St Francis of Assisi. The only miracles wrought by these post-Reformation saints were miracles of goodness and marvels of benevolence. St. Ignatius Loyola placed at the service of the church not the miracle-mongering of the medievalist, but the ardor of the Spanish lover allied to the greatest political organizing genius of his or any other age. Just after the Reformation the Catholic church was far more sane than the Protestant bodies. The church became more masculine in its way of thinking and acting. The great religious wars put an end to the feminism of the Middle Age; Mary began to lose her hold on every-day devotion- Catholicism did not, as did Protest- antism, cast out Mary from the company of the gods, her 294 THE WAYS OF THE GODS doctors did not follow the example of John Knox, who tore down the painted image of Mary from the walls of the Cathedral of St. Giles, saying: "Tis naethin, but a pinted boord," and so threw it into the street. The Catholic fathers were far better mannered, they used the political artifices of promotion to remove the goddess out of the way of the male world that was looking for male gods. The deification of Mary was the care of the Curia and the Jesuits ; by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which became an article of the faith in 1854 by decree of Pope Pius IX, Mary was delivered from the curse of the daughters of Eve. It is the wretched lot of the common woman, accord- ing to the teachings of the church, to conceive in sin and shape in wickedness, she bears in her womb the guilty seed of Adam and her babe comes into this world under the curse of God. From this miserable estate Mary was delivered by the miraculous intervention of God- The doctrine of her perpetual virginity removed Mary from earth to heaven. She was not of mortal nature, she be- longed of right to the immortals. The Spanish genius of Murillo paints her as the new Artemis, standing in the cres- cent Moon, surrounded by a cloud of babies that were never born, and, because never born, never grow old, but play like kittens eternally round their deity in the upper cirrus, where Mary stands at ease. Such a goddess may condescend to visit the earth from time to time and soothe the hysteria of an overwrought nun, she may step out from the Moon to kiss the eyes of real little children, but she can never be the divinity of the work-a-day world ; she can never bend her back under the basket nor pin up her skirts and with bare feet trample the grapes in the wine vats. Her delicacy for- bids the roughness of the world. Priests might exalt her and women worship her, but men began to say: "She's naught but a woman, and this is a man's world-" Human life in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in Europe was shifting its base from the supernatural to the natural, and the Church was slowly following the shift. The common people moved more rapidly than the clergy. The THE WAYS OF THE GODS 295 clergy are always an age behind the people in all that regards the common life. The good Cardinal Pelliccia, in his "Christ- ian Antiquities," speaking of the vestments of the clergy, says: "These, at the first were garments common to the clergy and the laity, but when they became obsolete with the laity, they then became peculiar to the clergy." And this is a general proposition: What is obsolete with the laity is the peculiar possession of the clergy. As Mary became peculiar to the clergy, the monk, and the nun, she became more and more obsolete with the laity. The worship of the Virgin no longer holds the first place with the man of Northern Italy, of France, and of England. The cult of Joseph is superseding the cult of Mary. The common people, reasoning as the common people do, mytho- logically, are finding in Joseph a god in accord with their present thought and feeling. In spite of the church they are in this cult asserting the paternity of Joseph; they are say- ing that if Jesus were a son he must have had a father, if Mary was a mother she must have had a husband ; and who was the father of Jesus and the husband of Mary but Joseph? History knows of no other. So Joseph has come into his own again. For centuries the theology of the church had denied Joseph the company of his wife and the paternity of his son- It had declared him unfit for the high and holy function of husband and father; he had been made to play the ignoble part of a protector to a son not his own, and the guardian of a wife who was a wife in name only. But all this the common sense of the common people is correcting; by the worship of Joseph they are asserting the divinity of the hus- band and the father over against the divinity of the mother and the son. They say if Jesus is on the right hand of God, and Mary on the left, then Joseph has a right to stand before God and speak his mind. He can know better the needs of man than a woman, he is nearer to the earth than his exalted son, so the men of the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries, who were sailing the seas, discovering new coun- tries, founding new states, building cities, and plowing the 206 THE WAYS OF THE GODS wilderness, turned to Joseph as to a god who was himself a man, living a man's life, and doing a man's work. The growth of the cult of Joseph in the modern Catholic Church is a growth of naturalism at the expense of super- naturalism. As the late St George-Mivart (himself a Cath- olic, but for this and other like sayings, excommunicated and dying outside the Catholic pale) said : "It [the cult of Joseph] is preparing the Catholic Church to acknowledge the natural generation of Jesus and to confess the sanctity of nature." For which act of condescension, when it comes, Nature, with her cleansing waters and her stainless skies, will forever be beholden to Holy Church. CHAPTER LIX The Gods Break Loose The revolution in Europe that gave to the Western world freedom of thought and conscience (miscalled the Reforma- tion) came with violence. It was a shifting of the base of human life from heaven to earth. It was a struggle between freedom and authority, between imperialism and nationalism, between centralization and home rule- It was a conflict be- tween the god of the church and the god of the world. Prince and priest were fighting to the death in this warfare. Luther, when he nailed his thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg, was in reality only the spokesman of the Elector of Saxony. It was Frederick who stood behind Luther and urged him on. All the princes of North Germany were in rebellion against the papal and the imperial system. They received no blessing from the Pope and no protection from the empire. The exactions from the papal and imperial THE WAYS OP THE GODS 297 treasuries impoverished them and their people. Frederick bit his nails in anger and disgust when his rival Albert of Brandenburg, under cover of the sanction of the Pope, sent his hawkers of indulgences into the Electorate of Saxony, to get money to pay for the Archbishopric of Mayence. When, then, Luther called the people to revolt, he had not only the tacit consent, he had the active cooperation of the Prince. It was the princes, as the representatives of the people, who were the earliest beneficiaries of the so-called Reformation. Luther appealed from the Pope to the princes, and the princes sustained his appeal. In this crisis the Holy Roman Empire was revived and made its last struggle for supremacy in Europe. Just after the outbreak of the Reformation the throne of the Empire was vacated by the death of Maximilian. The vacancy was contested by three brilliant young princes who had just suc- ceeded to the thrones of the three leading monarchies in Western Europe: the gallant Francis I of France; the bluff, impulsive Henry VIII of England, and the man of genius, Charles V of Spain, were the rivals for the imperial purple. Charles, a prince of Austria, of the house of Hapsburg, secured the prize. Upon this young man fortune had showered all her favors. In the right of his father Philip, he was the Lord of Flanders, Brabant, and all the rich provinces of the Netherlands ; in the right of his mother Johanna he was heir to the throne of Ferdinand and Isabella who had, by the conquest of Granada, extinguished the dominion of the Moors and had made of old Hispania the consolidated kingdom of Spain. And as if this were not enough, fortune sent Columbus avoyaging that she might pour the gold of the Montezumas and the Incas into the lap of her favorite. 'Nor was Charles unworthy of his fortune, being comely of person, acute and far-seeing of mind, and possessed of that subtle quality that we call genius. Furthermore, he was a soldier of no mean capacity; he was cautious in victor}' and imperturable in defeat. 298 THE WAYS OF THE GODS As a ruler Charles V was perplexed by the multitude of his affairs and the heterogeneity of his dominions. The Nether- lands, Spain, and America presented problems of government beyond the power of any man to grasp and solve. Lord of the Netherlands at fifteen, King of Spain at seventeen, Charles at the age of twenty-two was the most considerable personage of Europe- For thirty-two years he weathered the storms of the stormiest period of human history, and as a worn-out old man laid down the cares of empire at fifty-five and retired to a monastery, where he died. Such was the leader of the forces of the old order in the warfare between the priests and the people. Charles, after some vacillations, embraced the fortunes of the papacy and devoted his energies during the greater portion of his reign to the suppression of heresy and reestablishment of the Catholic faith. He placed the Protestant princes under the ban of the Empire. These princes in the year 1528 assembled in Schmalkald, formed a league, offensive and defensive, and made war upon the Emperor- The war of Schmalkald was a war between Protestant and Catholic Europe ; it was a war between North and South Germany ; it was the beginning of the rivalry between Prussia and Austria. In Germany this war lasted (with interregnums) for a hundred and twenty years ; by it Germany was desolated ; the soldiery, Catholic and Protestant, were equally ruthless, cities were sacked, children murdered, and women violated in the name of Christ and in the name of the Pope. As the war went on the armies of Wallenstein from the south and of Gustavus Adolphus from the north, overran the country and left a wasted land behind them. Peace came with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Writing of this period Menzel says : Misery and suffering had cooled the religious zeal of the people, license that of the troops, and diplomacy that of the princes. The thirst for blood had been satiated and pas- sion worn out by excess slumbered. Peace was at this THE WAYS OF THE GODS 299 juncture proclaimed throughout the Empire to all besieged cities, to the trembling princes, to the wailing people. 1 Then, as now, poor Belgium was the meeting-place of the contending armies. Upon the abdication of Charles V his wide dominions be- came the possession of his son Philip II. Philip had nothing of the genius of his father. He was a Spaniard by birth and nature and a bigot of the old faith. He made the suppression of heresy and the reestablishment of Catholicism the sole purpose of his reign- In that effort he lost the Northern Provinces of the Netherlands, impoverished Spain, reduced that country from the first to the third State in Europe, and forced it to enter upon a decline from which it has never recovered. The new faith spread rapidly in the Netherlands. It won to its leadership a genius of the first order; William (called the Silent) Prince of Orange, who is one of the heroic figures of history. There was nothing in the youth or early manhood of this prince to forecast the future that was to make him remembered for all ages. Brought up as a Catholic, in the court of Charles V, he was a favorite of the Emperor, who leaned on his shoulder on the day of his abdication. A free liver, William expended the revenues of his rich posses- sions and involved himself in debt, but in common with all the princes and nobles (Protestant and Catholic) of the Netherlands he resented the violation of the liberties of the Provinces by the tyrannies of Philip II- With Egmont, Horn, and others, Orange entered upon a constitutional op- position to the policy of Philip. When Egmont and Horn were betrayed and beheaded, the burden of leadership fell upon William, and he proved himself equal to the task. He renounced his Catholicism ; the extravagancies of his youth fell from him, and he came to be known as Father William, plain, homely, a leader rather than a ruler of his people. Under his steady hand the revolution in the Netherlands, so far as the Northern Provinces were concerned, was conducted to a successful issue. 1 Mcnzel's "History of Germany," Bohn Edition, vol. II, pp. 394-5. 300 Philip threw against this indomitable man and his people all the forces of Spain. The Duke of Alva practiced every stratagem and cruelty known to warfare- The Duke was a pious Catholic ; he went to Mass every morning and he called his soldiers to go to Mass and then from the altar of his God he went out to lay waste the fields, to burn the cities, to murder the men, and outrage the women of Flanders, Bra- bant, Hainault, Holland, and Zeeland. He besieged, took, and sacked Antwerp, and in the sacking of that city there was no horror left undone. He went out toward Flushing, and the people opened their dykes and flooded him with the waters of the sea. In the wars of the Netherlands, it is estimated that more than a million people perished by violence, and property exceeding in value five hundred million pounds was trodden under foot and burned by fire. The wars of the gods are costly. During all this carnage William was silent, steady, un- conquerable- To get rid of him, Philip had to have him assassinated. But dead, he still, by his spirit, held the people to their task. Exhausted Spain was compelled to grant in- dependence to the Northern Provinces, and Holland, for a brief period, succeeded Spain as a leading country of Europe. In France, the old and the new gods fought for the mastery on the open field and by secret assassination, respectively on the field of Ivry and in the Massacre of St. Bartholemew, Henry of Navarre gave religious peace to France by compro- mise. He bought Paris by a Mass- He embraced the old faith, without believing it ; gave freedom to the new faith, without caring for it ; turned the minds of men from religion to politics and to women; fought Catholic or Protestant, as suited his schemes; prepared the way for Richelieu, who pur- suing the indifferent policy of Henry in matters of religion, made France the arbiter of Europe. In the struggle between the old and the new gods France suffered the loss of her religious life and her moral integrity. Formally Catholic, really atheistic; her manners depraved, THE WAYS OF THE GODS 301 her politics corrupt, she entered upon that downward career that brought her to the horrors of the Revolution. In England the struggle between the old and new was neither so violent nor so bloody as that of the Continent, nor was it so radical. Fortunately, the king wanted a divorce and broke with the Pope, who would not give it to him- Mary, by the sacrifice of a few lives in the fires of Smithfield, hoping to make England Catholic, succeeded in making that country Protestant beyond reclamation. Elizabeth estab- lished a hybrid church, Protestant in doctrine, Catholic in ministry and worship, which to this day has satisfied the religious requirements of the English people. When the religious wars were over, the gods of the past were driven back to their old seats in the Mediterranean basin ; the gods of the new order possessed the North and the West. London was the center of exchange ; the Atlantic Ocean succeeded the Middle Sea as the highway of commerce, and mankind began a great movement from the Old World to the New in search of new homes and new gods. BOOK X GODS OF THE MODERN WORLD CHAPTER LX The Disruption of Protestantism The movement in the religious history of the Western world, known as the Reformation, was far more destructive than reformatory. Beginning as an effort to restore the church to its primitive purity, it accomplished the complete disruption of the organization and made of a united Catholic Church a congery of hostile sects. Protestantism, based as it is upon a contradiction, is by name and nature disruptive in its effect; for, while appealing to authority, it asserts the right of private judgment in matters of faith. Private judgment and authority cannot, however, live together in peace. It is as if one tied a cat and a snake together in a bag: the cat will claw the life out of the snake, or the snake will strangle the cat. Protestantism was not progressive, it was a reactionary movement; it had no desire to explore the future, its only wish was to restore the past. Luther's first appeal from the Pope was to a General Council of the church, a General Assembly wherein he might ask the church to decide the matters at issue between himself and the Holy See. But it was not for a monk to call a General Council; that was the province of the Pope and the Emperor. In the absence of the Emperor, Luther appealed to the princes of the Empire, many of whom joined with him in this de- mand for a reforming council. In this action the Reformers were in accord with usage, for all church disputes had been settled in General Councils. Only a hundred years before the outbreak of Lutheranism the Council of Constance had met in 1414 for the reforming of the church in its head and members, had deposed the 305 306 THE WAYS OF THE GODS reigning Pope, John XXIII, and had elected the Cardinal Colonna, Martin V, in his room. It was not until the Diet of Augsburg, in 1531, that the Lutheran quarrel took on the nature and proportions of a schism. In the Diet of Augsburg, the Emperor, Charles V, made submission to the Pope a condition of imperial protection, whereupon the Lutheran princes protested and withdrew from the Diet and a war between the Empire and the Re- formers ensued, a war that lasted for a hundred years. The protesting princes directed their theologians to draw up a Confession of Faith, which document, known as the Augsburg Confession, is to this day the theological creed of all Lutheran bodies, and is the source of the XXXIX Articles of the English church. The Confession takes over bodily from the ancient church the theology of the Greek philosophers and of the Latin lawyers. Its conception of God is the conception of Athan- asius and Augustine. The doctrines of the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, the final judgment, heaven and hell, together with the sacraments, were all reaffirmed in the Augsburg Confession, a confession that discarded the authority of the Pope, the worship of the saints, and the celibacy of the clergy, and denied all merit to good works, making salvation by faith only the emphatic Article of the revised creed. The new movement, when organized, simply substituted one church for another. In this church the princes were the popes and the theological faculties the cardinals. The new orthodoxy was even more rigid than the old ; heresy was punished by fire and sword, not only as treason to the church but as rebellion against the prince. Lutheranism when crystallized became the state religion of Northern Ger- many and Scandinavia, and it is so to this day. But this newly-established church could not control the Protestant movement. Next in importance to Luther in the world of modern religion was John Calvin, a native of Pic- ardy in France. Banished from his own country by the Catholic King, he fled to Geneva, where he converted the people to the new faith and established his religious capital THE WAYS OF THE GODS 307 as the rival of Rome. The history of the next hundred years was the history of the struggle of Rome with Geneva for supremacy in France, the Netherlands, and Great Brit- ain. Calvin, like Luther, was not a progressive but a reaction- ary; his appeal was from the church to the Bible. He put the human mind in thrall, not to Athanasius or Augustine but to Moses and Isaiah, to Jeremiah and David, to Paul and John. Calvin revived the worship of the God of the Book: the God of Calvin was to be found in the Book and nowhere else but in the Book. Under the hand of this master workman the Hebrew Scriptures were inspired line by line, word by word, comma by comma, by Jehovah, God of the Hebrews; the writers of the Book were the penmen of Jehovah, inscribing his thoughts and writing of his life. So perfect was this work of Calvin that to this day hosts of educated men and women think when they are reading the Bible that they are reading the history of God. It is only in our day and among the more advanced minds that the Bible has lost its peculiar place of sanctity and been restored to its lawful position among the literatures of the world. This talismanic book was the sole rule of faith in the Genevan church, to be interpreted by each man according to the light that was in him; but woe be to that man who interpreted it contrary to the construction put upon the Word by Calvin and the doctors. Such a one was a heretic, fit only for exile and burning. Calvin was a metaphysical genius. At the age of twenty- seven he wrote "The Institutes of the Christian Religion," which ever since has been the quarry of Protestant Evang- elical theology. Calvin's scheme rests as on a corner stone, upon the absolute sovereignty of God. Its cardinal text is "The Lord God Omnipotent Reigneth." There is one God and there is none besides Him. The omnipotence of God is limitless, what He wills He wills and nothing lies out- side His will. Logically, Calvin was as much a Unitarian as Mahomet, but being a schoolman, he was enmeshed in 308 THE WAYS OF THE GODS the contradictions of Greek theology, which he took over bodily and incorporated in his plan of salvation. Second in importance to the sovereignty of God was the doctrine of the total depravity of the nature of man, conse- quent upon the sin of Adam. In the thought of Calvin man as man is under the wrath of God, condemned to .eternal torment. God in his good pleasure, to show forth his glory, elected or selected a chosen few of these lost wretches to salvation ; the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, voluntarily undertaking to pay the proper penalty of their sin. In this plan of reorganization, Calvin allowed only two sacraments: baptism and the Lord's supper (and the Lord's supper was a memorial feast, not a sacrifice); did away with the altar and the priest, and established the pulpit and the preacher. This form of religion, in the period of its expansion, freed the Netherlands from the bondage of Spain, gave civil liberty to England, and laid the foundations of the Am- erican Commonwealth. The Calvinist took over all the promises of Jehovah to Israel. He was the chosen of God, his God was the War- God of Israel. As God had drowned the Egyptians in the waters of the Red Sea, so did he sweep the cohorts of Alva to their death by the waves of the Zuycler Zee. The men of Cromwell drove the army of Charles I from Marston-Moor crying: "The sword of the Lord and Gideon!" The Pilgrim Fathers on the Mayflower laid the foundations of a new nation on the Word of God. Few movements in human history have been more prolific of results than the Genevan movement of John Calvin. A third variety of Protestantism found its expression in the teaching of Huldreich Zwingli, of the Canton of Saint Gall in Switzerland, who made his appeal from the church to the Bible as interpreted by the human reason. This movement, at the first feeble to abortiveness, has gradually permeated both Lutheranism and Calvinism and is at pres- ent the most influential force in Protestant Christendom. The Bible as interpreted by the reason is becoming more and more the religion of the Protestant; but this is only a THE WAYS OF THE GODS 309 half-way station, the road must end in the constant dis- ruption and final disappearance of Protestantism. Already the critical reason has destroyed the authority of the Bible as an infallible revelation from God. Primitive Protestantism, in its three phases of Luther- anism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism, was the creation of the rising burgher class, the religious form of the struggle between the merchant and the landlord. In its result it brought about the partial triumph of the purse over the sword. In this form of Protestantism religion ceased to be pietistic and became materialistic ; its virtues were the virtues of the merchant cla^s; it went short on sanctity and long on respectability. Carlyle designates this sort of re- ligion as "gigmanity," since no one could be reckoned a good Protestant who had not risen to the dignity of riding in his own gig. The mean workmen and the poor have never been at home in the Protestant churches; at best these are allowed in Protestant places of worship only on sufferance. They can sit in back seats and in remote galleries, but must never trespass on the preserves of the pew-holder. In the Anabaptist movement, which had its center in Munster, an effprt was made to democratize Protestantism. The leaders of this movement, who were either of the work- ing class or allied themselves with that class, proclaimed the doctrine of free consent as the basis of the religious life, every man being given the liberty to choose his god by the free act of his own will. On this ground the Anabaptist denied the validity of infant baptism, declaring such baptism was void, because it was not preceded by the free choice of the baptized person. Not only baptism but all church rites and legal forms were subject to the acid test of free choice. No one was to be required to believe what he did not choose to believe, nor to do what he did not choose to *jdo. This doctrine, freeing, as it did, men and women from the binding rules of an oppressive social order, gained great headway with the working classes who are the vic- tims of that order. Had the Munster movement succeedr 310 THE WAYS OF THE GODS ed, the working class revolution that is now in progress would have been anticipated by three centuries. But it could not succeed, because its time was not yet come. The merchant class had to evolve and prevail before the working class could attain to that degree of class consciousness and class solidarity which has given it its power in the present world. The uprising of the working people in Munster, and other cities, under the leadership of Zwickaw, Storch, and Stubner, was suppressed with terrible slaughter, and the peasants' war, which threatened for a time the destruction of the whole social ordter, was arrested by the same ruth- less methods. After this conflict with the working class, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism hardened into the forms that they have held to this day. They are little aristocracies based upon material wealth ; high church Lu- theranism is the natural meeting-place of the old and the new aristocracy; Calvinism is the home of the successful merchant ; and Zwinglianism the club of the successful scholar and professional man. The working class is either Catholic or agnostic. The Catholic church remains to-day, as it has been since the days of Leo I, a vast imperial democracy, while the Protest- ant churches are little aristocratic republics ; and imperial democracy rather than aristocratic republicanism has al- ways been the refuge of the working class. Protestantism in all its forms is to-day in process of dissolution. It has divided and sub-divided until it has at last lost its explosive power. It can no longer so much as cast off new bodies from itself. Its conceptions of the world are outgrown, its teachers ar without authority, its various churches competing for membership are by this competition becoming bankrupt. With creeds discredited, with people destitute of cohesive energy, organic Protest- ism is slowly but surely melting away, and its forces, so long restrained in a congealed orthodoxy, are flowing down in streams to the great sea of living thought. There are in the United States about 20,000,000 Pro- testants divided into more than 100 sects, ministered to THE WAYS OF THE GODS 311 by 170,000 clergy, with an average congregation of 150 and an average salary of $600. These facts speak for them- selves. CHAPTER LXI The Crystallization of Catholicism As a consequence of its struggle with Protestantism, Catholicism crystallized its past and by that crystallization, made forever impossible its adaptation to the changing thought and life of the world. At the Council of Trent the church reaffirmed its ancient doctrines and its ancient rights. It did not abate one jot or one tittle of its claims to the spiritual and political sovereignty of the world. The Pope, as the successor of Peter and as the Vicar of Christ, exercised all the powers of God in the earth. Prior to the Protestant movement the Roman papacy partook in a small degree of the nature of a constitutional monarchy; since the Reformation it has developed into an imperial autocracy. By the decree of papal infallibility of the Vatican Council of 1870, the last vestige of Con- stitutionalism was removed from the papacy, so that to-day the Pope rules alone in the church in all matters of doctrine and discipline, creates all cardinals, appoints all bishops in foreign parts and, either directly or by means of his appointed agents, regulates the most minute affairs of the church. Under the present order of the Catholic church, the Pope is the incarnation of the Celestial Caesar of the Roman lawyers. As God rules in heaven, so does the Pope rule in the earth, and any rebellion against him is treason against God. Theoretically, there is no limit to the power of the pontiff. As the supreme authority in all that con- cerns faith and morals, he has the right of control over the education of the young; the relationship of husband and wife is in his keeping; he has the censorship of all think- 312 THE WAYS OF THE GODS ing, writing and speaking. When there is any conflict between the civil mind and the mind of the Pope the mind of the Pope has the right of way. He as the Supreme Pas- tor of the Flock of Christ, the court of final appeal in all disputes relating to conduct and opinion. The present Pope, by right of his office, is as much the ruler of the world as was Gregory VII or Innocent III, nor was Boni- face VIII more drastic in the assertion of papal claims than is the present Pontifex Maximus; together with his cardinals. The power of the Pope is limited only by the Catholic tradition. No Pope may go contrary to Catholic tradi- tion, for that would be to do violence to his own authority, which has its source in this same Catholic tradition. At the Reformation, Catholic tradition was finally crystallized into theological dogma, and by this crystallization the primi- tive and medieval world survives into modern times. In its political organization, in its conception of nature, in its thoughts of life and death, in its notions of God, in its de- scriptions of heaven and hell, in its cult of the saints, in its reverence of the clergy, in its worship of the Pope, we have in crystallized form all that was active and living in the life of Western Europe Irom trie Fourth to the Fifteenth Cen- tury. This church has resisted with crystalline power all efforts of modification from within, but has been worn away by the slow corroding process of attrition from without. The creedal division of Europe at the close of the reli- gious war was as it is now : Southern Europe was stead- fastly Catholic, Northern Europe as firmly Protestant, with France as doubtful territory lying between, and Ireland, for racial and political reasons, more intensely Catholic than Rome itself. In America to-day the like division pre- vails : North America belongs to Protestantism, with a Catholic infusion, and South America and Mexico are Catholic, with a tendency toward rationalism. Since the Reformation the Catholic Church has continued to work along the lines of more perfect crystallization, every attempt from within to adapt the church to present life and thought having met with signal failure. THE WAYS OP THE GODS 313 In the Seventeenth Century, Molinos, a Spanish priest resident in Paris, was enamoured of the discipline of the German Quietists. He sought to make the life of the soul less dependent upon the church; and while not denying the value of confession, of public prayer, and of the Holy Sac- rament of the Altar, he insisted that spiritual life was, in its essence, the direct communion between the soul of man and the spirit of God; that it was a secret life, and not even a priest had the right to pry into this holy relationship, when the lover was with his beloved the door was shut against all curious eyes. This teacher discouraged frequent confession, deplored constant resort to a spiritual director, and made public prayer subordinate to private prayer and meditation. Molinos' teaching came as a breath of fresh air to a people weary of formal religion. Fashionable Paris, especially the women, ran after Molinos and his church was crowded whenever he gave the sermon or meditation. From Paris Molinos went to Rome and was received with acclaim by clergy and people. Many of the cardinals were numbered with his followers, and it was hinted that even the Pope inclined to his teaching. For a moment it seemed as if the Catholic Church would readmit by the back door what it had driven out by the front; but this was not to be. The Jesuit Order took alarm, the Holy Office of the Inquisition became active; in a night Molinos and a host of his followers, among whom were high dignitaries of the church, found themselves in the grip of that mysteri- ous and terrible power. His following dispersed, Molinos was condemned as a heretic and languished in prison for the rest of his life. Another effort at modification, made in the Seventeenth Century by a group of French pietists, came to a like disas- trous end. This endeavor had its origin in the writings of one Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres in the Low Countries, who, tinged with Calvinism, gave to the Grace of God an undue place in his theological scheme. These writings of his failed to allow due prominence to the rites of the church and the merits of the saints, while they laid undue 314 THE WAYS OF THE GODS stress on personal holiness as a requisite of salvation. His rather commonplace book became the inspiration of a move- ment that for a time threatened once more the unity of the church. A devoted band of men and women (known, from the Convent that was their headquarters as the Port- Royalists), some of them the leading minds of the time, such as Pascal, his sister Jacqueline, and Arnaud, a pro- fessor of the Sorbonne, became the disciples of the new cult. The Jesuits were the sworn enemies of the Jansenists, and the struggle between these factions disturbed the peace of the church for nearly fifty years, a conflict made forever famous by the "Lettres Provinciates" of Pascal, in which, with an irony unrivalled in literature, he attacked the posi- tion of the Jesuits and laid open the secret sources of their power. But, despite the weapon of Pascal's genius hurled in deri- sion against the morality of the teachings of the Jesuits, and despite the eloquence and learning of Arnaud, the cause of the Jesuits triumphed. The Convent of Port-Royal was suppressed, its preachers silenced, its nuns were scattered abroad, and the Catholic Church in France, because it knew not the time of its visitation, was left to await its destruc- tion in the storms of the Revolution. In the Nineteenth Century the Catholic Church had for a moment a liberal, reforming Pope in the person of Pius IX, who at his election was hailed as the coming liberator of Italy. But early in his reign, frightened by the violence and radicalism of the liberal movement, Pius became an extreme reactionary. In the Encyclical of 1854, he condemned modern science ; he made the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary de fide, and in the Council of the Vatican declared the infallibility of the Pope to be an Article of Faith of the Catholic Church. When Doellinger and the theological faculty of Munich, the one Catholic in- stitution of learning that had standing in Europe, pro- tested against the dogma of the infallibility as unhistorical, these great scholars were excommunicated and died without THE WAYS OF THE GJDS 315 the pale of that Communion which for a generation they had served with a learning and a zeal that gave to their church the respect of the thinking world of the time. Yet these were men who had sought, in a small measure, to adapt the Catholic Church to the thought and mind of the modern world, for which progressive act the church cast them out as unholy and as violators of their vows! The amusing attempt of a group of French and English priests to rewrite the dogmas of the church in terms of modernism is a matter of recent history. Pius X in the En- cyclical de Pascendi condemned modernism, root and branch. The Modernists in return wrote saucy letters to the Pope intimating that His Holiness did not quite know what he was talking about. But for all this, Pius was the Pope, and the Modernists, giving up the effort of reform from within, left the church to its incurable conservatism, and now are among the most brilliant writers and speakers on matters of religion in the Western world. Father Tyr- rell is dead, Pere Loisy is in retirement, but Joseph McCabe, DeLisle Burns, and Mr. Sullivan are preaching by pen and tongue a doctrine of Modernism that is destructive of ancient dogma, both Protestant and Catholic. Because of the rigor of its crystallization the Catholic Church has lost the spiritual and moral leadership of the Western world. In the present crisis the Pope is helpless. Imprisoned in the Vatican, he can only look on and bewail moral evils and spiritual horrors that he is powerless to avert. Pius X died in an agony of impotence. The present Pope lives unregarded in the presence of a cataclysm that is shaking Christendom to its foundations and changing the order of the world. His powers, in inverse ratio to his claims, make of him an object of commiseration. How are the mighty fallen ! He who could once make emperors tremble and kings afraid, he at whose word nations bowed in fearful submission, cannot now get so much as- a hearing in the councils and conflicts of the nations.^ The Catholic Church has sacrificed its life to its organization. Like the Roman Empire, of which it is the ghost in the modern world, it is as perfect as a crystal, and as dead as a crystal. 316 THE WAYS OF THE GODS CHAPTER LXII The Return of Pan Both the Catholic and the Protestant denominations for the past four hundred years and more have been subjected to a pressure from without, which, with all the force of a slow- moving glacier, has ground the brittle dogmas of Protestant- ism to powder and has reduced the crystalline form of the Catholic Church to comparatively diminutive proportions. This force has been the operation of the free intelligence ; in the investigation of natural and social phenomena. Three great movements of the human mind during this period have completely destroyed the ancient and medieval scheme of the universe, thus making the dogmatic state- ments of the church impossible to the educated man. These three movements were the revival of letters, the development of science, and the democratic revolution. 1 The first of these, the revival of letters, came at the end of the Fifteenth Century, as a consequence of the fall of Constantinople. Toward the end of that century, in the year ^403,' Constantine, the last of the emperors, died in the defense of his city, and the capitol of the Roman Em- pire was stormed and sacked by the hordes of Mahomet, the Turkish Sultan. Christian men and women of noble birth were bound together like sheep and sold as slaves in the shambles. Prior to the capture of the city many distinguished schol- ars had fled from the wrath to come and had made their way to Rome and other Italian cities, carrying with them a store of precious manuscripts of the poems of Homer, the dramas of JEschylus, and other writings of the classical literature of Greece. These exiles, in order to earn their living, established themselves as teachers of the Greek language and literature, and under their inspiration Greek 1 The democratic revolution is so vast a subject that it calls for separate treatment in an additional volume. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 317 learning became all the rage in Italy, whence it spread rapidly over western Europe, changing radically the course of study in every seat of learning. The writings of the Christian fathers and the schoolmen fell at once into dis- repute; the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testa- ment were thrust into the background, while the scholar- ship of Europe occupied itself with the mastery of the language and literature of the Athens of Pericles and Plato. Greek manuscripts brought fabulous prices, and the dis- covery of a new parchment was an event to stir the heart of the world. This passion for Greek learning gave rise in Europe to a passion equally intense for the Greek life. The ascet- ic ideal of the Christian religion became abhorrent to these students of Greek culture. Nature, which the church had condemned as unholy, was, by this revolution in thought made divine ; the human passions and appetites, it was agreed, were given to man for his delight; their suppression not their indulgence was the sin; and it was the right and duty of every man, as he was able, to live the full, free life of the senses. Wine, women, and song were as neces- sary to his proper development as were bread and water. Popes, priests, and people threw off the restraints of the then old-fashioned religion of Christ, and gave themselves up without restraint to the worship of Pan ; and that god of the Greeks, half man, half beast, became the favorite di- vinity of the Hellenic revival of the Fifteenth Century in Italy and Europe. The more sober of the Greek gods, such as Apollo and Athena, were neglected, while men and wo- men practiced with feverish haste the sensual rites of Aphrodite and Dionysus. The men of that age reacted with fearful violence from the religion of Grace to the religion of Nature. The leaders of this reaction were the Popes, the cardinals, and the clergy of the Catholic Church. The court of Leo X was in belief and practice openly Pagan. The pontiff and his courtiers practiced all the vices and but few of the virtues of Grecian antiquity. These men made a scoff of the religion that they administered, and went from the altar 318 THE WAYS OF THE GODS to the free indulgence in wine and women as a relief from its tediousness. No age of the world has surpassed the Italian Renaissance in licentiousness and cruelty. The effect of the revival of Greek learning was the de- liverance of letters from bondage to the church. Pro- fane writings competed with the sacred Scriptures for the interest of the reader, and as the profane were the more in- teresting, they commanded the greater attention. From that time, even until now, no man is considered worthy of admission to Holy Orders in the English Church until he has mastered the amatory odes of Anacreon and the love songs of Theocritus. A strange marriage was made between Christian austerity and Greek freedom, the product of which has been the English bishop, together with his deans and canons. The Catholic clergy of the Fifteenth Century, in embrac- ing the Greek learning, warmed in their bosom a serpent that stung their theology to death. provocative of thought, and thought was a corrosive poison [atal to theological dogma. The history of the Catholic Church since the Renaissance has been the history of a long and bitter struggle with the virus of Greek literature, with its concomitant freedom oi thinking, which its Popes, its cardinals, its bishops, and its deans so unwisely introduced into its veins. CHAPTER LXIII The Vision of The Infinite The revival of letters, which made the mind of Christen- dom acquainted with a non-Christian past of great beauty and significance, was quickly followed by another event which opened to the Western vision a future of astound- ing importance. When Columbus sailed from Palos to THE WAYS OP THE GODS 319 the West he was seeking a more direct route to the ports of China and India. His discovery of a continent lying between the West and the East seemed so incredible that the discoverer himself could not believe it. After four voyages, and the exploration of what are now known to be the shores of Central and South America, Columbus died in the belief that what he had found was nothing more than the outlying regions of the Chinese and Indian Empires. So convinced was he of this that he called the natives of these newly discovered lands Indians, and as Indians they have been known ever since. It required a century and more of exploration and adven- ture to convince Europe that it had found not the ancient land of Cathay but a region vast in extent, rich in natural wealth, lying open to the possession and settlement of the first-comer. Not only did this discovery inflame the am- bition of the European to extend his sway over the lands beyond the sea, it had the further effect of sending him out on voyages of exploration into the heavens. Successful curiosity begat curiosity. The accepted astronomical system of Ptolemy, which had the imprimatur of the church, failed to satisfy the more acute minds that were studying the movements of the sun, the moon, and the stars. The system of Ptolemy placed the earth in the center of the universe as a fixed point, and caused the sun, moon and stars to revolve around it by means of crystal spheres, in cycles and epicycles. The phenomena of the passing of the sun through the signs of the zodiac, the nodes of the moon, and the procession of the equinoxes were all accounted for by an elaborate ma- chinery of motions and counter-motions in the crystal spheres. This machinery was so complicated, so clumsy, that it caused Sancho, King of Aragon, to say to his astron- omer that had he been in the councils of the Creator he could have suggested simpler methods of regulating the heavenly bodies and their movements. This dissatisfaction of Sancho with the system of Ptolemy was shared by many minds engaged in active search for the simpler methods that the King of Aragon desired. Among 320 THE WAYS OF THE GODS these explorers of the sky was Nicholas Copernicus, an ob- scure Polish priest. After trying patiently, but in vain, to make the sun, moon, and stars conform to the system of Ptolemy, he finally discarded that system altogether, and by a daring flight of intellectual imagination, placed himself in the sun and observed the movements of the heavenly bodies from that coign of vantage. No sooner had he found himself at this new point of observation than he perceived that the movements of the celestial orbs were simplified and accounted for by making the sun the fixed point in relation to the earth and causing the earth to travel in a circular path around the sun, as a central body, once every year. By a revolution of the earth on its own axis, Copernicus accounted for the phenomena of night and day; for by this process the earth was constantly putting its own bulk between itself and the light, and the darkness of night was nothing else than the shadow of the earth. Copernicus further observed that certain stars, which were called "planets" or "wandering stars," were, like the earth, moving in a circuit round the sun. Some nearer the sun than the earth moved within the earth's circuit, others farther away described a path far outside that of the earth. From all these observations the astronomer concluded that the earth (itself a planet or wandering star) was, in obedi- ence to some unknown law of motion, moving with other planets about their common center. As the final outcome of his explorations, Copernicus postulated the Solar Sys- tem, consisting of a given number of heavenly bodies in a common central control. ; The publication to the world of the results of the ob- servations of Copernicus is the beginning, in a rough way, of the scientific movement, which from that time, with ac- celerating rapidity, has destroyed the ancient and medieval conceptions of the universe and has made a new and vaster v thought-world for the mind of man to live in. *- Copernicus died on the day that the book containing his solar theory was placed in his hands ; thus he reaped from his labors neither glory nor shame. His book, like all such THE WAYS OF THE GODS 321 original works of genius, did not at first attract the atten- tion of the world. Only professional astronomers saw its significance and mastered its reasoning. The doctors and rulers of the church, busy in the administration of ecclesias- tical and political affairs, were not alive to the new danger that threatened them. It was not until Galileo began to teach in Italy the doctrine of the Polish astronomer that the authorities of the church became alarmed and endeavored to suppress this dangerous heresy. Galileo was already a distinguished astronomer; by means of the newly invented telescope, he had explored the heavens, had discovered the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupi- ter. Coming soon to the conclusion that the naked eye of man saw only the outer edges of a vast universe, which was opened to his gaze by means of the magnifying power of the telescopic lens, Galileo embraced the theory of Copernicus with ardor, as the only reasonable explana- tion of what he had observed in the sky. The earth's motion was to him a self-evident fact (he could see it move), and when, in the prison of the Inquisition, in or- der to save his life, he was forced to deny that motion, under his breath he still cried: "It does move." The struggle of the old system of astronomy with the new was short and sharp. Everywhere the new doctrine was received with acclaim by astronomers. Giordano Bruno gave to the theory of Copernicus a wider sweep when he made the assertion that the fixed stars were so many suns, each with its system of planetary worlds. In the presence of so stupendous a thought, the little uni- verse of theology, with its definite heaven, its compact earth, and its central hell, ceased to exist; it was lost in the grandeur and the sublimity of the Infinite, so suddenly uncovered to the gaze of man. In vain the church silenced Galileo and burned Giordano Bruno in the Piazza, del Fiore in Rome. In spite of every effort, the system of Copernicus was accepted and perfected by each succeeding astronomer. Kepler brought greater order into the solar system by substituting the ellipse for 322 THE WAYS OF THE GODS the circle of Copernicus; Newton welded the whole into perfect unity by his discovery of the principle and rule of gravity, thus giving a reasonable explanation to the phen- omena of heavenly motions, and so making it impossible for the mind to entertain any theory other than that of Copernicus. Within a century and a half of the death of Copernicus the church gave up the battle for Ptolemy as lost, discarded his system, and taught in all her schools the doctrine that she had once denied and persecuted as destructive of her dogma. That she has been able to survive this disaster is owing to the fact that the universe of Copernicus is too vast for the common mind to live in. It is only the greater souls that can look in the face of this Infinite and live. Lesser spirits must hide themselves from that face by some Mosaic veil, some lesser conception that shall give to them a protection from the vastness of the Infinite. There are millions to-day who still live in the system of Ptolemy, with its stationary earth and moving sun, with its nearby heaven and its subterranean hell; these souls na- turally find in the church a shelter from the greatness of the world. But such protection is becoming every day more and more precarious. The intellect and soul of man is ever expanding to accommodate itself to its new and glorious habitation. Every year the number of those seeking the shelter of the church is decreasing, while those who are finding themselves at home in the open are a mighty host, rejoicing in their new-found liberty. To them the heavens declare the glory of the Infinite and the firmament showeth His handiwork. One day telleth another and one night cer- tifieth another, and there is neither speech nor language, but their voices are heard among them. The Infinitude of man is responding to the Infinitude of God. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 323 CHAPTER LXIV The Vision of The Eternal The mind of Christian Europe had not yet recovered from the shock consequent upon the discovery of new continents, and the expansion of the universe into infinite space, before it was thrown into a fever of consternation by the assertion that the history of this earth extended back into an eternal past and had the promise of an eternal future. In the presence of this conception, the 4004 B. C. of Bishop Usher's chronology, instead of measuring the antiquity of the world, did not so much as span the modern era. In the history of the human race it was but a moment; in geological time but the infinitesimal fraction of an instant. From this point of view men reckoned the duration of the earth not in years but in aeons; they spoke not of this or that year but of this or that age. This revolution in thought was accomplished with less spectacular violence than was occasioned by the change in the conception of the relation of the earth to the sun. It was not so dramatic a transformation, and the general mind, after the discovery of America and the acceptance of the Copernican theory, was more open to change of view. The notion of the earth's antiquity came to the mind of man as the result of an investigation into the structure of the rock foundations of the earth. In the beginning it was an accidental rather than a conscious movement of the human intelligence. Thoughtful quarry-men and masons found strange forms imbedded in the stones which they handled ; they saw the impression of a fish or fern outlined in a rock, and they began to speculate as to the meaning of these curious plays of nature. The cogitations of these unlettered men were reenforced by the more dis- ciplined minds of wandering scholars, who found the re- mains of marine animals far up the mountain side, hun- dreds of miles from any sea. All of this stimulated man's unquenchable curiosity, and one after another gave himself up to the study of the history of the rocks of the earth. 324 THE WAYS OF THE GODS It was not long before the conclusion was forced upon the observer that the facts under investigation could not be accounted for on the theory that the formation of the earth had always been as it is now. The student, as he turned over the rocks, read on their surface the account of changes vast in their proportions and requiring ages upon ages for their accomplishment. The petrified trilobite testi- fied to the fact that the uplifted mountain side upon which it was found had once be~en the shore of a sea; the coal found in the depths of the earth was seen to be the re- mains of submerged forests that at one time had grown and flourished on the open ground. These and like discover- ies gave to man a new notion of antiquity. He learned that the continents, the islands, the rivers, the lakes, and the seas that we know are comparatively new to their place ; where now is a mountain was once a sea, and the floor of the sea was once a mountain-top. Instead of the everlasting hills of the Psalmist, it was perceived that the life of a hill was, in its degree, as transitory as the life of a man. It was here in a geological to-day and gone in a geological to-morrow. The cause of these changes in the structure of the earth was at first ascribed to overwhelming catastrophes which has cast down the mountains and uplifted the seas. The agents of change were subterranean fires issuing in volcanic eruption. But it was soon discovered that, while volcanic fire had played its part in the drama of geological history, it was by no means the only .actor on the stage. The ques- tion soon arose as to whether water rather than fire were not the hero of the play. If fire had upheaved the moun- tains, water had washed them down ; the action of fire was sporadic, while that of water was constant. Geologists at first divided into the schools of Plutonists and Neptun- ists, but were at last reconciled by the discovery that Pluto and Neptune were partners in the business of making and remaking the rocks of the earth ; for Pluto welded the gran- ite, while Neptune laid down the sandstone. It was also discovered that Pluto and Neptune were still on the job, Pluto blew the bellows of his forge at Vesuvius and /Etna, while the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 325 waters of Neptune carried silt down every hillside, to form fresh sandstone on the bottom of every sea. It was at last the conviction of geologists that past changes in the formation of the earth could be accounted for by the operation of present forces. This process of change was still going on and could be studied on every mountain peak and seashore, and of this process the geologist could see "no sign of a beginning, no forecast of an end." 1 The Biblical theologians were bewildered and shocked beyond measure by these assertions of the geologists. They could not, they would not believe such blasphemies. The Bible said the world was made in six days, and what the Bible said must be true, for was not the Bible the Word of God? "And let God be true and every stone a liar." If the world were of such vast antiquity, where, then, did God begin His work of creation? For fifty years the pulpit raged against geology as the in- vention of Satan ; the fossils were placed in the rocks by God to fool the geologists, to their eternal damnation ; to be a geologist was to be an atheist. If the world had been torn down and built up a thousand times, what was the use of a God? If there had never been a creation, where, then, was the Creator? In this contention of theology with geology there were no imprisonments, no burnings. The geologists were for the most part men of the North, where the mind of man had, in a measure, been delivered from bondage to ecclesiastical control. In due time the theologians found it painful to kick against the pricks ; little by little the facts penetrated their own minds and could not be ignored. At first the theologian, shifting his ground from absolute denial, tried to reconcile geology and Genesis. The days of the Bible became the aeons of geology. But finding this work of reconciliation mere child's play, the clergy gave up the Bible altogether and went over mind and soul to geology. And now some of the most ardent and learned of geologists are to be found in the ranks of the clergy. That Christian men recovered so quickly from the shock of geological discovery and displacement, and reconciled their 1 Lyell's "Principles of Geology." 326 THE WAYS OF THE GODS religion to their science, is owing toUthe psychological fact that all past time is equally distant. Memory can as easily (and sometimes more easily) recall" the , happenings of ten years ago as the happenings of last week/ And in history ten million zeons is no more distant than ten thousand years. It requires a trained mind and great powers of reflection to grasp the significance of the ageless duration of the earth. Such minds, which are increasing in number every day, have a vision of the Eternal which makes the conception of a definite special creation impossible to their thoughts. They do not seek a Cre- ator in some past event or future happening. For them Creator and Creation are One. CHAPTER LXV The Making of Man The sixth decade of the Nineteenth Century was made for- ever famous by the publication of a scientific theory, which, even more than the astronomical theory of Copernicus, or Gali- leo, or the geological theory of Playfair and Hutton, was at war with the theological conception of the universe. In this instance, science, leaving the outlying region of the stars and coming down from the mountain tops, entered the secret cham- bers of life. It began to trace all living forms back to their origin and to account for their variations by natural causes. The human mind had from the beginning been bewildered by the multitude of living creatures that disputed with man the possession of the earth. Insect and reptile, bird and beast of varied form and habit, met him at every turn, they threatened his life by day and disturbed his sleep by night. Some of the higher forms of animal life had, indeed, been converted to the uses of man ; he had butter and milk from the cattle, wool from the sheep, the horse carried him on his journeys, and the dog THE WAYS OF THE GODS 327 was his companion in the chase and his guardian in the camp. At home and abroad man was in constant contact with this multiform animal life. As soon as the intelligence of man was sufficiently developed he studied the animal world and endeavored to find some ra- tional explanation of its origin, some principle of order in the midst of its confusion. In the course of his investigation, he found that there were only four or five architectural plans employed in the construction of the various animal forms. Therefore, he reasoned, the first and obvious effort was to classify these creatures according to the basic plan of their structure. So they were arranged in the orders of vertebrates, molluscs, crustaceans, and the like. But in these genera were an almost infinite number of species, and within the species still more bewildering varieties. As if living forms were not sufficiently confusing, geology must unearth a vast number of extinct species, like and yet unlike to existing species. After the work of classification was in a measure accom- plished, the question of origins forced itself upon the mind of the student: How did the various species come into existence? To all outward appearances these species were fixed and permanent. Each specie continued its kind from generation to generation; dog begat dog, man begat man, and there seemed no exception to this rule. It was, then, natural to trace dogs back to the first dog and men back to the first man. Then came the further question: What was the origin of the first dog and the first man? To this question theology gave the easy answer that the first dog and the first man were the creation out of hand of a God. With some notable exceptions it was universally held by scien- tists and laymen up to the sixth 1 decade of the Nineteenth Cen- tury that each species of vegetable and animal life was a dis- tinct creation. A Being, called "Jehovah" or "Elohim" by the Jews, (which names, as translated into English, are God and Lord) made the various specific forms of animal life one by one, endowed each with the power to reproduce its kind, and after this manner every living form, from the infusoria to the man, came into existence. 328 THE WAYS OF THE GODS This creationist theory never found universal acceptance. It was not known to the primitive man ; the absolute fixity of species had not entered his mind ; in his thought it was an easy thing for a man to become a wolf, or a woman a snake; and so far from believing that all the species were the creation of a common Creator, he assigned to various gods the work of moulding the forms and giving life to the various kinds of vegetable and animal existence. So far as one is able to master the thought of prehistoric man as we find it expfessed in the myths that he has handed down to history, one gathers that the ancient belief gave to each order of life its own creative power. The god of the species was the species constantly creating and re-creating itself. This faith found expression in the fetich, in the worship of trees and animals. Among ancient philosophers there was a decided disposition to hold the doctrine of transformation, and to consider it a possi- ble thing for one form of life to pass into another ; thus, a man might become a dog and a dog a man. This is akin to the Eastern doctrine of the transmigration of life, or soul, through the various forms of existence. The West derived ij hard-and-fast theory of creation from Hebrew sources. /The Hebrew thinkers, unlike the In- dian and the Greek philosophers, did not derive mankind by generation from the Divine, but by creation. God did not beget iiTan' "He made him^f This thought shaped all the religious conceptions of the Hebrew. God to him was not in the world, He was outside of it, just as a maker is outside his manufac- ture. This thought pictures God as a workman in his shop, fashioning one object after another and laying each aside when finished. As a potter moulding his clay on his wheel, each vessel of life is fashioned by the will of the potter to its de- signed use, some to honor, some to dishonor. This theory of creation brought in question the skill and the wisdom of the Creator. Why should Infinite Wisdom employ the leisure of His Infinity in creating the vermin and the fly? Why should He contrive the tarantula and the Gila monster . J These and like perplexities disturbed the mind of the most de- vout believer in God as the Creator of the world. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 329 Beside these moral difficulties, the theory of creation is be- set with intellectual perplexities. The life history of the hu- man form is an amazing sight to contemplate from the view- point of the creationist. Beginning in the slime, a mere cell of protoplasm, passing in the embryonic stage through the various cycles of animal existence, now breathing through the gills like a fish, now shaped like a dog; born helpless, crawling, speech- less, evolving through savagery and barbarism to a state of man- hood consistent with his environment, the human being by his life history accuses his Creator of useless complexity and con- fusion in the manner of his creation. If in the beginning God made man by a separate creative act, why did he not make him out of hand at once and not squeeze him up from a worm? The same query came into the mind of the geologist as he studied the fossil species imbedded in the rocks of the earth. These species were related to existing species through slight variations in form ; an extinct species could thus easily be traced onward to its living representative. Louis Agassiz, to the day of his death, a profound and pious believer in the creationist theory, ascribed these corres 1 - pondences in the forms of extinct and living species to an archi- typal plan in the mind of the Creator. But other minds were not so easily satisfied. The speculations of Lamark, the observa- tion of Erasmus Darwin in the Eighteenth Century, the work of Cuvier and others in the province of comparative anatomy, and of Linnaeus in the field of botany, prepared the mind of the Nineteenth Century for the profound genalization of Dar- win and Wallace and for the ready acceptance of their theory of the origin of species. The word "evolution" was used to express the process by means of which the various existing species are derived from preexistent forms. According to this theory, the resemblance between existing and preexisting species is not accidental but or- ganic; it is not the work of a builder building a succession of structures according to slightly modified plans, it is the work of a living organism adapting its_elf by successive changes to new conditions of exisfeScI^ According to" this theory, man 330 THE WAYS OF THE GODS is not a creation, he is a growth. Little by little, by painful steps and slow, man has developed from the worm to the human. The amazing life history of each individual is but a repe- tition of the life history of the race. Each 1 man begins at the beginning and passes through the various stages of ancestral experiences; the worm is man's poor relation, and the monkey his cousin a million times removed. No revolution in human thinking equals in rapidity and completeness the change from the creationist to the evolu- tionary theory of the origin of species. In 1850 the whole Western world, scientific and theological, was creationist; in 1882, when Charles Darwin died, the whole Western world, scientific and theological, was evolutionist. The times were ripe for the change, and the change came. For a moment the theologian sputtered his protest, but his sputterings were only the dying gasp of a lost cause; and Charles Darwin, who had incidentally but effectually undermined the foundations of the theological system, was buried with all honors in the Christian church of Westminster. The reason of this easy victory of the scientific over the theological conception of the origin of the human species was that the theological conception had long before lost its hold on living thought. ^Adam, who for so many centuries * had borne the blame of human sin, had slowly faded away : into an innocent myth, and with him had gone the whole doc- ' trine of the fall of man, with all its complications and impli- cations. Just as the Ptolemaic theory of the solar and stellar universe was displaced by the Copernican so the theological theory of the creation, the fall and redemption of man, has been removed to give room to the evolutionary theory of Darwin, which is now, in its fundamental principle, the ac- cepted theory of the thinking world. It is too soon in the history of the evolutionary move- ment to appreciate to the full its effect upon existing be- liefs and institutions; it will take at least another generation for this now universally accepted doctrine to work itself out to its logical conclusion in the minds of the mass of the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 331 peoplef Deep-rooted beliefs die hard; men go on by mere vis inertiae, believing they believe long after they have ceased to believe. In relation to the doctrine of the fall and redemption of man, the formal religious world is now in the stage of believing that it believes; the old words are used, the old forms observed, but the vigor of life has gone out of word and form. It is .only by effort that the be-- lief in the belief is maintained./ When a man is in his cEurch he may say that he believes the archaic form of words, the dim religious light hides from him his own infidelity; but when he comes out in the open light of day and buffets with the actual facts of life, his belief is not strong enough either to guide his thought or con- trol his action. Belief held under such precarious tenure soon fades away, and the mind finds its rest in a more stable con- ception. Among the books that I, when a theological student, was required to master was Bishop Bull's Treatise on "Man Before the Fall." From that profound and learned work I gathered that before the disaster in the Garden of Eden man was en- dowed with every perfection, physical, intellectual, and mor- al. Erect, noble, good, he stood fearless in the presence of his God. But, alas ! beguiled by a woman, deceived by a ser- pent, this perfect being lost in a moment all his perfections. How such a wise being could be such a fool was a question that used often to trouble my mythological understanding. But, as everybody believed it, I believed it; and I let it go at that. I now see what every one else sees : that this story is not only untrue to fact, it is absurd. What we call the evil in man's life is not the consequence of man's fall, it is the result of his rise. Man began not in a garden but in a jungle. He did not receive his human nature as a hand-me-down, ready-made; he had to make it. The belief of primitive man was nearer the truth than the later thought of the author of Genesis. Man as he stands to-day is not the handiwork of a Creator, he is the product of a process. Urge within and force without have driven, 332 THE WAYS OF THE GODS beaten, and battered him up from a trilobite to a troubadour that sings his song in my lady's chamber. Put scientifically, man has progressed from lower to higher forms of life according to fixed laws and by means of resi- dent forces. The God of the human species is the God Humanus, moulding and shaping the life of man to higher - telligence, to deaden the emotion, and to weaken the muscles. The man under these circumstances is the slave of the ma- 338 THE WAYS OP THE GODS chine, and if that slavery continues long enough, the victim loses all power of freedom, he can no longer walk, he must be carried, and mankind at large is rapidly nearing that de- plorable condition. Walking is becoming a lost art, and the man who walks is notable among his fellows. Not only have we machines to walk for us but we also have machines to think for us, to write for us, to sing for us, and there is little left of human endeavor to-day, be- cause of the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of the god of the machine. At the present moment, while I am dictating these words to a machine, the whole world is en- gaged in a war the most destructive of life and property that the world has ever seen. The armies of this war are numbered by the million, the battle fronts extend for hundreds of miles, and the battles last not for days, but for months and almost for years. For nearly three years now there has been a con- tinuous battle between the Germanic and Allied armies along the Western front of the war. This war is made possible sim- ply and solely because it is not primarily a war between men and men, but a war between machines. All the ancient pride, pomp, and circumstance of war is gone. The Knight no longer rides at arms; no more does the soldier follow the colors; no more does the bugle blow; but dull gray men in dull gray ditches handle vast machines, project explosive gases, and rush in desperation from one trench to another, perishing by the thousand where aforetime scarcely a score had died. Unless the intelligence of man can devise some method whereby to check the devastating power of the war machine, the end of the human race is in sight. Instead of man mastering the machine, the machine is mastering man and working his destruction. 1 There is a constant tendency in the universe toward the machine. Human organizations are subject to this tendency. ;In politics and in religion we have the machine, an or- ganization that works almost automatically in its own in- 'These words were dictated to a machine on the 30th of June, 1917, when the news had just arrived of the landing of American armies in France. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 339 terest, without intelligence, and without moral sense. The great nations of the world are little else than machines. Their act in contradiction to the intelligence and the conscience. And the same is true of the religious organizations now in existence. The greatest of all these religious organizations, the Catholic Church, is to-day little else than a worn-out machine. It has lost all power of intelligent adaptation or moral cooperation with the existing world. Men in every \ country where it has been dominant, as in Mexico, in Italy, ; and elsewhere, are scrapping it as useless. The various Protestant denominations are likewise machines. They do not think, they follow custom ; and to follow cus- tom is of the very essence of the nature of the machine. Na- ture does not think intellectually, only mechanically. And just as soon as any organization is perfected it is a ma- chinery to be used so long as it is useful, and then to be cast aside. ( The great problem of the immediate future is to bring the ^god of the_ machine under the dominion of the god of the moral order. Man must not be mastered by the machine; he must, by his intelligence and his moral appre- hension, command his tool. CHAPTER LXVII The God of the Market By one of those curious transformations so common in re- ligious history, Jesus the son of Joseph, called the Christ, who was the god of the catacombs, worshipped by the slaves, the beggars, the thieves, the harlots of ancient Rome, as their Lord and Saviour, has become in our day the God of the Market. Evangelical Christianity is that form of religion most patronized by the business man. If it were not for this class Evangelical Christianity could not survive for a 340 THE WAYS OF THE GODS day. It is the commercial element that builds and maintains its churches, employs its ministers, sends its missionaries to every land to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, financier of modern times began his will, dispensing his immense fortune, with the di- rection that his heirs should employ their lives and his wealth for the maintenance of the Gospel of Christ in the world. The first billionaire in history, a man of business genius unequaled in any age, is a most devout believer in and earn- est supporter of the Baptist form of faith. The Young Men's Christian Association, with all its vast equipment and means of usefulness, is the foundation of the merchant class, and is used by them for the furtherance of that form of religion which they patronize. No man can be a voter in that As- sociation who is not a professed member of some Evangelical body. This dominance of the business element is seen in all the workings of the Evangelical churches. They are on a busi- ness basis ; pews in the houses of worship are rented and sold on the same principle as stalls in the market, the better place bringing the higher price. The clergy in these churches are ranged as fifteen-thousand, ten-thousand, five- thousand, one- thousand-dollar men and under, and each man's ecclesiastical importance is measured by the amount of his ecclesiastical income : The principle of competition rules in the religious as it does in the business world. The ministers are in competition all the time for the better churches and the higher salaries. A church in need of a pastor bids for him in the market just as the merchant in need of a clerk bids for 5 him in the market. Money is the measure of success in the church as it is in the world. A minister who can draw an audience and secure from that audience liberal contributions is sure of promotion ; the highest places in the church are within his reach. In every respect the church and the world are alike, both have been commercialized by the commercial class. Jesus the Christ is the central Divinity in this scheme of worship. God the Father is remote to the thought of the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 341 Evangelical. He is a God who sits aloft creating and judg- ing mankind, but having no intimate relation with the life of the people. All the hymns in these churches that are popu- lar with the people are hymns addressed to Jesus. "Jesus saviour of my Soul," is in the heart and on the lips of every devout evangelical Christian. To Jesus is ascribed the most important of all divine functions, that of saving the people from their sins and conferring upon them the gift of Eternal Life. When we analyze the foundations of evangelical belief, we get a clue to this strange situation. At first we are perplexed to an extreme to understand how it has come to pass that the Jesus of whom we read in the Gospels, whose whole life and teaching was a continual protest against every principle of commercialism, has come to be the god of commerce. Ac- cumulation is the fundamental postulate of the commercial creed. To lay by in store is taught as the virtue of virtues. A man without a surplus capital has no standing in the market ; and yet Jesus condemns all accumulation as faithlessness in Divine Providence. Accumulation in his sight is a sin; "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth." Not only is it a sin, it is folly. Jesus would Jhave men to be as the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, dependent upon the daily ministrations of nature for their daily bread. His prayer for bread is limited for the day, it knows no to- morrow. When he was alive here in the earth (if we may believe what is told of him) his anger was fierce against those who "devour widows' houses and who for a pretence make long prayers." The explanation of this patronage of Jesus by the mer- chants is to be found in the fact that the Jesus of the Mar- ket is not the Jesus of the Gospel. He is the Christ of the Evangelical creed, and the Christ of the Evangelical creed is the center of religious exchanges. The Evangelical has made with the Christ of the creed a bargain similar to that made by Jacob with Jehovah. He says to his God Jesus, as he calls him: "If thou wilt be with me in the way 342 THE WAYS OF THE GODS that I go and bring me to my father's house in peace, if thou wilt secure for me the forgiveness of my sins and the blessings of eternal life, then thou shalt be my God and of all that thou givest me I will give thee the tenth." The Evangelical faith is in this respect Hebraistic. The relation of the worshipper to his God is not organic, it is contractual. It is the religion of the covenant, so much for so much, and it is to be said for the evangelical that he is true to his bargain. Trusting to Jesus for the fulfillment of his part of the contract, his worshipper gives freely of his wealth, even to the tenth, to promote the preaching of Jesus as the Christ in the world, and to sustain his worship. Mil- lions are poured out every year in this religious enterprise. Evangelical ministers and missionaries penetrate to every portion of the earth, and their source of supply is the wealth accumulated in the market. If Jesus were as a man, with the feelings common to man, he might well be proud of his present preeminence. His promotion from the godship of the beggar to the god- ship of the merchant prince might well seem to him an as- surance of his success in the universe. He no longer is poorer than the bird of the air and the fox in the thicket, having no place to lay his head ; he is housed magnificently in palaces on the wealthiest thoroughfares in the wealthiest cities in the world. It is not the men and the women, who out of the simplicity of their hearts know no better that sing his praises in rude form as they march in and out through the catacombs, but the most highly trained voices, the most expensive musi- cal instruments are employed in his divine worship. He does not have to hide his head for fear; he can show himself openly in the seats of the elders, and he is welcome to the highest place in the synagogue. He is to-day no less a per- son than the God of the Market; and to-day the market rules the world. The market is one of the most wonderful contrivances de- vised by the wisdom of man for the accomplishment of his well-being in the earth. Before the day of the market each THE WAYS OF THE GODS 343 man had to provide as best he could his whole means of liveli- hood. He had to dig with his own fingers the roots that he ate, and catch with his own hand the prey that he devoured; he had to skin the beasts and cure the hides to cover his nakedness; he had to build for himself the hut that shel- tered him, or find refuge in a cave of the earth. By means of the market, man has escaped from this condition of pov- erty. Each man has come to labor not only for himself but for his fellow-man. Man might almost be called a commercial animal. From the very first the instinct of the trader has been manifest in him, an instinct that is found nowhere else that we know of in all the universe. The expert fisherman, catching more fish than he needed for his own use, exchanged his surplus with a skilful hunter or a patient husbandman, and so se- cured a more varied food supply. We may, indeed, see the beginnings of the market system in the pack that com- bines to hunt the common prey, but we do not have here any exchange, we only have the principle of the common weal as the outcome of the common labor. By this contrivance of the market, man has brought about that division of labor which is the source, really, of his wealth. Each man, each community, does that which it can do to the best advantage, and then exchanges the surplus of its product with other communities, obeying the same law of labor. Wine- raising countries exchange the fruit of the grape for the wheat that grows on the upland. This system has become so organized that to-day the market is coextensive with the world. From the beginning commerce has been the builder of cities and empires. Tyre and Carthage, Venice and London, all owe their greatness to their commercial supremacy. Each in its day was and is the market town of the world. Without the market it would not be possible for mankind to over- spread the earth as he is doing now. It is the accumulated commercial capital of London that has opened up the prairies of Canada to the Englishman and the pampas of Argentina 344 THE WAYS OF THE GODS to the Italian. This capital has delivered millions from the slums of London, Naples, and New York, and given them the free, open, independent life of the country. When we consider what the market has done for mankind, we are at a loss at first to understand why it is that none of the greater and older gods were ever gods of the market. Uranus, as we have learned, was the god of space, Chronos of time, Zeus of the city, Jehovah of the tribe, Jesus in his day the Divinity of the people, Mary the goddess of consolation. Not one of these but would have been insulted to have been called the god of the market. To find com- mercial divinities, we must descend to Beelzebub, Mammon, Biliken, and Mercury, and of these the only one having any claim to respectability is the last, who was known in ancient mythology as the god of thieves, and merchants. From the very first a disgrace has attached to the mar- ket. The word trader and traitor are derived from the same root. Even to our own day it was a shame for an English- man to be a tradesman; such a man had to take off his hat and stand humbly in the presence of his superiors. Here again we are at a loss at first for a reason that will ade- quately account for the phenomenon. ,/The disrepute of the market lies in the motive of the market. The primary purpose of a mercantile transaction is nojt human service but iCoouaercial gain. Profit is of the es- sence of mercantile life^The capitalist who lends his money in London does not d&'so primarily for the purpose of open- ing up new countries and benefitting contracted lives; his act is not one of beneficence but of business. He puts his money out at interest, and it is what his money earns for him, not what his money does in and of itself, that concerns him. He will lend it as readily to destroy and enslave a people as he will to promote their well-being. The market buys and sells whatever is in demand: wheat, coal, iron, a child's life, a woman's virtue, are all put up in the market indif- ferently for the price they will bring. The God of the Mar- ket, like the God of the Machine, has neither higher intelli- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 345 gence nor moral sense; his intelligence being the intelligence of the market, and his morality the morality of the market. The merchant who fails to meet his engagements is con- demned; the merchant who is smart and overreaches and gets the best of the bargain is commended. The ruin of a rival is the crowning glory of the man of the market. In its own vernacular, one man "does" another, and the man who "does" is acclaimed for his business ability. The market corrupts religion, depraves literature, and d&- bases art. The teacher, the preacher, the artist, is employed by the merchant class to preach commercialism as the high- est, best, noblest way of living. The preacher and the teacher must not speak as they think, but they must express the thought of the market. The artist must portray not the miseries of the poor, but the gorgeous well-being of the rich. He must paint their divinities in the likeness of his patron. During the Renaissance the artists were in the em- ploy of the great commercial cities, the merchants them 7 selves for the most part being the patrons. The Popes who made a trade of their religion in that age, vied with- the merchant in securing the services of the great geniuses of the age. I cannot recall any picture of poverty (as it ex- isted at that time in those centers of life) on the canvas of any great artist. The models for the Madonnas of Ra- phael are the women of the leisure class, and all the figures that surround this central divinity, to whose glory he devoted his genius, are the wealthy men of the time, the men who paid him to paint the picture. It would have been well for the world if Raphael could have given us at least one pic- ture of one leper, of whom there were a multitude at that time in the highways and byways of Italy. All the squalor, ail the misery, of the period goes unrecorded, and we have perpetual Madonnas repeated perpetually for the glorification of the wealthy and the leisure class. In our own day our merchants are eager to possess the paintings of these old masters; but not one of them employs an artist to go down into the highways and byways of life 346 THE WAYS OF THE GODS as it is in the modern world and picture it as they see it. Once in a while a great master does this of his own ac- cord, and his paintings hang unsold upon the walls of hi? own studio. They have no market price. The commercial world knows of nothing but commercial values. I heard a celebrated business man (an advertiser, by the. way, and a brilliant speaker) say to an audience that money is the measure of ability and success; that a man who had ability could use it in the commercial world to secure for himself the rewards of that world and amass a fortune. And no one questioned the assertion, for it is a truism in the market. Therefore, according to this principle, the courtesan who sells her favors to the highest bidder is a woman of greater ability than the virtuous housewife who labors early and late in the interests of her household. The prophet who prophecies smooth things, and in consequence draws his salary of fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a year, is an abler man than a rugged and rude John who preaches in the wilderness, living on locust and wild honey. It is the profit system that makes the market what it is, a disgrace to humanity. Every great commercial center has always been a center of social corruption. Tyre sold a boy for a harlot and traded the virtue of a woman for a gem. England has depraved its working class in the in- terests of its commercial prosperity. New York is more noted for its Great White Way than it is for its many noble charities. Its Great White Way is the natural product of its commercialism, while its institutions of charity are the outcome of an effort/to stay some of the greater evils of the commercial systeru'/It is the market that is the efficient cause of that deadly disease poverty that has afflicted mankind since the beginning of his social life on the earth, and unless the market can be regulated and its greater abuses abated, it will destroy present civilization, as it has destroyed ancient civiliz- ations. /London is to-day in its death-throes because of the terrific "abuses that have been permitted to prevail in the business life of the nation. If England is to recover, it can THE WAYS OF THE GODS 347 only be by the stern elimination of the practices hitherto permitted, whereby one man and one class has been allowed to exploit another man and another class in its own interests. The landlord, the money monger, must be brought under the influence of a higher law than that of the market. Behind the market is the great army of producers who are compelled to bring their product to the market, there to sell it at the market price. It is to the interests of the merchant to buy at the lowest possible price. He takes advantage of every glut, to secure the product at a sum that may be ruinous to the producer. In front of the market is the consumer who must buy at the market price; and here again the self-interest of the market man leads him to put upon the product the highest price that the business will bear. He has no consideration whatever for the necessities of the purchaser; for all he cares, the consumer may starve and freeze; he will have his price. It is this man between who has through'- out history absorbed a vastly undue share of the common wealth. He has been the merchant prince, living in luxury, clothing his wife and daughters in costly apparel, adorning them with jewels, turning human labor into channels for his own aggrandizement, and all the while, within his sight, great masses of people have been starving for the necessi- ties of life. The God of the Market is like the God of the Machine, without pity, without morality. He will have his pound of flesh no matter what may happen to Antonio. The only salvation for mankind is the substitution of the community itself for the middleman. The market cannot with safety be left any longer in private control. The producer and the consumer must combine to secure to themselves the values that are properly theirs. The market has become so vast in its operations, each man is so entirely dependent upon it, that it has become in private hands a despotism, destructive of all liberty. For a bare livelihood the great mass of mankind to-day must cringe and fawn before those who are in possession of the sources of wealth and means of distribution ; for the market owns the one and controls the other. 348 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The revolution now impending is not a political but an industrial revolution. It is the redemption of the market from under bondage to the merchant class. The merchant must no longer be the master but the servant of the seller. ( and the buyer. The principles of Jesus the Son of Joseph, if applied to the market, would heal its sickness. He makes the basic prin- ' ciple of the market to be not profit but service. The mer- chant holds the same place in the economic world as that held by the minister in the spiritual world. He is to dis- tribute to the people the goods committed to his care. This task of distribution has its payment not in a profit but \in a wage. The man is not to buy and sell with a view to his own enrichment, but is to have constantly in mind the necessities of the people. This conception of the market is so foreign to the present mind that it is absurd; but, nevertheless, it is the true conception. Jesus forbids the accumulation of riches; nor does he do so as a mere vision- ary, ignorant of the world in which he lives, but because with his prophetic insight he saw that if the market were properly managed, if the industrial products of the world were properly distributed, there would be no necessity for such accumulation. The great mass of the people depen- dent on the market are unable to accumulate. Each day's wage purchases each day's supplies, and these live as do the fowl of the air and the flower of the field. Only the few contravene this law of daily providence, and endeavor to forestall the market and secure for themselves and their households an abundance of goods sufficient not only for the day but as far as possible for all time. It is this false conception of the market that is the fruitful source of the major evils of our time. Because of this we have the miseries of the poor and the debaucheries of the rich; we have the degradation of the menial and the insolence of the master. If Jesus is to come to his own as the God of the Market, then his ministers must preach in season and out of season his economic doctrine. They must lay stress continually on THE WAYS OF THE GODS 349 the sin of covetousness as the great idolatry, as the final denial of God. Until this is done, the present fantastic form of homage will continue, and we shall see the worship of Christ degraded to the level of the worship of Biliken. /The redemption, however, is at hand, and the God of the. .-Market as well as the Godjjf^the Machine is coming undler the domin- ion of the God Humanus, whose legend is not "Get!" but v i CHAPTER LX'VIII The God Humanus Looking down on the face of his dead daughter, a wo- man of rare mental and physical endowments, who, after a long and painful illness, had just died in the prime of her young womanhood, a celebrated scientist made answer to a friend offering him conventional words of religious com- fort: "I find no evidence of any feeling of compassion in the universe outside the nature of man. If a man is to be com- forted in his sorrow, he must find the source of comfort in himself." While this scientist, in the extremity of his grief, may have overstated the case, he did, without doubt, give words to a thought that lies heavy on every human heart. When, in the freshness of a great sorrow, one is told to seek com- fort from God, one can but cry with the Patriarch Job : "O, that I knew where I might find Him that I might come unto His seat. Behold I go forward, he is not there. And backward, but I cannot perceive Him." The indifference of nature .to our human grief never fails to astonish us that the sun should shine and the birds sing while our hearts are breaking seems to us but in mockery of our sorrow. Burns has made this the theme of the sacj- dest and yet the loveliest of his songs ; 350 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae 'fresh and fair; How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae weary fu' o* care? Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird, That wantons thro" the flowering thorn, That minds me o' departed joys, Departed, never to return. There is something in human grief that seems alien to nature. Nature can be sad, but never sorrowful. Human sorrow has in it not only the sense of loss but also the added sense of injustice. It seems that God is not only hard but unjust as well. Thinking of his indifference, we cry with Martha : "Lord, if Thou hadst been here my brother had not died." Thinking of God's injustice we are prone to utter the re- proach of the widow of Serepta to Elijah: "What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God, art thou come to call my sins to remembrance and to slay my son?" The injustice and cruelty of life make belief in the bene- ficence of God hard for the human heart. The scientist's grief was not more for the loss of his daughter than it was for his daughter's loss of the oppor- tunities and joys of her womanhood. His grief was not selfish, it was sympathetic; and this sympathetic grief is purely human. It is only man that follows his dead into their graves and seeks by his ministrations to bring some comfort into their dark and lonely abode. It is only the young of our race that are mourned after they are lost. The leaves fall from the tree and the tree does not regard it; the youngling drops from the nest and is straightway forgotten ; but human love goes after its dead to the portals of the tomb, and will not let them go. In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children, and refused to be comforted because they are not. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 351 It can be safely said that sympathetic grief can, so far as observation goes, be found nowhere in the universe but in the heart of man. Not only is nature irresponsive to the grief of man, but it is also indifferent to his moralities. It is a matter of no account to nature if a child is the product of a lawful marriage or an adulterous connection ; when once a child is begotten, nature pursues its even way, often giving to the love child more than it gives to the child of marriage. Nor does nature intervene to wither the hand that holds the murderous knife, the knife might be cutting the wood of a tree rather than the flesh of a man for all that the forces of nature care. The knife is sharp and the arm is strong, and the use it is put to does not concern the sharp- ness of the knife nor the strength of the arm. Nature as nature has no moral sense. Conscience, with its restrain- ing power, is an attribute, so far as we can see, of mankind alone. There is yet another human quality that has given man a unique place in the world, man, far beyond any other creature, possesses the power of reasoning, having evolved an intelligence that can see before and after. By the use of this acquirement, he can shape himself to his environ- ment and his environment to himself. It is this power that has given man the mastery of the earth and made him at home in every climate. By the use of his particular gift of purposeful reason, man has tamed the strength of the horse, has domesticated the cattle and the sheep, has of a crab-apple produced a pippin, and of the wild rose the American beauty; has built for himself houses and planted for himself gardens. Man clothes himself with his own thought and decorates himself with his own designs. We do not find conscious intelligence so developed elsewhere as it is in man. Man has these three qualities, implicit it may be in nature, explicit only in himself: the power of sympathy; the sense of right; the gift of self-direction. Because man has these three peculiar possessions, he is what he is, 352 THE WAYS OP THE GODS a sensitive, moral, reasonable being. And as these are more or less highly developed, so does a man live on a higher or lower plane of existence, so is he either a thing or a person. A man of cold temperament, feeble of con- science and of undeveloped intelligence, has not yet at- tained to his humanity; his life is not yet conscious, but drags along in the unconscious mire of natural force. John Fiske has told us that human progress was con- tingent on the length of human infancy. The love of the mother for the child was engendered not only by the in- timate connection of the womb and the breast but by the force of habit. Mother care, which is the source of mother love, was exercised not merely for weeks and months but for years, until by wont it became of the very nature of the mother life, and from the mother passed into the possession of the race. This growth of sympathy created the human institutions of the tribe, the family and the state. By means of these organizations man sought to secure for his young shelter against the ills of life. Sympathy when thus developed went out not only to one but to all the children, so that childhood as such was protected by the common love. The mother cared most for her own child; but the n'other- hood in her embraced not only a child, but childhood. Witness the fondness of the girl for the doll. The extension of the area of sympathetic love has marked the progress of humanity from the wild to the civilized state. Beginning with the mother and the child, it in- cluded within the circle of its warmth the members of the family, of the community, of the state, and of the race. Man has at last reached the sympathetic stage of development in which it is impossible for him to witness the distress of any fellow-creature without a spasm of sympathy. When one can look on suffering in any form with utter indifference one has in so far ceased to be human. It was the exercise of sympathy that gave rise to the moral sense. The wilful infliction of pain was resented as monstrous; he who could torture a child was not a man THE WAYS OF THE GODS 353 but a brute, whose actions called for condemnation in the interests of the social order. Since frail children cannot live in a world of unrestrained unkindness, men came to think of unkindness in terms of morality: an unkind act was not only painful to its object, it was wrong in its agent ; as the word implies, it was destructive of kin. Conscious unkindness made family, community and state impossible; because all these institutions are disrupted and dissolved by continued cruelty. So the cruel man, the murderer, the robber, the adulterer (who respectively indulged his hate, his greed, his lust at the cost of pain to his victims) was called a bad man, and as such was subject to the loss of his own life, his own property, his own wife and chil- dren. The moral sense in man has its root in grief. In proportion to his power of sympathetic grief is his sense of righteousness. Of the righteous servant of the Lord it is said: "He was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief." It is to his grief also that man, in a large measure, owes the development of his purposeful intelligence. Intelli- gence is man's defensive armor against the cruelties that beset him. By his purposeful intelligence he defends him- self from the extremities of heat and cold; he lays by fuel for the winter and ice for the summer. To ward off the horrors of starvation, man has contrived the plow and the harrow, the cultivator and the thresher. To assure himself against the woes of poverty, he has devised govern- ments and laws, and has sheltered himself behind the pro- tection of States. The fear of want haunts the millionaire as well as the pauper and stirs him to intellectual activity. It is, in a degree, because a man's fear of deprivation passed out beyond himself to his children and his grandchildren that we have had all the vast improvements in commercial and industrial activities. It is true that men have come to enjoy these activities for their own sakes, but they had their origin in his desire that his children should not come to want. Human nature, as distinct from animal nature, has been forged in the fires of human affliction. Out of 354 THE WAYS OF THE GODS his grief man has derived his sympathy, his morality, and his wisdom. Sorrow has not only been man's teacher, it has been his maker. Because of this, the old theologies are right in thinking of affliction as a visitation of God. They were wrong in thinking of such visitation as a visitation of wrath. Sympathy, righteousness, and wisdom are divine powers exercised by and through human nature. The love of God, the righteousness of God, and the wisdom of God are known to us only as we see them, as Human love, Human righteousness, Human wisdom; and because of this, God and Humanity are One. The salvation of the world lies in the recognition of this truth. The forces of man's redemption from cruelty, ini quity, and folly are to be found in the nature of man. Both the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil are within us; out of our hearts proceed the issues of life and death. Only human compassion can stay the course of human cruelty; only human righteousness can curb human ini- quity, only human wisdom can cure human folly. On the battle-fields of Europe we have all witnessed a gigantic struggle of natural cruelty, injustice, and folly against human sympathy, justice, and wisdom. Man is akin to the beast and the god. In Christendom the beast has broken loose and defied the god. Physical force, with its utter indifference to pain and loss, is under the control of highly developed intelligence fighting for the possession of the earth. It is as if the tigers of the jungle, equipped with the mind of man had broken loose to over-run the world. Such beasts have no comprehension of human values. The lives of children, the chastity of women, treas- ures of art, all are nothing to them but obstacles in the way of their conquest. They come upon a field of growing grain and leave it a trampled waste; they come upon a beautiful city and leave it a hopeless ruin; they come upon a virtuous woman, and leave her an involuntary harlot. When we look upon such widespread, wasteful cruelty THE WAYS OF THE GODS 355 we despair of our race which is ceasing to be human and is merging itself with the non-human elements of nature, cruel of necessity, and having no heart of compassion. But while we are thus despairing over unspeakable cruelties, we are beholding a manifestation of human sym- pathy that secures our faith in our humanity against all future doubt. Men and women far removed from the scenes of conflict, outside the sphere of its operations, are giving of their substance and their lives in the cause of their compassion; they are flocking by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands to rescue and nurse the wound- ed ; to feed the hungry and comfort the dying. The contri- bution of the American people to the relief of the sufferers in the European War is unparalleled in human compassion. Every one has made an offering great or small to aid these victims of man's cruelty. Our young men have gone as stretcher-bearers ; our young women as nurses, and these have been subject to all the perils of war. We of America have taken sides in this war, the side of compassion against cruelty, of life against death. And this is not the end. The war will be followed by a reaction against the horrors, the cruelties, the abomina- tions of war such as will make such a war impossible for generations, if not forever. Out of this great grief will come an increase of compassion. A like reaction against the horrible injustice of the War will go far to remove one of its efficient causes. All man- kind will learn, as from a fearful moving picture, that the safety of a people does not lie in the greatness of the State. The great States, those that are reckoned as first- class powers, are in this war the victims of their great- ness: Germany with its mighty army, England with its great navy, are in deadlock, and the youthful life of these militant and naval countries is being crushed out of exis- tence by their impact, while little Holland and Switzer- land, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are being saved from the greater calamities of these calamitous times. England is paying dear for her naval supremacy, Germany for her 356 THE WAYS OF THE GODS military might, and are verifying the saying of Jesus: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." The human sense of justice is in rebellion against the horrible injustice of a system that is the occasion of so great a catastrophe. It is impossible that the state sys- tem of Europe should survive the present war. It is shocking to the sense of justice in man that one who calls himself an emperor or a king should hold in the hollow of his hand the peace of the world and be able, by the signing of his name, to launch evils so fearful upon innocent people. Who and what is such a man who thus dares to disturb our peace and make of our world a shamble? He must be deprived of his power in the interest of all mankind. There can be no peace, there ought to be no peace, so long as such a man exists in the world. Mankind will be well repaid for all the horrors of this war if the end of the War sees the end of imperialism, so that from henceforth no imperial man and no imperial nation shall claim and exercise the right of rule in the earth. Nor will mankind in the future have aught to do with secret diplomacy. No body of men sitting behind closed doors shall decide the issues of war and peace. The people must be consulted in this, which is to them a matter of life and death. The people do the fighting and the paying, and as a matter of justice the decision rests with them. When we think of America, during this period of stress and storm, held steadily in its course by the will of a man who but a while ago was a private citizen, and who will soon be a private citizen again, we see the vast superiority of the American democratic system over the imperial and semi-imperial systems of Europe. And this is a presage of the future, when the people of the world will consciously rule the world and by their common sense and justice put an end to that injustice, political, industrial and social, which is the efficient cause of international, class, and social struggles that destroy the peace and happiness of mankind. It is only by human justice that injustice can be driven from the world. 1 1 This was written before the fiasco of the Conference at Paris. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 357 Not only does this war stand condemned as cruel and unjust, but it is also seen to be the acme of human folly. What we behold in Europe to-day is a sight worthy of Bedlam ; only in a madhouse might we expect such scenes of blind fury and irrational destruction. These warring nations, in a fit of passion, are making havoc of their own prosperity; the things which should have been for their health have become to them an occasion of falling; that vast power over the forces of nature which is the gift of science to mankind is being used by the political rulers of the nations for the destruction of mankind. Just when humanity, by means of applied science, might have escaped from under the burden of poverty the race is, by the stu- pendous folly of kings, emperors, and statesmen, placed under new burdens beyond all that they or their fathers were able to bear. The destruction of wealth surpasses the destruction of life, and the labor of mankind in the warring countries is mortgaged for generations to come. Surely, unless hu- man reason is to abdicate in favor of the folly of fools, some saner method than that of cruel warfare will be, indeed, must be, devised by the purposeful intelligence of man for the settlement of questions at issue between people and people. The outcome of the present war can be nothing else than the organization of the world for the maintenance of the peace of the world. Outraged compassion, justice, and wisdom will demand such organization as/a reparation for the past and a remedy for the future/The god in man must hold the beast in man in leash, and use the beast in the work and interest of the man. To accomplish this, each man and woman and child must recognize and assert the divinity that is within each. Too long has man sought for his god in the skies, and by prayer and supplication cried to him for help in time of need. As man could make nothing and do nothing with the forces of nature so long as he thought them in the 358 THE WAYS OF THE GODS keeping of the gods, so he can make nothing and do noth- ing with the forces of human nature so long as he thinks of them as divine only and not human, The saving forces of humanity are in and of humanity. Kindness, goodness, wisdom, are found nowhere, so far as our observation goes, except in human hearts. If they are the attributes of any god then that god has made the hu- man heart his dwelling-place. We have the highest au- thority for declaring tfiaTthV body of man is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and his soul the dwelling-place of the Most High. And this Divine Presence is not the prerog- ative of any priest or of any king; it is the birthright of the lowly of heart; it is as common and as useful as the grass of the field. Our quarrel with current theologies is not with their affirmations, but with their negations and limitations. When I am told that Jesus is the Son of God, I bow my head in reverent consent ; but when I am told that Jesus is the only Son of God, I lift my head in protest and protection of my own Divine sonship. I K too, am the son of God, not by legal adoption, but by spiritual generation. I do not, like Newman, look abroad in the world to see the face of God, nor do I look to see that face in the doctrines of any church. I My own heart is my mirror in which I see the face of God revealed in its kindness, its goodness, and its wisdom. My human nature is not merely a reflection of, it is the Divine nature. In the mirror of my heart I see my own face as the face of GodJjx'When a pope says to me: "I am the Vicar of God on me earth," I do not deny his claim, I only offset it with my own: "If the Pope, in his place, is the Vicar of Christ and God, so am I in mine." Whoever I be and wherever I am I am set to do God's thinking, With Him to work and plan; From toil nor sorrow shrinking, As we build a soul for man. THE WAYS OP THE GODS 359 Human nature has within itself the laws and forces of its own progress from lower to higher forms of life. By means of these forces, in obedience to these laws, it has through much tribulation emerged from the bestial savagery of the cave into the comparatively human condition of the present time; it has abolished cannibalism and chattel slavery and child exposure; it is abolishing industrial tyr- anny, the exploitation of labor, and the subjection of women. Humanity is not yet finished, it is still in the making, and its Maker is not any God sitting aloft, nor is it any emperor, king, or pope acting in the name and power of such God. It is Humanity that is making Humanity. CHAPTER LXIX The Service of God It is related of the Roman general Pompey that, on one of his military expeditions in the East, he occupied, tem- porarily, the City of Jerusalem. While there he visited the Temple, and in spite of the remonstrances of the priests, he pushed aside the veil and entered the Holy of Holies. The Roman was astonished beyond measure when he dis- covered that there was no statue nor image of any god in that sacred place ; and he inquired if the people of the Jews were a godless people ; he having always associated the existence of a god with the image of that god. If the Roman wished to pray to the god of war for victory, he sought out some temple of Mars, where the god sat in chiseled majesty to receive the adoration of his worshippers. This absence of a graven image in the Temple at Jerusa- lem was one of several reasons why the religion of the Jews was so great a scandal to the ancient world. There was a god in every temple except in the Temple at Jerus- 360 THE WAYS OF THE GODS alem, which was godless; and this charge of godlessness passed from the city and the Temple to the people; so it came to pass that the most intensely religious people in the world lay under the charge of irreligion. The primitive Christians were condemned as Atheists, because they would not sacrifice of their flocks and their herds in the temple of the gods. Animal sacrifice was the prevalent mode of worship. So when the Christians ab- stained from this practice they offended the religious sensi- bilities of their times; this offense being so serious that it brought down on them the wrath of the populace and the condemnation of the law. For four centuries the Chris- tians suffered persecution even unto death, because they would not worship in accordance with the custom of their day. Historic facts such as these are a warning to the thought- ful mind not to confound religious custom with religion itself. } As well might one confuse the clothing of a man with "me man himself. Man is, it is true, in the civilized world a clothed animal, and is never seen in public without his clothing; but strip a man of his garments, and he is none the less a man; nor does a man's body change its character with the changing fashion of his dress; whether he wear skirt or trousers, "A man's a man for a' that," What is true of a man is equally true of religion. Re- ligion as a principle of human nature survives all change of religious custom. Custom must change if religion is to grow with the growing life of man; the man cannot wear the jacket of a boy. To say of religion that it is un- changeable in its creeds and its customs is to pronounce it a religion of creeds and customs and not a religion of life. Creeds and customs appropriate to one stage of evolution are absurd and abhorrent to another. A modern man would not care to go to church with a cannibal and eat the flesh of a captive, whose heart was burning on a near-by altar as a tid-bit offered to the cannibal god. It would be shock- ing beyond measure to a religious woman of this age to attend divine worship in an ancient temple, the smell THE WAYS OF THE GODS 361 of the blood and the burning flesh would make her sick. Religion will change its mode of manifestation because it must; it drops its wornout clothing, that it may reclothe itself in garments in keeping with its present estate. Religion in our day is changing its mode of expression as radically as it did when Jewish law forbade the making a graven image and the Christians abandoned the custom of animal sacrifice. To many minds it is an alarming fact that the people are ceasing to go to church; the abandon- ment of church-going as a religious duty being ascribed to the growing indifference of the people to religion itself, as if in forsaking the churches they are forsaking their God. Every device is used to bring back the wandering flock to the fold, and still the people stay away. This absenteeism is peculiar to our times. In the primi- tive ages the people ran to the church before the morning light; they went to church in the gloom of cemeteries and catacombs; they risked their lives because of their church attendance. There was no question then as to how to get the people to go to church; they flocked to it as do beg- gars to a feast. In the medieval period the people went to church because there was nowhere else for them to go. The church was their life, it was their market-place, their theatre, their social center, their only place of amusement; the customs of the church were the customs of the times, the beliefs of the church were the beliefs of the times. But, unfortunately for the church, it is conservative while the spirit of the people is progressive ; therefore the reason why the people do not go to church is because the people have outgrown the churches. The creeds of the churches, Protestant and Catholic, have lost their hold on the intelligence of men and women. The words of the creeds of the Fourth Century have no meaning in the Twentieth Century; for they are not living words, they are but the dead symbols of a dead philosophy. No one to-day, outside of a theological school, concerns him- self with the problems of substance and person, which so agitated the minds of the generations of Arius and Athan- 362 THE WAYS OF THE GODS asius, of Cyril and Nestorius. These questions that were eagerly canvassed in the streets and market-places of Alexandria and Antioch, now engage the languid interest of the seminarian; but these Greek creeds are all Greek to the man in the street. The Protestant creeds of the Seventeenth Century are as far removed from the modern ways of thinking as are the Catholic creeds of the Fourth Century. These creeds are seldom mentioned even in Protestant churches. The long dogmatic sermon of our fathers, expounding the doc- trine of Grace, is never heard by their children; such ser- mons are not acceptable to modern hearers. A clergy- man once said to me : "I hardly mention theology in my sermons ; I do not think it good taste." The creeds are in evidence only at times of ordination, when candidates for the ministry must solemnly declare their implicit belief in doctrines, which from that day until the close of their ministry they are at liberty utterly to ignore, a liberty which the majority gladly take. A Pro- testant minister preaches of anythmg and everything ex- cepting the doctrines of his church. {Tt is quite evident that the creeds now survive only in the inherited prejudices of mankind; they are no longer reasoned beliefs; they are pre- served only by being hermetically sealed away from the influence of the intelligence. They disintegrate when they come in contact with historical research or are subjected to scientific analysis. } And unfortunately for ecclesiastical Christianity, its creeds are its life. When it cannot preach its creeds it has noth- ing to preach. Men can get astronomy, geology, biology, ethics, and sociology better outside the church than in it^ and they stay outside to get them. Real religion in the present age is based upon knowledge rather than upon belief. Knowledge is not, as in the theological system, the bond-slave of belief, but belief is the handmaiden of knowledge. The religious man of to- day does not say with the Latin Father: "I believe be- THE WAYS OF THE GODS 363 cause I cannot understand"; the modern does not, as did the ancient and medieval man, allow his beliefs to run rampant, he subjects them to constant verification and re- argument; he is always seeking to transmute belief into knowledge, and if a belief is incapable of such transmuta- tion, the modern man lays it aside as being useless for the purposes of human life. The modern world differs from the ancient and medieval in holding belief thus in the service of knowledge. The ancient and medieval man was credulous in believing; the modern man is careful. It is this attitude of the modern mind that will make forever impossible any return to the creedal churches, either Catholic or Protestant. The stream of life and thought is not into but away from these venerable organizations ; there will doubtless be backward eddies into the ancient pools of belief, but the river flows down to the sea of modern thought. The modern spiritual architecture is classic not Gothic. As the Greek of old, the modern man knows his limitations. He does not aspire, but is lowly in his own mind, and builds his spiritual temple out of the thoughts he can fathom and out of the experiences of his every-day life. He never dreams that his temple includes God; he is content if it does not exclude him. And like the Greek temple, his re- ligious system, based as it is in the solid earth of human experience and built out of the hewn stone of human knowl- edge, will stand as long as human experience and human knowledge shall endure. Every addition to human knowl- edge is an addition to this spiritual temple that man is building ; "only a religion based upon knowledge can be per- manent and catholic, for knowledge, which is acquired truth, is the same everywhere and always. Creeds, on the other hand, are opinions, and opinions change; creeds are opin- ions and opinions differ; therefore a creedal religion can be but temporary and local. In our day creedal religion is being displaced by the religion of knowledge. This change of base from belief to knowledge has made what is called the public worship of the church repugnant 364 THE WAYS OP THE GODS to the modern man. The prayers and praises of the church make no appeal to a soul that lives in the modern thought world. To such a soul the prayers of the church seem fu- tile, the praises of the church fatuous. Prayer is based upon the ancient belief that the mind of God is a different thing from the mind of nature, and that by persuasion the mind of God can be moved to interfere with and change the mind of nature. All prayer for outward blessing is vain; no one to-day prays seriously for rain or fair weather; no one in time of pestilence calls on the bishops and the priests to ask their God to stay the plague. The modern religious man takes his weather as it comes, shielding himself against its inclemencies by his own devices, and looks for the cause of his sickness, not in the wrath of some god, but in the presence of some microbe, which he fights not with prayer but with toxin. It has been suggested that the Catholic Church may sur- vive into the future by shedding its doctrine and its disci- pline and becoming nothing else but the vehicle of man's worship of the mystery of life. But without its doctrine and its discipline, the Catholic Church would not be the Catholic Church. Its life is bound up with the papal claims, and these claims have been rejected by the modern world. The English Church has greater possibilities of survival than the Church of Rome, for the reason that, by the prin- ciple of interpretation, it adapts its creeds to the changing thought of the world, while its clergy are men of the people and not rulers but leaders of the congregations. Priestly authority is asserted by High Churchmen, but it is a mere assertion, having no validity. The English Church has not only the advantage of intellectual liberty and free- dom from priestly dominion, it has the further advantage of using a living language in its public worship. The English Bible and Prayer Book have been invaluable aids in preserving the beauty and the purity of English speech against vulgar defilement. THE WAYS OP THE GODS 365 But neither the Catholic nor the Anglican liturgies can, in their present form, express the thought and the feeling of the present age and the age to come. Both liturgies are too pessimistic, too servile: they represent humanity as depraved and helpless. The worship of the future will have in it the spirit of Goethe and Wordsworth, of Whit- man and Emerson, rather than the moods of the Psalms of the temple and the hymns of the church. The worship of the future will have a sober joyousness and unquench- able hopefulness, inspired by an enthusiasm for that Hu- manity which, no matter how often it has fallen by the way, has lifted itself up by its own inherent strength and pressed onward and upward into higher, nobler life. The worship of the churches must be purged of all flatteries and obsequiousness ; from this time forth man will respect his God by respecting himself; he will ac- knowledge that he is a worm, but he will also assert that he is a man, and as a man he will stand upright in the presence of his God. Man is God's workman, and he has risen to equality with his employer. If man needs God, no less does God need man; and so man sings his hymn of willing service: Is there a God out yonder Sore troubled and beset; Doth he in waters flounder, Is he faint, cold, and wet? Doth he call to me for aid Across the seas of doubt; Must I death's deep waters wade That I may help him out? la there a God that needs me? Then let him tell me so When death from this flesh frees me, I'm his for weal or woe. 366 THE WAYS OF THE GODS The attitude of modern religion toward the universe is one of intelligent appreciation, patient adaptation, and a willing subjection to its service. The present world is not so good to any man that he does not wish to make it better; he finds the world, as the gods have made it, not quite to his liking and he seeks its constant improvement. / The revolution in thought and feeling, which is now changing radically the modes of religious expression, is ac- complishing its end by removing the activities of religion from the unknown to the known, from the future to the present. It does not pray to an absentee God; it works with a present God. In the old religions man had to be transformed into the nature of God; in the modern re- ligion God has to be transformed into the nature of man. He has not only to be in man, He has to become man; and it is only as He lives in Humanity that Humanity can live in Him. We say not: "Lo here! lo there!" for the Pres- ence of God is within us. Our Humanity is the only power that can save Humanity. Our quarrel with the creedal and priestly churches is that they do not help, they hinder the growth of human sym- pathy, which is the saving power of the world. The pres- ent frightful condition of Europe is owing, in a measure, to the hatreds engendered by hostile religious creeds. For centuries Catholics have preached hatred of Protestants and Protestants hatred of Catholics, making hatred not love the cohesive force of religion ; and as they are thus practiced in hatred, they have made themselves the easy tools of the animosities of nations and the antagonism of classes. Christianity, which in the mind of Jesus was the re- ligion of sympathy, unlimited by race, or creed, or coun- try, has become the established religion of racial, creedal, and national hatreds. Fear and hatred have become the very warp and woof of Christendom, which is burning up in the fires of a hatred that religion kindled centuries ago and is now powerless to extinguish. Christendom cannot survive the present calamity, which its lack of humanity has brought upon it; indeed, there is now no Christendom, THE WAYS OF THE GODS 367 only a struggling, fighting mass of races, creeds, nation- alities, and classes, which have lost all love of their com- mon humanity in their religious, class, and race hatreds. The only hope for Europe and the world is that this vast social upheaval shall bring men face to face with their com- mon humanity, as the only source of their common safety. The intelligence of man has outgrown the old limita- tions. By the invention of the means of rapid transit and inter-communication, the world of man is now one world. The world has attained to world consciousness; a world brain and nervous system has been evolved, which compels every one in the world to suffer the pain of the world. Human intelligence has extended the area of hu- man sympathy; and human sympathy will, in due time, abolish the horrors of war as it has abolished the burning of witches. This religion of Humanity is not coming; it has come. Already it has released the human mind from bondage to external authority; it has unified the world in a common knowledge; it is employing the religious energies of the soul in improving social conditions ; it is escaping the churches, to find its home in the streets of the city and the byways of the country; it is seeking to know the will of life, that it may do it. /Christianity is a failure, because it abandoned the teachings of Jesus for the creeds and rule of the churches^ Claiming Jesus as its Founder, it has come to hate what Jesus loved and to love what Jesus hated. Because of this, the spirit of Jesus has forsaken the churches and has made its home in the outside world. We are at the beginning of a new age born of a great sorrow. Institutionalism is giving place of Humanism. It is man as man who is to merge all races, religions, na- tions, and classes into one common humanity. Humanity is the whole of which these are the parts; and the whole is always greater than any of the parts. World Opinion is the pope of the coming age, having in its keeping the faith and the morals of mankind. The 368 THE WAYS OF THE GODS common intelligence, the common righteousness, the com- mon sympathy will overrule all lesser intelligence, all minor morality, all narrower sympathy. The ministers of this religion are already in its active service. These ministers are physicians whose knowledge admits of no racial, national, or creedal limitations; they are the students of nature, whose discoveries are necessarily the common property of the human mind; they are inven- tors who, by their genius, make every man neighbor to every man and so make the law "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" of universal application; they are that vast company of men and women who, without regard to racial, creedal, or national considerations, in prisons, in hospitals, in city slums, and lonely mountain regions, are doing what they can to make this poor world of ours a better world for man to live in. These all spend their lives directly in the service of man, and make no distinction in thought or action between the service of Man and the service of God, because to them the service of Man is the service of God, and the service of God is the service of Man. CHAPTER LXX The Day of Judgment It came to pass on the Sunday after the Feast of the Ascension, in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen, that I was present at the high celebration of the Holy Euch- arist in the Cathedral of All Saints in the City of Albany, New York. This Cathedral, the creation of that princely prelate, William Crosswell Doane, of blessed memory, is one of the few Gothic churches worthy of the name that have been built in modern times. THE WAYS OP THE GODS 369 This Church is set upon a hill; its pinnacle command- ing a view of the city and of the country for miles about. Within, its choir will seat some two hundred persons, and its nave and aisles two thousand more. Its columns of hewn stone, extending from the western doorway to the choir steps, give to this interior a sublimity worthy of the house of God; its high altar of purest marble is a fitting table upon which to offer the divine sacrifice of the Body and Blood. When I entered the church the choir of some fifty voices was already in its place ; the celebrant, vested in alb and em- broidered chasuble, with four attendant priests, was within the sanctuary; the great function of the day was in course of celebration. But what impressed me as I stood in that church, on this lovely Sunday morning, was not the sensuous beauty of this act of worship but the absence of worshippers. I looked over the wide spaces of the building and I estimated that there were present about fifty men and one hundred and twenty women and children ; and even these few seemed to have little interest in what they were doing. I watched their faces and I did not see a gleam of glory there ; there was no divine light in their eyes; their listless attitude, the dullness of their expression made one wonder why they were there at all; one felt that this dull folk could not hold their God in high esteem ; they were so apathetic in his presence. At the proper place in the program the preacher went up into the pulpit to preach. He was a man in middle life, of medium height, clean shaven, full breasted, a pleasant man to look upon. He evidently took himself seriously- His entrance into his pulpit was a matter of a great formality; a verger in black gown with mace in hand preceded him to the steps of the pulpit and made obeisance to him as he ascended to the high place from whence he was to speak to the people the Word of God. Before he addressed his congregation he turned and bowed to the altar and called upon the Holy Spirit of God to inspire his words with wisdom from on high. As this Sunday was in the octave of the Ascension, that event was naturally the theme of the preacher's sermon. He proceeded, in all seriousness, to tell us, his hearers, that the 370 THE WAYS OF THE GODS Ascension of Jesus into the heavens was an outward event in the history of mankind. He said that on a certain day and at a certain place, a man called Jesus, who had been dead and was buried, but who had arisen from the dead and had come out of his grave, before the eyes of many witnesses, his human body intact; compact of flesh and blood and bones, did, of his own volition, rise slowly from the earth into the sky, and, while the gazers watched, this body passed from their sight into a region that they called heaven- This story as the preacher told it interested neither him nor his hearers ; the marvel of it did not give convincing power to his voice, nor did it stir the hearts of the congregation to astonishment and admiration. While he preached the people, as before, sat inattentive, not listening to the sermon but waiting for it to be done with ; and when it did come to an end there was a stir of relief in the little gathering. Then the preacher turned again to the altar and bowed, ascribed to God the wis- dom and the glory of his utterance, went down out of the pulpit, and was conducted by the verger to his place in the choir. In that moment of silence the drone of an aeroplane was heard in the air, and all the people sat up and listened, their faces alive with interest in a living event. As I came out of the Church into the open and saw three aeroplanes going up and up into the sky until they were lost to sight behind the clouds in the upper cirrus, and as I saw all the streets full of people, standing at gaze, I said to myself: "Alas ! poor preacher, the miracles of your Church are out- classed by the miracles of science. What you said could happen only once, and that to your God, now happens every day, and that to common men-" There is nothing in all the history of religion that is more conclusive of the thesis that religious beliefs are the product of economic conditions than this story of the Ascension of Jesus with its consequent doctrine of his second coming. It has been said, and truly, that without a belief in the resur- rection of Jesus there would have been no Christianity. The THE WAYS OF THE GODS 371 resurrection of itself, however, would have been without re- sult; it was the belief in the resurrection, the ascension, and the return of Jesus that became the creative cause of Christen- dom. And of these three beliefs the last was by far the most important factor in bringing Christendom into existence and in making the history of the Western world. The preaching of Jesus when he was yet alive was revolu- tionary. It raised in the hearts of the mass of the people who heard him a hope for better things- His words promised bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, shelter to the homeless, health to the sick, and free- dom to the slave and the prisoner. It was an economic change that Jesus preached. He came to restore the Kingdom to Israel ; to do over again the work of Joshua, whose name he bore ; to drive out the oppressor ; to redistribute the land ; to cancel all debts ; to bring in that condition of economic equal- ity which had been written in the constitution of his people in the name of their great law-giver Moses. The death of Jesus would naturally have put an end to this hope of his disciples, had he not risen up in the heart of Peter and inspired this great follower with the conviction that the Master had come again from the dead, and that the revolution which he preached was not abandoned, only post- poned; that he who had gone away into heaven would come again with glory to judge the world in righteousness, to put down the mighty from their seat and to exalt the humble and meek, to fill the hungry with good things and to send the rich empty away. Peter called together the scattered fol- lowers of the crucified Jesus, inspired them with this new hope, and so inaugurated the greatest religious movement in the history of mankind. The Christian Church crystallized around this belief in the Second Coming of Jesus, with all the economic and political changes which that coming prom- ised. The condition of the Roman world gave a ready welcome to this doctrine. That vast, seething mass of hopeless pov- erty which, as a quagmire, was engulfing that ancient civiliza- 372 THE WAYS OF THE GODS tion was given pause by the energy of this new force. The Christian Church gave practical expression to the doctrine that it preached. Within the Church the slave was the equal of his master and the poor sat at the table of the rich. We cannot penetrate at all into the secret of the success of early Christianity unless we understand the doctrine of the Communion of Saints- The primitive church was a com- munity, the basis of which was economic equality; its prin- ciple was from every man according to his ability, to every man according to his need. The belief in the speedy second coming of Jesus, bringing to an end as it would this present world, deprived all worldly possessions of essential value, so that men who had houses and lands sold them and laid the price at the apostles' feet. And that which was first an en- thusiasm became a habit and unworldliness was the badge of the Christian; the ambition for place and power and earthly wealth, which was the passion of the men of this world, was abomination to the Christian. Private wealth in its most virulent form, consisting as it did of private ownership, by enslavement of the working class, carried on implacable warfare against this common- wealth. But in spite of persecutions the Christian community increased in numbers, in wealth, in moral and spiritual power, until private wealth was compelled to compromise with it and give to the religion of Christ first a place, then the chief place, and finally the exclusive place in the religious life of the Roman Empire. The result of this triumph of Christianity was the loss of } ' its distinctive institution- The world became Christian only on condition that the church should become worldly. The little self-governing communities of Christian folk" were merged into the vast imperial church ; the bishops became prelates and popes, and sat beside the princes and the emperors. The distinction between the Church and the world was obliterated, and these two were of one mind as to the desirability of earthly pomp, power, and riches. This state of affairs caused the more ardent Christians, those who still held to the teachings of Jesus, to abandon both the world THE WAYS OF THE GODS 373 and the secular Church; and fleeing to the desert and the wilderness, they hid themselves in caves, they embraced pov- erty as a bride, and would none other. The outcome of this movement was the monastic system. These anchorites formed little communities, in which there was absolute economic equality- Organized by Saint Benedict of Nursia, the monastic system spread all over Europe, and was the salvation of the Western world. In the midst of the wars that never ceased, the monastery was unprotected and at peace; its gate was open; it knew no foes; it succored, with equal charity, the Swabian and the Frank: the monk could among armed men walk freely, protected by his sanctity, . poverty and his charity. As a consequence, out of these co- operative communities came the rulers of the world. The monastery gave its bishops and popes to the Church and its teachers and statesmen to the nations. But the government of the world was a side issue with these holy men: their real business was to watch and wait and pray for the Coming of the Lord. The belief in the Second Coming of Jesus reached its high- est pitch of intensity, after the first enthusiasm had passed away, in the year one thousand. Man has always been under the spell of numbers, and this year one thousand aroused feelings of awe and expectation. The state of Europe was one of poverty and ignorance that made the pre- sent a horror and the future a fear. Thoughtful men natur- ally despaired of this world: its ending seemed the only way out of its misery; and as the year nine hundred and ninety nine passed away hysteria took possession of all Europe, and the dawn of the new Century saw multitudes of men and women forsaking wife and husband, children and friends, lands and houses, and fleeing to the monasteries to prepare for the Coming of the Lord. The year one thousand came and went, and the Lord did not come. But what did come was a new world. The belief that the Coming of Jesus was the safety of the world inspired men with a desire to make the world a decent place for Jesus to 374 THE WAYS OF THE GODS come to. l^The monastery, absorbing as it did the best men and women of the race, became the source of order and culture to the world.j The next two centuries were the golden centuries of Western Christendom. The belief in the Second Coming of Jesus inspired men to build in his name, and in the name of his Virgin mother, shrines of impressive beauty and sublim- ity, and to create the greatest order of architecture, save one, that man has ever used in building the houses of his gods. This enthusiasm inspired an hymnody unsurpassed in sacred song. The "Dies Irae" and "Jerusalem the Golden" were sung by pilgrims as they went from saintly shrine to saintly shrine, seeking the intercession of the saint to save them from the wrath of God on the day of his coming. The outcome of this concentration of human energy in the monastery was the acquisition by the monastery of political power and material riches. At the end of the Thirteenth Century the monks not only ruled Europe, they owned it. One-third of the land of Europe was in their possession and one-third of the labor. ^ Riches and power corrupted the monastery as they had corrupted the Primitive Church, and in the first three years of the Fifteenth Century the monastic system went down with a crash."\ The modern era may be roughly dated from the year 1403, when Boniface VIII excommunicated Philip IV of France, and Philip defied the Pope. In this quarrel the Papacy was routed and the age of pietism came to an end- The monasteries were given over to the spoliations of the young- er sons of the nobility The more intelligent of the clergy threw their missals into the discard, abandoned the reading of St Thomas, and gave themselves to the watching of the heavens, not for the Second Coming of Jesus, but to note the movements of the heavenly bodies which were there and always had been there. The priests, the popes, and the princes, leaving the nuns and the rustics to watch for the coming of Jesus, took vengeance on their past austerities by plunging into every excess of sensual indulgence; they sought the woods not to shun but to embrace the satyrs. This THE WAYS OF THE GODS 375 present world laughed and jeered and danced the heavenly world out of existence. Man's life lay not in the denial but in the enjoyment of his desires, to eat and drink and love and fight was the highest aspiration of that age. The revival of religion consequent upon the Protestant Reformation brought back a belief in the Second Coming of Jesus- But the purpose of that coming was not, as in prim- itive and medieval theology, to restore the Kingdom to the spiritual Israel. It had nothing to do with the social order; Jesus came not to inaugurate a revolution but to hold a court. He was to sit in the seat of judgment, and all the living were to stand before him and all the dead of all the ages were to come from their graves naked and shivering, like felons from their cells, to hear their doom. One by one, as their names were called, they were to stand at the bar and receive their sentence. " According to the Calvinistic theory, their fate had been determined long before they appeared in this open court God himself in his absolute sovereignty had pre- determined the destiny of each individual soul, electing some to salvation and some to damnation, and that his judgment might be justified, he caused the sinner to sin, and gave his righteousness to the righteous. ^ This grotesque belief in the Day of Judgment that pre- vailed in the Seventeenth Century was dissolved by the ra- tionalism of the Eighteenth Century and was finally made forever impossible by the conception of the universe that mastered the minds of thinking men and women in the Nineteenth Century. With spasmodic revivals, the belief in the Second Coming of Jesus has ceased to be an active belief in the churches, it now serves as the distinctive doctrine of an obscure sect called the Adventists, the great body of Christian people holding it simply as a survival. The preacher in All Saints Cathedral did not believe it ; his hearers did not believe it. In fact, a devout person shrinks with a sort of horror from the thought of the coming of Jesus at the present time after the conception of the primitive and medieval church. Think of jthe headlines in the morning newspapers announcing his de- 376 THE WAYS OF THE GODS scent upon the Mount of Olives, of the interviews to which he would be subjected by the modern reporter, of his dese- cration to the base uses of the moving picture, and be thank- ful that he must still abide in his secret place! And why should he come? Has he not suffered enough? Must he be dragged forth to look upon the failure of his mis- sion and the ruin of Christendom i| On that day in 1914 when ) the nations of Christendom rose up in fratricidal strife, and called in the heathen from Asia and Africa to aid them in their mutual slaughter, the Christian era came to its end, and Christendom ceased to exist. A new era dates from that day ; a new world is emerging from that conflict. Christendom was the product of economic, social, political, and emotional forces working in the Mediterranean Basin V from the Tenth Century B. C. to the Fifteenth Century A. D. During that period the shores of the Middle Sea were the seat of Western civilization. In the earlier period of this era, Tyre, at the extreme East, was the center of commercial ex- changes; at a later period this center moved west to Carthage; in the Roman period, to Alexandria; in the medieval period Venice was the center of commercial exchanges and the Lombards the bankers of Europe. Christianity is the religion which was the final outcome of the creative forces of that world. It derives its religious element from Judea, its theology from Greece, and its political organization from Rome. This religion has as its characteristics the exclusive- ness of Judaism, the intellectual subtlety of Greece, and the political tyranny of Rome. \-~After the downfall of the Roman empire Europe was uni- fied by this religion. The barbarian from the North fell under the spell of the people whom he conquered. This union of the energetic mind of the Teuton with the subtle intel- ligence of the Latin gave being to modern civilization; the expanding forces of that civilization are Teutonic ; the molding forces are Latin. During the early formative period of this era the Latin element cast the Germanic mind in its religious mold. This religion took over from Judaism its exclusiveness. The Christian God was the only God ; the THE WAYS OF THE GODS 377 Christian religion the only religion. All outside the pale of Christianity were infidels, and by that circumstance subject to the wrath of God- When a Christian met a heathen he either converted him or told him to go to hell. The conse- quence was a Christendom separated from the rest of man- kind not so much by social and political as by religious barriers. The thought of Christendom was unified by a system of dogma that was the product of the Greek mind. The Geek mind was short on observation and long on definition- The Greek evolved a beautiful language, and then fell in love with his words. Always on the verge of great discoveries, he lost himself in the maze of his definitions. /The religion of Jesus was a way of life to Jesus ; under the influence of the Greek mind it became a mode of thought, the energy of the church for four centuries being expended in an effort not to serve God but to define him. \ The religious exclusiveness of the Hebrew and the in- tellectual definition of the Greek were organized into a political system by the Roman lawyers for the government of the Western world- This completed the unification of Christendom. There was one God, one Creed, one Church, and this was the God, the Creed, and the Church of the Medi- terranean Basin. Rome was its political and religious capital, Florence its intellectual center, and Venice the center of its commercial exchanges. This unity received its first vicious blow not, as one might expect, from the fulminations of an heretic, but from the for- tuitous voyage of a sailor. Christopher Columbus, a devout Catholic, sailed westward and discovered a new continent. One of the consequences of that discovery was the loss of Christian unity. Vasco Da Gama, inspired by the voyage of Columbus, circumnavigated the Continent of Africa, and op- ened a water way to Bombay, the immediate effect of which was to transfer the center of commercial exchanges from Venice to Lisbon. This center passed on from Lisbon to Amsterdam and from Amsterdam to London- The Mediter- ranean Basin was no longer the highway of commerce. This 378 THE WAYS OF THE GODS change of the center of exchanges was followed by political and religious upheavals. The north of Europe renounced its dependence on the South. The so-called Protestant Re- formation was the chief consequence of this revolution. Christendom was divided into two hostile sections, Catholic and Protestant and the Protestant section into a dozen war- ring sects. Each of these divisions and sects carried over from the parent body its whole equipment of Judaic exclusive- ness, Greek subtlety, and Roman tyranny; and each section set about the colossal task not only of converting all the heathen but of converting as well the members of all other churches and sects- In neither enterprise has any of these churches or sects been eminently successful. This division of Christendom was exceedingly favorable to freedom of thought in Europe, and the scientific movement gained a headway that enabled it to free itself from ecclesi- astical control. In this universe of science there is no place for any throne of God, no seat for his government. What- ever God there be is everywhere or nowhere. It is the thought of science that has made unbelievable the creed of the Church- It was because the preacher and the people in All Saints Cathedral were subconsciously possessed by the scientific mind that they were not interested in the story of Jesus' Ascen- sion and gave to his second coming no second thought. The human mind no longer occupies itself with Church dogma ; it is eagerly engaged in the pursuit of scientific truth. Withdrawing itself from the ecclesiastical control, it has gone on from acquisition to acquisition, until it has come to have a well-rounded conception of the universe in which it finds itself. This conception is based not on any divine revelation but upon human investigation and reasoning. During the scientific era knowledge has been secularized. Christian dogma is the exclusive possession of the Christian Church ; scientific knowledge is the common property of all mankind. It depends for its validity not upon the decree of any pope or council, but upon the affirmation of the human intelligence. Nothing is true for the mind of man which the mind of man THE WAYS OF THE GODS 379 may not verify. It were absurd to call this system of know- ledge "Christian." Science has destroyed the foundations of Christian dogma, and so far as knowledge is concerned Christendom has ceased to exist. J With the secularization of knowledge has gone the secular- ization of art and recreation. Christian art occupied as it was with the Christian mythos, has passed away with that mythos. Architects to-day are not engaged in the building of Cathedrals, nor are the artists painting the pictures of Virgin and Saints. The architect is busy with the problem of the office, the warehouse, the factory, the theater, and the public hall- The artist finds his inspiration not in the dreams of the Church but in the direct vision of nature. He pictures the dawn and the setting sun as his eye sees them ; the models he uses are neither the anchorites of the cell nor the nun of the cloister but the peasant in the field, the woman in the home, and children playing in the streets. Modern art is in no sense Christian: it is natural, unsectarian, and interna- tional. The bold execution of the West wins the admiration of the East and the delicate handling of the East charms the imagination of the West Christian art has had its day. We preserve its treasures, but its divinities no longer inspire the artist. The only God whom the artist worships is the God of Beauty whose presence is seen in every land and on every sea. During the primitive and medieval periods Christian peo- ple found their recreation in the Christian Church. In the earlier period the slave escaped from the dreariness of his drudgery to recreate his soul in the vital air of the Christian community ; his soul was stirred from its sluggishness by the eloquence of the preacher and was swept along on the song of the congregation. In medieval times the church was the place of common amusement. Not only were the pageants of the church the entertainment of the masses, but the clergy as actors gave theatrical performances to delight the people. The miracle plays of the Church are the source of modern drama. The Protestant Reformation put an end to all this, and in London and elsewhere the actors were driven from 380 THE WAYS OF THE GODS the precincts of the cathedrals to take refuge in such places as the Bankside, where harlots and thieves had their haunts, and in such rich soil was grown the greatest dramatic genius the world has ever known. Since the days of Shake- speare the theater has been of the world, worldly, and the Church has feared and hated it as its deadly enemy. As a consequence, all recreation has been secularized ; Gods and angels no longer occupy the stage: it is to study the passions of men and women that men and women resort to the theater. The Catholic Church stills holds the people by the splendor of its ceremonies and the charm of its music; but the appeal to the senses alone cannot mould the life. It is only when the intelligence justifies the senses that the soul can be stirred to fear or to admiration. The ceremonies of the Catholic Church have lost their power to hold the intelligence because they have lost their reality ; the world that they picture has passed away and they cannot compete to-day with the moving picture, with its crude representations of the crude realities of the world as it is. But the greatest disaster that has befallen Christendom is the secularization of the revolution. The primitive and monastic church preached, sang, and practiced the revolu- tion- Its gospel was good news to the poor. It lifted the beggar from the dunghill and sat him with the princes of the people; its aristocracy was an aristocracy of merit; it abol- ished the tyranny of property; it gave to the lowest of man- kind the priceless gift of personal dignity; it promised men redemption from poverty here and now, and what it promised, to the extent of its ability, it gave. In the primitive church and in the monastery no man was allowed to say that aught of the things that he possessed was his own but they had all things in common. But modern Christianity has no such doctrine. Since the Reformation the churches have been saying to the people : "If you will be good and order yourself lowly and rever- ently to all your betters; if you will consent to go hungry and thirsty, naked and houseless, languish in sickness and in prison in this life, then we promise you in abundance THE WAYS OF THE GODS 381 heavenly manna, the water of life, white robes, palms, and crowns, the company of God and angels, after you are dead." The economic equality which is denied men on earth is lavished upon them in heaven- In this way religious sanction has been given by priests and preachers of the Christian Church to the most iniquitous system of economic exploita- tion that has ever existed among men. Because of this, the preaching of the revolutionary gospel of Jesus has been taken from the Christian clergy and given to the outcast people themselves. Not the British clergy but the British Labor Party has formulated the program for the reconstruction of the world. That vast, involuntary, unnecessary poverty that the modern industrial system has produced, that modern Christian governments have legalized and modern Christian churches justified, has renounced Christianity ; it knows no creed ; it only knows its own misery ; it is rising everywhere to abolish its poverty or to wreck the world. It can wait no longer for the second coming of Jesus. For the revolution Christendom has no existence. Humanity is coming to the rescue of Humanity. With the passing of the belief in the Second Coming of Jesus, goes the whole structure of Christian theology, the paraphernalia of Christian worship, and the right of the Christian clergy to the teaching office. Out of this wreck- age there is only one salvage, and that is the Humanity of Jesus. And it is this Humanity of Jesus that has judged the Christian Church, the Christian nations, the Christian industrial methods, and condemned them- Jesus gave the of- fice of Judge on the Day of Judgment not to any God or to any Son of God but to the Son of Man. It is Humanity that is the final judge of all that relates to the life of Humanity. All institutions, religious, political, social, and industrial, are on trial in this Court of Humanity. Humanity creates such institutions; and so long as they serve the well-being of the race, Humanity permits them to stand. When they fail utterly to be useful, Humanity throws them aside and creates new machinery to carry on its work. All institutions are subject to the law of growth and decay : When they have 382 THE WAYS OF THE GODS grown old and useless they cumber the ground and then the axe is laid at the root of the tree, and the tree that beareth not good fruit is cut down and cast into the fire. The weakness of the Christian Church is largely the fault of its age. .The Roman Catholic Church is a survival in the modern world of the Roman Empire. It uses the Latin language ; its priests are dressed in the fashion of the Roman gentleman of the Third Century; it thinks as the Romans thought when they were still the imperial race. But all this has passed away never to return. The Latin language is dead and in process of burial; the fashions of the Third Century are passe, and imperialism is no longer in favor with the peo- ple. A great war has just been fought to put an end to it. The Protestant churches are not so old as the Latin Church, but they have less vitality. They are the representatives of European nationalisms and modern class distinctions. They are provincial, and can make no universal appeal to mankind- A divided, discordant Christendom cannot hope to convert the world. It must be clear to every man of vision that the mission of the Christian Church to the heathen world is a failure. The great masses of non-Christian people can never now be converted to Christianity ; nor can the Catholic Church be reconciled with Protestantism ; nor the various Protestant bodies be unified ; nor will the vast mass of unchurched people ever return to the Church. The Church is the product of spent forces. Humanity, which existed for ages before the Christian era and will continue to exist for ages to come, now that the Christian era has passed into history, is en- gaged in building for the future- The world is in revolution : institutions which had their origin in later barbarism and early ci\ilization are falling into ruin; the family, in which civiliza- tion had its origin, is in process of dissolution. The liberation and emancipation of woman has destroyed that dominance of the male which was the cornerstone of the ancient famil}'. Woman now does not belong to any man, not to her father, still less to her husband ; she owns herself, and is an integral element in the body politic. THE WAYS OF THE GODS 383 The rise of the working class from the condition of serv- itude, which has been its lot from the beginning of human industry to the present age, has changed the structure of society ; the relation of master and slave no longer exists ; the slaves have not only secured their own freedom, but are taking over the political control of the world. Europe has lost the political, intellectual, and religious leadership of mankind, and is now dependent on America and Asia. The center of exchanges is shifting from London to New York. Competition is giving place to cooperation. The great war just ended has shaken the old civilization from its foundations and made necessary the rebuilding of society. The Christian religion, with its Judaic exclusiveness, its Greek subtlety, and its Roman tyranny, is inadequate to the spiritual necessities of the present age and the age to come. "Creation !" is the watchword of the old time, "Evolution !" of the new. God is no longer on his Throne, he is in his workshop. He is incarnate not only in Jesus of Nazareth but in every creature that creeps and crawls and walks upon the earth. The universe is ruled not by power external to itself but by power within itself, the force that holds it together lies not in the mighty sun but in the minute atom. It is this sovereignty of the atom that is transforming the political, industrial, and the social world. It is the coming to con- sciousness of the human atoms that has caused the downfall of the ancient order and is to build up the new- The peace and prosperity of mankind is no longer in the power of gov- ernments; it has come into the control of the people. Certain elderly gentlemen of the old order, not aware of this change, have been busy in Paris trying to restore the Humpty-Dumpty of nationalism to its place on the wall. They have made a peace, which is no peace, and a League of Na- tions that leaves the nations as they are each with its naval and military establishment, to impoverish an already im- poverished people. The motive of this peace is Vae Victis. New wars lurk in it- Bleeding Europe may hardly staunch her wounds before she must bleed again. t ^^rx-vAxx? ^ \''^\ \ '-\ l ^ V-\ \ r --- ,~A-~.^ 384 THE WAYS OF THE GODS But the future is not within the keeping of these politic- ians; their treaties and their League of Nations are but the last gasps of the Old Order. A new era, which does not know these politicians, is at hand. Emerson speaking of civilization said: "We are not at its meridian but only at the cock-crowing and the morning star." A cosmic hour has passed since then, and our Eastern skies are reddening with the angry dawn of the new day. f It is not in the West that the sun rises but in the East. It behooves the watchman 1o fix his gaze not on Paris but on Pekin and Moscow.^ In this new day that is dawning there will be work for every man, woman and child. We must restore the waste places and build up the tabernacles of the gods that have broken down. We will have to recover our sense of the divine in nature. Cardinal Newman said that if we had faith we might see an angel of God in every flower; and that was the faith possessed by every pagan boy and girl; they were taught to see a divinity in every blooming bush, to feel it in every blowing wind, and to hear it in the music of running water. These Gods of old, compounded as they are of sun- light and the rain, have lost for us their divinity in their commonness- Because the sunlight falls with equal blessing upon the high and the lowly, the rich and the poor, the evil and the good, and because the rain is rainingr somewhere every day, these are but sunlight and rain to us and form the theme of our daily complaining. We say of the sunlight that it is hot and glaring, and of the rain that it is cold and wet; and we never worship these (as our pagan fathers did) as the embodiment of the Living Force which gives to us our life. And we must proceed from a recovered sense of the divin- ity of nature to restore our belief in the divinity of man. We have been taught to believe in the divinity of Christ; and was not Jesus, the son of Joseph, who was called Christ, a man; and if Jesus was divine, why not you or I? Too long have we suffered the Church to slander man, to call him fallen and depraved. Man has stumbled, but he has never fallen- In pain and sorrow he has made his way up the steep ascents THE WAYS OF THE GODS 385 of life from the amebse to the man. No God from without has helped him; it is the God within him that has won the victory. It has been my lot for more than seventy years to live very close to the heart of humanity ; and if any man says to me that that heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, I say such a man speaks evil of the good- It is not the wickedness but the essential goodness of the human heart that has been my wonder. That heart is often corrupted by riches and high place and power; it is often hurt by poverty and bad treatment, but that heart as a heart is sound to the core, and all the salvation that has ever come to man has come to him from the human heart. Because man is divine, his labor is sacred; his strength is as the strength of a God. It is this sacredness of human labor that condemns our present industrial system as sacrilege- Human labor is not something to buy and sell in the market, to put to base uses in making gauds for women and intox- icants for man. No human labor can be wasted ; every exer- tion of it is needed to furnish forth the necessities of life. Every man, woman, and child in the world is entitled to a sufficiency of good food and pure water, to beautiful clothing and dignified shelter. Until these are supplied to all, any expenditure of labor on useless things is a sin against the sacredness of labor; and when these essentials are supplied, labor should cease and every man enjoy his leisure- In the new day man must recover the freedom of his soul and his intelligence; the right to think and the right to the full expression of thought is not only essential to the well- being of the personal soul, it is a necessity of society ; without such freedom society stagnates and dies of its own impurities. Institutions are the foes of intellectual freedom, because free thought is the dissolvent of institutions. As Emerson has said : "When a thinker is born all things are at risk." It is the fatal error of the Church that it has tried to give per- manence and universality to creeds- But creeds j^are opinions, and opinions change; creeds are opinions, and opinions differ. Opinions are the clothing of the intelligence, and the man who 386 THE WAYS OF THE GODS does not change his opinions is all one with the man who does not change his shirt. Such intellectual uncleanliness breeds the foul diseases of spiritual pride, fanaticism, bigotry, and intolerance. As for me, it has long been my habit to give my intelligence a bath every morning and to send my opinions to the wash once a week. And what shall we say more? Shall we speak of Death in the New Era and what is to come after Death? Not now. Death is every man's private business, and he may think of it as he will. He cannot avoid it, and when it comes it will solve its own problems. x Let us discharge our minds of the thought that we cannot see whatever Gods there be until after we die. If we do not see these Divinities before that event, I trow we shall never see them at all. \A The Living Gods M THE LIVING GODS. en tell me that the Gods are dead, As leaves of yesteryear. From out their forms their souls are fled The skies weep o'er their bier. They tell me that Varuna's gone From out the midnight sky. His children stars all fruitless moan Within his arms to lie. They tell me that the Hours of Day No more can happy be. Since their God Chronos went away They are mere chronology. They tell me that the Steeds of Light, No more the darkness follow. No more they burst the bars of night Hard driven by Apollo. They even say at break of day Athena cannot come. Her mist like form, her breath of spray Is melted by the sun. They tell me Zeus no longer sits Enthroned among his fellows ; But round that throne the night wind flits And there the storm cloud bellows. They say Jehovah comes no more On social service bent, To sit cross-legged at the door Of good old Abram's tent. They say that Jesus Christ is dead, And buried long ago. The race of man he has not saved, Nor healed a single woe. They say that Mary's radiant star No longer lights the sea. The iron laws of nature bar Her true virginity. They tell me all the Gods are dead; Not one of them is left. The very race itself is sped. Of Gods the earth's bereft. But let men tell me what they will, I know it is not true I know the Gods are with us still To them our love is due. I know the stars all com'fy lie Wirhin Varuna's arms; He walks with them about the sky And still their wild alarms. I know the jocund Hours of Day Still dance from sheer delight, And turn their faces every way To keep their God in sight. I know Apollo's gallant steeds Still come at break of day. Upon the dark their swiftness feeds And eats the night away. I know that with the graying dawn Athena's cooling breath Brings healing to the fevered one And shuts the gates of death. I know that Zeus in heat of noon Seeks Leda's cloud cool bower And there dissolved in lover's swoon Pours down in golden shower. I know that when the skies are black With wraiths of monstrous form That fly before the wind wild wrack Jehovah rides the storm. I know that Jesus Christ is ris'n And is at Man's right hand, And there for every creature wiz'n As suppliant doth stand. I know that Mary's kindly light Still leads the sailor home. By nature 'tis the woman's right To rescue men that roam. Yes, yes, the Gods are all alive, Not one of them is dead. In faithful hearts they still do thrive In spite of all that's said. They are each the weaving of the ONE That knows nor wrong nor right, On whose eternal loom is run All Gods both dark and bright. 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London : Ellis & White, 1876. WARD, C. OSBORNE. The Ancient Lowly. Chicago: Purdy Publishing Co., 1890-1900. WELLHAUSEN, J. Sketch of the History of Israel and Judah. London : A. & C. Black, 1891. WHITE, ANDREW D. A History of the Warfare of Science ivith Theology in Christendom. New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1896. Seven Great Statesmen. New York : The Century Co-, 1910. WHITMAN, WALT. Leaves of Grass. Philadelphia: D. McKay, 1900. WORDSWORTH, WILLIAM. Sonnets. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1910. XENOPHON. Memorabilia. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1853. YOUNG, ARTHUR. Travels in France. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1900. YOUNG, EDWARD. Night Thoughts. New York: C. Scribner, 1851. INDEX Abiathar, 105 Abraham : 100. 101 ; Jehovah, the friend God of, 108 et seq.; character of, 109 et seq.; 113, .118, 135, 153, 161, 260 Absolute: identification of Jehovah with the, of Plato, 228, 229; coming of the, 230 et seq.; clash of Professor James and Professor Royce on the, 230- 236, passim; Christus, Son of the, 237, 248; 252, 266 Actium, 196 Adam, 19, 114, 153, 265, 330 Adrian of Utrecht, 292 /^schylus, 316 Agassiz, Louis, cited on the archi- typal plan of creation, 329 Agrippina, 162 Ahana, 53 Ahaz, 132 Alaric, 251, 252 Albany, 368 Albert of Brandenburg, Prince, 290 Alexander the Great, 42, 66, 105, 157, 277 Alexandria 142, 230 Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and Hell, 256 et seq. See also Elohim, Jehovah. Alpheus, 82 Al Medina, 274 Alva. Duke of, 300 Amelek, 102, 106 Amecica ; IQ ; in relation to land monopoly, 133; 143 Amsterdam, 377 Anabaptist movement, 309 Anastasius, 242, 243 Ancestry: origin of, worship, 13 et seq. Andrews, Bishop, quoted, 144 "Annals," Tacitus, quoted, 168, 169 Anne, Queen, 44, 52 Anthony, St., of Padua, 280 Antioch : 203 ; filthiness of civil- ized, 214; 230 Antwerp, 230 Anubis, 161 Aphrodite : goddess of desire, 59- 65; 67. See also Venus Apollo : the god of the explicit rea- son, 54 et seq.; 78, 80, 81, 92. See also Phoebus. Aquinas, St. Thomas: xvii, note; 154 Arbela, 66 Ares : 51, 62 ; the god of war, 65 et seq. See also Mars. Arethusa, 82 Aristotle, 160 Arius the Libyan, 241 Arnaud, 314 Arnold, Matthew : quoted, 176 : cited, 180 Artemis: virginity of, 52; 258 Aryans: xvii; 2; marital condi- tions of ancient, 5 et seq.; 25, 28, 30, 31-38, 41, 47, 77, 78, 81 et seq., 87 et seq., 133, 153 Asclepios, 55 Asia, 25 Askew, Anne, 261 Astruc, Jean : discoverer of the two Bible stories of the Crea- tion. i5i Athanasius, 241, 300 Athena : goddess of the implicit reason, 49-53 ; 62, 67. 68. ?T Athens: 43; story of foundation of, 49 et seq.; 82, 83, 98, 1^7. 172 Augsburg confession, 306 397 398 INDEX Augustine, St.: "De Civitate Dei," cited, 252; 253, 255, 256; atta- tude of, toward Hebrew Scriptures, 256 et seq.; 258; divine scheme of, 259; Christus and, 263 et seq.; 271 et seq.; 306 Augustus: Age of, 158 et seq.; 162, 297 Babylon; 108: and the Jewish cap- tivity, 139 et seq.; 240 Balzac. Honore de, cited on the Absolute, 236 Bargain God, The, 112-116 Bathsheba, 130 Beersheba, 114 Beethoven. 193 Bene-Israel : war God of. 104 et seq. See. also Hebrews, Is- raelites, Jews. Brnjamin, 131 Bernard, St., 81 Berthier. Marshal, 183 Betbanv. 178 Bethsaida. TOO Bible : myths of the, ro.s : auto- biographical character of, 108. TOO: quoted on God's contract with Jacob. 114 115: Solo- mon's contributions to. 130: study of. Hymn of Creation, i"o ft sea.: Protestant inter- pretation of, 308. 309. 325 Bombay. 377 Bonaparte. 199, See also Napo- leon. Boncompagni, Ugo (Gregory VIT1") 2Q3 Boniface VIII. 288, 374 Book. God of the. 139-144 Borgia, Rodrigo (Alexander VT\ 2Q2 Borodino, 67 Bourbon, Constable. 293 Bozrah, 148 British Museum. 283 "Brother Copas," A Quiller-Couch, quoted, 283 Brown. John, 106, 197 Bnmelleschi, xiii Bruno. Giordano, 29, 261 Brutus, 196 Buffalo, 332 Bull, Bishop, "Man Before the Fall," 331 Buddha, 21 Burke, Edmund; 14; cited, 150 Burns, De Lisle, 315 Burns, Robert, 349; quoted, 350 Byron, Lord; "The Giaour," quoted, 74 ; quoted, 75 Byzantium, 259. See also Con- stantinople. Caesar: 42, 51, 66, 67. 91, 92, 94, 105, 107, 112; absolutism of the, 158 et seq.; 168, 196, 238; the celestial. 251 et seq. See also Divus Caesar. Cassarea-Phillipi, 186 Caligula. 163 Callixtus. St., 219 Calvin. John : character study of, 306, 307: 308 et seq. Cambio. Arnolfo di, xiii Canaanites. 106, 129, 135 Canossa, 276 Capernaum 190 Capua. 218 Carlyle, Thomas, quoted. -?oo Carter. Professor. "The Religious Life of Ancient Rome," quoted. 88 Carthage. 253, 343 Cassius, Cains. 196. 258 Catacombs. 218 et seq. Catholics xiv, 7, 80 Catholicism, crystallization of. 311 et seq. Cavour, 271 Cephus, 182. Sec also Peter. Chaeronea, 157 Chalcedon, Council of. 243 Chaldees, in Charles I, 308 Charles Martel, 275 Charles V, 297. 298, 299 Chastity: early enforcement of marital, 6 et seq. Chavannes, Puvis de, 284 Children : early attitude toward, 2 ct seq. China, 19. 319 Chislere, Michele (Pius V). 293 Christ: 21, 149; opens war in the synagogue, 198, 199; 298. See INDEX 399 also Christus, God, Humanus, Jesus, Joshua ben Joseph. "Christian Antiquities," Cardinal Pelliccia, quoted, 295 Christians: 45, 153; Nero and the early, 167 et seq.; faith of, in resurrection, 172 et seq.; pri- mitiveness of early, 192 et seq.; distinction between early, and the Jews, 202 et seq.; 257, 258, 259; minor gods of the, 278 et seq.; 360 "Christianity," Henry Holt Mill- man, cited, 209 Christus : the God, 167 ct seq.; ob- scurity of origin of, 1693 youth of, 170; War God of spiritual Israel, 198 et seq.; tent God of spiritual Israel, 202 et seq.; son -of Jehovah the Righteous, 208 et seq.; re- volutionary spirit of, 210 et seq.; growth of power of, 227 et seq.; son of the Absolute, seq.; early worship of, 222 et seq.; growth of power of, 227 237-248; 263 et seq.; eclipse of, 271-277. See also Absolute, Christ, God, Humanus, Jesus, Joshua ben josepn. Chronos : god of time, 31-35, 36, 76, 81, 89 et seq. Chrysostom, St. John, 272 Church: organization of the early, 202 et seq.; cause of institu- tion of Christian, 213 et seq.; worship of Christus in the pri- mitive 218 et seq.; the, and the Sonship of Jesus discussed, 240 et seq. Cicero : 14, 92 ; quoted on Roman religion, 93 City : genesis of the. State, 12 et seq. Civil War, 196 Claudius, Emperor, 163 Clement XI, xvii, no f e Colonna, Cardinal (Martin V), 306 Columbus, Christopher, 297, 377 Constance, Council of, 305, 306 Constantine, Emperor. 259 Constantinople, 242, 243, 259. See also Byzantium. Copernicus, Nicholas: 320; astro- nomical system of, 321, 322, 326 Cos&a, Bartholomew (John XXIII)* 292 Creationism: evolution of, 1 12 et seq. Cromwell, Oliver, 283, 308 Cudworth, Ralph, quoted on the Absolute, 235 "Cults of the Greek States," L. R. Farnell, quoted, 46; cited, 53; quoted, 79 Cupid, 62 Cuvier, 329 Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage: 'De Catholicse .Ecolesia; Unitate," 253 et seq. Cyril of Alexandria, 242 D'Ailly, Peter, xvii, note Daniel, 262 Dante: "Inferno," cited, 77; 154 Darwin, Charles, 330 Darwin, Erasmus, 329 David: attitude of humanity to- ward, 105; 127; career of, 129, 130; the poet, 146; 148, 183, 237 "De Catholicae Ecclesiae Unitate," Cyprian, cited, 253, 254 "De Civitate Dei," St. Augustine ; cited, 258; on hell, 261; 271 et seq. Delos, 54 Decius, Emperor, 253 Delos, 54 Delphi, 83 Demeter, the mother of sorrows, 68-72 "Dies Ira?," 374 Divtis Caesar, 160 et seq.; 210, 221, 238. See also Caesar. Dionysius, 43 Dionysus, god of madness, 77-81 Doane, Bishop William Croswell, .168 Doeg, 105 Doellinger, 314 Domitian ; attitude of, toward Christians, 209 Dyaus, 36 et seq., 53 400 INDEX Eden, Garden of, 19, 20, 108 Edom, 148 Egmont, 299 Egypt: 55J 108; Jews in, 117-121; religion of, 118 et seq. Eleusis, 71 Elijah, 135, 170, 350 Elizabeth, Queen 52 Elohim : defined, 152 327. See also God Jehovah. Emerson, Ralph Waldo ; 197 ; quoted, 385 Emmaus, 178, 182 England: 15 22 112, 126: in re- lation to land monopoly, 133 Ephesus, Council of, 242 et seq. Ephraim, 125 Epictetus, 46 Esau, 114 Etruscans, 89 Euphrates, 132 Europa, 47 Europe, 19, 25, 67, 143 Family; evolution of institution of, 2 et seq.; early relation of, to land, 13 et seq.; relation of hearth to, 16 et seq. ; influences at war on integrity of, 21, 22 Farnell, L. R., "Cults of the Greek States," quoted, 46; cited on name of Athens, 53 ; quoted on cult of Dionysus, 79 Ferdinand and Isabella, 297 Fire: attitude of archaic man to- ward, 16 et seq. Fiske, John : cited on human pro- gress 352 Florence, xiii, xiv France: 38; during the Terror, 262, 300 Francis I, 297 Francis, St., 21, 81 Frazer, J. G., "The Golden Bough," quoted, 69 Franks, 271, 275 Frederick, Elector of Saxony, 296 Galilee, 170, 179, 183, 202 Galileo, 321, 326 Callus, Emperor, 253 Gama, Vasco da Gana, 377 Gaul, 67 Gea, 28 et seq., 35 Gengis, Khan, 67, 277 Genneraret, Lake, 179 Germans, 51, 271 Germany, 298 Gerson, Jehan, xvii, note Ghiberti, xiii "Giaour, The," Byron, quoted, 74 Gilboa, 190 Giotto, xiii Glasgow, 285 God : of the Trinity, xviii ; of the house, i et seq.; 19, 20; of time, 31-35; of explicit reason, 54' et seq.; of war, 65 et seq.; of madness, 77-81 ; friend, of Abraham, 108 et seq.; of the book, 139-144; the, Christus, 167 et seq.; Humanus, 349-359. See also Christ, Christus, Elo- him, Jehovah, Zeus. Goden, See Woden. "Golden Bough, The," J. G. Frazer, quoted 69 Goths, 251, 252 Government: essence of, 125, 126 Granada, 275 Grant, U. S., 183 Greece; 34, 65, 66, 112; literature of, 144, 145 Greek Dialectic : Gods of the, 227- 248 Greeks: xvii, 4, 14; gods of the, 26 et seq.; 36, 53, 54,; attitude of, toward intellectual clarity, 58, 67, 81, et seq., 104 157 et seq., 158; in relation to language, 234, 244 Gregory VII, 276, 312 Gregory XV, xvii, note Gustavus Adolphus, 209 Hades, 36, 69 et seq., 73-77 Hainault, 300 Hale, Chief Justice, quoted, 126 Hall, Father, quoted, 146, 147 Hamlet 106 Hannibal, 92 Haran, 114 INDEX Haroun al Raschid, 235 Hearn, Dr. William Edward, quoted 5 Hebrews : xvii ; character of the literature of the, 145 et seq.; . gods of the, 97-163. See also Bene-lsrael, Israelites, Jews. Heliogabalus, 208 Helios, 55 Hell: birth of the Christian, 258 et seq. Henry VIII. 261, 293, 297 Henry of Navarre, 300 Hephaiston, 63, 67 Hera, 36, 47, 54, 62 Herod, 171 Hezekiah; 132, 257, quoted, 258 Hindoos, 25 "History of the Aryan Household," Dr. William Edward Hearn, quoted, 5 "History of Germany," Menzel, quoted, 298, 299 Holland, 300 Homer : 42 ; quoted on Zenus, 45 ; 58, 144, 160, 316 Horeb, 135 Horn, 299 Horus, 118 House-Father, 5-10, n, 12, 13, 17, 22, 38, 43, 91 House-Mother, 7, 17 "Human Personality," Myers, cited on psychical projection, 194 Humanus: the God, 349-359 Hutton, 326 Hypatia, 242, 261 Hymn of Creation, Bible; study of the, 150 et seq. Incas, 297 India, 19, 53 Indus, 157 "Inferno," Dante, cited, 77 Innocent III, 312 Innocent VIII, xvii, note "Institutes of the Christian Reli- gion," Calvin, 307 "Intellectual System of the Uni- verse," Ralph Cudworth, quoted 235 Isaac, 101, 119 Isaiah, 131 et seq.; quoted, 134, 135, 141, 252, 265 Isis, 118 161, 208 Israelites, 100 et seq. See also Bene-lsrael, Hebrews, Jtws. Issus, 66 Italy xviii 34, 87, 252 Jvry, 300 Jacob: 100, 101, 103; the Bargain God of, 112 et seq.; business instinct of, 115, no, 120; 135, 161, 341 James, St., 175, 237 James, Professor William; brush of, with Josiah Royce over the Absolute, 230 et seq.; opin- ion of, on the Absolute, 247; 266 Jehovah: 45, 104; role of, in the religious drama, 106 et seq.; in relation to sex, 106 et seq.; the friend God of Abraham, jo8-ui; and creationism, 112 et seq.; God of the working class, 117-121; the tent God of Israel, 123-128; the Righteous, 128-134; the Holy, 134-138; God of the book, 139-144; god of inspiration, 144-149; Creator of Heaven and iiarth, 150-154; 160, 161, 162; Father of Christus, 198; and Zeus com- pared, 228; identification of, with the Absolute of Plato, 228, 229; 234, 237, 252, 260, 327, 341, 344 Jereboam, 131 Jeremiah, 146, 149 Jericho, 288 Jerusalem, 26, 130, 132, 134-136, passim; fall of, 139 et seq.; 146, 170, 177, 178, 182, 187, 247 "Jerusalem the Golden" 374 Jesuits: and the deification of the Virgin, 294; Molinos and the, 313 Jesus : xviii, note ; 104 ; attitude of humanity toward, 105; 128, 133 : and the Resurrection, 172 et seq.; Mary Magdalen and the resurrection of, 175 et seq.; 19, 219 et seq.; 237; deva- 402 INDEX tion ui, to divinity, 242 et seq., ijt. Augustine's conception 01, -a3 ei seq.; 207; genius ol, 277; tiie God ot uie Market, 339 et seq.; 344, 348 356: and Christianity, 366 et seq.; 371, 3i, 384. See also Christ, Christus, Joshua ben Joseph. Jethro: and Moses, 256 et seq. Jews: gods of the, 97-163; Disper- sion of the, 142 et seq.; sacred writings of the, 142, 143; Christ's mission to the, 187; difference between, and early Christians, 202 et seq.; warlike nature of the, 209; separation of Christ from identification with the, 228 et seq.; 256 et seq., 327, 359. See also Bene-lsrael, Hebrews, Israelites. Job, quoted, 349 John of Antioch, 243 John XXIII, 306 John, St.; the penman of God, 108; interpretation of Jesus by, 1.78; on the Resurrection, 179, 202, 237 John the Baptist, 138, 170 et seq., 172, 183, 184 Joseph: xiv et seq.; 170, 211, 237; comes to his own, 291 ; 295, 339, 348, 384 Joshua: 106: as a leader, 129; 211, 287 Joshua ben Joseph, 170, 276. See also Christ, Christus, Jesus. Jotham, 132 Judah, 130, 131 Judea, 170, 202 Jupiter, 39, 90, 251. See also Zeus Justin Martyr: cited on the wor- ship of Christus, 222 ; relation of, to the Christian 'religion, 229, 230 Juvenal : cited on moral depravity, 214 Kant, 32 Keepers of the Blood. See Manes. Keepers of the Fire and of the Store. See Penates. Keepers of the Gate. See Lares. Kempis, Thomas a, quoted on duty to bod, 247 Kepler, 321 Khadijali, 274 Knox, J ohn, 294 Kodesh, Jehovah, 134-138 Labor : early application of, i et seq.; ancient slave, 98: Moses, the first, leader, 119, 120; trouble with modern, move- ment, 121 Landholder : development of the, 3 et seq. Lares, xvii, 4, 10-16, 21, 22 Latins, 4, 25, 67, See also Romans. Lawrence St. 222 Lazarus, 243 League of Nations, 383, 384 Lebanon, 110 Leda, 47 Leo I, 310 Leo X, 44, 289 et seq., 292, 317 Leto, 54 "Lettres Provinciates," Pascal, 314 Levites, 125, 130, 131 Lincoln, 128, 196, 197 Linnaeus, 329 Lisbon, 377 Li via, 162 Lloyd George, David, 336, note Locke, John, 32 Loisy, Pere, 315 London, 343, 344, 377 Louis XIV, 42, 44, 60 Lucifer, 260 Luke, St. : quoted on the Athen- ians 82 ; on the Resurrection, 177, 178, 179 Luther, Martin; on indulgences, 291 ; opens conflict of freedom against authority, 296 et seq.; 305 Lyell, "Principles of Geology," quoted, 325 Macaulay, quoted, 90 Macedon, 157 Mahomet : career of, 273 et seq., 307 INDEX 403 Magdalene. Mary: the, tradition of the Resurrection, 175 et seq.; 193, 194, 195 McCabe, Joseph, 315 Maintenon, Madame de, 42 Mamre, no Man: marital virtue of, 6-10; su- premacy of archaic, 18 et seq.; relation of man toward lower animals, 25 et seq.; the god- needs of, 106-111; archaic thought on origin of, 112 et seq.; the making of, 326 et seq. Manasseh, 125 Manes, xvii, 4, 6 et seq.; 15, 21, 22 Marcus Aurelius: 97; attitude of, toward Christians, 209 Marduk, 240 Mark, St: 175; on the Resurrec- tion, 175, 176; 177, 179, 181 Marriage : evolution of, institu- tion, 2 et seq. Mars, 106. See also Ares. Mary, Virgin: 170, 175, 237, 238, 242. Goddess of consolation, 278-284 Massacre of St. Bartholomew, 300 Matthew, St. : on the Resurrection, 176 177; 179 Mayence, 290 Mayflower, 112, 308 "Measure for Measure," Shak- speare, quoted, 75 Mecca. 273, 274 Medici, Giovanni de (Leo X), 289 et seq., 292, 317 Medici, Lorenzo de. 42, 289 Medici, Gulio de (Clement VII), 293 Mediterranean: 87, 143, 158, 251 Menzel, "History of Germany," quoted, 298, 299 Mercury, 344 Mesopotamia, 100 Mexico : and land monopoly, 133 Micah : 141, 265, quoted, 267 Michaelangelo, xiii, 284 Milan : cathedral, 283 Mill, John Stuart, 336 Millman, Henry Hart, cited, 209 Miltiades, 66 Milton, John: "Paradise Lost," cited, 77; 154 Minerva. See Athena. Mithra, 161 Moah, 102, 106 Modernists, 315 Molinos, 313 Monks : Christianity and the, 272 et seq. Montezumas, 297 Moore, 297 Moscow, 384 Moses : attitude of humanity to- ward, 105; the penman of God. 108; in Egypt, II&-I22: activities of, in the Wilder- ness, 123 et seq.; estimate of, 129: the lawgiver, 371 Mount Ida, 36 Miiller, Max, cited, 53 Munich, 314 Murillo, 294 Music: interpretation of, 56. 57 "Mythology of Greece and Rome," Fairbanks, quoted, 58, 59 Myths : reliability of religious, 104 et seq. Naples, 344 Napoleon: 38, 42. 105; quoted, 149: cited, 169; 183; quoted, 199 Nazareth, 170, 202 Nebat, 131 Nebuazar-Adan. 139 Negroes: 12; slavery of, 205 Neptune. 324. See also Poseidon. Nero, Claudius, 162 Nero, 163, 167. 209 "New Basis of Civilization," Pro- fessor Simon Patton, 335 New York 332, 344 Nestorius, 242, 243 Netherlands, 208, 308 Newman, Cardinal. 154. 285 384 Newton, Sir Isaac, 322 Nicean theology, 243 et seq. Octavianus Caesar, 158. See also Augustus. Odoacer, 271 44 INDEX "Old Testament Theology," Her- mann Schultz, quoted on myths, loS Olympus: 29; gods of, 40 et seq.; 76 Ovid: cited on moral uncleanness, 214 Osiris, 118 Ouranos, 25 et seq. See also Uranus Pagans: defined, 258 Pantheon, 168 "Paradise Lost," Milton, cited, 77 Paris, 300, 384 Pascal, Blaise: "Lettres Provin- ciales," 314 Pater, Walter; quoted on Roman religion, 93 Patton, Professor Simon, "New Basis of Civilization," cited, 335 Paul, St. : quoted on marital chas- tity, 9; on intoxication, 80; 149; 154; and the Resurrection, 172 ft seq.; attitude of, to- ward the Resurrection, 181 182; psychological manifesta- tion of Jesus to, 193 ; influence of, upon spread of Christian religion, 228 et seq.: and the wrath of God, 265 et seq. Pekin, 384 Pelliccia, "Christian Antiquities," quoted on Protestants, 295 Penates, xvii, 4. 16-19, 21, 22 Peretti, Feleci (Sixtus V), 293 Pericles, 46 Persephone, 69 et seq., 76 Persia, 25. 27, 161 Persians, 67 Peter. St. : the Resurrection tradi- tion of, 181 et seq.: the char- acter of, 182 et seq.: relation of, to Jesus' Messiahship, 184 ft seq.: denial of Jesus by, 187 et sen.: flight of. after the Crucifixion, 189 et seq.; re- turn of, to Jerusalem, 191, 192; 194, 195, 202, 229, 237 255 Pharaoh : attitude of toward the Jews, 117; relations of Moses and, 118 et seq. Pharsalus, 92, 157, 196 Pheidias, 46 Philip II, 299, 300 Philip IV of France, 374 Philistines, 129 Phillipi, 196 Phoebus Apollo ; 64-59 Phanicians, 140 Pilgrim Fathers, 308 Pindar, 189 Pius IX, xvii, note; 294, 314 Piux X, 315 Plato: 43, 46, 58, 66, 83, 149. 228, 229, 230; the word-juggler, 234; 235, 236, 241, 246, 266 Playfair, 326 Pliny the Younger, cited on early Christians. 209 Pluto, 324. See also Hades. Politics: and the family, 21, 22 Pompey. 92 Pope: The: exaltation of 276 ft seq.; 208, 305, 311; power of, 312 Poseidon, 36. 49. 5o, 81 Port-Royalists. 314 Prometheus. 42 Propertv: religions origin of sa- credness of, TO et seq. Protestantism : Growth o>f. 206 ft sen. : disruption of, 305 et seq. Prussia. 208 Ptolemv. 160. 310. 320, 322 Punic Wars, or. 92 TMVioeroras. 58 Pvthon. ^4 Quiltpr-Coitch. A T.. "Rrother Conas," mioted, 282. 283 Quintilian, 160 Rameses, 238 Raphael. 345 Rawlins. General. 183 Red Sea. 120, 308 Reformation, xv, 296 et seq., 305 et seq.. 311. 312, 379. 380 Rehoboam, 131 "Religious Life of Ancient Rome," Carter, quoted, 88 Renaissance, xiii. 280, 200. 345 Renan Ernest, "Origins of Christ- ianity," quoted on the Resur- rection, 180 Resurrection : Jesus and the, 172 el seq., psychic phenomena of the, of the dead, 173-197 Rhea, 68 Richard Coeur de Lion, 275 Robespierre, 262 Romans ; xvii ; in war, 65, 66 ; the god of the, 87-94; 104; 157 et seq. Rome: 14, 39, 46, 65, 66, 90, 91, loo, 112, 142; supremacy of, 157 et seq.; the early Christ- ians in, 167 et seq.; ijl, 196; persecution of Christians in, 208 et seq.; depravity of ci- vilized, 214; 218 et seq.; 251; in days of St. Augustine, 259, 260, 268, 271 Royce, Josiah: brush of with Pro- fessor James, 230 et seq. Russia, 126, 275 Ruth, 149 Saint Roche; Paris, xv Saint Maur, 280 Saladin, 275 Salamis, 67 Salome, 175 Samaria, 171 Samuel, 127, 129 Samson, 109 Sancho, King of Aragon, 319 Santa Maria del Fiore, xiii Saracens, 275 Satan, 76, 77 Saturn, 251 Saul: 127; estimate of, 129 Saul of Tarsus, 228. See also Paul Savonarola, Fra Girolamo, xiv Saxons, 275 Schultz, Hermann, "Old Testament Theology," quoted on myths, 105 Science: conflict of, and religion, 113 et seq. Scipio, Publius, 92 Scott, Dred, 133 Scott, Walter, 285 Scotus, 154 Second Coming of Christ, 374 et seq., 381 Seeley, Professor ; cited on Na- poleon, 199 Se janus, 162 INDEX 405 Shakspeare; quoted on death, 75; 145 Sidomans, 129 Silas, 149 Sixtus II, 218 et seq. Sixtus XII, xvii, note Slaves, 3 ct seq. Smith, Goldwyn, cited on Romans in war, 65, 66 Smith, Sir William, quoted on Apollo, 55 Socrates, 58, 66 Solomon; 127; Sketch of reign of, 130, 131 Sophocles, 149 Spain, 296-300, passim; 308 Sparta, 82, 83, 98, 157 Speech: origin of, 231 et seq. State : origin of the, 12 et seq.; effect of, upon the family, 21, 22 St. George-Mivart : xviii, note; quoted on Christ's paternity, 296 St. Paul's without the Gates, Rome, 224 St. Peter's, xiii, 224, 287 St. Sylvester's, Rome, 218 Suetonius ; cited on depravity, 214 Sullivan, Mr., 315 Switzerland : Protestantism in, 308 Syracuse, 43 Syria, xvii, 55, 92, 100, IO2, ill, 117, 139, 236, 281 Tacitus, Cornelius: 97; cited on depravity of civilization, 214; quoted on Nero in relation to the Christians, 168, 169 Temple: God of the, 134-138 Tent God of Israel, 123-128 Tetzel, 291 Teutons, 67, 68 Thames, 93 Thapsus, 196 Thebes, 157 Themistocles, 66 Theocritus, 145, 146 Theodosius, 242 Thomas, St., 280 Tiber, 87, 171 INDEX Tiberius Csesar, 93, 162 Titans, 35 Trajan, 91, 168, 209 Trent, Council of, 311 Trinity : xvii ; 104, the second per- son in the, 278 ft seq. Troy, 51 Tyre, 343 Tyrrell Father, 315 Unitarians, 80, 307 United States : Protestantism in the 310, 311 Ur, ii Uranus, 31, 35, Si, 89, 45, 244. See also Ouranos. Uriah, 130 Uzziah, 131, 132 Valentinian, 242 Valerian, 222 Valhalla, 68 Vandals, 271 Varuna, 25 et seq., 36 Vatican, 287 Venice, 343 Venus, 112, 161, 251. See also Aph- rodite. Vergil, 145, 146 Victor Emmanuel I, 271 Victoria, Queen, 52 Vinci, Leonardo da, 64 Virgin Mary, xv, xvi, xvii, 52, 104. See also Mary. Wallace, 320 War God of Bene Israel, 104 et seq., 227 Washington, 105 Webster, Daniel, 79 Westphalia, Treaty of, 298 Whistler, James McN., 232 William the Conqueror, 112 William the Silent, 299, 300 Wittenberg, 291, 296 VVoden, 68, 106 Working Class, God of the, 117- 121, 227 Woman; early status of, 1-5; modern, 9; and marital chastity, 6-ip; archaic, 18,19; and se- lection of mate, 60 et seq.; debt of civilization to, 68; right of, in her children, 70, 71 ; in relation to industry, 71, 72; status of, in early church, 205 et seq. Yathrib, 274 Yohanan. See John the Baptist. Yorkminster, 283, 287 Zadek : Jehovah, 133 et seq., 138 Zeeland, 300 Zeus: god of the city, 35-40; 42; twofold destiny of, 45-48; 54, 65, 69, 76, 81, 82, 153; morality of, and Jehovah compared, 228 et seq.; 344 Zin, Desert of, 171 Zion, 127, 139 Zuyder Zee, 308 Zwingli, Huldreich, 30$ PASADENA HOME FOR THE MCO